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 STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Electronic Arts So. For those unaware. The Force Unleashed is the latest Star Wars game by LucasArts, in which you play (mostly) Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, Starkiller, during the period between the new movies and original trilogy, as Starkiller hunts down the remaining Jedi while training to help Vader kill the Emperor, whereupon they will rule the galaxy together as one, etc. None of that’s really important, because The Force Unleashed is really a tech demo for the integration of three technologies new (for varying values of “new”) to video games. They are, in order of most familiar to least: 1) Havok physics (as fully showcased in Half-Life 2), the same physics engine used by almost every video game nowadays, which allows virtual objects to bounce off each other, float, and otherwise behave as real-ish objects in a real-ish world. 2) Euphoria (first showcased in Grand Theft Auto IV), a method of creating virtual nervous systems for electronic characters, such that they animate naturally. For example, using Euphoria, if you knock a stormtrooper off a catwalk with no railing, he can grab on to the edge and try to pull himself back up, and every time you do this he’ll animate differently, depending on the force and angle by which he was pushed, all without the programming team having to motion-capture an infinite variety of falling-off-a-ledge animation. It’s also useful for making sure they cower behind crates realistically. 3) Digital Molecular Matter (debuting in The Force Unleashed, I believe), a method of dynamically deforming or destroying virtual objects—with DMM, you can have a steel door bend under force as a steel door really would, or have a glass or wooden object shatter into shards or splinters that behave like real glass or real wood would. The Force Unleashed is pretty ambitious in its attempt to fully integrate those three technologies. You can destroy objects using the Digital Molecular Matter engine and then the resulting debris will behave as directed by Havok, while nonplayer characters will react to the destruction as directed by Euphoria. Theoretically, being able to cut things apart, shatter them, throw them into other things, and make hordes of stormtroopers cower in corners, dive behind cover, and frantically try to catch themselves from long falls will all go perfectly with playing an unstoppable Sith badass. Unfortunately, as a game, The Force Unleashed is short and aggravating in places, and has very little replay value. The gameplay is amusing for as long as the game keeps introducing new environments, but the environments are ultimately repetitive and the controls aren’t tight enough to make it a really compelling action game, like, say, Devil May Cry or God of War. Even as a tech demo, The Force Unleashed is pretty limp. For example, one thing that showed up in every preview video was using a thrown lightsaber to cut down trees, which then fell apart logically into the cut-apart bits plus many splinters, all of which bounced around off each other and the rest of the environment like real physical objects etc. This shows up in the actual game once, in the very first level, while you’re playing as Darth Vader on the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk. Still it looks very impressive! The tree bark shatters and all the underlying wood gets cut, and everything falls and the bits react to each other. But later on, when you go back to Kashyyyk as Starkiller, it doesn’t work—the lightsaber just bounces off the trees to no effect. Granted, the second visit occurs after Kashyyk has been taken over by the Empire and mostly torched, but are we supposed to believe lightsabers won’t cut through wood with a light coating of charcoal? Bogus. On top of that egregious oversight, the game's Digital Molecular Matter is mostly used for bending open metal doors, which is impressive the first time but quickly becomes routine, Euphoria is used to dynamically animate stormtroopers cowering while they hang in midair, but it doesn’t actually make them tactically unpredictable—they have significantly less behavioral depth than characters in many games using preprogrammed attack patterns. The game makes good use of Havok physics, but what game doesn’t make use of Havok physics nowadays? The first level is impressive, and then the rest of the game doesn’t do much with the tech it demonstrates. Anyways, I enjoyed it while I played it. It is an awesome rental, contrary to my earlier assertions that games “only worth renting” aren’t worth playing at all. I was wrong on that, and I recant. Still. The Force Unleashed, you may not want to buy.  LEFT 4 DEAD Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Valve Corporation This is the first multiplayer game to grab me and attract my play time since my brief affair with Halo 2 around its launch. With no plot to speak of, Left 4 Dead is a game about four survivors of the zombie apocalypse working together to get from point A to point B (where rescue awaits), surviving hordes of zombies and the occasional mutant superzombie along the way. Every play element has been carefully designed to make it an interesting team experience, where working together gets you the win and going off on your own gets you and everyone else killed. The game has campaigns, each with one set of five sequential maps. A full campaign takes about an hour to play through. An AI director alters placement of items and enemies, ensuring each playthrough is unique. Furthermore, in Versus mode, two teams fight against one another, alternating between playing the survivors and the mutant superzombies. I don’t have much else to say about this one. Valve makes good games, and they focused the full might of their design apparatus on making this one good, too. So, it's a good game. Got it?  SILENT HILL: HOMECOMING Platform: Xbox 360 and PS3 Publisher: Konami Silent Hill: Homecoming is the video game equivalent of a decent American remake of a really good J-horror movie series. Aside from being useful shorthand, that statement’s also strictly true—it was developed by the America Double Helix Games instead of Konami’s Team Silent, and I feel really divided about the result. On the one hand, it’s skillfully done and, while the fighting could stand to be more polished, it’s not actually bad (or at least it stopped being bad once I realized I occasionally had to dodge backwards, and not just left and right). The game basically does the same things previous Silent Hill games have done, and does them well enough. The enemy designs make sense in light of the protagonist’s psychological issues once you figure out what those issues are. On the other hand, this game is emblematic of how creatively stagnant the Silent Hill series is. There is nothing new here except current-gen graphics and a bit of Havok physics applied to environmental debris. Like a lot of American remakes of good J-horror, it’s basically a remix of some of the better elements from the original executed with more polish and less innovation. The soundtrack, by Akira Yamaoka, feels like he was told “Make another Silent Hill soundtrack, you know, like the previous ones.” It actually drew my attention to how little was new about the gameplay in Silent Hill 3 (I prefer not to think about 4), The only really horrifying thing it showed me is now may be time to put the series to bed. To be fair, that does make it a really horrifying game, because I love the Silent Hill series. It’s just, um, I don’t think it’s the sort of horrifying they were going for. So, in conclusion, if you want another well-executed generic installment of what was once a startlingly original and non-generic series, this is the game for you. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here hoping Team Silent just does something really bizarre and untested for the next game. The series needs it.  SPIDER-MAN: WEB OF SHADOWS Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Activision Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is the latest Spider-Man game from Treyarch, the same studio that made the promising first Spider-Man movie game, the critically acclaimed Spider-Man 2 movie game, the critically reviled Spider-Man 3 movie game, and the Ultimate Spider-Man game I never played but kind of wish I did. Web of Shadows does many things well, and in a lot of ways is better than Treyarch’s Spider-Man 2, which everyone still remembers loving. In a video game featuring a main character as familiar to me as Peter Parker, I tend to play in-character—that is to say, I do stuff in the game I think Peter Parker would do, not necessarily stuff that gets me the most points or powers or whatever. So here is where I fell in love with Web of Shadows: I was rescuing a group of civilians from a mob of attacking symbiotes, when I noticed that nearby, within sight, was another group of civilians being attacked by another mob. (Normally, the game’s virtual New York is big enough this doesn’t happen.) I realized I wouldn’t have time to save many of the second group even if I headed over to them right away, and if I did that, everyone in the group I was currently saving would die. So, as Peter Parker, I consigned the second group of civilians to death in order to save the first. I enjoyed this not because it was a pleasant experience (it was unsettling), but because this is not something I had ever experienced playing a video game before. I’ve done vaguely similar things playing as other characters, but none of those characters were Mary-Jane Watson’s loser superhero boyfriend. Spider-Man has a famous quote about responsibility, and no Spider-Man game before now has been as much about assuming responsibility as this one is. I love games that are about things.
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