Never Too Old To Play™

Originally intended as an Xbox 360 launch title when it was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005, Alan Wake finally arrived in May of this year to hordes of anxious fans. Okay… well… not hordes of fans, or even very many at all (less than 750,000 copies of the title have been sold worldwide in nearly 5 months on the market).

However, just because the general gaming public didn’t take to the game doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t… depending on the type of gamer you are. While Alan Wake employs a fair amount of combat, it’s not really an action game at its core. The game has a more psychological feel to it with a rather eerie atmosphere, much more reminiscent of Silent Hill (another game series that hasn’t done very well at retail) than the blockbuster Resident Evil series.

In Alan Wake, you take on the role of the titular character who is a former best selling novelist looking for some inspiration to get past his two year writer’s block in the quaint Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls, Washington. As expected, Alan’s life is turned upside down when his wife, Alice, disappears from the remote lake island cabin they rented and he is blamed. Strange, nightmarish things start happening, leading Alan to believe that there’s much more going on than a simple kidnapping, and he must work with his agent and the local sheriff to stop an evil from engulfing the whole town.

It’s an interesting premise that is superbly realized on the screen by a combination of clever writing and beautiful art direction as well as some engaging game play elements that fit perfectly with the game’s decidedly dark atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the more cerebral nature of the plot probably dooms the game to a lifetime of abstinence from the more trigger happy segment of the gaming market looking only for the next Call of Duty or Gears of War title to grace store shelves. It’s understandable that they would be turned off by the more slow paced game play and fantastical elements of the story when all they really want to do is frag their buddies in online deathmatches.

I’m sure the lengthy development process also turned off a lot of gamers who may have been truly excited for the game back when it was first announced or when it was “coming soon” for the first several years of the Xbox 360’s life. The game does look like it was developed earlier in the generation: the art direction is wonderful, but the graphics technology is obviously dated. Great graphics don’t inherently lead to a great game, but it’s entirely understandable that some people have trouble ignoring the visual wonders of titles like Uncharted 2 and Red Dead Redemption when looking at the preview stills from Alan Wake plastered all over gaming websites.

Nevertheless, gamers who decide to pass over this title in favor of the next frag fest or action extravaganza are most certainly doing themselves a disservice as Alan Wake offers a unique game play experience coupled with a disturbing yet enthralling story line all wrapped up in a chilling atmosphere that would make Stephen King proud. Indeed, playing Alan Wake is likely the closest thing to playing a good video game adaptation of a King novel, complete with the accompanying paranoia and week long aversion to walking down into the basement by yourself.

Final score: 5 out of 5

Parent to parent

This is not a game for children. There are some mature themes in play during the course of the game, and the gamer is required to engage in quite a lot of violence against enemies that are essentially representations of the townsfolk they meet early on.  The dark and supernatural aspects of the experience certainly don’t help. Enjoy the game yourself, but spare your kids the nightmares.

Experience this for yourself!

• Alan Wake (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Alan Wake: Limited Edition (Xbox 360) (Amazon)

It’s been a while since the shift of power in the console gaming industry from Japanese developers to their Western counterparts. Microsoft kick started this trend with the introduction of the Xbox, a video game console that was similar enough in architecture and design to a PC that formerly PC-centric developers had little problems porting their titles to the system. All of a sudden, Western developers like Bungie, Epic, id, and Valve who were marquee players in the world of Windows and Macintosh gaming but virtually unknown by gamers whose cash lined the coffers at Nintendo, Sega and Sony found themselves at the door of a whole new market of consumers.

However, while the console gaming population’s appetite for games like Halo, Grand Theft Auto III, and Splinter Cell grew, they still relied on Japanese developers like Square and Namco for their role-playing fix. Game series like Final Fantasy, Xenosaga, Kingdom Hearts, and Dragon Quest were among the many Japanese role-playing franchises available on the PlayStation 2, and the genre contributed to the console’s greatest strength: its “something for everyone” library of software. Some titles even reached blockbuster status with four in the top ten list of best selling PlayStation 2 games.

Then, the Xbox 360 arrived and everything changed. (Cue dramatic music.)

Actually, all Microsoft did was take the smart approach with regards to the design of their new console. (Cue PlayStation 3 fanboys ranting about RROD.) Microsoft knew the appeal the Western style of game development, up to that point mostly exclusive to the PC platform, would have with the growing video game market, and knew what those developers liked about working with the Xbox. Instead of trying to make radical changes for the sake of change (and under the guise of innovation), they simply expanded on what already worked and kept the architecture similar enough that the transition from Xbox to Xbox 360 would be fairly easy for developers. More importantly, they listened when the teams demanded more memory without which games like Gears of War and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare would have been impossible.

One of the results of this approach was the release of highly evolved fourth entry in the Elder Scrolls role-playing game series on video game consoles. Oblivion arrived to much fanfare due to the high degree of character customization, the vast and fully realized world, the sheer number of characters with whom to interact, the epic story, and the beautiful graphics which all but guaranteed that gamers who weren’t interested in role-playing games before took notice. Critics raved about the game to the tune of a mid-90s average review score and many year end awards. The game went on to sell 2.93 million units on the Xbox 360 platform and 1.15 million units on the PlayStation 3 platform.

Bethesda followed up this masterpiece two and a half years later with the even better Fallout 3, a more action-oriented role-playing game set in the post apocalyptic world of the Fallout series of computer role-playing games. Fallout 3 was almost the exact opposite of Oblivion as far as concept – instead of a high fantasy world of wizards and warriors, elves and monsters, and good and evil, you had a depressing glimpse at a realistically possible future set on the desolate backdrop of a ravaged Washington D.C. where the denizens didn’t have the luxury of worrying much about the morality of their choices.

Similarly, BioWare’s space opera Mass Effect, released a year before Fallout 3 in 2007, challenged the player’s own perception of what was right and wrong. Although the setting was completely different – Mass Effect took place in a distant future where humans are galaxy-trotting with aliens on board advanced starships – the developers had the same approach with regards to the choices you made: almost nothing was clear cut good and evil, and it was commonplace for someone to find themselves conflicted about which path was the right one to take.

What these three games did was introduce console gamers to actual role-playing games where the gamer actually plays a role by deciding what their character says and does, and how they say and do it. Until this point, most gamers only knew Japanese RPGs, which were games that merely paid lip service to the term “role-playing game” – the stat-building aspect of traditional tabletop role-playing games was there but the spirit of the genre was missing.

Oblivion, Mass Effect and Fallout 3 opened gamers’ eyes to the reality of JRPGs. The wool over their eyes had been lifted and many realized just how shallow and simple these games were: it’s kind of hard to go back to the linear progression, restrictive turn-based combat, static stories, and canned dialogue that simply served as sound for pre-rendered cutscenes when you’ve experienced open worlds, thousands of dialogue options, real-time action, and the ability to make choices that have an actual impact on the game.

The old style of “role-playing” was no longer acceptable, and both sales and critical reviews reflected this new attitude. Of all the JRPGs released this generation, only one – Final Fantasy XIII - broke a million units sold with 1.88 million as of early February. Mind you, this is after seven weeks on sale in Japan where Final Fantasy XII sold 1.82 million units in Japan in the first week alone and ended up with a total 5.69 million units worldwide when all was said and done.

Games without the benefit of a mega franchise fared significantly worse at retail: Infinite Undiscovery from Square moved only 0.57 million units; Blue Dragon moved less than that at 0.53 million worldwide; and the well-reviewed Demon’s Souls (GameSpot’s 2009 Game of the Year) has only managed 0.63 million in sales. And none of the JRPGs released this generation have achieved aggregate scores in the 90’s at MetaCritic whereas just one – Demon’s Souls - barely made it at GameRankings (Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Mass Effect 2 all scored in the 90’s on both sites).

And if the game with one of the biggest brand names in console gaming history can’t put Japanese role-playing games back in the spotlight, what game can? Dragon Quest X? Highly unlikely despite the history of that series because the game will be a Wii exclusive. A third Kingdom Hearts game? The Final Fantasy series has historically sold better and received better reviews so the likelihood of that currently theoretical game surpassing Final Fantasy XIII is probably low. Plus, the real diehard Disney gamers are actually likely to spend the money on a Wii (if they don’t already have one for all those Disney licensed games) just to play Epic Mickey, a Disney game where you actually play Mickey Mouse instead of just drag his buddies Donald Duck and Goofy along for the ride, instead.

No, sadly (for JRPG fans, anyway) this seems like the permanent trend as Western developers for all genres take the reins of the video game industry from Japanese developers mired in their old ways, unwilling to adapt with the times and create products that appeal to more than just the often quirky tastes of the Japanese consumers.

In response to a recent IGN interview with Sony executive Peter Dille in which Mr. Dille proclaimed that the PlayStation 3 would “be around in 10 years” and eventually overtake the Xbox 360 in sales, GameStooge writer Jordan Lund unsurprisingly went on an anti-Sony tirade, making sure not to forget any of the key fanboy tactics in arguing the superiority and domination of their preferred entertainment device.

Mr. Lund gets what appears to be an ad hominem argument out of the way early on in the article, declaring that Mr. Dille’s position cannot be taken seriously because he is a Sony executive and other Sony executives have in the past professed confidence that the PlayStation 3 would surpass its competitors (or at least its primary competitor, the Xbox 360). While Mr. Lund is of course unable to support any point of view that said Sony executives are wrong about their predictions since the timeframe has not yet passed, the intent is certainly there to link the possibly dubious nature of their claims to the validity of Mr. Dille’s.

The crux of Sony’s argument that the PlayStation 3 will eventually outsell the Xbox 360 is the premise that Microsoft’s console is not “future proof” and thus cannot possibly stay on the market for an extended period of time beyond the historically standard “five year lifespan” afforded to video game consoles, resulting in a period of time during which the PlayStation 3 will no longer have competition from the Xbox 360. This is a laughable strategy because the PlayStation 3 does not and will not have a deep and broad enough library of software to be a viable “cheap” option for so many years after the next Microsoft, Nintendo and, yes, Sony consoles hit the market. The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 were able to stay relevant because they had enormous game libraries – the PlayStation 3 selection pales in comparison.

Mr. Lund has the generally right idea, but argues based on the iffy prediction that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony will not launch new consoles anytime within the next six years (assuming that Mr. Dille was actually referring to a ten year total life cycle for the PlayStation 3 and not an additional ten years from now). The notions that in six years the economy will not have recovered to the degree where gamers would not be interested in new console technology and would be fine with playing Project Natal games and editions of Halo and Gears of War that look pretty much the same as the ones we played a couple years ago are ridiculous at best.

He continues with irrelevant paragraphs of stats that are focused entirely on the North American region with no consideration whatsoever for the rest of the world mainly because the only significant Xbox 360 sales lead is in this region whereas the two consoles are nose-to-nose in Europe and the Xbox 360 is a lost cause in Japan. After crunching tons of numbers to show just what kind of a lead the Xbox 360 has over the PlayStation 3 in terms of install base, he “put(s) things in perspective” with an extreme example of the PlayStation 3 needing a whole year of sales consistent to its 2009 numbers while the Xbox 360 sells nothing instead of the realistic example – the PlayStation 3 maintaining its current weekly worldwide lead of just under 37,000 for three years – that might show just how flimsy his whole line of argument is.

In short, Mr. Lund’s protestation of Sony’s incompetent arrogance is understandable, but his modus operandi of using nearly any statement by Sony that doesn’t fit into his narrow world view of things to vomit a veritable feast of selective statistics tarnishes his credibility by painting him as little more than a bitter fanboy trying desperately to play down any bit of positive news for “the other system.”

And lest we forget – Nintendo did not lose the 16-bit console wars to Sega. Sega squandered a two and a half year lead time for their Genesis console to end up with only a 10% market share lead on Nintendo just two short years after the launch of the Super Nintendo. Now, to put that into perspective, imagine a scenario where the PlayStation 3 didn’t launch until December 2007 yet started off 2009 with the same proportion of sales to the Xbox 360’s that it enjoys today (45% of sales that don’t include the Wii) at only 10% the number of games that the Xbox 360 had. That would be pretty impressive indeed.

Note: It might be useful for me to mention that the reason why Mr. Lund’s fanboyism doesn’t surprise me is because he is a (now rare) poster in the Usenet forum alt.games.video.xbox that I often browse.

The IGN family of gaming websites is my general “go to” source for game reviews and game-related news, information and editorials. I’ve been an avid fan since the early 2000’s and visit their various websites on an almost daily basis.

Lately, IGN has been giving me a different reason to love them, though. Earlier this week, Rus McLaughlin told us readers why he doesn’t think Halo 3: ODST is Game of the Year material, citing issues he apparently doesn’t believe apply to the equally unimpressive but far less hyped Halo 3, which prompted me to point out how Halo 3 fails in the same ways. I’m thankful for this as there are only so many reviews one can write in a week.

A couple of days ago, Ryan Geddes opined that Epic Games needs to rip certain pages from Bungie’s Halo playbook in order for their blockbuster Gears of War franchise to thrive in the future. In addition to the rather unbelievable supposition that there’s any chance that future Gears of War games won’t be even more successful than the first two, Mr. Geddes both suggests things that are simply smart game development choices attributable to any number of studios and games and criticizes what he sees as faults with Gears of War that are every bit as applicable to Halo.

One of the most critical issues with both Gears of War and its sequel is the rather lackluster multiplayer experience that is at best a tepid, toned down version of classic PC multiplayer deathmatches with the exception of the second game’s compelling Horde mode (in which up to five players must work together to face increasingly difficult waves of Locust forces with the goal of surviving as long as possible).

One compelling multiplayer mode is not good enough, though. Multiplayer is a very important aspect of games, especially shooters, these days, and gamers need more than just standard deathmatches if a game is to have any longevity. However, improving the flaws in the multiplayer experience is not emulating Halo 3 - there are plenty of action games with great multiplayer components such as the Call of Duty and Left4Dead series – but just following common sense.

In fact, I hope that Epic doesn’t try to make Gears of War’s multiplayer mode a mirror image of Halo 3’s (and, yes, I recognize that Mr. Geddes also stated they shouldn’t) because with Halo 3, the Halo franchise’s multiplayer experience has degenerated into a bunch of ten-year-old kids running out of the gate for the most powerful weapon and then jumping up and down all over the map while spewing vulgarities that would make Eminem cringe. And, yes, I’m hyperbolizing.

It really just seems as if Epic Games has lost some of its identity with its transition to the console world. They really redefined the PC multiplayer gaming experience with their Unreal Tournament series of competitive multiplayer games whose single player campaigns were just the multiplayer mode with bots yet chose to focus on the single-player experience with Gears of War.

They, along with other PC-centric developers like Valve Corporation, also made extraordinary efforts to work with the fan communities for their games with design director Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski often interacting with gamers on the company’s online forums and the company including hardcore fans in public beta tests of upcoming games and modes. Mr. Geddes seems to have forgotten this (or maybe never knew it in the first place) in speaking about Bungie’s multiplayer beta of Halo 3 as if they were the only company that did this.

On the other hand, I don’t think “community building” is really all that central to the success of mainstream blockbuster games these days. The hardcore fans might spend their time posting comments in Bungie, Epic and Valve’s forums, but the more mainstream gamers don’t visit gaming websites or post on message boards.

I assure you those mainstream gamers didn’t contribute to Halo 3’s eight million+ in sales because of what Bungie was doing at some gaming convention or because of cryptic websites, both of which really only matter to the devoted hardcore Halo loyalists. Everyone else? They were just brainwashed by the insane marketing machine Microsoft pushed out there, with images of the Master Chief everywhere from movie screens to bus stops to soda cans.

If Epic can really take anything away from this, it’s that you need to spend over $40 million if you want to sell eight million units of your game. I imagine, though, that they were happy with selling five million based on the strength of the previous game alone.

Mr. Geddes goes on to talk about how deep and expansive the Halo universe, how much more complex and provoking Bungie’s games are, when in reality the Halo and Gears of War worlds really aren’t that different when compared at face value. He states that Bungie is obsessed with expanding the universe “because they love it,” a sentiment that is contradicted by the rather lazy job they did with Halo 3. The rehashed story, recycled set pieces and stagnant gameplay tells the story of a development house that was sick of doing the same thing for a decade and rushed the game out so they could finally announce their split from Microsoft a week or two later. Hardly the behavior of a loving parent, is it?

Especially hilarious, though, are the criticisms Mr. Geddes levels towards Gears of War’s world without realizing that they apply as much, or even more so, to the Halo games. For example, he states that Halo is “about people struggling to survive against overwhelming odds” when a rather prosperous human race living on safe and sound Earth have a genetically engineered super soldier in tank armor who can skydive from one starship to another in orbit around a freakin’ planet to lay waste to the Covenant for them. That’s not to mention the entire army of soldiers with a fleet of spaceships and a seemingly endless amount of combat vehicles backing him up. But I guess the fear that the isolated pockets of emaciated stragglers exhibit anytime a pothole opens up in the ground or the lights go out at night on the planet that they had to bomb with nuclear warheads just to have a chance is all just an act.

He asks why Sera, that devastated planet on which Gears of War takes place, is worth saving. Why is Earth worth saving? It seems pretty obvious that Sera is the equivalent of Earth in the Gears universe considering the game notes at several points that the events unfolding before them are humanity’s last stand. Do we really need to know which specific people built the “towering buildings of lattice and spire,” which I might add look a helluva lot better than anything in Halo 3? Much like the barren wastelands of Fallout 3, the “destroyed beauty” of what remains of those magnificent structures tells a much more powerful story than some recited history lesson soliloquy from a floating metal sphere or blue holographic supermodel.

And while he’s right that we don’t know much about the Locust even after two games, how much did we really know about the Convenant and the Flood at the end of Halo 2? We don’t know where the Covenant or Flood came from whereas we know that the Locust call the subterranean bowels of Sera their home. We don’t really learn much more about the Covenant society than we do about the Locust society: both are actually collections of various species with the same “religious beliefs” – the Covenant believe in the “oracles” (the artificial intelligence maintaining the halo installations) and the Locust worship the riftworms.

We have no idea why the Covenant hate humanity so much whereas we learn through the course of the two Gears games that humanity’s ever-growing need for energy sources led them to dig into the Locusts’ territory, an intrusion the Locust chose to take as an act of war. The ensuing conflict even served a dual purpose for the Locust, who were in the midst of a civil war with Locusts who had been powerfully mutated by overexposure to the same energy source humans tried to harvest.

And the Flood? They don’t even have any real motivation we can gather aside from the – say it with me – cliché desire to assimilate all living creatures in the galaxy. They’re really nothing more than a virus – how many times have we witnessed that metaphor in science fiction works?

Ultimately, though, the real difference between the Gears of War and Halo franchises is the humanity of the former. Despite everything Mr. Geddes claims, Gears is a far more personal, far more emotional experience from the heart-racing, visceral, in-your-face nature of the combat with its focus on teamwork and strategy to the more believable and accessible purpose all the way to the actual characters themselves.

He describes Marcus and Dom as meat puppets which I suppose would make Master Chief a meat puppet in a can since he has virtually no personality and is one of the most underdeveloped characters in gaming history. Master Chief displays nary an emotion through the course of three games – the fate of the galaxy rests in his hands and friends and comrades fall left and right, yet you’d never know it with his calm demeanor and monotone murmurs. He fears no one and nothing, is never relieved at having just made it through a treacherous fight, has no sense of humor, and is never elated or even just happy for his victories.

Marcus Fenix, on the other hand, actually has a personality (even if it’s tough to make out through his gravelly voice). He’s sarcastic; he gets pumped up; he mourns the dead; he fears for his friend Dominic’s stability. Dominic himself is probably the most “real” character in either franchise: he pines for his missing wife, is quick with a witty comment or wry jab at a comrade and understands far more than most people about the cruelty of the world and the necessity for military strength.

And let’s not forget about one of the most colorful characters in video games in a while: Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, who makes even the most grueling combat situations enjoyable with his enthusiastic banter and overconfident trash talk towards the enemy. He loves the thrill and the adrenaline, which is probably the reason why he was a star defensive lineman for the national “thrashball” league before all hell broke loose on Sera, a celebrity status that is reflected in non-player character reaction to and interaction with him (even your squad mates gush when first meeting him in the first game).

All these little details and nuances help make Gears of War feel so much more alive than the rather disconnected and neutered experience of Halo 3. This isn’t to say, however, that Gears of War did everything perfectly. The reason anyone can even claim that the franchise needs some degree of “saving” is because the single-player campaign mode of the second game simply fell flat, ironically because they listened too much to the fans.

To appease gamers who didn’t like the single-minded focus on generally close quarters squad-based tactical ground combat, the team diluted Gears of War 2 with new scenarios that felt tacked on – freeform vehicular sections where the player pilots an armored vehicle with clunky controls through icy caverns and fights giant spiders, tedious battles on top of giant armored transports, a Panzer Dragoon-inspired aerial on-rails level, and an excruciatingly boring and contrived end game where the player rides on the back of a plodding Brumak (a several-stories-tall monstrosity covered in armor and armed with missile launchers and guns).

I agree with Mr. Geddes when he says that Epic needs to bring the Gears of War franchise “back to basics.” It was a mistake to try to “go big” and expand the scale to be a little more like Halo 3. Gears shouldn’t be about Michael Bay-esque set pieces but about dark and gritty combat where the already wasted landscape is left a lot bloodier. It should be about saving the species and the planet, a more realistic, attainable goal that people can better wrap their heads around, rather than trying to stop some intergalactic force from destroying the galaxy with just an assault rifle and a couple of energy grenades – Gears works best as Saving Private Ryan, not the latest James Bond flick, and is a better game for it.

In fact, the Halo series could do well to emulate some aspects of Gears, and actually has already started to do so. Even after the disappointment of Halo 3, I was excited about Halo 3: ODST and later Halo: Reach. The scale of both games is cut back quite a bit.

In ODST, you’re just another soldier in the military rather than John McClane on steroids. You can’t go all gung ho on the Convenant and expect to last long – some degree of rudimentary stealth is inherent in the game.

In Reach, you even know right off the bat, if you paid any attention at all during the three proper Halo games, that you’re not going to save anything: Reach falls no matter what you do. There’s a more prevalent sense of danger in that even though you’re still playing a Spartan like Master Chief, the forces must be threatening indeed as they were able to wipe out an entire platoon of Master Chiefs. No more laughing in the face of danger, hopefully.

However, the thing that needs to change the most is the technology. Halo 3’s game engine, which is a moderately enhanced version of the Halo 2 game engine, itself a moderately enhanced version of the Halo game engine created way back at the turn of the millennium, is showing its age with subpar modeling lacking in intricate detail. Put side-by-side with Gears of War or Sony’s Uncharted, Halo 3 looks like a decidedly last generation effort.

I had hoped when Bungie announced their split from Microsoft that this would open up the possibility of another developer such as Epic to step in and create a truly innovative new game engine that could help usher the franchise into the top echelon of current-generation video games.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft and Bungie will do the right thing and take a page out of everyone else’s playbook this time.

Experience this for yourself!

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Gears of War Platinum Hits Edition (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Gears of War 2 Game of the Year Edition (Xbox 360) (Amazon)

About a week ago, a fellow poster to the alt.games.video.xbox Usenet group referenced an Engadget article about gadgets they considered to have defined the decade in which the Engadget staff chose Microsoft’s Xbox 360 for the gaming world. Despite being an avid fan of the Xbox 360, I had to laugh at Engadget’s choice considering the two systems they listed as “runners up” had much more impact on the gaming world than my current favorite console.

First of all, the Xbox 360 was only around for half of the decade and didn’t really pick up steam until about a year or so after launch due to the widespread “red ring of death” hardware failures that I suppose do make a case for the Xbox 360 defining the decade in some way. Engadget editor Paul Miller states that “You don’t remember a console for the chips inside or the case design, but the games you played.” I counter that what gamers most remembered about the Xbox 360 from 2005-2007 were four letters: RROD.

Miller goes on to list Gears of War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as the two games that made the Xbox 360 so very special to him mainly due to the Xbox Live online gaming experiences he had with them. I agree with him that those are two of the top games people can play on the system. I just have a slight issue with him ignoring that Call of Duty is, and has always been, available on the PlayStation 3 with online play made possible by Sony’s PlayStation Network, which is free in contrast to Microsoft’s $50 per year charge for Xbox Live play.

Now, before PlayStation fanboys get all tingly, I’ll point out that I’m not bashing Xbox Live or being critical of the charge – I in fact believe that you get what you pay for with these two services and that Xbox Live is a much more robust network that offers a better experience with that monthly or annual fee gamers pay to use it – but highlighting the folly of basing a claim that the Xbox 360 is the defining gaming system of the decade on its online gaming service (as indicate by “We went with the Xbox 360 for its innovation in online play”).

In choosing the gaming device of the decade, you have to look at a much bigger picture. The PlayStation 2 debuted in 2000, the beginning of the decade, and is still on sale today. Sure, its sales are straggling now and it may very well be on its last legs this year, but it’s been strong for the better part of the decade. In fact, it took the Xbox 360 a year and ten months to outsell the PlayStation 2 at the global level and even longer to really solidify a sales advantage over the then 7-year-old previous generation console.

The PlayStation 2 managed to survive this long on the strength of its games, the most important aspect of any video gaming platform. Like Mr. Miller said, you remember a console for the games you played – the PlayStation 2 has 1,800 of them. Many top franchises got their start on the system. Many of the best entries in beloved franchises called the PlayStation 2 their home. While Sony’s arrogance regarding this generation has cost them exclusivity on third-party video game series like Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy and Devil May Cry, those franchises were available only to console gamers who owned PlayStation 2’s from 2000 to 2009.

And the Xbox 360’s current success is really all due to Sony’s past efforts. Had it not been for Sony’s foresight with the PlayStation 2 – and the PlayStation before it – we’d all still be playing Mario and Kirby games (not that I have any problem with this – I love Nintendo’s games – but I know a lot of “hardcore” gamers who would give up gaming if their only choices were between one cute and cuddly mascot or another). Sony is responsible for making video games cool again, and the bulk of that transformation took place shortly after the launch of the PlayStation 2 with the release of games like Grand Theft Auto III, Final Fantasy X and SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs.

Now, I can kind of understand where people might have an easy time forgetting about a previous generation system that debuted almost a decade ago – I myself sometimes feel as if this generation of consoles has been around forever and pine for what amazement the next series of hardware and games will offer. However, that’s still no excuse for choosing the Xbox 360 as the defining gaming device of the decade when one of its contemporaries, the Nintendo Wii, has had a far greater impact on our favorite past time and the industry behind it.

The Wii landed on retail shelves about a year after the Xbox 360 did, but unlike Microsoft’s big white box Nintendo’s little one made an immediate splash, outselling its competitors on a weekly basis right out of the gate and surpassing the Xbox 360’s total sales in less than nine months (at which point the Xbox 360 had been on the market for 21). Even though the Wii’s software library was severely lacking in the traditional “core” games that long-time gamers favored, the console thrived on the strength of its innovative style of user interaction which was much more appealing to casual and non-gamers who had no interest in learning what the eight buttons, two sticks and one directional pad on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3’s controllers did.

The Wii has been a complete game changer for the video game industry. Thanks to Nintendo, the console gamer market expanded by several degrees, a result of their decision to stop engaging in the traditional “red ocean” strategy of beating competitors for existing market space and instead employ a “blue ocean” strategy of using innovation in key areas to create new market space. Millions of people who would never have thought to buy a video game console, whose gaming experience was limited to marathon sessions of Minesweeper, Bejeweled or Diner Dash on their PCs or who abandoned video games after the Nintendo Entertainment System simply because games got too complex to be a recreational vehicle quickly became part of that new market space, and Nintendo hasn’t looked back.

And while we’re talking about the Big N, let’s not forget the current king of the portable gaming space, the Nintendo DS, which also happens to be the king of all video gaming with more systems sold than any other handheld or console this generation. The DS debuted in November 2004, and in the half-decade since then it has become something of a portable gaming phenomenon, consistently outselling all other gaming systems worldwide on a monthly basis. Nintendo is basically printing their own money with this platform, which is so popular that millions of people have actually paid for what amounts to a marginally improved version of the hardware, the Nintendo DSi.

Nintendo’s foray into the blue ocean style of thinking truly started with the DS, which offered features that were innovations in the video gaming space, namely the touch screen interface, the second screen and the wireless connectivity for quick and easy multiplayer gaming, and games that took advantage of the functionality.

Nintendo even expanded the breadth of their library beyond traditional games with titles like Brain Age in which the player engages in brief activities designed to stimulate the mind, Nintendogs in which the player interacts with a virtual pet using the touch screen and microphone, and the Personal Trainer series of titles in which the player trains in various activities like cooking, mathematics and walking (this title comes with pedometers that are wirelessly connected to the DS system).

With the incredible impact the PlayStation 2, Wii and DS have had on the gaming space in the past 10 years, each essentially redefining what gaming was – and is – it’s a little shocking that people who are for all intents and purposes objective journalists could possibly cite the Xbox 360 has having been more important to this decade of video gaming. Of course, I realize that ultimately this is just a matter of opinion, but I believe that when you make such a bold statement you need to back it up with more than Xbox Live and, literally, a couple of games.

Experience this for yourself!

• Nintendo Wii Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Limited Edition Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Bundle (Amazon)
• Sony PlayStation 2 Console (Amazon)
• Nintendo DS Lite System (Amazon)
• Nintendo DSi System (Amazon)
• Nintendogs Dalmatian & Friends (DS) (Amazon)
• Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (DS) (Amazon)
• Personal Trainer: Cooking (DS) (Amazon)
• Personal Trainer: Math (DS) (Amazon)
• Personal Trainer: Walking (DS) (Amazon)
• Gears of War (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) (Amazon)

I remember being blown away when I first turned on my Xbox and started up Halo: Combat Evolved on November 18, 2001.

I had just returned home to Hoboken, New Jersey from the then brand new flagship Toys R Us store in Times Square, where I had travelled early that morning to get on line for the launch of the Nintendo GameCube and found, to my pleasant surprise, plenty of Microsoft’s black box, which had launched three days earlier and was completely sold out everywhere else in the country.

I lugged an Xbox, a GameCube, an extra controller for each, a memory unit for each, and three games for each from the train station all the way back to my house. Of the three Xbox games I purchased, Halo (Dead or Alive 3 and Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee were the other two) was the one I was most eager to play, being an avid fan of first-person shooter games on the PC at the time.

That opening level with your character, the Master Chief, fighting the Covenant forces invading the Pillar of Autumn starship, left me giddy with excitement – truly immersive first-person shooter gaming had finally arrived on consoles thanks to high production values, impressive graphics and a quality of artificial intelligence that was at the time often compared to that found in Valve Corporation’s Half-Life.

The story, involving the discovery of a ring-shaped space station with the ability to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy and your race to prevent the Covenant from activating it, captivated millions of gamers who made the game a financial success at the blockbuster level (over five million copies worldwide as of November 2005).

Halo 2, released almost three years later on the same console, continued that story with Master Chief and his allies defending Earth from an invading Covenant force (teased in the commercial that featured Master Chief launching himself out of a starship towards a Covenant ship orbiting Earth) and eventually discovering another “halo” installation that the Covenant are trying to activate.

During the events of that game, we learn that the Covenant have a zealous religious belief that activation of the space stations will initiate a “Great Journey” that will lead all loyal Covenant members to salvation and that there is growing dissension amongst the various Covenant races, particularly between the skilled Elites and the savage ape-like Brutes, who are vying for the former’s position in the Covenant hierarchy.

One Elite in particular, granted the honorable title of The Arbiter by the Covenant High Council, eventually joins forces with the Master Chief when he learns of the Council’s desire to wipe out all Elites as punishment for their failure to prevent the humans from destroying the first halo installation and of what will actually happen when the installation is activated.

One of the most memorable aspects of Halo 2 is the ability to play the Arbiter during specific missions that are interspersed with the Master Chief’s, providing a whole different perspective on the unfolding events as well as a distinctly different gameplay style (the Arbiter notably wields an energy blade that has devastating effects on enemies).

The evolution of the plot is also worthy of praise as the second game’s story takes the basic premise established in the first game and expands it to a whole new level, much like James Cameron did to the world of Alien with his superior follow-up Aliens.

Despite the rather abrupt and widely panned ending, Halo 2 is what every sequel should be: a much improved gaming experience that better does everything the first game did.

Fans eagerly anticipating the third game in the series and unfairly expecting it as a launch title for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which launched only a year after the release of Halo 2, were chomping at the bit when Halo 3 was announced at the 2006 E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) convention.

With the release of each new teaser trailer featuring Master Chief in high-definition glory, rendered impressively by the actual game engine, the hype just kept building as fans looked to the release of the game much like the next coming of Christ.

As a fan of the series, I bought into the hype, of course, utterly amazed at the level of detail in the characters being displayed to me through my television or computer screen. I never once thought to consider that trailers rendered by the game engine but not containing actual gameplay footage would of course be of very high quality since the hardware didn’t have to worry about so many different factors existent within actual gaming sessions (or that the game engine could actually be running on more sophisticated hardware than was actually present in the console).

You can imagine my dismay when negative comments about the quality of the graphics surfaced from people who had played the much-hyped Halo 3 multiplayer beta included with Crackdown. I myself had chosen not to participate despite having received a code with my copy of Crackdown mainly because I had already begun to lose interest in competitive multiplayer, but I was, of course, eager to hear any news or opinions stemming from the wide scale test run.

When the game finally arrived in stores in September 2007, I was not surprised by the graphical faults of the game but nevertheless very disappointed. Unfortunately, the game’s shortcomings didn’t stop there.

So what exactly did I think was so wrong with Halo 3? Why do I frequently cite it as the most disappointing game of this generation in online gaming forums and message boards?

It boils down to what I perceive as a rather lackadaisical effort on the part of a developer who seemed in a rush to end a series they had been working on for the better part of a decade and move on to something else (even if that something else was a pair of games that take place in the same game universe). There was clearly nothing coincidental about Bungie announcing a split from Microsoft mere days after the release of Halo 3.

It seemed as if years of Microsoft slave driving the company into working exclusively on the Xbox brand’s flagship series had finally taken its toll, and many aspects of the game had suffered because of it.

The (somewhat understandable) need for Microsoft to have a Halo game ready for the early part of the Xbox 360’s life left little time for Bungie to invest a truly appropriate amount of time in improving the game to a degree appropriate for the generational transition that occurred between 2004 and 2007.

Were the graphics better in Halo 3 than in Halo 2? Of course they were. Were they improved enough such that they could be perceived as “next generation” quality visuals? Absolutely not. Sure, there were some notable improvements to lighting and water effects, draw distance, animation, etc., and all of these improvements were important ones, but the core models and structures – the things that players focus most on in an action-driven first-person shooter game – really were not that much better than they were in Halo 2.

If Halo 3 had been a sequel for the original Xbox system, the degree of graphical improvements would have been admirable. In fact, the game looks like it could have been done with just a slightly advanced version of the original Xbox hardware (yes, many of the “background” effects I listed above require the advanced hardware in the Xbox 360 but perception is everything).

The problem was that gamers had moved on to the brand spanking new Xbox 360 with significantly more powerful hardware and the newest entry in Microsoft’s flagship franchise should have been mind-blowing, should have looked revolutionary, should have been a shining example of how games in the new generation looked and a standard bearer for what gamers could expect for the next half-dozen years.

Yet Gears of War, a game released almost a year earlier, was far more impressive and much more indicative of how games would look going forward thanks to the developer, Epic Games, having actually devoted significant resources to creating a brand new iteration of the Unreal Engine instead of recycling the same game engine in use since the beginning of the previous console generation.

Many gamers will, of course, challenge my opinion with the mantra that “graphics aren’t everything.” This is a viewpoint that I myself hold in high regards. In general, I don’t need the latest and greatest graphics technology in order to enjoy a game. In this case, however, we’re talking about the flagship series for the Xbox brand – this is the U.S.S. Enterprise of Microsoft’s “fleet” so to speak and they couldn’t give us a game worthy of that status? They couldn’t even give us a game that was truly high definition – Halo 3 runs at only 640p, significantly below the 720p “high definition” threshold.

However, despite wondering at first whether there was something wrong with my copy of the game after seeing the rather primitive model for Sergeant Major Johnson appear on screen the first time, I was willing to look beyond the substandard graphics if the game were to deliver a substantially improved gaming experience and an engrossing new story that appropriately advanced the overall Halo plot to its “finish the fight” end.

Unfortunately, the game did neither.

With each new area I discovered (and I use the word “new” loosely as many of the environments seemed much too reminiscent of previous Halo games) and each new battle I played, I felt a growing sense of having played all of this before. Indeed, there is very little “new” about Halo 3. There are only marginal changes to the gameplay and artificial intelligence, and with few exceptions the set pieces are rehashes of those seen in Halo and, more obviously, Halo 2.

You know things are bad when the concept behind the game’s finale is transplanted entirely from the finale of the first Halo. And you know things have really hit the fan when this new finale, while reminiscent of that first one, is far less gripping and nowhere near as fun to play.

The story fares no better – it’s simply a regurgitation of the same narratives and plot from the first two games. Master Chief and his merry men need to stop the Covenant from activating halos and deal with the Flood along the way. Sound familiar?

I’ll go with the rather negative popular opinion of the third Star Wars movie in saying that Halo 3 is most definitely the Return of the Jedi of the franchise except that such a statement would be insulting to Return of the Jedi.

Having said all of this, I don’t actually think that Halo 3 is a bad game. It’s a decent game with decent graphics, decent production values and a decent storyline. It’s simply a subpar entry in a revered gaming franchise and not up to the standards set by its predecessors, resulting in a huge disappointment for a Halo fan such as myself.

I will end this on a positive note, though. The Forge feature that Bungie introduced in Halo 3 that allows gamers to edit multiplayer maps and upload them for others to enjoy is probably the most revolutionary thing about the game. The ability to dynamically modify levels as you were actually playing them (sort of a real-time, in-world editing mode) was far ahead of the PlayStation 3’s critically acclaimed LittleBigPlanet, which featured the same concept. Kudos to Bungie for that.

Final score: 3 out of 5

Parent to parent

Halo 3 is not outright bloody like other gun violence centric games such as Call of Duty or Gears of War but there is still a lot of gunplay going on. In the single player campaign, the violence is entirely directed at obviously evil aliens, but the multiplayer games often have human characters killing other human characters. The game is decidedly less realistic than other first-person shooters, but nevertheless a ten-year-old, for example, shouldn’t be playing it.

Experience this for yourself!

• Halo 3 (Amazon)
• Halo 2 (Amazon)
• Halo: Combat Evolved (Amazon)

The “zombie” sub-genre has been a popular one in entertainment, dating back to such classic horror films as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (and the sequels he directed) and the loosely related The Return of the Living Dead.

These movies influenced video games like LucasArt’s campy and fun Zombies Ate My Neighbors for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, the House of the Dead series that ruled the arcades of the mid to late 90s and Capcom’s ever popular Resident Evil series of games with the latest entry available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles.

There’s even a pair of books by Max Brooks covering an alternate universe in which our planet is overrun by a sort of zombie apocalypse and details how humans were able to survive it. World War Z, which is being adapted for the big screen, is written as if it were a collection of historic accounts from survivors of this disaster whereas its decidedly more light hearted companion, The Zombie Survival Guide, is like a “how to” manual for defending yourself against the creatures of the night.

There’s even a popular version of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that’s being adapted into a motion picture. You know something’s big when people are creating literary mash-ups with works by revered authors.

Considering almost all zombie-themed entertainment focuses on humans trying to survive a seemingly endless horde of the flesh-eating undead, it seems rather odd that until 2008, no publisher had released an immersive first-person shooter that pitted the player against waves of zombie attackers. Yet in November 2008, both Activision and Valve Corporation released zombie-themed first-person experiences, much to the delight of video gamers everywhere.

From what little I’ve played of Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War multiplayer mode Nacht der Untoten (German for “Night of the Undead”) which puts 1-4 players in a house that they have to cooperatively defend against an unlimited number of Nazi zombies by shooting them and boarding up windows, it seems to be the more “authentic” zombie game (even though it’s just one of a few modes in the actual core Call of Duty game).

However, Valve’s Left4Dead is undoubtedly the more fun gaming experience by leaps and bounds. While the game doesn’t involve true zombies in the traditional sense (i.e. the flesh-eating reanimated corpses introduced to pop culture by Romero’s handiwork), it certainly delivers intense doses of action and the adrenaline-pumping thrills one would hope for from a “zombie apocalypse” scenario.

You play the role of one of four Survivor characters – Francis the tattoo-covered biker, Louis the systems analyst, Zoey the college student and Bill the former Green Beret – who are trying to make their way out of the city to find some sort of safe haven from the hordes of people who have been infected by the intentionally unidentified contagion that turns its victims into mindless, bestial creatures with rage issues.

The enemies you attack aren’t your typical undead zombies with a craving for human brains but are in fact regular people who have succumbed to this mystery disease in much the same way that the citizens of London were affected by the “Rage” virus in the Danny Boyle film 28 Days Later.

You never once see any of the enemies, referred to for the most part not as “zombies” but as “The Infected,” try to eat or even bite you – they seem content just trying to tear you from limb to limb for the fun of it. And when you shoot them, that’s regular old crimson blood spewing from their bodies, not the swampy green bile that you see in cartoony, fun-filled games like Plants vs. Zombies.

Further, the Infected are like the extras in 28 Days Later with regards to their speed and voracity. While you’ll certainly encounter a fair share of enemies just moping about on their own, any who take notice of you and aren’t put down by a bullet from your rifle will come charging at you like a parent who just spotted the last Zhu Zhu Pet at Toys R Us on Christmas Eve.

And that’s just the individuals or small groups you actually see. Every so often, the game will send a raging horde of Infected at you, swarming in from every which way (including behind you). They’ll climb up the sides of buildings and smash their way through doors to get to you – the only thing that will stop them is a fiery surprise from your pistol, shotgun or rifle. If you’ve ever played the classic PC game series Serious Sam, you’ll recognize the frenetic style of combat.

To make things interesting, the developers included a handful of boss-type enemies referred to as “the Special Infected.” These are admittedly less realistic enemies who require a little bit more suspension of disbelief and somewhat bridge the gap between the definitely possible concept of a biological experiment gone wrong and the more fantastic, imaginary realm of scary undead monsters you see in the movies.

The least unbelievable of the bunch is the Hunter, who is not much more durable than a standard Infected but is fast and can leap impressive distances (such as when it pounces on you and starts ripping your torso apart). It basically looks like a person in a gray hooded sweatshirt.

Then there’s the Boomer, a disgustingly bloated individual whose only goal is to vomit green bile all over you which triggers an onslaught of Infected focused solely on devastating anyone soaked in Boomer puke. The Boomer is also not much more durable than the common Infected but explodes in a mess of blood and guts that damages anyone within proximity.

Probably the most annoying Special Infected is the Smoker, a lithe creature typically prowling roofs and upper levels (out of sight and out of reach), waiting for unsuspecting Survivors to target. It attacks by shooting out a ridiculously long tongue and dragging its victim back (and often up) towards itself to be strangled. If you manage to take it out, its demise creates a cloud of dense and gagging vapor which partially obscures your vision.

More dangerous is the Tank, a damage-eating behemoth that charges at the Survivors like a rhinoceros on steroids and tosses anyone who gets caught in its grip like a rag doll. The Tank can absorb a massive amount of damage and moves with a surprising speed. It generally targets one particular Survivor and follows them around until it can pummel them or get put down by the others.

Perhaps the most dangerous Special Infected, however, is the Witch, a rather small and spindly female creature whose sobs can be heard from quite a distance (acting as a warning to everyone to tread carefully). The Witch is always found kneeling on the floor and crying, seemingly oblivious to everything around it. You can avoid it entirely by shutting off your flashlight and keeping your distance, but anyone who startles it with their flashlight or gets too close will regret it as the Witch zeroes in on that Survivor only. The Witch moves very fast and will incapacitate a Survivor with one hit at which point it rends flesh until the others can defeat it. It’s generally not wise to take on a Witch.

What makes the game really fun, though, is the artificial intelligence behind the game. Known as “the Director,” this A.I. will gauge how well you or your group of players is doing and adjust the density of the enemies, availability of weapons and items and frequency of Special Infected attacks accordingly. These things are all randomized such that no two run-throughs of any level will be exactly the same.

Left4Dead offers a few multiplayer modes and is in fact designed as an online multiplayer game. When you first load the game, the default game mode is actually the online cooperative multiplayer campaign – the single-player campaign is just the offline version of the same exact game with the other three Survivor characters controlled by the game’s A.I.

The Versus mode uses the same level maps as the campaign games but pits two teams of four players against each other with one team controlling the Survivors and the other controlling the Special Infected (the one a particular player uses is randomly assigned by the Director). The Special Infected are more limited than the Survivor characters in that they have no true ranged attacks (the Smoker’s tongue straddles the fence) but have more freedom in where they can go (they have the ability to climb buildings to maneuver into better hunting positions) and can see the Survivors through walls to plan their attacks. They also have the Infected on their side, of course, and can use a swarm attack to their advantage.

A Survival mode was added after the fact as a free downloadable update (and included in later versions of the game). This mode is fairly straightforward with a team of up to four players trying to survive as long as possible against an infinite horde of Infected.

I personally never got into Survival mode and I’m not a big fan of online competitive gaming anymore so I didn’t play the Versus mode much. I do, however, enjoy cooperative and single-player campaign games even now (when isn’t it a good time to kill some “zombies?”), over a year after the game was released, which speaks to the longevity of the game and its gameplay.

The game uses a fairly streamlined interface and control scheme. You can only “use” one item – be it a sidearm, a firearm, a throwable weapon (the two types are the Molotov cocktail which lights an area on fire and the pipe bomb which attracts Infected with its beeping before blowing them up) or a health boost – at a time, and you can only even carry one of each type of item with the exception of the standard pistols that you can dual wield. No firing and tossing dozens of grenades at the same time in this game.

To make things a little more challenging, you also don’t just magically heal when you use the first aid kit. You actually have to stop where you are and spend a few seconds patching yourself up (applying bandages and rubbing ointment on your body, I suppose), and hope that the Infected don’t decide to bum rush you (or that if they do your teammates can adequately protect you from the attack). Valve managed to strike a nice balance between fast-paced run-and-gun gameplay and a more methodic, deliberate style of gameplay.

Where Left4Dead shines dimmest is in the area of graphics. The game uses the latest version of Valve’s Source game engine, which debuted in 2004 behind Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2, both impressive games for their time but somewhat dated now. The lighting, the details in the environments and the ability for the engine to handle dozens of Infected onscreen at the same time is quite impressive but the character models themselves are decidedly less impressive than the ones found in games such as Gears of War, which uses Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which uses Naughty Dog’s latest proprietary game engine. However, you probably won’t notice this much considering how fast you’ll be running or spinning around dealing with swarms of enemies.

Despite its less-than-perfect graphics, Left4Dead manages to evoke a true sense of anxiety and be an immersive first-person shooter experience thanks to the intelligence of the game design and the creativity of the team at Valve. It’s not only one of the best shooters this generation but also one of the most fun games on any of the three platforms – and a bargain at just $29.99 retail.

If you’re in the mood for an exhilarating rush of action-packed thrills, do yourself a favor and pick Left4Dead up right now.

Final score: 5 out of 5

Parent to parent

This is definitely not a game for young kids. Gameplay consists of firing handguns, assault rifles and shotguns at enemies, setting your opponents on fire and blowing things up with pipe bombs.

I would even go so far as to say that some parents may want to avoid buying this game for kids younger than high school age due to the fact that players are not killing zombies but rather killing diseased people. None of the enemies have rotting flesh or missing body parts – in fact, they look like nothing more than grimy people hopped up on a little too much caffeine.

Of course, your mileage may vary – my nephews have long understood the difference between the fantasy in video games and the reality of the world in which they actually live, and assume that they’re simply making the undead dead again, anyway.

You know your kids best so just consider my warning and base your decision on your own comfort level.

Experience this for yourself!

• Left 4 Dead: Game of the Year Edition (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Left 4 Dead: Game of the Year Edition (PC) (Amazon)

So you’ve finally decided to take the plunge and buy a new video game console.

Maybe your stack of unfinished PlayStation 2 games has finally dried up. Maybe you’ve discovered the joy of playing games while sitting on your living room couch instead of at your computer desk or decided you don’t want to upgrade your 5-year-old video card to play the latest and greatest PC games.

Or maybe you just want to find out if there’s more to video games than sliding your finger around on your iPhone.

However you came to the decision to join the over 125 million people worldwide who enjoy video games on their Wii, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you really couldn’t have picked a better time to do so. All three console manufacturers – Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony – cut their prices in the last few months and, for the first time this generation, the PlayStation 3 is at an accessible price point.

My goal here is to try to help you make the choice of which console to purchase according to your interests and concerns. It can sometimes be a daunting task to look for advice on the web because for every unbiased website there’s a slew of immature, irrational forum posts by raging fanboys who are fiercely and unmovingly loyal to what’s essentially a hunk of plastic that spews pretty lights and sounds at them.

Indeed video game console fanboys (and fangirls) can be some of the craziest, most rabid fans in the world, singing praises at their console of choice and hurling insults at people who disagree with them. Often there’s no rhyme or reason to their rhetoric, which tends to be formed out of ignorance to reality.

Why bother weeding through that jungle of idiocy when it’s so much easier to just look at the facts and make your decision based on which console is more suited to your needs? Hopefully, I’ll help you at least a little bit with that today.

The first thing to consider is the kind of games you like to play. The Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are aimed at generally older gamers who have a lot of video gaming experience and more sophisticated tastes whereas the Wii is aimed at young kids and the more casual gamer who maybe hasn’t played a video game since the Super Nintendo days or dabbles only in lighter fare like Bejeweled or Diner Dash.

While there are certainly children’s and casual games available to play on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as well as more mature and complex games on the Wii, you can get a general sense of the style of gaming on the systems based on their marketing. If you like blasting away enemies, going on epic quests with lots of interaction with characters or playing realistic sports or driving simulations, your best bet is to go with the the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

In fact, the software libraries for these two systems are quite similar with the exception of a handful of exclusive games. The Xbox 360 has the better overall library of games with both acclaimed and popular titles like Halo 3, Gears of War and Left 4 Dead (and its sequel), but there are some killer PlayStation 3 exclusives like Final Fantasy XIII and Gran Turismo 5 (both entries in hugely popular series) coming out in the next year.

If you’d rather take a more laid back approach with games that have simpler and more straightforward goals and don’t require you to remember what two control sticks and eight different buttons do, the Wii is probably more up your alley. Another aspect to consider with regards to Wii gaming is that the games available on Nintendo’s system tend to be more geared towards “party play” – they’re not very complex so friends and family of all ages can quickly join in on the fun, no gaming expertise needed.

If you want to play games online with other people, you can do it with all three consoles. The Wii has the most restrictive online gaming functionality in that you can only play with people with whom you’ve exchanged “friend codes.” It’s a relief, in a sense, to parents who don’t necessarily want their children interacting with complete strangers on the Internet. On the other hand, it also means that you have to personally know a decent number of people who own Wiis in order to have some variety and flexibility in your gaming sessions.

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 allow you to send invites to people you already know (by typing in their IDs) or people you’ve played with right from within the gaming session. Even if you don’t have a lot of “real life” friends who own your system, you can still compile a sizeable list of people with whom you enjoy playing.

The Xbox 360’s online network, known as Xbox Live, is the only one that requires a monthly or annual fee (generally $50 per year) in order to play games. This seems like a lot to ask of gamers until you consider that Xbox Live is more mature (Microsoft introduced it in 2002 and has been improving it since then), more robust (there is a lot more content and functionality on Xbox Live than on the PlayStation Network) and more reliable (Microsoft has a lot more servers in a lot more locations for higher performance, greater reliability and more up-time). The online experience is also more consistent on Xbox Live due to Microsoft themselves handling most of the core networking code – developers of PlayStation 3 games need to program this themselves and can do it pretty much any way they want (to sometimes unfavorable results).

Of course, if none of that matters to you and all you want to do is play with some buddies, the PlayStation Network is a fine service indeed and won’t cost you a dime. Just hope that those buddies all have PlayStation 3’s (less likely in North America where there are almost twice as many Xbox 360’s).

On the other hand, the PlayStation 3 has a related advantage over the Xbox 360 in that it includes built-in WiFi, useful for people whose Internet service providers have given them a wireless router (or who have purchased one themselves). You can, of course, use an ethernet cable to connect an Xbox 360 to your network (that’s the same cable you would use to connect your computer if you didn’t have wireless networking), but if you want to get a wireless adapter be prepared to shell out $80 or more.

If you’re interested in doing things other than playing games on your gaming console then you can all but rule out the Wii as there isn’t a whole lot more to do on that little white box. If you have a wireless router at home, you can easily configure the Wii to use that to connect to the Internet in order to read news, check the weather and see what Miis (the little characters that represent you within the Wii’s game “world”) other people have put together. If you leave the Wii in standby mode (i.e. if you don’t unplug it when you turn it off), it will even automatically update itself on a regular basis to get you the latest content.

Disappointingly for some fans, Nintendo once again decided that theirs would be the only console to not play movies in any way, shape or form, despite utilizing discs that are the same physical size as DVDs and Blu-rays. Nintendo wanted to focus on games and target consumers looking for nothing more than a fun gaming system. Their logic was that most everyone has a DVD player these days and that the hardware is so cheap that there was no real advantage to including movie playback functionality. I can understand their viewpoint as easily as I can understand some fans’ frustration.

If you absolutely need to be able to watch movies on your console, you have to choose between the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 has the obvious edge here in that it can play movies stored on the relatively new Blu-ray disc format (pioneered, unsurprisingly, by Sony). Blu-ray is a technologically superior format that stores high definition video and audio (perfect for all those HDTVs that are dropping in price by the year) and includes evolved versions of many of the extra features found on DVDs.

Whether you would benefit from that superior quality or care about it is an entirely different matter. I don’t want to get into a meaty Blu-ray discussion here but I will suggest you take a quick glance at this chart circulating around the Internet that shows whether you’d even see a difference between Blu-ray and DVD based on the size of your television and how far you sit from it.

If Blu-ray isn’t a priority for you, then you can still watch all of your DVDs on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. They’ll even upscale the image quality to pseudo-HD which looks quite good (comparable to the quality of the HD television broadcasts from most of the national service providers like DirecTV and Comcast).

You don’t even have to use DVDs, either. Both devices are capable of accepting streaming movies, television and music from your home computer. You can even view all of your photos on your nice, big television set. This is a little easier with the Xbox 360 if you own a Windows-based computer since it utilizes the Windows Media Center that’s part of most Windows installations. There are plenty of free software online that will allow you to do the same things on the PlayStation 3. In fact, I use TVersity (compatible with both systems) instead of the Windows Media Center functionality.

Beyond that, you can rent or buy movie and television episode downloads from Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Many of these downloads are high definition with impressive quality despite not being as sharp as a Blu-ray movie. The pricing is skewed a little high, though, at the moment. If that’s a problem for you, join Netflix and you can stream thousands of movies and television episodes free to the system of your choice as part of your membership! The functionality is part of the Xbox 360’s operating system, but you’ll need to request a special disc for the PlayStation 3 which Netflix will send to you for free.

The final, and perhaps most important, thing to consider is the price you’re willing to pay to enter this generation of video game consoles. The Xbox 360 and Wii have the cheapest entry costs with models priced at $200 whereas you need to spend at least $300 for a PlayStation 3.

You technically get a lot more value out of the PlayStation 3 than you do out of the Xbox 360 and the Wii if you want and/or need the added functionality in Sony’s console (significantly, the Blu-ray capabilities). However, if all you want to do is play games, it’s tough to go wrong with any of the three consoles.

In short:

• If you’re a casual gamer who is looking for simple yet entertaining games that you can play with friends and family of all ages, your best bet is the Nintendo Wii.
• If you’re a more experienced gamer who wants a more robust gaming experience without breaking the bank, the Xbox 360 is a fine choice with the best overall video game library.
• If, on the other hand, you want all the bells and whistles and are willing to pay for them, you won’t regret purchasing the PlayStation 3, which will provide you with a solid library of games from which to choose and one of the best Blu-ray players on the market.

Experience it for yourself!

• Nintendo Wii Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Limited Edition Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Bundle (Amazon)
• Sony PlayStation 3 120GB Console (Amazon)
• Sony PlayStation 3 250GB Console (Amazon)