Unexpected server maintenance last Friday means two Gaming Reports in five days! "Good Friday" indeed.

Ross Fisher

The Art of the Gaming Setup
This is something, much like Frustration vs. Fun vs. Challenge, that I have been thinking about for a while now. I would love to show you what my gaming setup looks like, but a college dorm room (and its move-every-nine-months lifestyle) isn't the best place to showcase my ability to set up a room. Not that I don't look at every picture that someone posts online of his game room and dream about having my own someday.

For some time now, I've been mentally constructing the room of my dreams. I want to go minimalist with my decorations, but I want lots of silver and glass involved. Unlike some setups that I have seen, I don't want racks and racks of games everywhere. Instead I'm going to build some sleek-looking cabinets into the wall to house all my games and accessories. For me, the big hold up is whether I want to build one room that is both gaming/movie watching or to make them into two separate rooms.

But, this is all just rambling. I'm curious about what goes into making a game room. Do people approach it with a vision in their minds, or is it like a collage built up over time? Do you frame the posters or make them into wallpaper? Sort the games by genre or alphabetical order? Is it better to have your systems in easy reach or to make them look stylish? Would you set it up so that everything has a cubby hole to be returned to, or is your dream room the ultimate pig sty? These are all things I'm asking myself, and I'm curious what answers you've come to.

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Battlefield Vietnam is one that got lost in the shuffle that was mid-March. A new ATI driver released this week prompted me to start it up again and give it a whirl. Sadly, I seem to either have discovered a new bug or a networking issue - every game I joined online resulted in this odd problem where for every three steps forward I took, the game staggered me back one. The resulting headache was enough to make me give up playing online for the time being. So I fired up the single-player mode, which as anyone can tell you is a joke. The bot AI is absolutely horrendous, but if you get enough of them running around you don't really notice as much. They can't really fly in a comprehensible manner, as their favorite tactic is to fly over to an enemy base and bail out of a perfectly good helicopter. Still, single-player mode is a good place to practice flying those tricky helicopters.

I just recently started playing Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand again. It easily makes my top-ten list of best Game Boy Advance games. I just wish that Konami hadn't originally released a game that has a sun sensor at the beginning of last fall. Because I live in the Pacific Northwest, I didn't really get to play it at all last year. This spring has been my first chance to zap vampires with a fully charged gun. For some reason I find the game easier, and not just because of the increased solar radiation falling on me. If I had to guess, I'd say that having recently played through Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes multiple times is the reason. The two games work off the same basic stealth system, and the little sprite guy in Boktai even has Snake's wall tap maneuver.

The slanted 3/4 perspective doesn't really hurt the playability of the game, and the developers were even nice enough to toss in the ability to scroll the view a little bit. (Why Splinter Cell on the Game Boy has to be side-scrolling, I'll never understand.) The graphics are also pretty slick, and carry a sort of Konami/MGS flavor to them. The more I’ve played Boktai the more I feel it's just Metal Gear Vampires. It's enough to make you wish that they'd release a Metal Gear Solid game for the Game Boy Advance - but that opportunity has passed. We'll probably see MGS on the PSP before anything else.

A final warning to anyone attempting to sit in the sun and play Boktai: First, if you have platinum GBA . . . you're screwed. You might as well just look straight into the sun and get it over with. Second, remember that you've spent many years inside playing video games - your skin is weak. I say this because twenty minutes in the sun playing this game resulted in my right hand sprouting new freckles. Take these warnings and go defeat the evil vampires!

Daniel Riley

Quadrapus, my Rebel Mon Calamari, is currently working on Teras Kasi Artist, the Star Wars equivalent of an unarmed ninja. The unarmed fighting is intended to supplement the pistol skills gained for mastering Smuggler. As part of the "Imperial Crackdown," a feature publish that went live several weeks ago, Stormtroopers can be found wandering the streets of many cities throughout the galaxy. Sneaking up on them from inside buildings or around corners has been a great way to both thin out the Imperial ranks and to gain unarmed XP.

A new "dungeon," for lack of a better term, goes live on Tuesday. It is the Corellian Corvette, a ship similar to the one seen in the opening scene of "A New Hope." The ship will include nine new missions: three Rebel, three Imperial, and three neutral. The prize for completing the neutral missions is said to be a new player vehicle. Expect to see impressions of this new adventure in two weeks.

Nick Vlamakis

Unfortunately, after spending twenty-hours-plus of the previous week chucking shuriken and beheading demons, I didn't get much gaming time in this week. I did enjoy a brief fling with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin on the Xbox, just to catch up a little before this month's Hitman: Contracts release. I cleared three or four missions, trying to be as stealthy as possible, donning disguises and crouching in corners, but I was glad to use superior force on occasion. In fact, I felt a tad silly going out of my way to hide bodies and not act suspiciously so early in the game when it was just as easy to pick off enemies with headshots as I came across them. But the game will make you start over if you draw too much attention to yourself. After all, Agent 47 is a hitman not a Terminator cyborg.

Maybe three levels in, the mission was to eliminate a general and his Russian mafia contact (why not make enemies all around, eh?). It didn't take long to see at least three ways to get the job done. 47 finds some car bombs and a sniper rifle near the starting point, but I ended up using the trusty headshot to secure a guard's uniform. This enabled me to get into the meeting area, a public park that had been evacuated and was guarded by goons from both camps at every entrance. I waited until the targets met in the middle of the area and picked them both off. To my delight, the goon squads were too busy looking menancing to notice what I had done, so it was no problem to make my way back to my escape boat. Pulling that off the way I did was thrilling. The AI isn't too bad in Silent Assassin, so getting away with a kill like that gave me a real rush.

From Agent 47 to Agent 007 - I also started on Electronic Arts' James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing on the GameCube. This seems like a solid purchase with a lot going on and a lot to go back to once you've completed a level. Best of all, you don't have to wait until you beat the whole game to revisit a mission and try again, even on a different difficulty. Just like in EA's Lord of the Rings games, you are thrust into the action directly from the opening cinema with no time to gather your wits or scout your terrain. The idea is to meet all your objectives with enough time left on the clock, enough shooting accuracy, and enough flair to score a Gold or Platinum rating. The flair comes into play with "Bond Moments," little extra actions you pull off during the course of the level to clear obstacles or dispatch of enemies while using a James Bond sensibility. Why take the stairs when you can rappel up the wall? Why engage in a straight gunfight when you can bathe your enemies in steam to burn and bewilder them? Multiple paths through, third-person play, scores of unlockables, and multiplayer missions are big selling points for me, so I will be playing a lot over the weekend.

Eric Manch

Don't ask me why it's taken so long for me to jump on the Halo bandwagon, but now that I've beaten the game on Normal and am playing through it a second time on Legendary, I'm happy as hell to be on it. I'm not sure if I'll ever manage to get through that first room on the Truth and Reconciliation, though, the one with all the gold plasma sword Elites. That room makes me cry.

Until I started playing Culdcept a few weeks ago I was feeling kind of jaded about games. No longer. Culdcept is the most incredible and addicting game I've played in a long, long time. Not only is its Magic: the Gathering-meets-Monopoly premise intriguing, but the game itself is wonderfully nuanced. There are so many different decks you can build, and the incentive for replay is very, very strong.

Chris Rubin

First I was blessed with Breakdown, a game that I wasn't sure was actually going to be any good but had such an interesting premise I had to try it out. It did not disappoint. After having gone through it almost twice (I'll then be starting a third time for exploration on the hardest difficulty), I must say this is without a doubt the closest any video game has ever come to making me feel like I was actually there. A little clumsy at first and a couple of trouble areas aside, it drew me in and made me part of it to where I actually felt a little sad when I starting playing Pandora Tomorrow, just because it wasn't Breakdown.

But I went ahead and played Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow anyway, mostly because I was hungering for a good multiplayer experience, and to that end it delivers in spades. Both sides are incredibly fun to play, although I have a predisposition towards mercenaries. Partly perhaps the first-person aspect and me not wanting to let go of Breakdown, and partly because I more enjoy the idea of hunting down other players then I do sneaking around. Nevertheless, spies are still enjoyable, but I have little grasp on how to play them well and a tendency to run directly into proximity mines, so I tend to not fare so well with them. Training is in order, and how.

Oh yeah, Pandora Tomorrow also has a single-player mode, but who cares? It plays a lot like the original only with testy AI, and the extremely linear progression makes it feel like a game from last generation when such a dynamic and far more interesting multiplayer mode exists on the same disc. Frankly, it's boring. I'd rather hunt people.

James Cunningham

I played House of the Dead III yesterday and boy are my arms tired! [Cue laugh track.]

I love light gun games. I'm fairly decent at them, usually managing to stumble through to the end with a bit of practice, but my gaming setup is uniquely unsuited to playing them comfortably. I've got a near-indescribable bean bag chair (cheap velvet outside, crushed foam inside, hideous green, freakin' huge!) set up in front of the TV, and in order to properly play a gun game I have to kneel on it. A good hour of play and not only do I get the usual arm fatigue from holding the gun, but my legs start to atrophy. And yet I play them anyway.

House of the Dead III is the best gun game I've played in a while. I finally got a copy the other day, and promptly discovered that my light gun shot 2 inches to the left on my 27" screen. Fortunately I was able to adjust a little, but the gun had to go back the next day. Now I can snipe things rather than use a tactic that's the equivalent of throwing a handful of gravel at the screen. After a bit of play, I'm left with one non-hardware related question, though: Why would anyone want zombie blood to be preset to green? When they've made a game about blowing large holes in animated corpses, who on earth do they think they're appealing to by making it look like some not-blood substance?

My GBA time has been spent exclusively on Harvest Moon. My GameCube time has followed suit lately with Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. I think I may have mentioned that once or twice elsewhere, though. . . .

After all that farming, I needed an action break last week. Ape Escape 2 not only provided the action but humorous monkeys as well. Not really a whole lot to say about it other than it's a great game, worth a play, and filled to the brim with monkeys. Oh wait, there is one thing.

I've beaten the game with all monkeys caught, and my reward for this feat was a new player character. As near as I can tell, he plays exactly the same as the old one, except he's got no storyline to follow. Sure, I enjoyed the game, but I don't intend to replay it with a new character skin. Wouldn't it have made more sense to unlock him a bit earlier than before I was completely done with the game? I peeked at GameFAQs to see if I'd missed anything else, prior to stashing the game on a shelf or lending it out or whatever its fate will eventually be, and found that you can also unlock a different playable monkey in the music mini game, once again after you finally complete that mini game for good. I sense a theme here.

Still, other than the wonky camera it's my only complaint about the game, and it's less a complaint than me voicing mystification over a design quirk. It was the perfect break from a long-term game, and now I can sink back into Harvest Moon having scratched that action-oriented itch.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go see a man about a goat.