Other folks collect Jesus-shaped food, broken glass, hubcaps, used bandages, canceled checks, dog food, signed photos of burned-out gym teachers, coupons, pablum, rocket sleds, teabags, and soup.

And then there are those special souls who collect, of all things, other people.

I don’t mean the crazy-ass, paint-me-a-happy-clown, bodies-under-the-stairs kind of collection that gets turned into a Lifetime movie, but rather the socially sanctioned variety that made a mint for the dudes who started Facebook and MySpace, or AOL back when it was relevant.  Thanks to l’internette, friend collecting has taken on an entirely new, and newly profitable, dynamic, a concept which only recently used to baffle me as though I were a linebacker mulling the question to final Jeopardy.  (And to all the summa cum laude linebackers reading this, I sincerely and most humbly apologize.)

I could never figure out the appeal of having more friends than you could ever hope to keep up with on one of these social networks, until a dead woman explained it first to my very significant and quite spectacular other, who in turn obliquely pointed it out to me; of course the point is not the value of each individual as potential or actual “friend” (in the true, unobfuscated meaning of the word) but is instead the number on the page, as in “VapidWank316 has 668 friends!”  This much is self-evident, but what eluded me for so long was the reasoning behind it.  Now I know why, and I’m going to share it with you, Fair World.

Most of the time, there’s a kind of social auto-elevation that occurs when someone makes a friend, either actual or virtual, by virtue of acceptance of and approval from another.  It goes something like this; “Hey, Jane3101 really likes me.  She’s so cool and all — I’m glad she’s my friend because now I can feel better about  myself.”  This is precisely the kind of behind-the-brain automatic thinking that causes someone’s friends lists to swell to a sufficient length and girth to make Ron Jeremy blush with self-conscious detumescence.

The way it works for me is “Hey, Jane3101 seems to like me.  I guess this means that she’s okay.  Good for her, then.”  In other words, the only elevation taking place here is that my opinion of her rises when I find out that she likes me.  For me, other people are not a means towards some self-aggrandizing end, but are instead an end in themselves — some are ends worth pursuing and maintaining, and others (most) … not so much.

Welcome to my friends list. Resistance is...well, you know.

I cannot stand the concept of The Group, nor will I tolerate being lumped into a pasty, indistinct friendship bouillabaisse by those flitty, flighty socialites o’ malaise who send mass emails and those wonderfully impersonal “this is what happened to us this year” holiday updates, simply because the thought of actual personal communication (as opposed to social communication) is as anathema to them as is the thought of  telling their screaming, unwashed brood to shut the fuck up, lest someone might drag them into the Olive Garden’s bathroom, one by one, and beat the holy Roman piss out of them with a toilet brush.   If you’ve ever sent one of those horrible, “this is just how much I could give less than a shit about you” letters to someone who’s supposed to be your friend, please, for the sake of decency, be promptly and thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

If you’ve flypapered so many people into your address book that you no longer have time to write to each of them individually (which means, you know, as individuals), if you’ve reduced the concept of “friendship” to nothing more than spamming everyone you know once or twice a year with some insipid family newsletter (or worse — using Twitter to simultaneously yammer at anyone who wants to listen), please, once again, GFY.

I am not a piece for anyone’s collection.  I am not a means towards anyone’s end of improving their self-esteem.  I don’t give a shit how many friends you’ve got on Facebook, and I don’t particularly care if you care that I don’t care.  If you’ve got to “squeeze me in somewhere” when you come to town, don’t bother; I don’t find time for the people who matter to me; I make it.

The word “friend” used to mean something, back before it was lured into the that seedy-looking van, tied up, abused, and later pimped out onto the streets of our new electronic society by a few soulless corporate twats in Hugo boss suits, as little more than some dazed, makeup-smeared marketing gimmick.  A friend is no longer someone you go to the movies with, or shoot some hoops with, or fix your car with.  A friend is a now cyber commodity, a means by which those in control of these services can increase their companies’ value — a notion to which I offer a hale and heartfelt “eat me.”

Why does this bother me, and why should it bother you?  Well, if you’re one of those vapid skanks who enjoys collecting people like so many dessicated moths pinned to a entomology major’s display board, it shouldn’t. Go right ahead and be your shallow self, nobody cares. But if things matter to you, and if you’re not one of those too-cool-to-care douchenozzles who just can’t be bothered with any-fucking-thing, if words — specifically the content and character of ideas — matter to you, then you’ll take steps to halt the spread of this particular brand of concept-destruction.

If we permit the use of a particular word to describe something that is patently not that word, then we destroy the thing that is that word. The idea that a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of pee could be displayed in the same gallery and at the same time as a Rembrandt exhibit is in no way an expression of artistic freedom; it is instead a crass perversion of the very concept of art.  The fact that it was funded by an NEA grant says all you need to know about the value of this so-called art and the value of government agencies that distribute these funds.

The best way to ensure the destruction of the concept “friend” is to use the word to describe that which is clearly not a friend. Some ass-clown you met on XBL or PSN is not a friend, regardless of what the corporate knobs who run these networks want you to believe.  This is because — unless you’re James Joyce — words actually have meaning.  So does true friendship.

And I’ll be damned if I’ll be a party to the destruction of either.

Because you silly Americans won't buy anything unless it has breasts on the cover.

“You pick up Armin Shimerman’s performance as Andrew Ryan in BioShock and hold it up to the light. You carefully inspect it for creases, stiffness, and visible seams. Amazed, you put it down again and stand back reverently, because you suddenly realize that you’re in the presence of greatness.”

Two years later…

“You pick up the entire cast’s performance from Heavy Rain and hold it up to the light. Shrieking, you run from the room in horror, because you suddenly realize that it’s worse than you’d feared — it is, in fact, the end of time, and garbage is all that has survived.”

If you liked Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, stop here. If you liked BioShock, continue from here.

This is the first time I’ve had a game’s presentation ruin the experience for me. Normally, that would be a noteworthy accomplishment, but I guess once you consider that Heavy Rain is not really a game, but an “interactive film noir,” it all makes a kind of murky, poorly acted, badly written sense. Incidentally, this observation is coming from a guy who spent about a hundred hours last summer with Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, so I can say without guile or reservation that piss-poor presentation is generally not a deal-breaker for me.

When presentation is all you’ve got to offer, when your gameplay consists solely of mashing buttons, pushing sticks, and shaking the controller at prescribed times, you’d better be sure that the presentation is polished, buffed, and polished again to rival the sheen on a ferengi bartender’s skull bumps. This includes, but may not be limited to, hiring voice actors who can, you know, fucking act with their voices.

Two of the four major characters in Heavy Rain are voiced by people for whom American English is a second language, and it shows with every stiff, stilted line of dialogue. Since the game is plainly set in Standard Generic City, USA, it would have been nice to have heard more than one or two native voices, which might have introduced a microbe of verisimilitude to the experience. Instead, because of the sophomoric writing and the horrible acting, Heavy Rain feels like an imitation of what someone might expect from an “interactive film noir” (words which, by the way, shall not appear on this blog outside the isolating confinement of quotation marks), with scant attention paid to details of setting and background. If your game is set in the US, even after localization for different countries, you ought to be able to accurately depict such minutiae as the proper number of digits in a phone number.

Look, if you want to make a movie, then make one. If you want to use French or British voice actors, then do so, but for appropriate roles; with all the Americans running around out there, there’s absolutely no reason to have British and French actors speaking with bad American accents and vice-versa. Leon Ockenden, I’m specifically looking at you here, with your portrayal of Norman Jayden. (I’ll see what we can do about Gwenyth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr.)

This-here's what we in these parts call "gra-too-i-tus," in both the gameplay and the presentation. Get used to it.

There’s no greater insult to gaming than when developers like Quantic Dream consistently strive for the validation of another medium (film, books, theater, oiled hamster tossing, whatever) by making a game with mechanics as shallow and unsatisfying as those found in Heavy Rain, and then trying to pass it off as some sort of evolution of story presentation. Guess what; take away the wonky controls and the pigeonshit quicktime events, and all you’re left with are various versions of a very good-looking, clumsily written movie, with acting straight out of a high school Our Town audition. My ’66 VW Beetle and its three working cylinders had better timing, for cryin’ out loud.

A game can survive bad presentation as long as its other ducks are squarely aligned and squeaky clean. A game like Sacred 2, for instance, makes up for its laughable presentation with excellent collection and leveling mechanics, along with cramming enough content onto one DVD to keep you busy for hundreds of hours, if you’re determined to see everything the game has to offer. It sports a level cap of 200, which would take several playthroughs in order to achieve.

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because I can't act, or because I'm as expressive as a wet wax dummy run amuck."

Even the venerated Deus Ex is guilty of wielding some of the worst acting this side of silent films, especially with regard to its Asian voices and the protagonist, JC Denton. Deus Ex’s saving throw comes in the form of superior gameplay and the fact that the miserable voice acting is bolstered by some of the finest writing — both story and dialogue — that you’ll ever find in a game. Also, Deus Ex is thematically sound without bashing you over the head with its own intentions, as is the case with Gears of Wars’ oft-exhorted theme of “destroyed beauty” and Heavy Rain’s “how far would you go to save someone you love?” Each of these purported themes has been repeated by the developer ad-nauseum, though neither is truly a theme; background, perhaps, for Cliffy B.’s testosterone-fueled shooter, and character motivation for Monsieur De Gruttola’s “interactive film noir,” but neither developer’s statements are themes in the proper sense of the word. Moreover, if you’ve got to state the theme of your work for your audience, over and over and still over again, you’re doing something seriously wrong in your presentation.

Heavy Rain is not a bad game from a technical standpoint. The controls are often frustrating, though perfectly suited to its thoughtful, adventure-game style, and it’s one of the best-looking games that you’ll find on the PS3. Initially, I looked forward to a change of pace from games like Mass Effect 2 and BioShock 2, but Heavy Rain grew so tedious in terms of both gameplay and presentation that it quickly became a chore to play. In order for the story to be the primary motive for playing a game, it must be presented in a fashion that makes it possible for the viewer/player to credibly suspend disbelief, and in Heavy Rain, this simply doesn’t happen — its ham-handed writing and amateur acting provide two insurmountable hurdles between what might have been a great game, and something that’s merely a mediocre interactive…whatever.

Games — along with those who might shell out $60 for someone else’s work — deserve better than this.

If you’re old enough to remember the above tag line, and can name the movie that it escorted to a kind of breathless box office pulchritude in the summer of 1978, congratulations; you’re a dinosaur. Welcome to the club, and save me a haunch of iguanodon. I’ll show you the super-secret handshake later.

Jaws 2 made almost $10,000,000 in its first weekend; a paltry sum by today’s standards, but considering that it opened in only 640 theaters, and that an adult ticket cost about two bucks back then, I’d say that it did all right. With the exceptions of Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw (Dreyfus was shooting Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Steven Spielberg, and Shaw’s character Quint could only have returned in flashback, if you know what I mean), it brought back many actors from the original cast and went on to earn over $200,000,000 worldwide. It wasn’t a bad movie in itself, but the only way it could have stood up to the original was if Adam Baldwin loomed menacingly behind it and silently pounded one fist into an open palm; basically, the worst thing about Jaws 2 was its inevitable comparison to the original, and of course the salt-spattered litter of squirming celluloid rejects that it spawned in later years.

Sticking a “2″ in the title is almost the kiss of death when it comes to judging the quality of a sequel, whether we’re talking about books, films, or video games; the first thing the numerical title sequence is going to accomplish is to beg a comparison to everything that has come before. This is because judging a game on its own merits isn’t easy, especially if your biggest reason for playing it is that it’s a sequel to a game that you loved. Bioshock 2 is no exception.

By no standard can Bioshock 2 be called a bad game. It looks good (in spite of some muddy environmental textures), controls well, and tells a solid story, all while keeping the player’s head firmly immersed in the game world — there are no quicktime events, no rapid button-pressing, and thankfully, no intrusive cutscenes that rip you out of the action simply because you walked across a room. In fact, as far as the presentation goes, I’d say it’s as close to perfect as a game can get; it spins a convincing narrative without whanging you over the head with line after line of insipid, badly acted dialogue and character animation that looks more at home in Madame Tussaud’s living room than in what’s supposed to pass for convincing entertainment. CGI characters cannot act, and it bugs the fruity Christmas fuck out of me when developers try to shoehorn that uncomfortably square peg into the soft round hole of my dramatic expectations. Thankfully, 2K Marin, 2K Australia, 2K China, and 2K Uzbekistan along with Arkane Studios, Digital Extremes, and BF Goodwrench, have largely spared us the pathetic spectacle of watching 1s and 0s trying to mimic the accomplishments of Olivier and Brando, by keeping the story where it belongs – firmly in the action, and for that I am extremely grateful.

This CHICK is TOAST!

One of the places where Bioshock 2 falls a bit flat is in its reliance on stationary set-pieces to heighten the tension; it’s way too fond of locking you in a room and forcing you to finish off every enemy in sight before being permitted to move on, which makes the single player experience feel far too much like it’s trying to emulate a multiplayer match. In addition, any game in which resource management is such a crucial component of survival (and, as a result, to the extrinsic enjoyment of the player) being forced to “deal with” three Little Sisters in one particular level was a cheap and shitty substitute for player-directed action, as it removes the possibility of moral ambiguity; in Dionysus Park, the player must either choose the morality of rescuing the Little Sisters, or the immorality of harvesting them, and thus cannot progress until a decision is made. For a game that wants players to take the “reins of authorship,” forcing a choice in that context was a real ass-move.

Like its spiritual ancestor Jaws 2, Bioshock 2 falls hardest in comparison to its predecessor, and since it is a sequel, such comparisons are not only inevitable, but necessary; Bioshock 2′s road to success was cut, cleared, and paved solely by the accomplishments of the first Bioshock, so an entirely objective evaluation is not only impossible, it would render an inequitable assessment of the first game, which had to earn its way based entirely on its own merit. If a game would reap the benefits of succession to an established, bestselling franchise, it must be prepared to be judged against that franchise, and in this context, Bioshock 2 is a vastly unworthy sequel.

Gone are the picturesque and contrasting locales of the first Bioshock, replaced with uniformly deteriorating settings whose humdrum similarity makes it difficult to distinguish one level from another. Gone are the numerous backstories, as characters like Sander Cohen and Diane McClintock are nowhere to be found; there are still plenty of audio recordings scattered throughout the levels, but the subplots contained therein are not nearly as compelling as those found in the first game. One tells the story of Mark Meltzer, a father who came to Rapture in order to find his kidnapped daughter; it’s a premise which one might expect to elicit a powerful emotional experience, but in the end it failed to do so because of the way the specifics of Meltzer’s story were handled. It could have been a perfectly engineered subplot, echoing and integrating the theme of the two games, which suggests that compromised principles and unchecked extremism lead to disaster, regardless of the philosophical spectrum that guides them, leaving only hapless victims like Meltzer and his daughter in their wake. Meltzer’s story accomplishes nothing of the sort, as it fails to hit any of the requisite emotional chords.

The graphics, though impressive in their own right, don’t compare well to those in the first game, either. Players will notice a slight blur on some environmental textures like walls and floors, and the vita-chambers don’t look as good as they did in 2007. Though the two console versions are visually similar, the sound in the Playstation 3 version lacks the fidelity and detail of its Xbox counterpart; water droplets pinging off the helmet of Subject Delta in the 360 version are notably muted on the Playstation 3, along with various other auditory discrepancies, such the sound occasionally cutting out when visiting vending machines.

Again, on its own, Bioshock 2 is a very good game, one whose biggest strength is also its greatest weakness; it simply cannot compare to the first game, and since the first Bioshock is the only reason that Bioshock 2 exists in the first place, is it improper to judge it independently of its predecessor? Yes and no; as I learned with Mass Effect 2, objectivity is a two-way street, as you can enjoy a game for what it is, and at once bemoan everything it isn’t, but the latter is only likely to leave you frustrated. The only way I was ever able to even remotely enjoy Deus Ex: Invisible War was to judge it independently of the first Deus Ex, and anyone who held Bioshock in such exalted regard would be advised to do the same with its sequel.

Enjoy what it is, without  lamenting what it isn’t, and you’ll have a great time.

La Giaconda: Streamlined

“When I paint the original, people complain.  They say she no have the — what’s the word — accessibility, so I make a new one that everyone can enjoy!  In La Giaconda Prima, the colors, they were too much for some viewers, so I say ‘No more of the color!’ Now many people look at my painting, an’ enjoy!  Si, molto buono streamlining!”

Leonardo, 1515

Porsche Type 911: Streamlined

“I was never happy with the car the way it was originally designed. It was too difficult for people to get into, and the concept of a daily driver that’ll go from 0-60 in 3.2 seconds is absurd in this trying economic climate. We redesigned the 911 in order to accommodate the widening demand for mediocrity across a variety of economic strata.”

‘Butzi’ Porsche, 2009

Atlas Shrugged: Streamlined

“I wanted to tell the story about an engine that stopped a man of the world, and this was the result.  I resented and still resent the necessity of the pseudonym, but I think it’s a better book for its simplicity and its violent relationships. Some critics claim that the clown is gratuitous, and to them I say ‘go to hell.’”

Ayn Rand, 1972

RMS Titanic: Streamlined

“After exhaustive research, the engineers at White Star have devised a solution to the lifeboat conundrum that so vexed the Titanic: The entire ship is now a lifeboat, eliminating the need to deal with passengers, meals, amenities, and of course, that niggling iceberg issue.”

J. Bruce Ismay, 1922

Mass Effect: Streamlined

This game could be subtitled “an attempt to please the multiplayer-only gimps who’ve been lapping up the rancid droppings left by Gears of War for three years and who refuse to handle anything more complex than pulling a trigger and ducking for cover.”

Those of you who thought the first Mass Effect’s inventory system was cumbersome and ill-implemented, fear not; it’s gone.  Not reworked, not redesigned, simply gone, making this — you guessed it — an “RPG” without an equipment inventory.

Those of you who thought the vehicle segments of the first Mass Effect could have been handled better; fear not; they’re gone.  Again, not redone, not improved; eliminated.  Those of you who disliked having to (GASP!) press a button to restore your health during combat by using a medi-kit, fear not; they’re gone too.  Right again — this is an “RPG” without a user-implemented health system.  So what do you do when your health bar dips too low?  By now you must know the answer to this one: hide behind shit (HBS) and pray.

This time around, the cover system is vastly improved over the one in the first Mass Effect; snapping to barriers is done with a press of a button, instead of the maddening sticky-wall approach that the previous game used.  It’s much more fun to HBS your way through harrowing situations this time around, and that, as they say at Martha’s house, is a Good Thing, because it’s the only way you’re going to survive.

Those of you who liked Mass Effect’s story presentation — two people standing around chewing on hunks of exposition masquerading as dialogue — will be glad to know that it has survived, fully intact, ready to gag you with its ham-fisted, Bubba-sized helping of stiff animation and waxy-looking characters.  Developers don’t seem to understand this, and the more that the mass media fawns over “stories” like the one found in both Mass Effects, the less likely they are to ever understand it: Games are not movies.  They are not TV shows.  If Aaron Sorkin ever pulled the same kind of expository dialogue dump that Mass Effect gets away with — indeed, is praised to the rafters for — he’d be scrubbing toilets at Yankee Stadium, and rightfully so; two people standing in a room for fifteen minutes talking about the story is NOT storytelling.  Sorkin integrates action and plot, exposition and dialogue, better than anyone, yet his methods have yet to find their way to the theater of so-called “cinematic” video games.

You might say that Mass Effect 2 experimented a little in college with becoming a full-fledged role-playing game, but it never pursued the matter much further.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s a fine action-shooter with slight RPG tendencies, but it’s a little too much in love with its own presentation. I could give less than a shit about listening to Martin Sheen prattle off line after line of dialogue while I select responses to his ramblings that have little or no effect on the story or the gameplay, and such conversations comprise much of the time you’ll spend with the game.

Taken by itself, for its own merits and shortcomings, Mass Effect 2 is a helluva game.  Its predecessor primed me for an entirely different experience, though, and it’s not always easy to get past my own expectations to enjoy what’s there, instead of what I wish were there.

(Mild revision and addendum 1.31: It should also be noted that experience points are no longer awarded for defeating enemies, as they were in the first Mass Effect; instead, you’ll earn experience only upon the completion of missions and quests. This change is especially troubling, as it seems to mimic a burgeoning, industry-wide trend — BioWare went out of their way to intentionally limit the amount of feedback given to the player at any one time, presumably to avoid overtaxing the cognitive ability of those who consider playing the Uncharted games a deep and rewarding experience.)

One of the games which made me leap for unfettered joy at my fortunate placement in the tapestry of space-time was Serious Sam — not the original 2001 PC release, and not the new re-buffed, re-polished, re-dundant Xbox Live version, and certainly not the forgettable Gamecube/PS2 editions of Serious Sam: Next Encounter, and aw-hell-no not the illegitimate demon-spawn that was Serious Sam 2, but the original Xbox version of Serious Sam that was released in September of 2002. Although it was essentially the same game as its PC counterpart, the Xbox version of Serious Sam introduced several simple, exclusive mechanics that elevated it beyond the rank of Mundane First-Person Shooter, and transformed it — to paraphrase Pope Julius II — into a fuckin’ masterpiece.

The original Serious Sam on the PC allowed the player to save anywhere, as does the re-imagined, re-issued edition on the 360. The 360 version even takes the save-anywhere concept a much-needed step further by assigning the quicksave function to the controller’s Y button, making saving as conveniently second-nature as, let’s say, blowin’ shit up. Where Serious Sam HD ultimately falls a bit short (as is the case with Deus Ex and Invisible War) is in comparison to a previous game; Serious Sam HD simply isn’t as compelling as its Xbox counterpart, and this has everything to do with the aforementioned save function.

Nice doggie. Cute little pooch. Maybe I got a Milk Bone...

There was no save-anywhere feature in Serious Sam on the Xbox; saving was accomplished by activating one of several phone booths placed within a level, with numbered lives filling the gaps between save stations. Every hundred thousand points awarded an extra life, which was accompanied by both visual and auditory feedback, with the total number of lives displayed at the top-left of the screen. Lose a life and you’d respawn precisely where you bit it, until you ran out of Sams and found yourself reloading from a previous save point. Simple, elegant, and dare I say, brilliant.

Why? Because the concept of player lives in an action game like Serious Sam reinforces and — more importantly — fully integrates several mechanics which are all too often treated as unrelated entities; the collection of lives is displayed on-screen and tied directly to the points system, which is in turn duct-taped firmly to the feedback of player reward using score multipliers and level performance bonuses to further bolster the collection of lives. This is a system that rewards the player’s skill without punishing too harshly his failures; for me the dread of seeing the number of lives on the screen decrease was motivation far beyond the standard practice of forced repetition. Much like the resurrection phials in both Fable games, this kept the consequences for failure planted firmly within the context of the game itself, never seeking to punish me, the player, by showing me the words “Game Over” or “Mission Failed,” or by forcing me to perform the sadomasochistic penance of repeating tasks I’d already accomplished.  This provided an experience that was at once fresh, fun, and most of all, playable.

Serious Sam HD is not by any means a bad game; it’s as good as it was originally, but not as good as it’s ever been. Graphics aside, it’s the same game that was released on the PC almost nine years ago, down to and including its uninspired save-anywhere feature. Assigning the quicksave function to the Y button helps keep the action moving, but those who are unaccustomed to playing games without checkpoints are likely to be frustrated by SSHD:TFE’s unforgiving lack of hand-holding as far as progression is concerned. Having to schlep your ass back to the beginning of a level simply because you forgot to hit the stupid Y button is going to piss off a lot of folks who are used to, and frankly prefer, having their games handle such things for them.

At 1200 Microsoft Points ($15), Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter isn’t exactly cheap, but you do get a decent amount of nostalgic wise-cracking and ass-whuppin’ for those 1500 centavos.  For those of you who’ve never played Serious Sam in any variation, and who might have wasted the same number of points on games like Gyromancer and 0 Day Attack on Earth, it’ll seem like the best money you’ve ever spent.

Seriously.

We have a Go for fingerprints and smudges

In September of 2005, Nintendo did what they are wont to do and released the fifteenth twenty-seventh tenth fourth iteration of the Gameboy Advance, aptly dubbed the Micro for its diminutive weight and dimensions. It sported a slicker-than-butter backlit screen, improved contrast, and somewhat better tactile input than the Gameboy Advance SP, and its $100 price tag ensured that it sold about as well as baby seal kabobs at a PETA rally. I got one on release day purely by chance and erratic whim; it was redundant and entirely unnecessary, but damn if it wasn’t just Ghiradelli-smooth deliciousness in the palm of my hand.

Okay, so walk with me. Around the corner and down the hall about four years, we find Sony hard at work on the latest advance in handheld gaming technology and wonderment. It slides, you know. How ’bout that? And it feels…oddly familiar.

The PSP Go comes with a marginal list of added features and improvements, the most notable of which are 14 user-accessible gigabytes of built-in storage, Bluetooth compatibility, and the ability to pause and save your game at any time, but it’s also saddled with a shiny new price point; $249 gets your foot in the door, and nothing else. All those UMD-based games you’ve got rattling around in your purse? Tough luck, kemo sabe, this sucker is download-only, and entirely incompatible with every single PSP accessory you have ever purchased, from cases to cables to memory cards and even those useless plastic UMD holders that can be replaced by an empty tin of Altoids Apple Sours. That’s right, Mr and Mrs. Existing Loyal PSP Owners; Sony says fuck you. Both of you.

Clearly, Sony and the rest of the world have reached a bit of an impasse regarding exactly what constitutes a good value during The Worst Financial Crisis The Universe Has Ever Encountered™; unlike the Gameboy Micro, which did take a little away from the table in terms of backwards compatibility and peripheral support, the PSP Go removes an entire avenue of distribution from its UMD-based brethren and replaces it with a heftier admission price, to the tune of $70. If the Micro was a guilty indulgence for a lot of Gameboy SP owners, a kind of fun, frivolous afternoon at a baseball game with a favorite uncle, buying the PSP Go is like shopping for school clothes with a psychotic maiden aunt who will, in fact, stick her finger in your eye the moment you look at her askance; it requires a boatload of discipline, planning, and self-control not to cry out at the horror and injustice of it all.

Offer Me Solutions, Offer Me Alternatives

Opening the box, you’ll find the Go wrapped in a slick clear plastic envelope, reminiscent of a Hot Pocket in its microwave sleeve, only without the inevitable third-degree burns and dental reconstruction surgery. It comes with the now-standard array of begrudgingly necessary accessories; a charger and a new proprietary USB cable, each of which I’m certain Sony would have gladly omitted if not for the looming specter of a class action lawsuit. Also included was the disk for Sony’s Media Go software for the PC, which enables PC-based Playstation Store downloads and manages media files. Mac users like myself can apparently go urinate up the proverbial braided-fiber fastening apparatus.

The first thing you might notice when handling your PSP Go is that if it’s like mine, it didn’t ship with a charge on the battery. (Unless you buy a black one; then, as has always been the case with the black PSP, you’re going to notice that it collects more fingerprints than Eliot Ness on a Mountain Dew-macchiato bender.) The second thing is the poor quality of the plastic used in the face of the control panel, which feels rather disappointingly cheap.

The directional pad on my black PSP Go squeaked and crunched like extras from Ducklings vs. Lawnmower II: The Return of John Deere. As mentioned, the plastic fascia surrounding the controls is of dubious quality and/or construction, rattling and complaining about little more than the pressure required to hold the unit and manipulate its various inputs. I don’t know whether this is an issue with all of the black PSPs or if it’s isolated to the one that I got, but for me it’s a deal-breaker; I didn’t pay $249 in order to get pissed off every time I hit the d-pad. Crunchy is for corn flakes and the Flock of Seagulls haircut I gave up on in 1984, thanks very much.

Redemption, thy name is Pearl White

Luckily, the white Go that replaced my black one sports none of its darker sibling’s attitude problems, allowing me to focus more objectively on the thrice-redesigned platform’s strengths and shortcomings.

The screen on the PSP Go is smaller than that of its predecessors, squeezing a 480×272, high-contrast display into a 3.8 inches, as opposed to the same resolution on the PSP-3000′s 4.5 inches of visual real estate. The interlacing issues that plague the PSP-3000′s screen are notably and thankfully absent from the Go, although neither display is as bright or as smooth as that of the PSP-2000.

The controls on the Go are arranged in a smaller space than on previous PSP models, and as a result provide a more ergonomic experience, even for those with larger hands; games that require the use of the face buttons in order to move the camera, such as Gun: Showdown and Armored Core 3 Portable, are easier to control with the more compact arrangement and shorter travel of the PSP Go’s buttons. The analog nub, long a shard of discontent among the PSP’s critics, has also been improved with stiffer feedback and a shorter throw, though it continues to rankle if for no other reason than its lack of a single, much-sought feature; a companion. While a second analog stick is not strictly necessary for all games, it would only expand the platform’s appeal by instantly eliminating the need for the bastardized controls found in the games mentioned above, along with others like Coded Arms and Resistance: Retribution; using the face buttons to look went out of style in the late 90s, when a company that has forgotten more than it knows today released a controller with…wait for it…TWO analog sticks.

And I Decline

At last count, there were 259 original PSP titles available for download in the Playstation Store, not including original Playstation games and PSN’s new Minis. The store is always open and games are never out of stock, and each download permits the use of the software on up to five PSPs registered to the Playstation Network account that was used to purchase the games. So if you and your significant other or siblings each own a PSP, and they’ve been registered to a single “master” account, it’s like getting up to five full copies of each title for the price of one. Games can be deleted and re-downloaded as many times as you wish, either through the PSP itself, a Playstation 3, or a PC using the Media Go software.

One might assume that the lack of a physical disc drive in the PSP Go would lead to longer battery life, what with the dearth of moving components and whatnot, but that’s not the case. While tests are still ongoing, the Go thus far gets about three hours of gameplay on a single charge, with screen brightness set to maximum and volume at medium-low. This, coupled with the lack of a replaceable battery, ensures that overseas or cross-country travelers might instead opt to stuff their carryon luggage with various accoutrements of a Nintendo-flavored variety — the battery in the DS is not replaceable, but it’ll get you from New York to London without fading into weighty uselessness somewhere above the Sargasso Sea.

While the apparent disregard for the DS’s advantages at long-term portability might, at first glance, seem dangerously cavalier, it’s important to note that all the arrows point towards Apple, and not Nintendo, as the fruit in the PSP Go’s crosshairs; the download-only content, the attendant 16GB of built-in storage, and the smaller form factor all but scream “validate me!”, while Jobs and company press on, blithely unaware of the Sony-colored muck gathering between the treads of the vast Cupertino machine.

Much like the Gameboy Micro, the PSP Go doesn’t seem to know its audience. Unlike the Micro, which was original and quirky and fun in spite of its redundancy, the PSP Go reeks of desperate imitation, as Sony attempts to capitalize on the success of another company’s business model without first attending to the cause of that success. The Go seems to be aimed at the folks up in the technological nosebleed section, the razor-thin niche that owns neither an iPhone nor a PSP (which by my calculation includes approximately thirty-seven people), but those seats are filled by a cautious, late-adopter demographic that over the course of the last year or so has learned the meaning of the word “frugal.” It’s not that these folks won’t spend some money, but they’re going to think twice and hard about it, and they won’t be taken in by slick presentation and novelty items with a sticker price approaching the GDP of Andorra.

If you don’t currently own a PSP, and you’re interested in a handheld gaming contraption that also plays music and videos, views photos, surfs the Web, and offers download-only content, spring for the extra fifty bucks and get yourself a 16GB iPod Touch, or save $50 and go with the 8GB model. The iPod is a better device in all respects, including the fully functional Web browser and email client, along with the robust selection of software, games, music, movies, and TV shows available from the iTunes Store.

Content is king, but in this case pure functionality is its man-at-arms, and the PSP — in any form — is thoroughly outmatched at both.

French Revolution? Pfft. I’m talking about part two of the year/decade-end list of Games Most Likely to Make You Curse Like Robespierre’s Barber. Read on. And weep with me, un peu.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED (360, 2008/2009)

This game was released in 2008, so it doesn’t qualify for 2009′s year-end list, and it wasn’t really one of the worst games of the last decade, so what gives? It comes to you by way of the Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Technicality and Loophole Edition, which was released here in the States at the beginning of November. I do love exploiting a good loophole when it’s done right.

First off, let me reiterate a previously belabored point; a game that takes control away from me in the middle of a task (like walking or running or fighting, etc.) to show me something deemed by the developer to be more important than me actually, you know, playing the fucking game, isn’t going to be played for long. THE FORCE UNLEASHED offers no exception to this rule.

Second, wielding a lightsaber should be fun. It should be your badass self amidst buckets of seared stormtrooper parts flying like half-chewed bits of turducken from the Maddens’ Christmas table, with choreography to rival that of the prequels’ fight scenes, offered up with a steaming side of gravy-drenched fuck yeah.

Instead, what THE FORCE UNLEASHED delivers is a moldy Slim Jim, warmed by a couple of weeks spent nestled deep within Jabba the Hutt’s greasy tit folds.

How is it that a Sith apprentice capable of force-crushing a scout walker (an AT-ST to the faithful) into a tidy pile of save-the-planet-so-we-can-blow-it-up-later recyclable scrap can also be damaged by the same scout walker as it stomps its foot on the ground?

Such an insidious mechanic bears repeating. In THE FORCE UNLEASHED, the player character can be damaged by a scout walker stomping its foot on the ground; not on the player himself, mind you, but on the ground in the general vicinity of the player. That’s really all you need to know, because the game takes every cheap-ass opportunity such as this to substitute engaging, thoughtful gameplay with tired platitudes that went out of style around the same time that a certain blue dress was making its way around the Oval Office.

Unlike the player’s unblockable flourishes in both Fable games, many enemies in THE FORCE UNLEASHED are capable of deflecting your most potent attacks, so even after you’ve leveled up your abilities to their maximum, you’ll find yourself howling like a frostbitten tauntaun as Donnie Darktrooper foils your poetic, Twyla-esque Dance O’ Death with a pair of shield-generating rabbit ears cleverly hidden in his utility belt. Who knew that the Empire had such cool shit, and better yet; considering the story timeline, where was all this stuff in the original trilogy?

I understand the need for balance. Games should present a challenge, but the challenges in THE FORCE UNLEASHED arise not through the developer’s cleverness — the kind of good-natured cleverness which eventually lets the player in on the joke and rewards his ingenuity in overcoming it — but rather through a seemingly vindictive desire to punish the player simply for playing the game. Interrupting input with repeated strikes and inhibiting the player’s ability to respond to a roomful of enemies as they take turns beating him into a milky Jedi frappe ensures that there’s little fun to be had in LucasArts’ latest fare, making THE FORCE UNLEASHED one of the most disappointing Star Wars titles since MASTERS OF THE TERAS KASI and REBELLION.

(My German is beyond rusty, but I’m pretty certain that MASTERS OF THE TERAS KASI translates to “game of dangerous cheese,” a moniker which can be applied all too accurately to THE FORCE UNLEASHED as well.)

THE GODFATHER II (PS3, 2009)

Including THE GODFATHER II on this list is almost like shooting fish in a barrel, or better; swinging a large stick in a Hot Topic and hitting some mascara-smeared crotchbag whose hair looks like he walked backwards through a wind tunnel — not quite sporting, really, but every once in a while some little fish-prick will swim to the surface of said barrel, smirk at you like it knows something foul about your mother, and give you the finger. That’s when the gloves come off, the stick comes out, and some scaly little bastard finds himself shipped back to the Corleone compound wrapped inside a few sheets of newspaper and Luca Brasi’s bulletproof vest.

Some things you just don’t mess with. They are, for lack of an actual word, unmessable. Sacred, if you will. Sisters, mothers, Han shooting first, and if you’re a male between the ages of 25 and 60, the Godfathers I and II pretty much cover the pertinent bases. Leave it to Electronic Arts to defecate squarely atop an American icon.

The first Godfather effort from EA was passable enough; it wove a convincing character into the existing fiction of the first movie in order to produce a game that was, if nothing else, exceedingly average and playable. THE GODFATHER II takes what little respect the first game may have earned for itself and garrotes it. Hard. With its own piano wire. Harsh.

This time out, the good folk at EA decided that it wasn’t enough to merely tell a story around the existing narrative of The Godfather II, but rather they thought it would be a good idea to spruce up that old saw a little and, you know, change it around a bit. Tidy up some of the glaring plot holes. Surely those persistent hacks known as Coppola and Puzo can’t hold a candle to the master yarnsmiths at Electronic Arts, right? Target demographic market studies indicate that 84% of all current-generation console owners have never seen the films anyway, so what difference does it make whether the game pisses all over one of the most revered stories in American fiction?

Turns out it doesn’t matter at all, because the rest of the game is so dogshit-horrible that its story could have been a collaboration between Homer, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain, and it still would have sucked enough ass to paint Caligula an envious shade of green.

Start with a game that can’t tell what it wants to be, whether real-time strategy or third-person shooter, and mate it to controls that fell straight out of 1996, mix it up with automobile physics reminiscent of NIGHT DRIVER, and you’re merely scratching the surface of what’s wrong with THE GODFATHER II. Everything about the game seems wrong, from the look of the period clothes and cars, to the dialog, to the story, which was made no better for Electronic Arts’ ham-handed efforts to shoehorn that bastard into the game instead of molding the game to fit a story which has been earning its own keep in the world for almost three generations.

Way to go, EA, on making us an offer it was all too easy to refuse.

It seems like everyone loves year-end lists; the best of, the worst of, and everything in between gets a paragraph of smarmy commentary as a way to fill a slot during a season in which most writers would rather throttle their cares with four fingers of Maker’s Mark than come up with anything genuinely worth writing. And after looking at the games that were released over the course of the last twelve months, I’ll not be the first to cast any self-righteous AA chips in anyone’s direction.

Originally, we here at TGS (and by we I mean me) vowed to rise above the petty critiques and slavish fanboy stroke-fests that populate the legitimate media at this time of the year, but when we realized that it was also the end of a decade, it was too much for us to resist. And yes, we realize that the next decade doesn’t truly start until 2011, but in addition to our affected manner of referring to ourselves in the second-person plural, we’re also a bit impatient.

So behold part one of the first official This Game Sucks year/decade-end list of Stuff What Be Not Goode.

CALL OF JUAREZ: BOUND IN BLOOD (360, 2009)

At this point it’s hard for me to determine what’s dumber; the premise and the writing in this game, or me, for buying the damn thing. Twice.

Take three voice actors who’ve fashioned careers out of impersonating the likes of Ian McShane, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bill Clinton, cram their yammering pudding holes with dialog written in misguided earnest by the fifteenth runner-up in the latest Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, populate the game with the most reprehensible characters you’re likely to ever see in interactive media, and you’ve got the foundation for CALL OF JUAREZ: BOUND IN BLOOD.

If I want to watch assholes acting like assholes, I’ll do it for free the next time I drive, or open a newspaper, or play a game on Xbox Live. While I acknowledge that there are people who get off on this kind of storytelling, I am most certainly not one of them; the notion of the flawed protagonist, or the “anti-hero,” appeals to me about as much as does the notion of intentionally ingesting a cockroach on my next visit to Taco Bell. No doubt we’ve all eaten things that we’d rather not know about, but to do so explicitly because it’s disgusting, because it’s flawed, is the hallmark of burgeoning psychosis.  Playing CALL OF JUAREZ: BOUND BY BLOOD might make for a good fraternity hazing, but in terms of storytelling it’s like finding half a Periplaneta americana in your Cheesy Gordita Crunch; in fiction, as in dining, intent is everything.

Sure, the game looks good, and the cover mechanic is unique and worth exploring in future releases, but to place the player in the boots of a Confederate deserter (whose desertion was incited not by the immorality of his cause, but solely by his own personal interests), demands a justification that the writers simply do not address. Additionally, wresting control from the player at multiple sections to unnecessarily show nothing more than an NPC’s progress, or an inconsequential cutscene, only further undermines the game’s maddening presentation.

And by the way, there’s already a word for the concept of the “anti-hero.” It’s called a “villain.”

THE CONDUIT (WII, 2009)

How can you go wrong with a first-person shooter that charges you with the defense of Washington D.C. against an alien horde and elements of a shadow government bent on the destruction of all that is righteous and pure and vital to the survival of the rebellion? Simple: Put it on the Wii, and let the shit fall where it may.

It’s not that developer High Voltage did a bad job, or phoned the game in. THE CONDUIT plays as though a lot of care went into its development; from the highly customizable controls to the specular sheen that adorns most metallic surfaces to the detailed textures on the walls and floors, it’s a game that would deserve a spot on anyone’s shelf, if it weren’t hamstrung right out of the box by the very system for which it was developed.

THE CONDUIT would have been a decent enough game in 2002, but today both the ragged-ass resolution and the carpal-tunnel-inducing control schemes bring it to a rubber-wailing halt just short of mediocrity. It’s almost 2010 — try finding a standard-definition TV on a store shelf, and keep the results of your search in mind when putting together a game for Reggie’s pretty white contraption. Ideally, graphics shouldn’t matter as much as they do, but when you’ve milked a console for every drop of eyeball nectar and your game still looks as though it was fingerpainted by a six-year-old using mashed up Froot Loops and a carton of strawberry Quik, something’s awry in hardwareville.

While most people will forgive dodgy visuals if compensated in equal measure with choice gameplay, THE CONDUIT offers neither, and much of that is the fault of the Wii Remote. Keep in mind that in all first-person shooters for the Wii, the player must aim and look using a device for which the primary design philosophy was “don’t intimidate the grandmothers.” Might as well use a slipper and a tube of Ben-Gay to navigate your way around the game.

While it’s far from perfect, the brand of conscientious diligence that went into THE CONDUIT suggests that High Voltage is ready to discard their Crayolas and graduate to the world of watercolor. All they need is a better canvas.

Look for part two next week, as the merciless festivities fall upon us swiftly and without respite.

Get your fat space ass back here!

Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot demonstrated that he was often full of six different kinds of shit, but he nailed one particular axiom in “The Hollow Men,” which is oddly relevant to the financial ball-gag that Sony finds stuffed, Ving Rhames-style, in its yawning skull-cave; there’s a gulf of difference between the idea and its execution, or between that which we envision and that which we achieve.

If a writer cannot say what he intends, or a painter can’t put to canvas his vision of a sunset, it’s often because he holds undefined premises which thwart the transition of his ideas from the conceptual to the perceptual; namely, he attempts to write or paint with either a misplaced standard of creation (aiming for A and hitting Schenectady), or one so poorly defined that it produces only stream-of-consciousness drivel and/or 20th Century poetry.

Similarly, if a formerly successful corporation such as Sony begins to hemorrhage cash from every orifice, it’s important to identify the defective premises which serve as the catalyst for their pending, though yet avoidable, demise. Since arrogance and calamity seem to be SOP at SCE these days, and since competition is essential even to a trompe-l’oeil market economy such as ours, I figured I might as well help them out.

Prayers, Too Broke, and Stoned

If your business strategy includes forcing potential customers to embrace an unproven (and therefore unvalued) technology such as Blu-Ray, and you’re charging slightly less than the GDP of Luxembourg for the privilege, expect consumers to be, shall we say, slightly fucking hesitant. Asking would-be early adopters to fork over a month’s rent just to get their mitts on your glossy black box and its requisite accessories attains an altitude of marketing hypoxia unmatched since Dean Kamen set out the change the very nature of transportation in malls cities around the world, at $5000 a pop. Thanks, Dean. Yes we can.

If your tech strategy includes intentionally making your hardware difficult to develop for, requiring a higher investment and a lower return for developers, don’t be surprised when guys like Gabe Newell, who’s made a game or two in his day, admit that they’re a couple of little blue pills short of a full-on quarterstaff for your coyly inaccessible machina. Longer, more difficult development cycles mean fewer games per studio, which means less profit in an industry with a mosquito-dick margin; as a result, expect to see your third-party royalties dry up like Richard Simmons on hormone replacement therapy.

If your distribution strategy includes issuing a new hardware SKU every sixteen days, ensuring that even the most concupiscent Sony fanboys can’t keep up with your lasciviously schizophrenic appetites, expect to see on-the-fence adopters retreat in confusion and resentment at the constant state of feature entropy.  Between the elimination of the card reader slots, the loss of PS2 backwards compatibility, and fewer USB inputs, you’ve taken more meat away from the table than Jenna Jameson. Decidedly not good eats.

Chuan-Li lamented the shortsightedness of his getaway plan after barricading himself in the men's room of the only donut shop in Beijing.

This Is the Whey They Whirled. NNNN.

If your software strategy includes letting anything as remotely hideous as Haze appear on your system as an exclusive release, please hasten to solicit the services of an exorcist, because clearly you’re possessed by a 5th-level Demon of Perplexing Judgment, and it’s only a matter of time until the green puke and the crucifix make an appearance. Similarly, if the very best exclusive third-party title that you can offer contains the not-so-latently-homosexual vision of a man named Solid Snake grinding his junk into the sand in six different trouble spots around the world while exchanging erotically charged radio banter with a repressed anime fan and searching for Big Boss (also known as Naked Snake), I’ll pass, thanks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If your downloadable content strategy includes full Playstation 3, PSP, and PSOne games (+1), yet many of these games are priced the same on your network as they are at brick and mortar retail outlets (-1), without appreciable acknowledgment of the lack of manufacturing and distribution overhead, there’s no incentive for anyone to buy from you. Price and convenience are both crucial components of any business, but price, specifically the perception of value, trumps convenience every single time. Also guilty of this is Microsoft, which is under the impression that $15 is reasonable for the shitty Xbox Originals that they offer on Xbox Live; anyone who would today pay that much for Grabbed by the Ghoulies or Raze’s Hell indeed ought to have his ghoulies grabbed and perhaps pummeled and twisted into odd balloon-animal shapes.

Lest this seem like a fanboy rant, realize that there is no room in the games industry for misdirected standards; it is crucial that SCE survives this hardware generation, if for no other reason than their demise leaves my primary form of entertainment solely in the hands of the people who created Windows Vista. At this point their biggest faux pas seems to be the forced adoption of Blu-Ray, which at launch drove the cost of each Playstation 3 into the technological stratosphere; though their reasons for including it were sound (betting on Blu-Ray becoming the hi-def format, along with a drastic price drop on TVs capable of displaying images in the Blu-Ray-native 1080p resolution), this betrays an engineering standard completely divorced from gaming, as Blu-Ray’s benefit only fully emerges in the arena of home theater. Its value to gaming is purely peripheral.

If SCE is to survive, at least some of the aforementioned issues need to be addressed and remedied in the current console round. If they are to thrive into the next generation, they need to become the company they were ten years ago, which operated with a penetrating, singleminded focus on games and only games, and which made theirs the best-selling consoles for over a decade.

“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”

Behold the One True Version of Super Stardust, for I could not find box art for the PSP version!

A few months ago, I wrote in another venue about a number of truly horrible games which I enjoyed quite a bit in spite of their glaring shortcomings. I have no problem admitting my fondness for games like Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm; conversely, neither do I skitter into the crumb-filled crevice between the counter and the stove when the light of slavish adoration for all things Nintendo hits me squarely between the antennae. While I acknowledge that Super Mario Sunshine Galaxy 64 World Bros. and its various multi-genre spawn are – technically and aesthetically – very good games, I’d rather stab myself in the face with a frozen Koopa turd than play any of them for longer than three minutes.

Since most game reviewers are survivors of public-funded, government-run education (and to those who draw themselves up in haughty indignation, proclaiming “well I went to public school and I turned out okay”; get over yourselves – I went to public school too, and am only now recovering), it comes as no surprise that most reviewers have never been taught how to think objectively. Most hold the subjective as their standard of criticism, subscribing to a philosophy of intellectual hedonism which proclaims “I like it, therefore it is Good,” as opposed to the objective “it is good, therefore I like it.”

The nature of objectivity demands that consideration be given only to what an object is, not to what it is not or what the observer wishes it to be. It demands that evaluation must be gleaned from the attributes of the entity to be judged, from the object of thought (the game) rather than from the subject of thought (the reviewer).

So why does it surprise me when I read a review for Super Stardust Portable from a professional outlet which amounts to nothing more than a 700-word rant about how much the game is unlike its PS3 counterpart? I should know better by now, so I guess I’m just stupid, but I downloaded the game anyway for no other reason than to invalidate the reviewer’s illogically subjective premise.

Lo, game devoid of bananas, horses, and clowns of disconcertingly ambiguous intent, I pronounce you unworthy!

The key to objective evaluation lies in the ability to think in terms of essentials. At its core, Super Stardust Portable – like Super Stardust HD – is an arcade shooter, an homage of sorts to Asteroids, Galaga, Centipede, and Defender, with a dash of Geometry Wars Galaxies thrown in for flavor. It employs two very basic strategies – shoot stuff, don’t die – with various sub-strategies rounding out what happens to be a very satisfying experience on both platforms. The fact that the PSP’s design necessarily changes the gameplay should have little or no influence on the determination of SSP’s overall value, provided that the game’s essentials survive the translation, and they do, with one caveat.

Firing with the face buttons is not ideal, but it works well with some minor adaptation by the user; the hardware cannot adapt to the game, after all, so Finnish developer Housemarque did a rather commendable job of adapting the game to the hardware as best as could possibly be done. The rest is up to the player, who will either enjoy himself or not, but to accept the Big Media Outlet reviewer’s assertion that the game is not ideal and therefore should not exist in its PSP iteration is a brand of elitist perfectionism that can only be advocated by someone who does not (and perhaps cannot) create anything.

I see no value in assigning an arbitrary score to a game (which is I why I stopped doing it here), so when I read a review from an outfit I trust(ed), what I’m looking for is a broad assessment of design elements and fundamental mechanics. When a reviewer can only tell me “well, it’s not as good as the version on the $499 console, so if you like that version, don’t buy this one” I must hoist a skeptical eyebrow and silence the blaring bullshit detector. Adoring a game on a particular platform – or a previous game in a series, for that matter – does not warrant performing a subjective hatchet job of the same game on another, decidedly less capable platform, provided that the game in question is fundamentally (aesthetically and technically) sound. In other words, with complete disregard for the source material – if Super Stardust HD didn’t exist – what would be your evaluation of Super Stardust Portable? That is the foundation of objectivity.

When judged as it should be (on its own merit) Super Stardust Portable is fast-paced, good-looking, and loads of fun, and it succeeds in spite of some severe platform limitations. If flashy arcade shooters are your thing, and you’re not averse to a slight mechanical learning curve by firing with the face buttons, it’s well worth the $10 PSN price tag.