Ross Fisher

The Art of the Gaming Setup: Thoughts on Televisions
Last week I rambled about potential setups. This week I'm here with some thoughts on televisions. Mostly because I'm living in a situation (college dorms) that isn't conductive to owning a big-screen TV, and so dreaming about owning one is the best I can do. Lately I've been wondering about the pros and cons of widescreen TVs vs. the old 4:3 sets.

From what I've personally witnessed, widescreens make for lousy gaming TVs because most games only support a 4:3 aspect ratio. A badass 51-inch widescreen TV suddenly becomes a modest 42-inch TV when you add in the ugly black bars that appear on the left and right of your game. But if I were to buy a 51-inch 4:3 TV, my letterbox screen size would be 47 inches. In such a case I'm only losing four inches as opposed to losing nine.

Is widescreen utterly kick-ass for the few games, such as Panzer Dragoon Orta, that support it? Yes, but there are so few games. Will there be more games in the future? Certainly widescreen TVs are becoming so popular that it's become hard to find new 4:3 TVs that are both HDTV and big.

However, I'm not so sure game developers will rush to add widescreen support to their games, since it would mean one more layer of testing. Nor am I so sure developers will exclusively support widescreen displays, but then again Capcom is making Resident Evil 4 in widescreen. Who knows, maybe the PSP will spark interest in widescreen gaming. In the interim I'm going to be dreaming of Sony's 40-inch flat-screen HDTV (model number: SON KV40XBR800). It only weighs 300+ pounds. I could get that up the stairs and around the corner.

Revisiting the Fast Lane
For unknown reasons I started playing Project Gotham Racing 2 again. Previously I had finished off the main single-player mode, "Kudos World Series," but hadn't even touched the arcade racing modes.

It was while watching a replay of my latest achievement that I realized how much I've matured as a driver. You see, when I was a little kid I didn't know the meaning of the word "brakes." Now, I use brakes and even let off the gas every now and then. I'm calm in the face of wild twisting turns. If anything, I utterly enjoy the raw tactile feeling of whipping down a Chicago street at night.

If you get the chance, you should try out Bizzare's gift to racing fans: Nurburgring. It is without a doubt the best track I've ever had the pleasure of driving. It may not be the greatest-looking, but it's the best eight-minute race through the German countryside that you could ever ask for. You might think you're hot stuff, but try holding a high-end Ferrari Enzo steady as it screams downhill at 150+ mph.

PGR2 got screwed out of a lot of sales and awards last year, but you can help MS feel better by buying a copy today.

Finally, I've gotten back into Geometry Wars as well. Still my pick for best shooter of last year. Ikaruga may have had flashy shmup graphics and vertical-shoot whatnots, but Geometry Wars is old-skool arcade shooting at its best. My personal high score of 648,620 makes me think that a million points is doable, and I've started the training I feel will take me there.

With Project Gotham Racing 3, I hope Geometry Wars comes back. Maybe take it forward in gaming history from a vector shooter into some sort of sprite-based shooter. In either case, the game had better be back in some form!

Dreaming of the Longest Wait
Bungie Studios, maker of Halo and Marathon, recently re-launched its Web site. And of course they had to go and put new Halo 2 screenshots on the internet for us to drool over. I nearly fainted when I saw the first new single-player screen shot since last year's E3.

It got me thinking to the last time I awaited a game with such bated breath. The only game that came to mind was The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time; and I didn't even have to wait that long because I had only gotten my Nintendo 64 the spring of the year it came out. Not that I hadn't looked from afar every so often. More recently, I guess the wait for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was made worse by having been given a live demo at E3 last year by BioWare Corp. But, those are the only two games I really felt the "pain" of waiting for.

I find there really aren't enough words to describe what it's like to be gamer waiting for a game like Halo 2 - a game that as of this writing doesn't even have a real release date. As if "When it's done" actually means something. Does the lack of a date make it harder? Sometimes it feels like it does. Right now I'm mentally counting down the days till November 15th, which in my mind is the most realistic date there is. Those dreaming of a September release date need to join the rest of us in the real world. We're over here.

I'm not sure that fans of movies, early adopters of high-tech toys, or even expectant parents know what this "waiting" feels like. In every case they know when their gift is coming. The exact release date. In many cases they have more information, earlier, than we'll ever get about Halo 2 before it ships. Not that I really want to know too much about Bungie Studio's ode to first-person shooters.

I know that a lot of people are passionately awaiting Half-Life 2 and Doom III, but I couldn't really care less when those two games come out. For me, it's all about Halo 2. I'd pay $50 to play multiplayer for a day with Bungie Studios, but if you were to ask me for $100 . . . $150 . . . I'd probably pay that as well. Maybe more. It's worth that much money to me. Is it really worth it? Probably not. But . . . this is Halo 2 we're talking about after all.

James Cunningham

I haven't been buying many games lately, which is a bit of a change for me from the last few months. All of a sudden I just have enough to play, and when you add in the really slow release schedule of the spring season with my level of interest in just about anything that's been released, then it's a pretty clear course of action on my part - play what I already have and save the cash for E3.

I'm still doing Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life on GameCube, and will be for a while. I've probably written about that enough at the moment, but I am playing it, so it gets mentioned. I'm also playing Harvest Moon: Mineral Town on GBA, and at this point the cartridge is probably fused to the system. So . . . very . . . addictive!

House of the Dead III was fun for a while, but I think I just need a better setup for light-gun games. I also, just yesterday, finally tracked down Space Raiders and had a good time shooting things in a very old-school/new-school hybrid game. Lots of baddies, lots of bullets, and it's all done in a single-screen setup. I always liked the single-screen games, where everything took place on a gaming area that could be displayed with little-to-no camera movement at all, and this is a nice throwback to that style while still being a modern-day game. Plus the intro cinema is just great.

Really, that's pretty much it. Not a lot, I know, but it's keeping me busy.

Nick Vlamakis

If you happen to be in a Blockbuster or GameStop in Chicago anytime soon and you see a dark-haired man with shiny shoes pacing back and forth studying the descriptions and screen shots on game boxes, picking up some and carrying them around for a few minutes before setting them back and leaving empty-handed - you're welcome to come up and say hello. I'm going through a bit of a Hugh Hefner stage right now, but rest assured I am still talking about video games when I say I'm a "player." I see them, take them home with me, show 'em a bit of a good time for a couple of days, then grow disenchanted and eager to move on to the next potential conquest.

All this goes against my Year 2004 focus on finishing games, books, and other projects that I start. I view it as a temporary anomaly, though, and not a long-term return to my bargain bin glory days, when I spent more time buying software than playing it. My Pile of Shame grew almost exponentially in 2001 and 2002, as I went to town on $5 Dreamcast games and $10 PC RPG's and RTS's, most of which were lucky to see the inside of a disk drive.

No, it's quite different this time. I have been giving these titles eight or ten hours of my undivided attention, then taking them back, vowing to return to their virtual worlds one day. This gaming modus operandi is not really a bad deal if you're writing for the "Gaming Report," but it's not my idea of the good life.

This week, I rented Siren for the PS2. I'm only a little ways in (surprise!), but I can already tell this might be going back unbeaten. As with Manhunt, Hitman 2, James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, and other recent abortions, I am finding myself decidedly not in the mood for sneaking and sniping. I think what I'm looking for right now is a Guilty Gear or a Ninja Gaiden or a Zanac, where I can just mow down a succession or a horde of opponents and revel in the carnage. With all the edginess in the real world right now, I'm kind of looking more for head cracking than hiding and crouching.

Anyway, Siren doesn't seem like it would be my cup of tea even in more relaxed times. It's nice to look at and has a certain understated visual style that is appealing, but so far it seems like a string of go-here-find-this-protect-her missions with little more than a couple of nice gimmicks. Those gimmicks are a) commanding several different lead characters in a series of distinct but interrelated scenes while piecing together the overall story, and b) "sightjacking," whereby you jump into the head of your pursuers or companions to see what they see and hear what they hear.

Points for style and originality and some realistic models, for sure, but I find it too easy to fall out of the survival-horror mood with this game. It could have used a better opening (ask Capcom or Konami how to do those), a tweaked map system (or more effective way of feeling out just where you are - this game is blanketed in darkness but does not induce claustrophobia), and maybe a little more "survival" and a little more "horror." The difference between this and Resident Evil is like the difference between R-Type and a true twitch shooter. With Siren, it's less about careful playing and resource management and more about memorizing where the bad guys are and figuring out a way around them after messing up two or three times. It feels like an adventure game where you are perpetually on your last legs, there are no healing power-ups, and you may be blindsided at any minute. Unless, of course, you crouch-walk everywhere - then it just feels like a gigantic waste of time.

I'll play it for at least a few more hours, and if I find that I was mistaken in what I said about it, I'll let you know next "Gaming Report." But to cleanse the palate, I've downloaded Raiden on my mobile phone. Carnage, here I come.

Daniel Bucy

My recreational time this week has been spent trying to get back into baseball shape and unwinding with some Prince of Persia. I don't know, guys, just something about that game relaxes me.

For serious gaming, though, I've been trying re-attain my glory in Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the Xbox, while trudging through online campaigns with my friend Mike in Steel Battalion: Line of Contact. It dawned on me the other day that no review I've read for LoC even remotely does it justice. Actually no review of an online game is ever really accurate, due to the incredibly small amount of time the reviewer usually has between reviewing it and its actual release to the public, which will usually define how good an online game is anyway. But the reception of indifference LoC has gotten is just downright ridick.

So in the upcoming weeks, I intend to bring you, the TNL audience, a review of what LoC is really like, now that it's been out and under public consumption for a considerable amount of time.

Until then, remember the words spoken by the great Theodore Logan in the late 80's:

"Be excellent to each other."