srediskraD... ahem, Darksiders hosted a bull riding feature at PAX, and your's truely decided to sep up to the hell-bronco.

And then the bull got going.

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I know, for many of you who grew up in the 90's, you have a special place in your heart for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the subsequent iterations of the series.  For those of you who don't know, here's the formula:

Sage/Professor/Magical Being recruits teenagers/young adults to battle evil sorceress/mechanical/fish (once a evil mechanical sorceress fish) to save the city/world/universe/timeline from domination/destruction.  Said humans are given incredible powers, equipment, and mecha to perform this task.  All they while, they deal with their normal lives while guarding their secret or more recently, in public view.

A standard episode follows an even more narrow story formula:  ranger team member has problem, evil character preys on that problem, ranger learns to deal with problem thanks to the encounter.

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And why can't Forza 3 out-perform GT5?  Why can't Killzone 2 go toe to toe with Halo 3?  Why is Splinter Cell a MGS clone?

I like coining phrases, so here comes a new one:  "Crown Prince Syndrome".  Final Fantasy has it.  Metal Gear Solid has it.  Halo has it.  And now, most prominently, Grand Turismo 5 has it, over Forza 3... despite a CNET poll rating excitement for Forza over GT, and a TheSixthAxis story questioning the credibility of CNET.  (Of course, Turn 10 might be skewing the results by offering exclusive content to voters.) Anyway, some people might call this CPS the "halo effect" (unrelated to Halo the game) when the game actually comes out, but I classify the phenomenon as being distinctly different prior to release.

Just because a game has been awesome in the past has only a probabilistic effect on the performance of future iterations.  The fact is that Forza 3 MIGHT be better than GT5.  Of course, I would still put my money on GT5 being the more popular... and even being measurably better.

But what I'm getting at here is that these royal lineages... games that are automatically "great" as soon as they are announced... really have to stop.  Genres don't have a royal lineage any more than US Presidents or UK PMs do.  Each entry in each genre should stand on it's own and be evaluated on it's own.  You can certainly be a fan of a specific game and use that as a reason to buy it, but that shouldn't curb your enthusiasm for another game in the same genre, especially to the point that any other game is an affront to the monarchy.

Furthermore, continuing my hypocritical war on the "armchair analyst", you probably aren't a paid analyst and probably aren't a stockholder in these companies, so you should chill out and let the people who get paid for their analysis be the ones sicking their necks out.

Why be possibly wrong when no one is breathing down your neck to pick a side in the first place?

And all it took was Avatar to put me over the top.  You guys beter be glad I'm not competing in the GS challenge.

It's time play bingo with E3 press conferences!  On the table this year, Microsoft slims the 360, gets MGS4, and gets clan support at the dashboard level.  Nintendo announces a Zelda game, gives the DSi it's own VC, and waggles its Wii in HD.  And Sony gives the PSP trophies, slings a price cut, and slims the PS3.  It's all the fun of bingo, but with the thrilling knowledge that everyone is playing the exact same card!

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/26/sonys-e32009-conference-lets-play-bingo/

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/27/nintendos-e3-09-conference-lets-play-bingo/

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In college I became aware of victory fanfares in my head.  You know... Final Fantasy's or Metal Gear Solid's or Mario's .  Yeah, those play in my mind when I complete something significant and believe I knocked it out of the park.  Some times I also get "On a mission" kinda music from Metroid.

At the same time, I don't think I have ever expressed failure as game music, cause I tend to be a little more serious in those situations.

Does anyone else do that?

If there were a God of Gaming, he would issue this command:

"Thou shalt play for the love of the game.
Not for companies or for franchises.
Not for plots or for immersion.
Not for graphics or for sound.
Not for blood or for guts.
Not for exclusion or for elitism.
Not for money or for recognition.
Thou shalt play for the excellence of accomplishment, for the joy of empowerment, and for the thrill of competition."

I was hard on KZ2.   Really hard.  But I now find myself in the odd position of enjoying the game, even to the point of eagerly anticipating going home to play.  And just to think, if this game weren't hyped-the-sh*t-out-of, I could have come to this conclusion much earlier.

Now, I still think the campaign is utter crap, but the multiplayer is masterfully crafted.  Once you dig into the classes, the badges, and the progression system, everything is brilliantly aligned to deliver ongoing satisfaction.  You just have to get used to the controls, which oddly enough, I'm back on a Sixaxis for.

The progression system allows you to be insulated from a lot of the complexity of the game until you rank up.  Lower levels can get matched to gether and experience the core game without checking every friendly for enemy disguises or looking over your shoulder for cloaked scouts.  As you level up, you get exposed to tacticians laying out free-form spawn points, engineers building turrets, and medics reviving and healing you.

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I came across a story asking what the next "Bullet Time", or a really cool mechanics gimmick, would be.  I had this idea.

The next gimmick could be a combination of Quick Time Events and Bullet Time. Use Bullet time to actively script a sequence of actions that would otherwise be difficult to execute in real time. The game then calculates that sequence into a difficulty rating and hams up the animation. Then, the game replays the sequence you recorded in cinematic glory, prompting you with the QTE reactions at a difficulty relative to the complexity of what you scripted.

The deal is that you can do virtually anything in your slow motion scripting environment, but you have to cash the checks you imagination wrote when you execute the sequence.

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