The last installment of the Gears of War trilogy released recently, easily my own most anticipated game this year.  Gears of War has always been a different style from most shooters, placing the player in a 3rd person perspective looking over the shoulder of the character you’re controlling.  The ingenious cover system and it’s implementation into the game makes Gears of War unique among shooters.  The final Gears game did not disappoint.

The story is set 2 years after the previous Gears game, after humanity on the planet Sera had sunk it’s last remaining stronghold into the ocean in an attempt to destroy the locust horde beneath the surface of the planet.  In this game, humanity is on the brink of extinction and so is the Locust horde.  Both are being attacked by a new life form called the “Lambent”.  The Lambent is a parasitic life form that comes from the immulsion fuel supply that is widely used on the planet.  The Lambent is what pushed the Locusts to emerge from beneath the surface, causing them to flee.  In this game, you learn that the main character’s father is still alive (presumed dead in the backstory of previous games) and has a potential solution to the Lambent problem.  You fight across Lambent and Locust infested areas, crossing land and sea in order to find him.  This game throws a ton of character development at you as well, really showcasing the toll that this war has taken on these people.

Epic Games improved even more so the wildly popular survival game mode, Horde, in this installment.  Added to the Horde gameplay is a form of tower defense strategy.  Players can build fortifications, turrets, & decoys to aide them in their efforts to hold off wave after wave of Locusts and Lambent.  In a twist, another game mode was added to this game that takes Horde and turns it on it’s head.  Beast mode allows players to play instead as the Locusts and try to attack the human defenders.  You have a limited time to complete the wave, earning additional time with each kill or fortification destroyed.  Each kill also earns you money and allows you to select bigger, badder creatures to play as with each subsequent respawn.

The multiplayer portions of this game got a boost with the addition of dedicated servers.  The biggest complaint most people had with the first two Gears games was the poor networking code and how dependent gameplay was on the host Xbox’s connection quality.  With this game, ranked matches (and others, depending on server load) are hosted on dedicated servers, guaranteeing that no one player in the game has a significant advantage over the others.

Video games are a business and Epic Games has followed suit and introduced a pre-payment plan for downloadable content (DLC) for Gears of War 3, much as other game studios have done.  The Gears ‘Season Pass’ will cost you $30 outright, but it provides you with access to the first year’s worth of DLC with no additional cost.  Also, gamers can now purchase additional weapon skins for their guns to make them all nice and pretty.  You could fork over money and buy them all ($48) or just buy the ones you want, which are relatively cheap individually (~$3 each).

Overall, this is a great game to play.  The in-game feedback you get for doing specific accomplishments (ribbons, medals, achievements) is great.  Different combinations of rewards unlock different little ‘extras’ in the game, such as weapon skins, playable multiplayer characters,  or mutators for Horde mode (like skulls in Halo).   There are many options available to you when you load up the game, whether it be single player campaign, co-op, arcade campaign, beast, horde, or versus mode.  The game is fun to play and will be around for quite some time.

Sucker Punch is a new movie written, directed, and produced by Zack Snyder.  This is Mr. Snyder’s first original screenplay.  His previous work was in adapting popular comics like Frank Miller’s 300 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen to the big screen.  If you were a fan of those movies then you should skip reading anymore reviews and go watch Sucker Punch because everything that made those movies good is in Sucker Punch.  For example, like 300, Sucker Punch has clean, spectacular action scenes and like Watchmen, Sucker Punch has an off beat, comic book sensibility.  The real difference between Sucker Punch and 300 is that Mr. Snyder trades in the barely clothed, airbrushed beefcake for a bunch of beautiful women in burlesque outfits.  To complement the beautiful women Mr. Snyder creates some of the most beautiful settings and visuals to ever grace the silver screen.  The settings are as widely varied as they are beautiful and range from World War II trenches to futuristic trains.  Mr. Snyder populates these lovely settings with a wide variety of goons for his lovely cast to beat up on.  The goons the girls beat up on read like a list of everything video game nerds love and include dragons, robots, giant metal samurai, and clockwork Nazi zombies.  There is even a story that ties all of things things together coherently.  Even if the story gets a bit confusing and could use a strategy guide so that everyone can follow what is going on.

In and around all of the awesome action and scantily clad hotties is the story of the trials and travails of a young waif nicknamed Babydoll.  Babydoll is sent to a crooked insane asylum by her avaricious step-father to have her grey matter rearranged with an icepick.  She has five days to escape the asylum before the traveling doctor that preforms  the icepick lobotomies can get around to her. This is where Sucker Punch gets confusing because Babydoll decides to kick the squalid reality of the insane asylum to the curb about five minuets after being committed.  Squalid reality is replaced with some kind of bordello or burlesque club fantasy world.  From there things get more confusing as more fantasies get layered on top of the fantasy bordello world.  The layered fantasies are how Sucker Punch is able to travel instantly and seamlessly from a bordello to a World War II trench to futuristic train and back again.  All of the fantasy voyages to stunning locations play to Mr. Snyder’s strengths as an action movie director.  Instead of watching Babydoll sit around her cell and figure out how to escape she is simply given a video game style quest to get four items from an old man.  Then she fights three giant metal samurai.  This lets Mr. Snyder show off exactly how good he is at making action scenes and stunning fantasy vistas.

Mr. Snyder continues to play to his strengths as an action movie director for the rest of the movie.  Babydoll recruits her fellow inmates to help her steal the four items that she needs to escape.  Instead of showing the girls sneaking around and stealing things in squalid reality we are treated to fantasies where the ladies fight a laundry list of things nerds love.  They end up fighting dragons, robots, and clockwork Nazi zombies with a variety of guns, swords, and giant mecha.  Mr. Snyder has created a movie that reads like a nerd’s wet dream because the ladies run around these fantasy battles in some very hot costumes.  The hot chicks and awesome action are enough to make a thoroughly entertaining movie but Mr. Snyder seems to be trying for more.  Not to say that he pulls off a deep and meaningful story with Sucker Punch but he does seems to be trying for more than just awesome action.  The problem is that deep and meaningful is not his forte.  Awesome action is.

Hell Yeah!

Whether or not Sucker Punch is anything more than just an action movie is a matter of opinion.  Most of the critics seem to be arguing that Sucker Punch is as shallow as a puddle but I don’t buy that.  After watching the movie I found myself reflecting on it for a few days.  That there was something there for me to reflect on at all tells me that something deeper than the plot of the Expendables was happening.  I believe that this movie was made with the video game generation, my generation, in mind.  Sucker Punch seems to be taking the dictum that movies should show, don’t tell to the extreme. The video game generation is used to taking show, don’t tell to the extreme because video games usually only have about five minuets of exposition for each hour of play time.  Video games can’t use more exposition than that because it would get in the way of the game itself.  For example, some of the critics knocked Sucker Punch for not characterizing its characters very well.  It seemed like they were expecting the characters to tell the audience about themselves through exposition or dialogue.  Personally, I found the characters to be well characterized but I got a good read of who their character are from their appearance, weapon selection, and fighting style.  You know, the same way video games characterize their characters in a absence of exposition or dialogue.  In a similar vein, Sucker Punch never simply explains what is going on.  Instead everything is simply shown or not shown.  Taking the show, don’t tell dictum to the extreme.  This makes Sucker Punch confusing but potentially deeper than what it appears to be at first glance.  Of course, because nothing is explained any deeper narrative must be inferred, so any claim to depth is nothing more than an opinion inferred from the movie.  Mr. Snyder would have been better off if he took the time to add a bit of telling to his movie instead of simply showing alone, but showing does seem to be his forte.

Sucker Punch is a love it or hate it kinda movie but love it or hate it Sucker Punch deserves to be seen in the theaters, because it has such gorgeous visual effects.  Mr. Snyder is a master of created beautiful vistas and clean action scenes even if he might be better off adapting works to the big screen rather than writing his own material.  Of course, anyone part of the 20-30 year old male gamer demographic should see this movie because it was made for you.  For everyone else, I tried to explain what Sucker Punch is without spoiling anything so you can make up your own mind.  It is not like I am getting paid to put your butt in a theater seat.

I'm too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts

Is Deus Ex: Human Revolution on your new games radar yet?  If it isn’t, then let me do you a favor and give you a heads up about it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a first person role playing game being developed by Eidos Montreal for the Xbox 360, PC, and Playstation 3.  Human Revolution is a prequel to the popular PC game Deus Ex and the less popular Deus Ex: Invisible War.  Set in a cyberpunk future and featuring a globe hopping campaign, Deus Ex looks to be what  Alpha Protocol should have been.  Like Alpha Protocol this game promises options. Specifically, Deus Ex is promising that any Mahatma Gandhis out there can get through the game with a minimum of violence using stealth, social skills, and hacking.

Beyond all the boring talking, sneaking, and keyboard twiddling Deus Ex is a first person shooter.  It is promising a wide range of weapons and weapon upgrades.  Of course, upgrading weapons is nothing new but it looks like Eidos is making an effort to make the upgrades more interesting than hum drum damage and accuracy boosts.  The only upgrade that has been specifically mentioned is an upgrade that transforms a boring dumb fire rocket launcher into a heat seeking missile firing murder machine.  But the weapons are not the biggest draw for Deus Ex.  If you just want a bunch of weapons and AI targets the newest Call of Honor Zone game will scratch that itch.  The story Deus Ex promises to tell is the reason to check it out.

The story is promising to be a complex epic that involves evil mega corporations, conspiracies, and everything else you would expect from a cyberpunk world.  It centers around Alex Jensen, Mr. Too Sexy For His Shirt up there, and the nifty new mechanical arms he is kitted out with after an epic beat down. Big Sexy’s involuntary upgrade to stainless steel dick beaters adds a side story that focuses on trans humanist ideals and ethics.  This plays out in a sepia toned, near future dystopia in which Jensen is some kind of cross between Solid Snake and Dick Tracy that works for a, presumably evil, mega corporation that makes vibrating prosthetic hands for the ladies.  Well, presumably they make more than prosthetics with naughty features but a cyberpunk conspiracy story about the near future porn industry is something that I find oddly appealing.

Time to wrap this up before I get into theories about how porn will drive the cyberpunk technology of tomorrow.  Deus Ex: Human revolution looks like a promising first person shooter that will mix stealth, action, and smooth talking into an epic story that actually attempts to tackle trans humanist issues and ethics.  It does not have a release date beyond some time in 2011 but the news makes it sound like it will be out this summer.  If it waits too long to be released it will be up against the powerhouse noob stompin’ duo of Gears of War 3 and Mass Effect 3 that is slated to come out just in time for Christmas.

The Escapist has started a new series called Extra Consideration that features three very accomplished video game commentators discussing video game issues.  Extra Consideration deserves your consideration because it features Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, Bob “MovieBob”, Chipman, and James Portnow.  All three commentators have excellent video series on the Escapist.  Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw is the creator of the famous Zero Punctuation series and the weekly opinion column Extra Punctuation.  Bob “MovieBob” Chipman is the creator of the video series Escape to the Movies and The Big Picture as well as doing the weekly opinion column Intermission.  James Portnow is the writer for enlightening video series Extra Credits.  These men are some of the best video game and movie commentators that are available on the Internet.  You owe it to yourself to check out Extra Consideration.

Cthulhu Saves the World is a hilarious indie Role Playing Game done in the style of the 8 bit Dragon Warrior games.  Cthulhu Saves the World can be downloaded from the Xbox Live Arcade at a bargain price of 240 Microsoft points.  This game is a tongue in cheek RPG made by Robert Boyd, William Stiernberg, and Gordon McNeil.  Those three guys also made the hilarious old school RPG Breath of Death VII.  If you played Breath of Death VII then you already know how Cthulhu Saves the World plays because its core game play is almost exactly the same.  If you have not played Breath of Death VII then what the heck is wrong with you?  It was a hoot and only cost a buck.  Seriously, go buy Breath of Death VII.  Where was this going again? Cthulhu Saves the World?  Ah, yes, Cthulhu Saves the World scrubs the boring grind out of the old school RPG genre to deliver a fast, funny game for a price that competes with a meal from the dollar menu.  And Cthulhu is a lot heathier for you than anything you could buy from of a dollar menu.

Cthulhu saves the World is a soothing, lighthearted indie balm for the grim, gritty melodrama that the triple A studios pump out. Unlike Gears of War or Mass Effect this game can’t take itself seriously.  Cthulhu and the Narrator break the fourth wall to talk to the player and argue with each other. The cast of characters include tongue-in-cheek parodies of staple RPG characters and off-the-wall originals.  Nothing about this game is serious in the slightest, and it all adds up to one of the funniest games on the Xbox Live Arcade.  Cthulhu cranks up the funny with some of the wittiest dialogue available in any game.  To compliment the brilliant humor Cthulhu also delivers a deep old school RPG experience that is so good that it would put some Super Nintendo games to shame.  And it might just have the best soundtrack of any indie game on the XBLA.  Except for, maybe, I Made a Game with Zombies in it, which has an epic soundtrack.

Cthulhu Saves the World’s core game play is very solid because it scrubs all of the boring grind out of the old school RPGs genre while delivering a deep RPG experience.  Cthulhu uses a few nifty game mechanics to avoid the grind endemic to the old school RPG genre and to make the combat more complex.  The most important game mechanic that keeps Cthulhu moving quickly is that characters level up quickly and easily.  The ease of leveling is balanced by their being a limited number of random encounters in each area, so the player is discouraged from breaking the game by grinding himself retarded.  The limited amount of random encounters also helps the game move along at a quick pace because if the player gets lost in a dungeon the random encounters will stop so you could find your way to the end.  Cthulhu beats the grind in random encounters by using two game mechanics to encourage the player to end fights as quickly as possible.  The two game mechanics act as a carrot and a stick.  The game breaks out the stick by making all the bad guys 10% stronger every turn.  Cthulhu complements the stick by offering a carrot for ending fights quickly. After each fight Cthulhu and his crew recovers some Magic Points.  The game dangles a carrot in front of the player by decreasing the ammount of magic points that are recovered for every turn that goes by. This encourages the player to nuke the holy hell out of the mooks and, ideally, end each random encounter in one turn.  Figuring out how to end each random mook stomp in one turn is a fun minigame it its own right.  As much fun as it is to giggle stomp random mooks, Cthulhu does not encouraged the player to spend all their time terrorizing them.

Cthulhu Saves the World music video.

Cthulhu Saves the World delivers six solid hours of entertainment for only three bucks.  Even if you do not like old school RPGs the humor in Cthulhu is so good that you should give it a try.  The demo is free and it will give you a solid idea what the rest of the game will be like.  A game like Cthulhu shows that three guys with a good idea for a game can make something that is as much fun as a triple A title and delivers a lot of play time for your buck.  Cthulhu even manages something that the triple A titles rarely try for, comedy.  A wise man once said that comedy was harder to pull off than drama, but Cthulhu shows what a well done comedy game can be.  Cthulhu Saves the World is a great game to download if you have a slow, boring Sunday afternoon with nothing going on.  Just download Cthulhu and let the good times roll.  The power of the Internet compels you.