In Third Person

With the year winding down, many gamers have been discussing the best games of 2009, mostly to debate which game should be honoured "Game of the Year". I think it's impossible for any media outlet or any individual person to make a list that will make everyone happy. However, what I can do better than anyone else is speak for myself. With that said, my choice for "Game of the Year" is not the be-all-end-all opinion you have to believe in. Feel free to give me your picks for "Game of the Year" and "Game of the Year" nominees.

So...where to start? I guess so that we're all playing on somewhat common ground, I would cover off a few games that have been consensus "Game of the Year" nominees among many video game media outlets and go from there.

Uncharted 2

I've heard all sorts of wonderful things about the game's cinematic experience and super-fun gameplay. However, I do not own a PS3 as of this time, so I've never played it or the original. In the event I ever get a chance to play it, I will definitely give it a shot.



Assassin's Creed 2

Many critics of the first game had their gripes fixed with Assassin's Creed 2. Because of the criticisms of the first game, I decided to pass on the experience completely. However, with the great word-of-mouth and the "12 Days of Gaming" sale at EB Games (I got it brand new for $30), I thought I would give it a shot. I'm just over half way through the game and it's blowing my mind. The game does a fantastic job of making you buy into the life of Ezio. In terms of plot and setting, I haven't played anything this interesting...possibly ever. It's arguably the prettiest of all the open-world games out there right now. There's also a ton of fun stuff to do outside the great main quest. My only gripe with it is that the controls sometimes leave a bit to be desired when Ezio doesn't make the precision jumps you want him to because of the game's auto-correct jumping mechanics.



Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Up until I won this at my mom's work Christmas party, I had never played a CoD game and thought I never would. Man, was I missing out. So far the game is a ton of fun to play and really feels like an evolution on the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark era of FPS games that I am fond of. The only major sticking point to me is that the game feels kind of hard on normal difficulty, but maybe that's just because I'm a newbie (and not that good). I will definitely put more time into it in the new year.



New Super Mario Bros Wii

I don't think any game this year captures pure fun like New Super Mario Bros Wii. As a single player experience, it feels a lot like Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World, arguably the best two games in the series. It's also not a piece of cake like the DS version, so it will provide a great challenge for even the most seasoned Mario veteran. What changes the whole dynamic of the game though is the co-op play for up to 4 players. With 4 people in the screen, it's absolute madness. It's a testament to how universally awesome the game is when I can play it with my cousins together and we all have fun, and they're 11, 7 and 3 years old.



Batman: Arkham Asylum

At the time of release, I bought this only because of the great reviews and the sale price at launch. What I didn't expect was this game to live up to the hype. Batman is the definitive super hero game. It totally captures what it is to be Batman while being enjoyable throughout. I wholeheartedly recommend this game, even at full-price and I eagerly anticipate the recently announced sequel.


I would also like to put in an honourable mention to The Beatles: Rock Band, which was I think the definitive exclusive-to-one-band game. I'm sure that many more will come, but none will be made with the same love and care (and awesome music, but that's a personal taste) as the Beatles game was.

Are any of these my game of the year? No. My game of the year is one that came out very early in the year and I'm sure many people have forgotten to consider it because of that. Even with that against it, 2009 Game of the Year is a pretty easy choice for me to make. No game beat it in terms of the total time invested and total fun I had with it. It inspired me to get back into a genre of game that I felt abandoned me in 1995 and got me so back into it that I now actively follow the professional scene behind this game.

All things considered, my 2009 game of the year is Street Fighter IV.



I'm still an insanely huge fan of the Street Fighter II series. I've poured in countless hours of my life throwing hadokens and giving the business to M. Bison and company. To this day, I still play the original Street Fighter II. I even left a copy of the Super Nintendo version of the game at her house so I could play it when I'm visiting and she's doing something else. However, after Super Street Fighter II, fighting games got way too complicated and I stopped playing them completely. When Street Fighter IV was announced, it was being hyped up as a return to the series Street Fighter II roots, which is all I needed to know before jumping back on the bandwagon.

Did I get what I asked for? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I got a more accessible fighting game that I can play and enjoy at my skill level. No, I didn't get a carbon copy of Street Fighter II. I got an extremely modernized and fluid fighting game that at it's core brings back feelings of the classic. However, it doesn't come off as a rehash of Street Fighter II. Nostalgia be damned, Street Fighter IV is a better game in every respect.


I've invested over 200 hours into this game, mostly testing my chops against the best (and worst) XBOX Live has to offer. While the online systems weren't great, once you were in a fight, things generally ran as they should. I spent a lot of time trying to get better through training. It got me interested in trying BlazBlue (which is cool, but I'm still not sure I'm willing to invest the time I need to learn it). It also got me regularly following the tournament scene. It's been awesome watching the likes of Daigo and Justin Wong play this game at another level and then trying to implement their styles into how I play the game. It's almost like Street Fighter IV has transcended the world of "gaming" and moved into "sport" for me. Even almost a year after its release, the only thing I see stopping me from playing this is the release of Super Street Fighter IV in the spring.

Will there be enough new magic in SSFIV to make it my 2010 Game of the Year? We'll find out next year. But for now, I'll go back to catching scrubs on XBOX Live with my mean Raging Demon setups. Street Fighter IV is my game of the year.

During the early days of the World War II shooter (early 2000s), controlling a character from first person and shooting dudes was not really something I wanted to do. After games like Perfect Dark and Goldeneye sucked away hundreds of hours of my life, there wasn't really anything out there like it that I wanted to play. None of the FPS games of that generation appealed to me and I couldn't get a handle on playing these styles of games using dual analog sticks. Yes, that means I even missed Halo 1 and 2 in their prime. In the case of Call of Duty, I couldn't handle a dual stick FPS and I didn't want anything to do with WWII. Both of those elements combined for a series I had 0 interest in ever playing.

Ever since I invested in an XBOX 360 though, I've since played a number of FPS games. Heck, literally half of my game stash are FPS games, even though I still don't consider myself that big of a fan of the genre. By the time the Modern Warfare games took off, I had overcome my problem of dual sticks. But did I care for a more realistic war setting for a game? Not enough to go out and buy the game on my own.

As the hype train built up to critical mass for the release of Modern Warfare 2, I started to think that maybe I've been missing out on something special all along. I would often look around to see if I could get Modern Warfare 1 for cheap and at one point almost caved.

Luckily for me, my mom won a limited edition XBOX 360 with two controllers and a copy of Modern Warfare 2. I'm still not sure exactly what to do with the second 360, but I'm sure my brother and I will find a good use for it as well as all the other stuff it came with. We immediately busted the box open to play Modern Warfare 2 and see what the hype was all about.



First off, I should address my initial problem of being disinterested in the story/setting. Has the game changed my perception on "realistic" war? Not really, no. I still don't care that this takes place in the somewhat present. I read through the story of the first game and beat the campaign of MW2 and still don't care. Even playing through the "No Russian" level didn't really do anything for me. I appreciate the effort they put into this to try and make it as "Blackhawk Down" as they could, but it just doesn't stroke me the right way. Until I played as Soap, the game never really gives you a good sense of who you are, why you're hear and why you're doing the things you're doing. Ultimately, it feels like a Hollywood action movie that's big on excitement and short on substance.

Does any of this take away from the game for me? Not really, no. Behind it's setting and bombastic plot is arguably the best FPS game I've ever played. The core mechanics of moving and shooting guys feels just right. All of your shots feel like they have the appropriate impact and everything reacts the way you think it would. There's no shortage of guns and weaponry that adds layers of depth to the game. Do you arm yourself with a machine gun or a shotgun? Do you choose a rocket launcher and become vulnerable up close? Do you take a riot shield to protect you in exchange for a gun slot?

Movement from walking, running, crouching and crawling is easy enough to do and adds a lot to the game. Where the game takes it above and beyond are the extra weaponry, such as the AC130 and Predator missiles. Dropping a huge bomb or shooting hundreds of bullets from a helicopter at soldiers on the ground never felt so awesome.

In campaign mode, every stage is exciting to the point of ridiculousness. Every scenario seems to have been carefully thought out to provide maximum impact of adrenaline. Due to this planning, the story can take a back seat to riding snowmobiles or defending a burger joint from Russia. Maybe the experience would have more of an impact on me if I cared for the story, but I'm fine as is shooting guys.

The new mode introduced in Modern Warfare 2 is Spec Ops, which is sort of a mix of co-op campaign and Horde mode from Gears of War 2. Instead of a full blown co-op campaign or straight-up Horde mode, Modern Warfare 2 takes the best bits of campaign mode, adds co-op, and provides players with a scoring system to track your progress. While I still would have preferred straight-up co-op as well as this, Spec Ops is extremely fun to play and a great addition to the overall package.

As for multiplayer, not much more I can say about it. With the number of modes, options, perks and RPG elements, it's easily one of the best multiplayer experiences ever crafted. For me specifically, I think it's wonderful that 4-player split-screen was added. I know that the feature is antiquated and hardly anyone uses it anymore, but I still love using it when I have people over at the house. We all grew up on Goldeneye, so splitting a screen four ways is no big deal. The only thing that could have made it better is the inclusion of bots when you're not online.


Now that I know what this whole Modern Warfare thing is all about, I feel almost sad that I've been depriving myself of this experience for the past two years. Has it changed my mind enough to try the Treyarch Call of Duty games that come out every other year? I'm not sure if I would go that far, but I look forward to putting in many hours into this one.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. As a video game blog, I hope you found every game you wanted under the tree this year and that you provided your friends and loved ones with the gift of game as well. Between my brother and I, we received a bunch of games that I can't wait to dig into. Hopefully with my week off at work I can actually make a dent in them!

Having listened to the latest episode of the Joystiq podcast where they read and play clips of Joystiq readers share their favourite Christmas memories, I thought I would share one of mine with you.

It was the Fall of 1994. At the time, I was a regular reader of video game magazines, so I was fairly well informed as to what was happening in the video game scene at the tender age of 10. What caught me off guard though, was this personally-addressed video I received from Nintendo. Check out some of it below:



I knew of this game, but when I watched this video, it BLEW MY MIND. The graphics at the time were flat-out unbelievable. It looked really fun to play too. But man, THOSE GRAPHICS! In hindsight, maybe I was caught up in a pretty face and nothing more, but after seeing that video for the first time, I had to have that game.

Between that point and Christmas, I must have watched that video 100 times, eagerly hoping that Santa would drop a copy under my Christmas tree. I don't think I've ever eagerly anticipated anything that much in my life.

When the moment of truth finally happened and tearing open the wrapping paper revealed Donkey Kong Country, I was overcome with excitement. I popped that game in and played it all night.

Since then, I've had much better gifts, and in hindsight DKC may not be the best game ever. However, nothing (yet) has quite matched that moment in terms of sheer joy.

Feel free to share your gaming-related Christmas stories with me!

Last year, the original L4D rocked my socks hard as the ultimate zombie game. Gathering up three of your friends and attempting to survive the zombie apocalypse made it one of the best multiplayer experiences ever conceived. However, many also felt the game was a bit light on content.

Just one year later (and to the surprise and dismay of some) Left 4 Dead 2 arrives in stores with five new campaigns, four new survivors and a bevy of upgrades. For the most part, I feel like Valve has this down to a science.

At its core, L4D2 is what I wanted out of the first game. The core of what made the original is still here, augmented with a number of improvements. There are more campaigns, more guns, more special infected and more to enjoy.

The game comes with 5 campaigns, one more than the last and each chapter is generally longer than chapters from the first game. The new weapons do a great job of spicing things up, especially the melée weapons that are great up close and the grenade launcher that requires you to change your play style when you have it in your hands. Multiplayer is much more fleshed out with all of the campaigns being available for multiplayer as well as a bunch of new multiplayer modes.

For fans of the series and newbies alike, this package has a lot to offer and makes the old game pretty much obsolete. However, there are a few gripes I have with the game that keep it from perfection.



One of these gripes is more of a personal one. I really miss the original characters. Even though their absence from the sequel doesn't change the gameplay, I've grown attached to the original cast and the new cast just doesn't have the charm.

A gripe that does affect the gameplay is the difficulty balance. At normal difficulty, this game feels notably harder than the first, and at times downright cheap. There are times where you'll get rushed by a horde, boomer, spitter and hunter at the same time or some other combination that leads to insurmountable odds. A patch has been announced that supposedly includes some balance tweaks, so this may not be the case in the future.

Compounding these issues are your AI partners, who are dumber than doorknobs. They seem to have amazing accuracy when they decide to shoot, but they're prone to watching you get owned by a special infected for a while before deciding to help you out. In fact, they're even worse than your AI partners in the original. Try your best to play this with some friends and bypass the friendly AI completely.

In the wake of Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 still manages to provide a FPS experience worth playing and easily surpasses the original as the ultimate zombie game. If you're looking to run through the zombie apocalypse, there's no better way to do it.

For those of you who regularly check out my blog to view the video game world through my perspective: my apologies. Life has been nothing short of hectic these last few weeks with a full-time job, Chistmas preparations and a personal life. I still play games on a regular basis. However, finding the time to write about them has been very difficult.

I've got a lot to write about, having played Left 4 Dead 2, Assassins Creed 2, Modern Warfare 2 and a bunch more. But I thought to get back on the saddle, I'd talk about the game that arguably has taken up most of my time; Monopoly on the iPhone.

Monopoly, really? Yes, really.

Let me preface for a minute though. Growing up, I was a HUGE Monopoly fan, as I often played the original board game with my friends at the time. We never really finished any of those games, but it was always fun. Around middle school, I got a copy of Monopoly for my computer and dropped an insane number of hours into it. Something about the experience of buying properties, throwing down hotels and sucking your opponents bank accounts dry is so fun to me. When I saw this on sale for $3, I had to have it.

What can I tell you about the game of Monopoly that you already don't know? Well, not much. Gameplay wise, it's Monopoly. It plays exactly how you would expect on an iPhone. The interface works pretty well once you've mastered the intricacies of doing what you want to do. By default, you have to shake your iPhone to roll the dice. I found this annoying and turned off the feature immediately.

As a multiplayer experience, it works really well. You can easily save your game to play again at any time. There is also online play, though I don't really see anyone sticking out an hour-or-more experience on their phone. At least the option is there.

My only gripes come from the AI. Odds are, you're going to spend the majority of your time playing this game with computer opponents. Regardless of what difficulty level you play on, it always feels like the computer is out to get you. Even in a 4-player game where three characters are AI, it really feels like three versus one. The computer goes about stacking the experience against you by making nonsensical deals that would only make sense if everyone was out to get you. Also, when playing against the computer, it often seems to have the best of luck while you land in jail 4 times in a row without passing "Go".

If you learn to play the game a certain way, you can still overcome these AI faults. Overall, Monopoly fans should find a lot to like here, especially when it's cheaper and more portable than the real deal.

Today, my brother picked up a copy of the latest installment in the Rock Band series. Around the time this was rumored, I thought this was just a stupid joke cause the idea of mashing Lego up with Rock Band seemed too ridiculous to be true. Well, so much for that.

Unlike the other entries in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series, Lego: Rock Band is clearly skewed towards the kids. While the core mechanics are the same, everything from the set list, to no-fail on all the time, to a "super easy" mode for all instruments aims to make this fun for the tykes and their parents.

As hardcore Rock Band junkies, we picked this up as a means of bolstering our Rock Band 2 set-list. Being able to export all the Lego: Rock Band songs is a great feature, because you might not always want to play "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix with Lego dudes all the time. There are some great songs in here, such as the aforementioned Hendrix track, two Queen songs and the Ghostbusters theme song. However, for every great recognizable song, there seems to be two mediocre tracks from no-name bands. Taste in music is subjective and maybe you'll get more mileage out of it than I will.

What is disappointing without question is what you can transfer over to Lego: Rock Band. Due to ESRB ratings, only songs that classify as E10+ from Rock Band 1 and DLC can carry over. For me, roughly half of my DLC carried over and less than half of the Rock Band 1 songs carried over as well. Currently, there's no way to import Rock Band 2 songs. Bummer.

The other major shortcoming to Lego: Rock Band is the lack of online functionality. I know that parents probably don't want their kids to play online with strangers, but that's something you could control without having to remove the option from the game completely for others. Also, the lack of leaderboards is just lazy. What would you have to lose from putting them in?

The game has a few other weird quirks, too. Load times are longer than in Rock Band 2, and for some reason the ability to hit the green button during save screens can lend itself to making annoying noises during a time of silence.

Even as a die-hard Rock Band fan, I have a hard time recommending this right now. The song list isn't as strong as it could have been and it lags behind Rock Band 2 in a number of key places. If you can pick it up on the cheap, it's a decent way to add a bunch of new songs to your Rock Band 2 stash. Otherwise, I'd pass.

Back when this first came out in 2007, Crackdown was I think the first demo I downloaded when I bought my XBOX 360. I heard a lot of hype about its crazy GTA-meets-super hero gameplay and the demo of it was good enough to sell me on it...eventually.

I didn't pick it up that year. For whatever reason, I could not justify purchasing this game, making a note to myself every time I saw it that I would pick it up someday. Well, when the opportunity arose to get it for $5, I couldn't resist.

Is it worth more than $5? Absolutely. If you're the type of person that played Grand Theft Auto for the fun that comes with messing around with a big city, then this is right up your alley. In particular, the super powers of strength and agility make this game its own beast. The sensation of being able to jump to the top of a skyscraper and across rooftops is pretty exhilarating. It's this awesome gameplay mechanic that has left many a gamer scavenging the world for every last agility orb to maximize their hops.


Compared to Grand Theft Auto IV, Crackdown is a much more "free" experience. The game gives you essentially only 3 types of "missions" (capture a supply point, kill a general or kill a kingpin) and technically, you can complete them in any way you choose. However, the lack of structure can be a downer to those looking for a good story. The game ultimately boils down to "kill dudes", and not much else. Which for the most part is fine, because for what it does, it does really well.

My only real beef at the moment is that the game isn't really as open as it hypes itself up to be. Players are kept away from playing the game "out of order" by making elements of the world physically unreachable or the opposition too strong and too vast to take out. I totally understand why this was done, but it did feel really cheap in implementation.

With Crackdown 2 on the way early next year, this game is still worth a look even after all this time. I'm almost done the game, and maybe see myself picking up Crackdown 2 a lot faster than I did with this one.

One of my initial concerns over The Beatles: Rock Band was the limited song selection. With Rock Band 2 packing over 80 songs on the disc and currently over 900 songs total available, 45 Beatles songs seems paltry in comparison. Even if the game eventually included every single Beatles song ever made, the catalogue would never catch up in terms of sheer volume of songs.

Since the game came out though, I've played way more Beatles than regular Rock Band, because most of those 45 songs are really, really awesome. Adding to that awesome this week was the release of Abbey Road as downloadable content. If you're familiar with The Beatles catalogue, you probably already know wheter or not you want this.

For me, Abbey Road is easily my favourite Beatles album, so buying this was a no-brainer. The moment I had a chance, my brother and I played the whole album front-to-back.

The joy I felt from playing through the entirety of Abbey Road may have only been rivaled by the first time I "got" Guitar Hero. Your experience will vary based on how much you like the music, but for me that is the best music game content to date (and maybe the best it will ever be).


For all of the hyperbole, there are two caveats to this package. For the cost of completing the Abbey Road package, you're paying a lot for not much. Most of the big songs from the album came on the disc, so you're paying mainly for 2 full songs and the 16-minute medley. If you love Abbey Road then this doesn't matter. The pricing for individual tracks is a bit dicey as well. Would you pay $1 to get "Her Majesty", a 21-second song?

The only other beef that some may have is the inability to play certain songs from the medley separately. Due to te way these songs were put together, it would be weird to have "Polythene Pam" abruptly stop when "She Came Throgh The Bathroom Window". If you've played The Beatles: Rock Band, you've experienced this withthe first 2 songs off of Sgt. Pepper.

And in the end...if you're looking for more Beatles music for your Rock Band, this might be as good as it gets.

Released in 2008, Mirror's Edge was a game I was following closely. The concept of a game built around first-person parkour action in concept seemed totally awesome and totally un-doable. Most first-person games don't even let you see your own feet, control like you're a walking turret rather than a person, and platforming elements more often than not are a chore. How could a developer pull off such acrobatics from a first-person perspective?

Well, the game turned out good, hitting 79 on Metacritic, but a few of the flaws I found in the demo (as well as a limited budget and other games to get) prevented me from "jumping in" (sorry for the pun). I thought that the parkour action at its best was exhilarating in a way a video game has never made me feel before. However, I felt like I was constantly fighting with the controls and the combat systems felt clunky. I would die repeatedly because of the controls not doing what I wanted, which either caused me to fall off a building or get shot in the face at point blank range.


In spite of all that, I still wanted to give the game a chance. Today, I finally bought a used copy of the game for $5. At that price, I think I could take a chance on it. I also got Crackdown for $5, which was a game I waited even longer on to try out, but I'll talk about that another day.

I admit, I'm currently not that far into Mirror's Edge. From what I've seen so far though, it's kind of everything I hoped for (and feared) when I played the demo. The art style is awesome, the scenarios are exciting and the sensation of being a free runner flawlessly doing crazy stunts is incredible. But with all the awesomeness came dying. A lot. I must have died roughly 40 times in 60 minutes because I couldn't get a grasp of the controls. I feel that the buttons by default are mapped weird, and don't always respond the way I want them too. Also, the game really does fall apart when you're forced to fight, because the hand-to-hand combat and shooting engine are pretty bad.

I really want to love this game. I applaud Dice and EA for taking a chance on this and am glad that a sequel is on the way. I'll give the game more time and hopefully the game can change my opinion over the course of the game.

Over the last few hours, the video game blogosphere has been going insane over the inclusion of the word "sambo" in Scribblenauts.

Joystiq and Kotaku, just to name two outlets, have covered this topic, and I think blew it way out of proportion.

Kotaku in particular, went into a whole piece connecting the word "sambo" with the racist connotations while completely glossing over the other meanings of the word, even when they use the developers explanation in their own story.

Slaczka said that the word was included in Scribblenauts because it is an ingredient of the Ecuadorian dish Fanesca, which is listed, on Wikipedia, as including a "figleaf gourd," or "sambo".

So much for not buying Batman: Arkham Asylum like I said I would. I'm glad I changed my mind at the last minute.

If critical acclaim couldn't make me buy the game, what did? Thanks to Wal-Mart, many retailers in my country were selling the game at launch for just over half price. For most people, Arkham Asylum is a fine purchase at full price. At half price? It's a steal.

A lot of my concerns about the game that popped into my head during the demo were quelled when playing the final game. It didn't get repetitive. I didn't get crazy lost. It wasn't a crappy licensed game. The experience didn't drag on too long, and only got better with time.

Take out Batman from this game and it's still awesome. I played it from front-to-back in a 3-day binge and loved every minute of it. Well, almost every minute of it. I do have minor gripes with how it ends, but up until that point it just got increasingly awesome.

By far the best moments of the game featured the Scarecrow. It would be a crime for me to spoil any more than that. They are must-experience moments for any gamer, period.

Many people have said this is game of the year material. I don't think this will win it, but I would definitely say the game is a sure-fire honourable mention and worth your time. Go buy this game!

Making the rounds of video game websites and blogs is the above video from YouTube user Corporalgregg2, who recorded a few of the awkward things you can do with Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5. Everything from imitating Flava Flav's trademark, "Yeah boy!" to four Kurt Cobain's performing a Megadeath song with invisible instruments.

My initial reaction is, "LOL! Look at Kurt Cobain being crazy!" However, as someone who knows a little bit about the life and death of Kurt Cobain, I can't help but feel eerily uncomfortable watching this.

Part of the reason why Kurt Cobain is no longer with us is because he hated celebrity and the commercialism his music brought to him. He wanted to be seen in a certain light, and that not happening partially lead to his death. Ever since then, the legacy of Kurt Cobain has been fairly well protected.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise to see cyber Kurt Cobain in the video singing music from Bon Jovi and Stevie Wonder with an XBOX avatar and a skeleton. When the makers of Guitar Hero pitched this idea to the estate of Kurt Cobain, did they mention that this would be possible? If so, was the estate of Kurt Cobain cool with it?

As an outsider, this almost feels like they dug up the corpse of Kurt Cobain and slapped him into their video game strictly for marketing purposes. Am I the only one feeling uncomfortable about this?

A few nights ago, after a match of Street Fighter IV, I received a message from the guy I just beat. Usually, when I receive these types of messages, it's either something like "good game" or some form of verbal harassment. This time though was different.

He asked me in a voice message (not in an exact quote, but you'll get the idea), "How do you do moves and combos? I've only had this game for 2 days."

My instinctive response was to refer him to the training mode. He then replies with something like, "I know there's a training mode, but what buttons do I hit? I don't understand this."

Uh oh.

If you know anything about Street Fighter, you know that's a very ambiguous question to ask and an even weirder one to answer. Moves are dependent on your character and button configuration, while combos mostly rely on the "canceling" system, all of which is far too much to explain within the 250 character limit over XBOX Live.

I learned how to play Street Fighter IV primarily because I've been playing Street Fighter II for almost 20 years now. We learned by either playing similar-skilled people in person at the arcade or at home, or played with people better than us that were willing to give us pointers. Even back then, Street Fighter was a complex game to learn and you couldn't really get better unless you dedicated a lot of time and effort into getting good at it.

That environment to go hands-on and learn doesn't really exist anymore.

There is no arcade scene pretty much anywhere outside of Japan. People aren't really getting together to play at other people's houses like they used to. Fighting games, while making a comeback, are still not even close to mainstream. If you strictly play online, odds are you're playing a seasoned veteran who will just beat you up and go without giving you any sort of advice. If you're not able to spot patterns or observe the right things in an online match, you'll just get beat repeatedly without learning anything.

So how do you learn now? Well, unlike my generation, there is more resources on the Internet than ever before. Just Google it and you'll pull up a ton of beginner guides. There are also a ton of beginner and expert videos to watch on YouTube. Those helped me transition into IV a lot, but part of that was because I have a Street Fighter II foundation to build on. Without that, reading the guides and learning from the videos becomes much more difficult.

I hope the guy who messaged me on XBOX Live eventually figures the game out to a point where's he's happy playing it. Sadly, the best ways to learn just don't naturally occur in today's gaming environment.

"I Got Next" is a documentary about the fighting game scene. Filmed during the Sinsation tournament earlier this year, its goal as a movie is to cover the scene and the people behind competitive fighting games. I watched the short version of the film at www.igotnextmovie.com. A longer version of the movie is due out this winter, with footage from Evo 2009.

After seeing "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters", my hopes were high for this one. What made that movie so special wasn't the game, but the people stories behind the games. While the story was fudged a bit for the sake of entertainment, it ultimately became a video game version of Rocky with a clear protagonist and antagonist.

From what I've begun to learn about the fighting game scene, there is definitely enough of a people story there for a film. After watching a few tournaments online, listening to podcasts and playing a ton of Street Fighter IV myself, I was really psyched to learn more about the pros that drive this scene. Did it succeed? From what I saw, I felt the documentary left a lot to be desired.

Before I begin to criticize, I must preface by saying that the two movies are very different productions. The King of Kong was a fairly big venture, while I Got Next is basically a one-man project. Also, unlike King of Kong, which had a clear story and progression that occured over a long period of time, the majority of material for I Got Next was cobbled together mainly during a tournament that spanned only a few days. Considering the limitations holding back I Got Next, Ian Cofino did a pretty good job with what he had.

Maybe it's just me, but I really felt like it could have gone so much further. With the exception of Gootecks and the East vs. West thing, I felt like the film only scratched the surface of the guys they spotlighted for the film and the scene that holds all these guys together. I was watching it, warming up to the film, and then it abruptly ended without really satisfying any quenches I had for what the film was talking about.

If you're a fighting game fan, I still think it's worth a watch to get a glimpse of the pro scene you may be oblivious to. There's a lot more going on to Street Fighter than what happens on XBOX Live or PSN. Here's to hoping though that the next cut of I Got Next goes a little more in-depth.

The big console news to hit the Internet yesterday involved the results of a recent Game Informer survey. One of the questions they asked 5,000 of their readers was if they've had their systems break on them. Well, a startling 54.2% of respondents said their XBOX 360 has broken, which is in stark contrast to the Playstation 3 failure rate of 10.3% and the Wii failure rate of 6.8%.

Before we just accept these numbers as fact, there are a number of factors that could affect this result. First of all, while 5,000 is a decent sample, 5,000 Game Informer readers (who are likely hardcore gamers) isn't necessarily the best representation of the overall video game playing population. They may also not use their Wii as much, which means it gets less wear and tear.

Outside of all that though, I do believe that XBOX 360 number to an extent. Having seen all of the anecdotal evidence, knowing that all of my friend's with 360's have had this problem, knowing that I myself have had one system red ring, and that Microsoft has spent over $1 billion dollars to try and fix it, I almost feel like 54.2% is too low. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying that any 360 that hasn't broken yet will in a matter of time due to the poor build quality.

As much as I love my XBOX 360, there is no way I'm buying their next system on day one. With this red ring/E74 problem to the original XBOX power cord possibly burning down your house, their track record of hardware quality is atrocious.

In a deal that sounds too crazy to be true, Activision is for a limited time, offering those who purchase Guitar Hero 5 can get Guitar Hero: Van Halen for free before it hits stores.

If I were a Guitar Hero fan, I'd be all over this.

Key word: "if".

For a myriad of reasons big and small, I've hated every single Guitar Hero game since Guitar Hero 2. It's also worth noting that I began hating the series once Harmonix got bought by MTV to make Rock Band instead.

As someone who has played every single Guitar Hero game not made by Harmonix and disliked it, and as someone who has dropped hundreds of dollars in Rock Band instruments, games and downloadable content, a free copy of GH:VH pre-Hagar only isn't going to get me back into the series. However, don't let me rock your boat. If you're a Guitar Hero fan, there's much reason to rejoice.

If you bought the regular edition of BlazBlue like me, you missed out on the sweet bonus tutorial DVD that shows you how to not suck at the game.

Well, we're in luck. Thanks to Youtube user Jaxelrod, we have access to all of the character guides in that DVD. Above is the Noel tutorial.

Having watched a few of these, I still feel horribly lost and confused. Maybe if I keep at it I'll eventually figure this game out.

If you have any sort of interest in pro-Street Fighter IV play, definitely check out the live stream above. A lot of the top Japanese players are there (including Diago and Mago) as well as a few of the top North American players.

It's really interesting to compare and contrast this from how players were playing at EVO a few weeks ago. The styles of play for the same game are very unique to each region.

The Rock Band series of video games are hands-down my favourite video game series this console generation. I could go on for days talking about how awesome the games are. However, this time I wanted to highlight one major gripe I've lived with since I bought the full band kit on launch day of Rock Band 1:

The Rock Band 1 instruments are some of the worst-made video game controllers of all-time.

While my guitar technically still works, the strum bar feels horribly mushy and makes it difficult to consistently hit the notes.

My drums though, have given me way more problems.

I've sent them back 4 different times over the course of 2008. All 4 sets broke. In that time I've had 3 kick pedals. All of them have snapped in half.

Unfortunately, the warranty ran out on my drums a while ago. So what am I left to do? Besides drop $100 on a new set? Attempt to fix them.

My first attempt at fixing the drum pads involved me snapping the cracked pads back together and taping them up. That worked for about...two days. Then, I got more serious.


In order to prevent the pads from cracking apart again, I taped plastic butter knives across the cracks. This worked...for about a week. Unfortunately, directly around the middle piece is a round crack where not even a broken piece of butter knife can properly reinforce.

My next step? Construction glue.


They're drying right now on the table. I'll re-enforce these with something else once the glue is dry.


My kick pedals had to go through this shoddy surgery too. In order to keep them together, I've taped plastic butter knives to the bottom of the pedal.

It's so frustrating to be in this position. I could just buy new drums, but why should I if there's a way I can fix them on my own? I know my fixes feature terrible craftsmanship, but if it works, why not? The Rock Band 2 drums as far as I know work fine, but for the millions of people who got punked by the Rock Band 1 drum set, I feel your pain.


Top image from PS3 Attitude

I'm a huge podcast junkie, and the Player One Podcast has been one of my go-to shows since the very first episode. This week's episode from Chris Johnston, Greg Stewart and Phil Theobald (all former EGM editors) is a tribute to former EGM editor Andy Baran, who recently passed away at the age of 35 due to pancreatic cancer.

Growing up, EGM was a huge part of my life. Andy Baran worked at EGM during the early to mid 1990's, which many hail as the glory days of the magazine. While I personally don't recall much of his work in EGM specifically, listening to this very touching tribute makes me wish I had paid more attention.

The show features a ton of voice mails and the Player One crew celebrating the life of Andy Baran, and it's very touching to hear all these great stories about him. If you have a heart, definitely check out this week's episode of the Player One podcast if you don't subscribe to them already. Below is a link to listen to the show:

Player One Podcast Andy Baran Tribute