I'm inundated in video games—most of the big games for this fall, in fact. Some people would call this Christmas. I'm a little less excited (though, uh, this is totally Christmas).

Big budgets and too many hands in the pot often have an inverse effect in the games world—just look at this year's Snore Spore. Did you know the game was originally gonna be science-crazy, and then a “cute” movement sprung up at the dev, and they proceeded to dumb the game down? Ugh.

Thankfully, none of this season's hyped releases have disappointed the way Spore did. But that's like saying none of them took a dump in my ear. Let's get back on gaming track by looking at the PlayStation 3 care package I received earlier this week. Jump with me for that console's big Christmas exclusives: LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm 2, and Resistance 2.

I bet Sarah Palin can see Russia from that helicopter she just hijacked. Conveniently, this "update" to the game in question won't be out until well after the election, by which time we can only hope Palin isn't still gathering pitchfork-bearing mobs and demanding recounts.

And besides, no political video game tie-in will ever outdo Bill and Hillary's "boomshakalaka" days:

I like Gameworks' Thursday night special--pay $10, get all-you-can-play access from 10 p.m. on--but the rest of the week gets nothing. Per-game prices have dropped, but mostly for older games that you can play on an Xbox by now. I haven't noticed any drink specials. And about two months ago, a Gameworks room was cleared out to make a dining hall with an eye toward (relative) elegance and a sign asking for companies to rent the space for their next major luncheon. Trouble is, that fancy room is pushed up against the shoot-basketballs kiosks. Who are you targeting, the PR department for Gymboree?

But I have reason to return, beyond my stupid arcade nostalgia: I'm still rolling with $60-ish in credit on their proprietary swipe-cards. Fricking drunken birthday party... So I stopped by last night on my way back home and noticed, again, the place looked barren. But the dozen people last night weren't spread thinly over the place's zillions of square feet. They weren't spazzing on the DDR machines. They had piled upon a Street Fighter 4 cabinet.

Sadly, this photo is not of Seattle's Gameworks

Big deal? The new game's Japan-only right now... and is ridiculously fun. I had been planning a pilgrimage to Tacoma to play SF4 with friends, as some bowling alley owner down there had imported the game a few months ago (just in time for PAX), but scratch that.

Street Fighter has been redone in 3D to look like a living cartoon, and the mix of 3D models and paint-brush effects is striking. More importantly, SF4 takes out the clutter of the zillions of Street Fighter clones, returning to the series' simpler fightin' glory. Tighter pacing; fewer moves; rebalanced characters; blah blah. The important thing was the feeling: its gravity, speed, and whallop of hits had a believably cartoony quality that was welcoming and instantly fun.

But the best part was the line. Players old and new to this version rapped about tweaks to moves, SF4 changes they liked, the way they were gonna get each other next round, and on and on. Mixed into that conversation was old-school arcade admiration; whether a guy was racking up a seven-win streak or finally getting his after a newbie's ridiculous comeback, I couldn't help but get into the game by proxy as this scraggly gang of 20-somethings cheered each other on. This is how Street Fighter 4 should be consumed; don't wait for the 2009 Xbox version.

I should also mention Rambo. There's a new Rambo gun game from Sega at Gameworks, and it puts you in charge of an oversized machine gun with nearly endless ammo that rattles like a bastard. Clips from the original movies pop up between hundred-man murder sprees for good measure--and just like the movies, somehow Rambo barely ever gets shot. America!

Those were the only new machines I saw in my full venue run-through, sadly. But it's a good start--those two serve up more fun than a lot of stuff around Pacific Place. Now, can we get more new cabinets, Gameworks? Or at least some drink specials?

(ht: pixelsumo)

You can tell they're German because they spell it komputer:

Copies of LittleBigPlanet are being recalled from shops worldwide after it emerged that a background music track contained two phrases from the Koran.

The music in question comes from a Grammy award-winning Somali artist and is known to have been available through online music stores for months.

In an e-mail the [Muslim] gamer who spotted the Koranic phrases warned that mixing music and words from Islam's most holy text could be considered deeply offensive by Muslims. He suggested producing a software patch to remove the music.

Media Molecule said it did produce a patch but, following consultation with Sony, decided to go further.

"We decided to do a global recall to ensure that there was no possible way anyone may be offended by the music in the game," said a Sony spokesman.

In June 2007, Sony apologised to the Church of England after setting scenes in a violent video game inside Manchester Cathedral. On that occasion the game was not withdrawn.

So what's behind this story? Is Sony afraid of violent Muslim radicals? Or a boycott? (Does the Muslim world really make up that much of their sales percentage?) Or is it just a case of someone being so open-minded that his brains fell out?

And a couple lines in a song by a Grammy-winning singer is nothing compared to, say, setting violent scenes inside Mecca. (Which, at least, would be historically accurate.) So why the disproportionate response from Sony?

This recall doesn't smell like sensitivity—it smells like fear.

Rock Band 2
Harmonix/EA/MTV Games (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)

While trying out Rock Band 2, I've enjoyed not having to review it. It's the same basic concept as Rock Band 1, which was already Guitar Hero on steroids--two people on fake guitar/bass, one on a USB microphone, and one on a four-pad drum kit play along to popular rock songs from the '60s to today. Play songs to unlock more songs, along with trinkets for your virtual egotists.

There are improvements, and I'll get to those, but by nature, RB2 is decidedly similar. New songs, same play. So I've paid more attention to the way people digest it.

Perhaps you have a posse who loves the game, and your dedicated foursome racks up RB scores by memorizing complicated song passages. That's a different review. My experience has been mostly with people who stumble upon the game—showing up at the wee hours with a buzz, seeing plastic instruments strewn about, and figuring they may as well give 'em a shot.

For these players, it's a rush to the drum set, which plays 1:1 with the music. You are banging along to a real beat; even if it's on a plastic kit, it's still the most successful portion of the "be a rocker" experience. Then somebody grabs the microphone—they're drunk, they wanna sing along with the Go-Gos or Journey. Whatever. The mic picks up your pitch, but not your words, so you can mumble-hum your way through songs. The plastic guitars get picked last, which control the same as they did in 2005—so they still don't control like real guitars. With five buttons, rather than a real guitar's endless array of notes and chords, the play becomes percussive (though certainly less intimidating for a party's sake).

In a perfect session, everybody's taking turns and trying it all. It's not typical. Somebody doesn't want to sing. Sometimes, they're insecure. Most of the time, they've run out of songs they're comfortable singing--this is not a karaoke kind of selection, which means less Neil Diamond, more Sonic Youth and Grateful Dead. Casual singers have been underwhelmed after burning through the game's obvious hits.

Meanwhile, other people hate playing the fake guitars--either the feeling of them or the whole "press a button, then strum" mechanic. Even with the new, welcome no-fail mode, and even with intoxication in the mix, some people do not budge in the face of RB's party potential.

On the other hand, when you have a group that's on a roll, the play turns mechanical. Not so much laughing at bad singers and people faux-strutting with their stupid guitars. Instead, everyone stares at the screen to keep up with constant note patterns. You shouldn't pay $190 for four people to gang up and ignore each other--why not make interaction more inherent with this new iteration?

I did find the sweet spot for some of my play. With the right mix of experts and novices, we laughed it up, made fun of each other, got the hang of the fake-rock system, and found ways to interact even when the game didn't make that inherent. The song selection is pretty broad, balancing its duds with party-perfect fare (and you can borrow someone else's RB1 disc and, for a $5 fee, pump those songs into the new game, which doubles the game for newcomers). RB2 has enough tweaks, if not massive changes, to make this near-essential for anybody who already blew cash on the old instruments last time—slicker interface, 84 new songs, new online modes. Hell, what else are you going to do with those old instruments?

But the full instrument+game pack is $190, as is the same pack from Guitar Hero World Tour, seeing release in a week or so. People will soon nitpick over which fake band setup is better—GHWT has slightly better drums and a make-your-own-song studio, while RB2's new wireless gear is quite solid, and its song selection is larger (though before dropping cash, hit Wikipedia to compare the games' song lists). Flip a coin if you're concerned about the slight differences; I'm more interested in when the virtual-rock bell curve will start dipping. With so few new features here—and nothing to compel players to interact with each other in-game—I'm guessing sooner than later.

Sony announced today that they've begun a worldwide recall of their fall blockbuster game LittleBigPlanet. This "platformer 2.0" game, loaded with tons of user-made content and Pixar-esque art design, was set to hit stores one week from today--and is sitting in a lot of stores right now--but they'll all have to come back to Sony while new discs are made.

Reason? A song by the Mali group Toumani Diabate's Symmetrical Orchestra is in the game, and its lyrics contain lines from the Qu'ran. In spite of the same song seeing release by Nonesuch Records in 2006 with no complaints, Sony has chosen to recall all discs to stop this song from reaching our ears. Apparently the transfer of a Qu'ran-quoting song from a CD to a video game crosses an ironclad line in Islam. You know, the one that was created when Muhammad first went to that cave with a Game Boy in hand.

Or maybe Sony was concerned about the content of the quotes getting into the game, which translate to "Every soul shall have the taste of death" and "All that is on Earth will perish." Because if it's sung in Arabic, it must be a threat, rather than a contemplation on an eventual downfall and rebirth of all life. Good thing Sony took aggressive recall action before our PlayStation 3s became tools of Islam. Thanks, culture of fear!

In other gaming news, Nintendo's cult smash series Mother (known here as Earthbound) saw an English release this morning. The third, Japan-only entry in the series has been translated by a small group of fans without Nintendo's consent. This hack has been in the works for over two years, though, so if Nintendo was going to throw a legal hissyfit, chances are this thing never would've been released. (I'd know; I've been checking the fansub site four times a week since 2006.) If you have a soft spot for RPGs that slyly insult Western culture--AND WON'T GET OFFENDED--then click here.

I'm a puzzle-game freak, so I enjoyed it, but like most Tetris retreads, it never approached the original in mass popularity. The biggest reason I lost interest was that it didn't make the most of its 3D aspects. You played on top of a sphere, but control was limited to a 2D plane.

I can't help but think of Tetrisphere when I find myself enjoying Cubello, the second in Nintendo's new Art Style series on the Wii. A few weeks ago, this downloadable series debuted with a re-release of an obscure Japanese game, but it looks like the series will also host new, experimental titles like this one.

The screen displays a tower of colored cubes, and you're told to clear them all out. Instead of knocking them down a la Boom Blox, you aim with the Wii remote and shoot colors at the stack to create four-of-a-kind chunks, which then vanish.

The catch, and what distinguishes this from other "match-the-color" puzzle games that have been around for decades, is that this tower rotates in 3D. What's more, you cannot push a joystick to move the tower around; instead, your shots make the tower spin.

At the beginning, this spin-and-wait is an enjoyable sensation as you wait for the next shot to show itself in the busy playfield. Doesn't hurt that aiming shots with the Wii pointer is more precise than should probably be expected. Then as the game gets harder, you're not just aiming to clear the stack; you're also aiming to line up your next shot as quickly as possible. It's a welcome, er, twist.

The rotational effect reminds me of why Tetrisphere seemed so cool in the mid-90s. This time, there's an engaging 3D puzzle experience embedded in the effect, as maneuvering through a 3D tower and lining up perfect shots--and eventually combos--is a rare breath of new in an ancient genre.

Perhaps the game's most compelling fact is that Nintendo doesn't ease players into Cubello. The music and sounds are grating, future-synth stuff, complete with a creepy robo-voice announcing the action. The challenge ramps up immediately after a brief tutorial. And the bombardment of visual elements can be confusing even after learning the game's rules. Compared to Nintendo's recent roster of safe, Mario-loaded games, Cubello feels decidedly experimental. Like an indie garage game.

And at the price of $6, Nintendo can afford to put out bizarre, experimental titles. It probably costs them peanuts to have a small team develop something like Cubello; they don't have to pay for advertising or publishing, either. Just toss it up on Wii Ware, price it at $6, and see if lightning strikes.

It may not strike with this game, genius as its concept is. There's no two-player mode, which Cubello's begging for; I dream of a battle mode where you attack your opponent by freezing his tower-spin for a few seconds. Brutal. Also, like Snood, you can get stuck at a puzzle's end with garbage colors that no longer have a match since you've cleared the board. This wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't tend to reduce its timer like crazy when you reach this point. It feels cheap.

Nintendo could fix these issues with a patch. They could even release a retail version, complete with extra modes and an option to turn off the robo-voice (oh, Jesus, please do this). But even if not, Nintendo's on to something with these Art Style games. Keep giving your developers an outlet to try crazy shit. I'd much rather pay for eight of these, gems and bombs alike, than another Metroid game.

Not a dev? Starting Sunday, the fest transforms into a public, all-you-can-play show for $10 entry. And for the first day of this switch, if you're a teenager, you can attend and play for free.

I love that they're encouraging teens to come to an exhibit with the Dark Room Sex Game, which proved far more fun than I'd expected during my playtest today. Turns out the thing is a four-player game, in which your "partner" is a surprise every round, and you work to out-hump your competition by waving Wii remotes at each other at the perfect tempo (and hearing aural moans to confirm you're doing it right). The developers are still wrapping their heads around what they can do with the Wii remote--I asked if they might add some ass-slapping motions to the game, and they didn't rule the idea out.

It proved to be a developer favorite--and a loud audio distraction in the small gallery--but it couldn't outdo the wow factor of levelHead. This demo footage I shot explains things better than I ever could, though skip ahead 20 seconds to get past some glitches:

Rotate the cube in real-life, and the computer camera at the base of the table turns it into a gaming snowglobe. Then tilt to help the little man walk around in there; when he reaches a door, rotate the cube some more to find him again, and repeat. It's still a little wonky, but this experience alone was worth the drive to Bellevue.

Some of the dozen-plus games on display are just as phenomenal to witness, like a stop-motion Myst-alike that would get Tim Burton wet. And Yet It Moves is another treat, a hand-drawn side-scroller game where you rotate the world 90 degrees at a time to get from place to place. Unfortunately, other games on display are too complex for a crowded, public showing, like Democracy 2, a civil engineering sim--complete with a real-time terror-watch matrix--that only freaks like Jon Golob could appreciate.

Don't attend this expecting something akin to GameWorks. Many of these are more interesting in concept than in complete gameplay. The Unfinished Swan is decidedly unfinished, though its mindblowing "paint to see" mechanic is fun to toy with. Or there's the one where you make an old lady walk slowly in a straight line, have her sit down, and then walk her back the other way. Just call that one "interactive art" and move along.

But the good at IndieCade totally outweighs the bad (though I can only hope they switch out their awful, one-foot-tall table setups). The fact that so many of the titles are done by one-man teams--and often in as few as seven days--is something to behold.

The exception, I suppose, is the online Wii Ware store, where the past few weeks have seen fanboy fare like a new Mega Man and some Homestar Runner point-and-click adventures. Fine on both of those--and their respective fanbases have been served solid, authentic fare at a nice price, based on my playtime--but it's hard to get excited about yet another Trogdor joke.

Then yesterday, the Art Style series landed with no advance notice or hype. Not sure why they were so silent; I would've piled on the hype. Nintendo called it bit Generations in Japan, and I fucking loved it. It's as if Nintendo hired some garage developers to make stylish, thoughtful games that could hold their own without having Mario awkwardly slapped on the box--incredibly refined Flash games that even Mom could dig.

From the sound of Nintendo's press blast, they're releasing three of the seven bG titles on Wii Ware by the end of October. No word on the final two yet, but first up yesterday was Orbient, in which you use only two buttons--attract and repel--to pilot a little star around a bunch of other stars, each with their own orbit. The push-pull system becomes imprecise as the game chugs along, but with zillions of easy retry chances and a relaxing, spacey presentation, there's charm in floating around in this one--like a cosmic version of the PS3's flOw. And at $6, it's a steal compared to the older--and simpler--import version. The loving care given to this Wii update bodes well for the rest of these bG-into-AS titles; fingers are crossed for a 2-player version of the bizarre Digidrive.

Up next either this week or early next: Rock Band 2. The game and the updated "instruments" showed up earlier today, and I'll wear 'em out to learn whether or not pretending to be in a band has gotten any better this year.

The Dark Room Sex Game is a rhythm game of sorts--shake your Wii Remote with the second player with a sense of mutual rhythm, and you win. No graphics--only horny audio cues indicate whether you're "thrusting" at the right pace or not. Though it's silly, it's actually a genius twist on rhythm games--rather than steadily pressing buttons, you're forced to invent your own rhythm and then dynamically change it alongside another player. Makes Rock Band look pedestrian. (By the way, this game's not for the Wii; you have to trick your PC into recognizing your Wii controllers for this to work. Sorry, grandma.)

Though this game is available as a free download, you might prefer to wait until October 10th to see a crowd embarrass themselves with it. The game will be publicly demoed with 24 other indie-gaming contest finalists at the IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games, held this year at Bellevue's Open Satellite gallery space. The main festival lasts two days, while the indie game competition will stay at the space until October 17th.

Sadly, the festival is pricing its panels and talks out of mainstream attendance--$250 for a full pass? Yeesh. But the week-long game showcase will be open for only $10/day, which is perfect. It costs that much to play for maybe ten minutes at GameWorks--and the games here will be infinitely cooler. In the past year, IndieCade has vetted recent indie hits like Braid, N+, and Everyday Shooter before the rest of us caught on, so there should be at least a couple of soon-to-be-smashes at Open Satellite's showcase just down the block. In a few minutes of perusing the competitors, I've already been blown away by The Unfinished Swan, in which you have to paint the world in front of you to reveal your path and solve puzzles. Might not be refined as a full game yet, but their proof of concept is dazzling.

IndieCade hasn't yet posted the full list of competitors, but gaming blog Joystiq apparently has the list, as they're posting impressions of the games every day this week. I'll be sure to get my grubby hands on the games next month as well.

This is the second big indie-games competition around town in as many months--the other one, the PAX 10, finally announced its winner this week. No shocker to me, The Maw took top honors. This cartoony delight will see retail release in the first half of 2009 on downloadable services like Xbox Live. Other runners-up at the PAX 10, particularly the genius magnet-puzzler Polarity, will be showcased at IndieCade as well.

PAX was swept under the rug by outlets and people alike as a niche festival, but the event's focus on indie gaming was quite telling. If IndieCade can follow up on the momentum, who's to say Seattle won't look more attractive as a region that appreciates and encourages the next wave of small game developers--the ones who take chances with ideas like multi-touch Tetris and journalists embedded in Palestine?

The market's changing because of downloadable games--from games on mobile phones to money-sucking MMOs that are flattening the rest of the market. Cheaper, humbler, and smarter games will be the inevitable future. Fests like this give our city a chance to claim dibs on this new kind of "indie." Or, at the very least, to shake Wii remotes and moan in public.

The year's best "crash-to-win" racing game just got painfully better today. Like, "tear ass down a highway and launch into the most ridiculous motorcycle jump to win a race" better. See the above glee noise.

For whatever reason, EA is giving away a Burnout Paradise expansion rather than charging for it--see? The people behind Spore's DRM ain't so bad. Anyway. This pack adds motorcycles to the game's original car/bus/four-wheel fleet; big whoop, right? Thing is, bike mode's tiny tweaks double the gameplay in BP's massive network of roads and highways. Welcome to turbo.

Less traffic to contend with. Higher acceleration. No need to build up nitro powers or crap to reach top speed. Even when you crash, your driving resumes more quickly than before. Every tweak big and small leads to less wait, more WAAAAAAA... People like to talk a lot about open-ended games, but BP's aimless driving was already more thrilling than anything GTA IV served up. Now that the racer has added bikes, it's officially the coolest virtual take on a Hot Wheels loop-de-loop in your living room--and there are still more expansions to come.

If you've got a jones for dirtbikes or ATVs, another new game this month, Pure, is pretty compelling as well. Its gameworld is nothing like BP's city, but it has lots of hills and big-air jumps. Plus, you can do stunts... I think people still like stunts and X-Games shit, right?

Warhammer Online (PC) -- Also seeing release today is an MMO with orcs, dwarves, elves, and knights. Sound familiar? There's already World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings Online, and Everquest, and... did Age of Conan have any dwarves? Dunno, don't care.

So why cough up another $15 a month to play with more people named "Khyghlar" and "Memnemnemnom"? Simply put, because you'll actually play with them.

Spore
(PC/Mac)

It's not until I abandon my city of monsters that Spore finally feels right. I'm in a spaceship, zipping across a Milky Way-sized galaxy and managing an empire with equal parts diplomacy and combat. My six-legged creations are light years away, and the distance is doing me some good.

It's because by then, Spore has given up on evolution-based gameplay. Growing from a single-cell organism to a space-crazy empire sounded intriguing when Sim-lord Will Wright announced the video game years ago, but he never made it clear how it'd be converted to something worth playing.

There's little evidence that his team figured that out, yet the issue isn't the game's ambitious sprawl between single cells and spaceships. Rather, Spore suffers from a disconnect between its brilliant creation system and the gameplay duct-taped to the back of it.

I'd do a disservice if I didn't rave about the game's organic Lego kit. Understand that Wright and his crew have made a system where you can mix and match hundreds of body parts in highly unsustainable ways, and yet the game will take your seven-arm, three-leg, four-vagina bastard and convert it to a lively, sentient being. Natural, procedural animations; emotional responses; maybe even realistic Kegel exercises (I didn't check).

You can make something in ten minutes that looks and acts more alive than most game characters.

The pre-space chunk of Spore keeps these creations busy in four development stages: single-cell, creature, tribe, and civilization. The hope is that you'd create something and, through the game's evolutionary system, feel connected to it through the growth process. With real-time adaptation, the game would always feel fresh.

Spore has no interest in this idea. By the time you take your critter to land, you're confronted with the game's hard-fast rule of advancement: either eat other species, or befriend them.

Your constructions can be abstract and bizarre, but their actions don't have that luxury. Couldn't I appease a more powerful beast by bringing it food? Befriend a brainy creature by serving as its sharp-toothed protector? Make myself look like a leaf and poison deer that bite me?

Used to be, a new football season meant heated competition in the virtual pigskin category--two, maybe up to four, franchises vying for your buck. A few years ago, Electronic Arts changed that, snapping up exclusive rights to the NFL. It's alllll Madden these days, unless you want to play the dated Blitz: The League series (tip: don't) or consider the forthcoming Madden en Espańol an actual alternative ("ˇEl boom!").

But with Brad gone and Jonah sick, somebody's gotta pipe up about the NFL's opening weekend around here. May as well do so with a nerdy Madden NFL '09 vs. Madden NFL '09 wrapup.

Madden NFL '09 (Wii): This is the keynote game in EA Sports' new "All-Play" series. Translation: they want the Wii Sports crowd. Seems like there's hope; fewer buttons, simpler plays, and party modes? I'll bite.

Like other Wii Madden games, you use the motion-sensitive remote to hike the ball, throw the ball, throw up stiff-arms, tackle, and so on. It's a fun twist at first, but this gets old fast, especially once you realize the "motion sensitivity" doesn't exist. You can wave the thing up, down, sideways, or like you're sawing something in half, and it'll trigger the same move in a given instance. Kinda takes away from the feeling that you're in the game, and worse, if you're defending a pass, you can't choose whether your waggle dives at the receiver or jumps to swat the ball. It picks for you.

What's changed this year is a relative reduction in button presses. Assuming your wrist isn't as decrepit as mine, this works out well, with one exception--on default controls, aiming at a receiver in a pass play is impossible. Do you hold the control stick in the direction of your fave receiver? Point the remote at the screen? Stick the remote up your ass? I could never figure it out; the game always chose for me. There's an "advanced" control set that fixes this to save you an interception or seven, thank God.

What else? The game's highly touted five-on-five mode tries to be like Tecmo Bowl, with only four plays per team and a lot of ridiculous deep-ball throws. My nostalgic juices were flowing, I'll admit. But the mode instead plays like a super-simple Blitz (which is simple to begin with). I really wanted this to be a four-player winner, but my groups of friends tired of it quickly; we preferred the two-on-two mode which, for whatever reason, is deeply buried in the game's menus.

You can create your own plays by pointing at the screen and drawing receiver routes. This would be an awesome thing, and would greatly improve five-on-five mode, except you can't design plays outside of an actual game. How, then, do you surprise your buddy on the couch next to you? Fail.

The party games blow. There's NFL trivia, which is robust but won't win over any casual Wii Sports fans, and there are a ton of dud mini-games like "see who can punt the ball furthest!" A punt-fest where everyone has to wait to take turns? Meh.

But what about the basic, core play?

(jump for the Xbox 360 edition's review)