I have been thinking about… video game clones.
This week, I took on the Zynga/Nimblebit story for The Daily, focusing on a different angle than most outlets: the Canadian App Store. (Read my story here). A few more clone-related things came up in the past few days:

* Seattle dev SpryFox finally launched its cute, addictive puzzle game Triple Town for iOS and Android last week, but perhaps more importantly, they launched a lawsuit against alleged clone Yeti Town this morning. If you care about video games, you’ll sticky this story in your online news reading thingamadoodle. The laws on the books tend to favor clone games, so long as they don’t lift copyrighted material, source code, or art, but no precedent has been set since the smartphone revolution began.

This isn’t Sonic the Hedgehog resembling Super Mario; it’s hundreds of companies lifting shamelessly from the competition because there’s no barrier in cost, time, or oversight. Often, the violators are “biz-dev” folks pumping out tons of software or apps in the hopes of one hit sticking and making a ton of cash (read: venture capital schmucks). Whether their clone game takes off or tanks, it still dilutes the source material’s value and market potential.

At first glance, the small team at Spry Fox are in over their heads. Thing is, they’re Microsoft veterans and longtime gaming industry consultants who have spent their prime career years swimming in red tape and bureaucracy. If anyone can size up a prolonged civil suit process, it’s them. This path could make their company, winning them both groundswell respect from fans and knowing nods from the mainstream/investment world. Here’s to hoping the devs ponder an iOS take on the real-life story; maybe Tiny Courtroom, complete with microtransaction bribes?

* Within the past few months, two hip iOS games that draw inspiration from Boggle have launched: Spelltower, which plays like Boggle solitaire, and Puzzlejuice, which has Tetris shapes turning into Boggle tiles once full lines are formed. The creators of these two games engaged in some gentle ribbing on Twitter this weekend, talking about how they’d talked to each other about their similar games as they were each in development to make sure no egregious lines are crossed. Harmony in the indie dev ranks, y’all.

But, uh, did anybody send a letter to Alexey Pajitnov? Nevermind that Puzzlejuice adds a whole new spelling element to the Tetris formula. That’s still goddamned Tetris. Even the “official” Tetris grid size–22 blocks x 10 blocks–is in there. I’m not offended, by any means. After all, no matter how many times current rights holders EA pump out new editions, the game may as well be public domain material. Straight-up Tetris has reached its limit, and Puzzlejuice gave the block-dropping genre new life this week. But so long as Pajitnov is alive–and painfully incapable of topping his opus–how much should he get to share in his descendant’s success?

I have been playing… Soul Calibur V.
Because I received an early copy from Namco Bandai, I am on NDA. Look for a review at The Daily later this week, or pick your way through the NeoGAF forums to find opinions from people who lucked into early copies.

I have been playing… games on a “debug” Xbox 360.
After years of begging, Microsoft finally sent me the mysterious developers’ edition of the Xbox 360, meant for testing unfinished games. It also connects me to PartnerNet, MS’s testing bed for forthcoming–and occasionally unannounced–Xbox Live games. The box was draped in an NDA that required a retinal eye scan to unlock, so I won’t be sharing the things that I’ve found on PartnerNet anytime soon. Currently, only one game in the not-yet-released queue has been driving me wild. Wi-i-ild. Can’t wait to talk about it.

I have been avoiding… Resident Evil Revelaitons. (Misspelling is intentional.)
I played roughly an hour of this 3DS exclusive after Eurogamer barfed glee all over its little cartridge (which, according to enthusiasts, reaches a whopping 3.17 GB of data… guess that’s what happens when you render every cut-scene for stereoscopic vision!), and I’ve yet to unlock the co-op mode that Rich Stanton loved so much. Everything he says is on point so far in my experience, but this the kind of game I can see myself eyeing five months from now, thinking, “you know, I meant to play that again.” It’ll surely join Splinter Cell: Conviction, Lost Odyssey, and an unfortunate amount of dust.

I have been actively avoiding… Final Fantasy XIII-2.
People go on about RPGs that feel backwards or ancient without fully voiced conversations. My response to them is, those games’ awful dialogue becomes infinitely stupider when adults read it aloud with serious intentions. Sure, this latest Final Fantasy is gorgeous, even through the framerate stutters, and it makes strides to render the XIII universe playable, but I’m not 16 years old. I’m too old to sit on a couch for this sort of 50-hour, semi-active, semi-mature quest. On the other hand, since its battles are still controlled by that weird tactics system, it would certainly be playable on the smartphones of the future. I’ll wait a couple of years.

I have been listening to… Lenola, My Invisible Frame. Dreamy, Flaming Lips-esque college rock from the early ’00s. YouTube doesn’t have anything from that LP, but they do have one video. Enjoy.

At this point, a real review is impossible, considering the beta of near-final content lasted only a couple of weeks and the full-game preview only started Tuesday. I pushed forward to write an impressions/preview for The Daily this week, but when it was edited for space, my bosses removed, er, most of the actual “impressions,” turning it into more of a “what is an MMO?” piece for novices. That would’ve been fine, except I made some pretty big judgment calls on the game without critically backing them up.

The key paragraph that got nixed was the following:

​If you’ve played WoW or other major MMOs, you’ll feel right at home. Perhaps too much so, honestly. Hardcore gamers will notice little tweaks to genre tropes like “player vs. player” warzones, character upgrades and item crafting, but SWTOR plays it safe in the nuts-and-bolts department.

It’s tempting to forgive Bioware for sticking so closely to the WoW skeleton of play, considering how successful their design has proven after years of refinement, and some of the tweaks do pay off. Companion characters have taken a page from Torchlight’s book, because they can run off to do grunt tasks for you, from finding crafting items to selling loot; and Bioware has found a sensible balance between WoW-style controls and character powers that feel unique to the Star Wars universe.

But the required time and cash investments in an MMO mean that players will need a new reason to stick around if they’ve dabbled in WoW at all. Maybe Bioware and Lucasarts just assume there are enough people who a) haven’t played WoW to death and b) want a WoW-like experience with a Star Wars skin, and those people will be willing to grind through all-too-similar quests and PVP battlegrounds for months on end. But, you know, WoW has had seven years to snatch up that exact playerbase.

The major difference, then, is the focus on fully spoken dialogue, which proved a lot more impressive than I expected when I first heard about it. Bioware has a knack for finding great voice actors who don’t wear thin after dozens of hours of play. But, again, an important point was stricken from my impressions article:

The game doles out points when answers reflect either the light side or dark side; it’s a cool twist at first, but it effectively punishes players for flip-flopping, which dampens the otherwise impressive script with a few predictable outcomes.

This very fact wouldn’t bring down a game that’s 10, 20, or maybe even 30 hours long. But the impotence of dialogue choices will make WoW-like play feel that much more redundant by hour 40.

Ultimately, I walked away from my test time with SWTOR interested in playing the game some more. It means I’ll start over with a new class, since I don’t wanna do my other classes’ sessions all over again, and that’s fine by me. Looks like there’s still a ton to do here that’ll be new to me. I started with the kind of negative expectation that would get me booted off a jury pool, and Bioware deserves credit for pulling off a world that, at first blush, seems worth hanging out in for a while.

Most of my most recent games writing has been hosted by The Daily, a magazine meant to be read on an iPad. Lucky me, those wind up on the web as well, but finding archives is tough; even Google doesn’t cache ‘em. So I’ve taken to marking any of my pieces there as a “favorite” on my Twitter account. I suppose I could launch an RSS feed or a Tumblr or whatever the kids use these days, but this is how I’m rolling for now.

If you want the quickest way to see what I’ve been writing, and you don’t want to bother following me on Twitter, just check this link from time to time: Sam’s favorites!

Still, by skipping meals and forgoing sleep, I racked up a decent gaming tally. In the days since the fest’s closure, I’ve split my time between sleeping and cataloguing my every move at PAX, playing equal parts big-name games and indie sleepers; the result is as much a look at the biggest public games show in the nation as it is a state of the union in games. Don’t expect brevity.

PAX’s logistics: The three-day show maxed its square footage, thanks to a new third exhibition hall, a presence at the nearby Paramount Theater, and a total takeover of the Washington State Convention Center’s annex building. Even local titans Nintendo needed more space, spilling over into the show’s famed beanbag lounges. If there was ever such a thing as too much fun, PAX earned that achievement.

Even while bearing that load, PAX finished out with nary a disaster or even annoyance. Thanks to great mapping and planning, fans didn’t have to deal with endless walks, ridiculous delays, shortages in the freeplay zones or even lack of nearby food options. Outsiders often remark on the show’s annual sell-outs and massive, passionate crowds, assuming the whole thing’s a clustercuss to attend. PAX’s all-volunteer core continues to blow that assumption out of the water and deserves commendation; no American con does it better (and, for ticket-buyers, more cheaply).

But the time crunch proved more brutal than ever. It’s time for PAX to expand its exhibition hall hours; even one extra hour a day would make a big difference.

Borderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars TOR: I touched upon these already at The Daily. To save you some time: good, great, poop.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The quest game’s demo was the same I saw at E3, only this time playable. I started down a hill into a village, then up a snowy mountain; no introduction or helpful guide. Knowing I didn’t have much time, I ignored the village’s chatty occupants (other than a quick stop to, uh, smith some swords) so I could find some caverns and combat. I made my character a cat-man before delving, by the way; my orange, fluffy tail whipped about through chain mail, so that’s authentic, I guess?

The game pares down well to an Xbox 360 controller. You control the weapons/spells in your left and right hands with the respective trigger buttons, and you can pull up side-of-screen menus to swap gear at any time. In emergencies, tap the Xbox’s d-pad for one of four last-ditch things that you assign, like health potions. I was lousy at triggering these if my six deaths were any indication. To be fair, I fooled around with a variety of weapon combos: two axes, sword and shield, a huge spear, a dagger and a spell, or two spells.

Skyrim’s two-spell mix-and-match system isn’t unique to the genre, but it’s a good fit for the game’s huge world and feeling of “boy, I can do anything here.” Combine fire and wind for, uh, fire-gusts? Stuff like that. Sadly, PAX didn’t allow players to equip anything other than the simplest fire and cure spells; I sure set things on fire—roasted some trolls like marshmallows—but hopes to mix didn’t pan out. The timing in weapon combat proved hard to make sense of, and I had no clear idea about where I should go, thanks to a total lack of paths or guidance. Such is the scourge of a 30-minute demo for a 40-hour game.

People seem to be deadset on loving the latest in the Elder Scrolls series. Open world. Tons of RPG tropes. Maidens that are apparently coated in gasoline, awaiting your dark cinders. In some ways, Skyrim is review-immune; people who are averse to the Elder Scrolls formula will speak such a different review language, creating a conversational chasm. Some people just want to be led by the hand through their quests; others want a substantial puzzle element. Elder Scrolls says pfffffft to both of those. Run around and cause your particular brand of ruckus, glitches and accessibility be damned.

Rage: I read other writers’ gushing thoughts on this game and shake my head. Am I on a different planet than these people? We’ve played this game before, and it was better as Borderlands. To review: You wander around a desert apocalypse in first-person perspective (Borderlands). You receive quest objectives, then drive to a point and tear through an instance to complete said objective, only to return to your quest giver to receive better gear and cash (Borderlands). You do this all by yourself (compared to Borderlands allowing 3 buddies to join). You’re limited to the id Software standard of, like, nine weapons (compared to Borderlands’ hundreds of crazy guns).

id would surely counter that this game’s more beautiful and has smarter AI than Borderlands. Well, I suppose. Enemies crawl and hide and strafe and leap as they approach in a 60-frames-per-second world. On an Xbox 360 controller, these guys are difficult to aim on because of their weird side-to-side hops–tuned for a mouse, not a joystick–but it doesn’t matter. Once they leap directly at you, boom. One shotgun shell. Fancypants is dead.

This isn’t like Borderlands’ combat, which at least pumps its weapons full of giddy stupidity, nor Halo Reach, whose AI foes swarmed, surrounded and punished you for bad strategy, yet victory against them felt fun. Instead, Rage is yet another id game with cramped corridors and out-of-nowhere spawns, where victory over your foe is an inevitable, good-looking tedium.

Game industry, please stop kissing id developer John Carmack’s incredibly, incredibly intelligent ass. He can make a dandy of a game engine, and things go splat and heart rates go up as baddies show up and yell “BOO!” But some of those years spent making an engine should instead change the games we play. The FPS genre is too crowded for anything less.

Torchlight 2: I appreciated the first Torchlight, mostly because I understood it as Diablo for dads. You could jump right in, lose 20 minutes to a simple, loot-filled grind, then jump out. But fans who didn’t hear that pitch had good reason to complain–after all, Torchlight’s makers created the original Diablo and fetched some high expectations–and the sequel, so far, appears to have heard all those complaints. Dads, stick to the first one.

The original’s three characters were too rote–big guy, generic magician, speedy archer. Within seconds, I was pleased to notice that the sequel’s fighters feel more overpowered in very specific ways; that is to say, the new EmberMage character can’t clear a huge crowd of foes by default and will either need to play smarter or team up with a different-powered friend. For a game that attracts 50+ hours of grinding combat, that nuance means the world. The hub world’s far more open this time, and the monsters I encountered were enjoyably overpowered. But my demo was pretty short; I’m optimistic, but I’ll withhold judgment until the game launches. Three different reps insisted the game will come out by year’s end. I’ll believe it when I see it.

League of Legends Dominion: UTTER BIAS. TOO ADDICTED TO LEAGUE OF LEGENDS TO SAY ANYTHING COHERENT. If you don’t know what the acronym “MOBA” stands for, skip ahead.

LoL’s first real break from the MOBA formula has been tuned for shorter matches, and my time at Riot Games’ booth bore this out; games averaged 15-20 minutes, compared to the usual 40, which will hopefully tame the fanbase’s notoriety for ragequitting.

Your team of five now competes to claim and control five turrets spread around a circular map. MOBA games normally send streams of minions at your opponent, which you hide behind as you advance upon your foes, but Dominion’s wimpy helpers proved a lot less crucial to pushing your opponents. Heck, dying wasn’t so bad, either; the mod’s lead designer, Richard Hough, stood over my shoulder and watched me suck at the game, yet he continually pointed out that by dying, I “bought time” for my teammates to grab other towers.

I had a good time losing in this one. But unless Riot tweaks this new mode to empower minions, your favorite characters–particularly ones tuned for “jungling” (clearing out minions to earn in-game cash)–may prove more useless than Hough cared to admit. That could be a dealbreaker for folks who paid either time or money to nab their favorite LoL champions.

Spelunky HD: As an Indiana Jones wannabe, you descend through a 2D, treasure-filled cave armed with a whip, ropes and bombs. The deeper you go, the better the treasure gets. Might sound familiar if you’ve played the free PC version from a few years back (go git it); just like that one, every level here is procedurally generated, meaning no two sessions play the same.

The HD update transforms the old retro graphics to beautiful, hand-drawn ones, and as you descend, new, lush environments pop up (including, yes, the cliched ice world), but so do new foes and structures, making this the definitive Spelunky, not just a flashy update. Too bad about the game’s disappointing take on deathmatch. Four spelunkers whip at each other in far-too-tiny rooms, muting the normal game’s sense of wonder and exploration. Oh well.

On the bright side, creator Derek Yu was on hand with a bunch of sweet Spelunky figurines, and he was kind enough to give me the mascot one. Thanks, Derek!

PAX 10: Puzzle-platformer Fez has been drooled over by the press for years, and as a PAX 10 entrant, the game finally made its public debut. Sadly, its most special feature–a “rotate a 2D world in 3D” puzzle mechanic–didn’t come with interesting puzzles attached, thanks to its baby-sized demo. I wound up drooling over The Splatters instead, which I’ve dubbed “Angry Birds if developed by Mensa.”

watch?v=mo2mDQrznIY

Each Splatters puzzle is a single screen, but instead of birds and pigs, you get googly-eyed blobs and gooey targets. Launch your blob-people, which are already strategically placed within the puzzle, at targets to make them explode, and take advantage of ramps and bumps to maximize your blob launch speed and angle. It’s that latter stress on geometrical physics (and the ability to re-launch blog-people in mid-air) that gives this game so much more precision and intelligence than Angry Birds and its ilk. The developers are aiming this game at Xbox 360. I told them they were goddamned fools and should release it on phones and tablets instead. I was not slapped for saying this.

Word Fighter, a combination of Boggle and Puzzle Fighter, seems like a win on paper–Scrabble combat! Woo!–but it was PAX 10′s biggest disappointment. Combatants get the same grid of letters, so it’s too easy to screencheat and steal words, breaking the game on a basic mechanical level. Phbbbt.

Games like Atom Zombie Smasher and Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony are both already available for purchase on PC, so my praise would be redundant, but it was nice to see them fetch big PAX 10 crowds. (I’m hopeful that the latter sees Xbox 360 release someday; its four-player shmup co-op is too hard to pull off on a computer.) The most popular of the unreleased PAX 10 games was Antichamber, a first-person puzzler that allowed players to truly solve puzzles however they saw fit. Thanks to its long lines, I never got a crack at it. Frowny face.

PAX 10′s neighbors: In my dreams, I dwell in PAX’s 6th floor hall for all eternity. There, Jonathan Blow and Tim Schafer take turns feeding me grapes.

Monaco, a retro-styled heist game, was perhaps the most polarizing title in this year’s gallery. Four pixelated thieves break into buildings, each using different strengths–computer hacking, disguises, lockpicking–to get in, steal something and get out. Developers have been gushing about this one for years, but PAX’s more casual crowd struggled to pick up on its mechanics, strategies and visual cues. Hopefully, its sole developer, Andy Schatz, paid attention to fan frustration. I personally like the progress that the game’s made over the past few years, and I like its criminal mission variety; even with the looks of an Atari 2600 game, it already looks smarter than GTA IV.

Retro/Grade has seen tons of previews lately, particularly a nice playthrough at Giant Bomb (above). You control a spaceship backwards through time; instead of attacking enemies and dodging their shots, you have to move your ship to the chiptune soundtrack’s beat to recreate the past. Get it wrong, and you rip the space-time continuum a new one. Now that I’ve played the game–complete with Guitar Hero controller–I can tell that its glowing previews have ignored a key flaw thus far: the timing. You play along to the game music’s beat, but my clicks of a Guitar Hero controller didn’t trigger to either the beat or the visual cues; they were about a millisecond between, which will drive rhythm game fans nuts.

Last year’s PSN sleeper, Joe Danger, launched with expectations of an Excitebike clone, but that comparison never quite took. Yeah, there were 2D motorcycles, but Joe Danger was more about thrilling stunts and navigating obstacle-loaded courses than pure racing. The sequel, Joe Danger: The Movie, turns the game into a series of movie-themed sets, which makes more sense for what the game stresses. Along with motorcycles, you’ll hop on skis and jump into mine carts, forcing players to really buy into the stunt-heavy premise.

I took the Seattle-developed Skulls of the Shogun for a spin a few months ago at a local indie games party, and I appreciated its cute, turn-based combat–a breezy, multiplayer take on Final Fantasy Tactics–but PAX’s crowds didn’t care for the interface and controls thus far. See above thoughts on Monaco, then multiply my level of concern by 10.

Nintendo: Super Mario Land 3D was the same as its E3 demo: a tinier version of Super Mario Galaxy. I appreciated the attempt to break Galaxy into bite-sized chunks, but it’s not smaller enough, if that makes sense. In 3D Mario games, aiming and timing things like jumps can be iffy enough on a full TV screen; I consider myself a Mario expert and struggled almost immediately with how much Nintendo tried to cram on the 3DS’s small screen. I won’t be surprised to find that the final product is a rushed retread, considering it launches in, what, November? Mario Kart 7, set for a December launch, also felt underwhelming in its “sure, I like this franchise, I’ll buy it” kind of way. Nintendo’s desperate to sell some 3DS units, I guess.

Didn’t play Zelda, didn’t play Kirby, didn’t play Star Fox 64. I came to PAX to play new games.

Sony’s piddly booth: Speaking of. I walked past Sony’s zone twice and didn’t see anything other than Resistance 3, Uncharted 3, Twisted Metal, Ratchet and Clank and the Ico/Shadows of the Colossus reboot. Let’s be clear: Uncharted 3′s refined, cinematic take on multiplayer is a must for PS3 owners, and I’m hopeful that the new Twisted Metal will carve itself a stupidly fun combat niche, but Sony put more effort into propping up its old hits than to tantalize with new content.

(Starhawk’s an exception, but I didn’t get any time with that online land-and-space battle game, which I regret.)

Also MIA: any compelling Move content, and any demos of the coming-soon portable Vita system. In Vita’s case, I got confirmation from Penny Arcade reps that Sony’s Japanese bosses instituted an asinine rule: no public Vita demos for the USA yet. Uh. Doesn’t the system launch in three months? Don’t they want to build some goodwill and momentum from hardcore fans?

On the Move side, all Sony did was allow players to use the Move wand to aim guns in standard gun games. This runs concurrent with my all-along theory: that PS Move was a kneejerk release with no long-term software strategy in place. A blockbuster game typically takes 2-3 years to hit the market, and Move launched roughly one year ago. Based on that timeframe, PAX 2011 would’ve been the ideal time to announce any “coming very soon” Move exclusives. News flash: Sony doesn’t have any.

Xbox Live Arcade: Microsoft actually gets this part of PAX right; its Xbox Live Arcade and Dream.Build.Play kiosks were plentiful and loaded with odd content. Some of it was a bummer–ew, a War of the Worlds movie game? I didn’t know farts came in digital form–but debuts of the new Trials and Trine games tantalized, and indie hit Retro City Rampage–an 8-bit homage to Grand Theft Auto–arrived for its Xbox 360 debut. Within my first two minutes of RCR play, I took down pixelated versions of the Ninja Turtles and the A-Team. Target audience: met.

Dance Central 2: Rules. I already said that at E3, but really, two-player Kinect dance battles are where it’s at. (I didn’t touch Kinect Disneyland, sorry.)

Halo Fest: I stopped by the Ikea of Halo fully prepared to poo-poo the whole thing, but Jesus damn, Microsoft’s 343 division has poured thick vampire blood into the Halo 1 HD remake. It’s aliiiive! The redone art transforms the old, single-player quest (and, weirdly, so does the optional 3D support, which works much better with Halo’s lasers than with Killzone’s bullets). More importantly, I cackled–hell, I HOWLED–while replaying old versus maps in the Halo Reach engine. Before Xbox Live, Halo was meant for couch combat–tight, frantic levels with plenty of sneak-attack potential, yet no space or time to camp. This is the Halo I think of fondly, and I’m happy that the newer games’ mechanics–like jetpacks and invisibility—have been poured successfully into the old arenas.

(Word on the street is, 343 has two dedicated teams cranking out tons of map packs, redoing classics and sculpting new ones alike. As far as I know, they’ll all be compatible with Halo Reach.)

Board Games: The only reason I’d want a full, fourth day of PAX would be to play more of its selection of free board games. Local nerd shops like Uncle’s brought hundreds of boxes for fans to check out, library-style, and I teamed up with my hometown D&D friends to play a few.

Penny Arcade: Gamers Vs. Evil seemed appropriate to test out at PAX; the brand-new card game boils down to a simplified, streamlined take on mega-hit card game Dominion. The folks I played this with, who detest Dominion, appreciated the tweaks, but I could see this one wearing out its welcome after only a few playthroughs.

Power Grid: Factory Manager, which is two years old, has compressed the auction-based strategy of Power Grid into a snappy, 45-minute game. That’s an insane achievement. You don’t get to interact with foes through map takeovers in this one, though; the competitive jabs come from what each player snatches in auction rounds, but that can be devastating enough. A cool alt to the hit game.

Battleship Galaxies drew the most lookie-loos in the tabletop section—and for good reason. Hasbro handed its classic game to designers from Wizards of the Coast (D&D, Magic), who turned it into an epic sci-fi battle game, and it’s a curious transformation. Instead of hiding your ships behind a screen and guessing each other’s locations, players take to a massive hex-grid map, on which they place ships and send them off to destroy each other or accomplish mission tasks. My group of friends despised the confusing rulebook and the dice-roll attacks—roll a letter and a number, then call it out and see if you hit the ship in question. As such, smaller ships are harder to hit than bigger ones. Me, I liked that twist on combat, along with the use of missions to spread out how armies battle each other, but I’m not sure if the asymmetric factions—humans versus aliens—make for a balanced game. Seems like the aliens have the edge, and as such, I’m tempted to wait for Wizards to tweak the balance again before shelling out $50 for the remixed game.

The PAX ’11 trend: PAX exhibitors tend to fear showing off mobile/iOS products, which is the exact opposite of shows like GDC and Casual Connect, where phones and iPads rule all. Nobody wants to come off as a non-hardcore company, after all. One company tried bucking the PAX prerogative by launching a geolocation-battle game for Android on day one. This backfired when PAX’s masses logged in, crashing the game’s login servers. The game deleted all my progress not once but twice, so I refuse to even name it.

But the other game-biz buzzword, “freemium,” has fully entered the hardcore world thanks to League of Legends—whose booth was absolutely slammed the entire fest, and attracted the most interesting cosplayers to boot. As such, companies are pumping more money into freemium titles, particularly the advertising onslaught for Firefall, which means gamers might finally get more than what they pay for in the freemium space.

I’m a huge fan of this industry transition because it levels the review playing field. I hate the old cycle: game is smothered in NDA, game gets press previews, game launches, game vanishes after three months. When the community gets first dibs on a game—and when people like me pay to review the game in question (which I’ve totally done w/ LoL)–then the conversation turns more organic, the game lives much longer, and the game receives perpetual smoothing and upgrading. It removes the phony sense of “journalism” from the games review process. Fuck scoops. Long live freemium.

At E3 2011, Ice-T performs "Cop Killer" in front of a Gears of War 3 logo.

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After seeing Microsoft’s gaming lineup at this year’s E3, you’d be forgiven for calling its Xbox efforts family-friendly. In particular, its most recently announced Kinect-enabled games that week included incredibly kiddie fare like Sesame Street and Disneyland.

On Tuesday night, that sure seemed to piss rapper/actor Ice-T off.

Taking the stage at an LA nightclub, the Law & Order: SVU star reunited his notorious punk band Body Count at a party celebrating the upcoming Xbox shooter Gears of War 3, even unveiling a song with the game’s name in the chorus. Minutes later, clad in an orange jumpsuit and spraying f-bombs like machine-gun fire, T demanded that a crowd of game designers and businessmen in suits shout along to the song “Cop Killer,” going so far as to ask fans to “sing it from your nuts.”

That’s one way to get your game rated M for mature.

Xbox’s E3 presence repeatedly bounded between the polar extremes of Gears of War’s skull-crushing combat and Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster’s adorable critters. Consider that stance a necessity for the company. Unlike its rivals, Microsoft had no new hardware to show off, so its PR message instead revolved about being the game system for “everyone,” from the hardcore to the family.

Certainly, Microsoft tried to proclaim that Kinect, the system’s motion-sensing add-on, could satisfy both extremes. Emphasis on “tried.”

“I can make a hardcore game with Kinect, and I don’t want to go back to a controller,” declared game designer Peter Molyneux as he presented the Kinect quest game Fable: The Journey at a private press demo. But his game’s footage didn’t match his words; while promising that the game wouldn’t unfold “on rails,” the 10-minute demo followed a fixed path. Players waved their hands to ride a horse in a straight line, then pointed at the screen to blast fireballs at goblins, light-gun style. If Peter wanted to convince us of his mission, he picked the wrong segment to show off.

There’s a reason so many Kinect games are on rails, as Sega’s new horror game Rise of Nightmares proved. Its demo had players walk through an abandoned prison and deal with wretched zombies, mining the campiness of the House of the Dead series. That meant Kinect tracked your every move. Use your hands to wield chainsaws at campy zombies? Cool! Use your shoulders and feet to steer and walk yourself? Awkward!

Kinect Star Wars didn’t fare much better in that department; its on-rails demo allowed two players to team up against the Empire and flail together, as Kinect intermittently responded to lightsaber swipes and “force” pushes. Wait for encounter, wave arms wildy, automatically walk to next encounter, repeat.

In better news, last year’s biggest hits have gotten better with an extra year in the kitchen. Dance Central 2 showed off two-player support and competitive modes, meaning the game might finally rival the massive Just Dance franchise; also worth noting, dance routines now come with preview videos. Fitness title Your Shape will add much-needed floor routines and regimen refinements to its fall 2011 outing, as designer Nicola Godin admitted that in last year’s, “workouts could be like a black hole.”

The Kinect-crazy folks at Ubisoft are also putting the polish on a Raving Rabbids mini-game collection, the first in Kinect’s lineup to push augmented reality. The game’s cute Rabbids walk around your living room, and you can pick them up, fling them, bop them on the head, or pose with them for photos. Behind closed doors, I snuck a glance at a very rough demo in which I had a booger hanging out of my nose on the screen, then attached a Rabbid to it, swung my head around to build momentum, and flung the critter hundreds of feet.

On the normal-controller side, Microsoft was surprisingly quiet about some of its best fare. Indie games Bastion and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, set for release this summer, will surely rank on critics’ best-of lists with their remarkable takes on things like spoken narration and art design, but they were overshadowed at Microsoft’s booths by run-and-gun squad game Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and supercar sim Forza Motorsport 4 (which, admittedly, are both pretty slick for their respective genres).

Strangely, the company also played it cool about its potentially biggest game of the year, the 10-year anniversary reboot of Halo: Combat Evolved. As a way to placate fans, the game’s original engine has been left intact–”we didn’t want to ruin a classic,” said producer Dennis Ries–with a modern graphic engine loaded on top. If players want proof, they can tap a “time warp” button at any time to make the game look just like it did 10 years ago.

Indeed, the original, 10-year-old version looks terribly dated, but the “updated” graphics aren’t much to shout about, hovering just short of Halo 3′s looks (which isn’t saying much). The game will come with a weird mulitplayer mode, as CE’s seven original combat maps are on the disc… but run separately in the 2010 Halo Reach engine. CE Anniversary buyers will get a code if they want to attach those maps to their copy of Reach, instead. As of now, that makes this $40 package a barely touched version of CE and a map pack. If I’m gonna replay a tried-and-true franchise, I’d rather put my holiday games money towards Gears of War 3–at least if its updated Horde mode, complete with slick tower defense elements, is any indication of the final product.

The best news at Microsoft’s E3 presence was just how much there was. Microsoft’s press conference, parties and showcases gave fare like Gears of War and Kinect Star Wars the biggest booths and loudest f-bombs, obviously meant to entice and titillate the mainstream. But Microsoft was better than any other company at E3 at dotting its floorspace with compelling and varied content. Kinect had its fair share of sleepers, like this week’s Children of Eden and the forthcoming Fruit Ninja, a smooth spinoff of the iPhone hit.

And there was enough Xbox Live fare to make some of MS’s booth look damn near like indie-friendly GDC, from the Populous-esque world-building weirdness of From Dust to the two-player “tower offense” combat title Rock of Ages. That quantity and quality approach, more than anything, did the best to fulfill Microsoft’s “games for everyone” mission.

Last week, in-flight magazine American Way published my take on all of this year’s new motion-control game systems. Next month, they’ll print my piece on Gran Turismo 5.

My column at The Atlantic in Washington, DC, has been filling up with game reviews, as well. Here’s one for the downloadable, lovable Super Meat Boy. Here’s one for Halo: Reach. And here’s a musing on the industry’s reliance on patches and bug-fixes, and how that affects the hobby’s reputation as “art.” I strongly recommend that one, even if its commenters by and large disagree.

More of my Atlantic articles can be found here.

Readers don’t notice it that often, as we typically don’t empathize with alleged one-note perps. But niche audiences sure notice when they get mixed up in criminal blame-games, so we have KOMO-4 News in Seattle, and its recent blast against video games, to thank for such a reporting farce today.

Its opening line:

Detectives investigating the strangulation death of 16-year-old Kimmie Daily are trying to determine whether her accused killer might have been acting out a violent fantasy from Dungeons and Dragons [Online].

Dots are connected: violent crime, video game, official investigation linking the two. The intro does its job, creating instant Internet linkbait: “D&D tied to murder.” We have seen this story before.

As the KOMO-4 story continues, it clarifies the intro’s use of wimpy modifiers (“trying,” “whether,” “might”), eventually admitting in the final paragraph that the premise is a lie:

The true cause for this crime is still unknown. They aren’t blaming a game for this violence, but they are trying to understand what triggered this murder and why.

The author took 12 paragraphs to convert from “might have been acting out a violent fantasy” to “not blaming a game.” It’s not until the near-end of the article, as well, that we see a quote from the aforementioned detective:

“The defendant admitted some kind of connection between the murder and the video game,” Lindquist said. “I’m not clear at this point what exactly that connection is. The defendant himself said he went to play video games to forget.”

It’s a wobbly premise, that a coping mechanism after acting out caused that very action. If you get into an angry argument, then take a long stroll to cool off, do you return home and burn your walking shoes as part of the apology process? No. It’s stupid.

KOMO-4 acknowledges no responsibility for common sense in its reporting – no willingness to apply higher-level thinking, because they have a quote! Detectives said it, right? We report, you decide. Lucky us, at least, this old-school journalism disaster has been launched on the Internet, where we can comment, copy+paste, highlight, embolden, and cast doubt. The article’s comments section is proof of that.

This article isn’t a burden for gamers. Video game fans are no longer the maligned niche of old. Nowadays, shoddy, ancient journalism is.

What life awaits after death? Most forms of expression, from books and films to poetry and philosophy, have taken turns pondering on it, and the maturing world of video games is no exception.

LIMBO, in spite of all appearances, isn’t one of those games. The brief, downloadable video game for Xbox 360 appears to dwell in the afterlife—and beautifully so—with a black-and-white aesthetic, lack of conversation, creepy inhabitants, and balance of darkness and light. Yet the Danish title is most compelling because it speaks to the struggles of living with loss, not fading away into death; and it does so not with text, nor with musical cues, nor any concrete storytelling. You simply drop into LIMBO, and it forces you to find your own meaning through exploration, puzzle solving, and inhaling its lonely world along the way.

The game opens with a child’s silhouette waking in a shades-of-grey world, himself all black save his tiny, white eyes. With no story as impetus, players immediately encounter forests, ponds, and caves (and strange foes within each), all rendered in 2D with shimmering particle effects, as if LIMBO’s entirety had been drowned in fresh, falling ash. Other than occasional tones and background effects, the sounds are as simple as the boy’s feet plodding along grass, dirt, and hard metal, and the sound direction turns out far more colorful and organic than the fuzzed-out looks would lead you to believe.

Players are limited to running, jumping, and grabbing certain objects, which makes the ingenuity of Playdead Studios’ puzzles so striking. Every “a-ha!” moment is a spoiler in the making. Anyone who has played the puzzle game Braid will be tempted to compare the two games, but LIMBO skips such puzzle gimmicks, instead forcing players to consider every bit of the sparse environment as a means of progression. Dead bodies, turning cogs, hungry birds, gravity switches, and dangerous boulders each reveal themselves as greater figures in seemingly simple puzzles, and their respective moments will last in gaming’s lexicon for a long time, ranking with the head-scratching likes of Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of the Colossus, and Portal.

LIMBO can run as short as four or five hours in the first go-round, which is tragic since its puzzles are brilliant without gimmicks; the game doesn’t wear out its welcome with, say, time-travel tweaks or a specific, limited item. LIMBO could probably have kept on going another hour or so without anybody getting bored. To be fair, as a concentrated experience, its every region is stark and memorable in spite of the black-and-white sheen, both in looks and in puzzles that prove familiar and exciting even on a second playthrough. (Those regions shine when you force a huge change in the world, like yanking a hidden switch to change the weather or power down a dilapidated hotel.)

That stark brevity fits the game’s understood purpose: to present a boy in search of a lost sibling, a boy who’s desperate, quiet, and willing to proceed left-to-right without any plot or outright provocation. As such, we too follow along without asking questions. We solve puzzles and brave confusing foes because we “have” to. The wordless inspiration, and the game’s overt nod to it, rises above the game’s astonishing qualities—its beauty, its economy of sound, its puzzles, its fluid control, even its never-too-hard difficulty—to make this 2010′s best video game so far.

This is not a game about death, but about living, and unlike any other form of expression, we learn that in the game of LIMBO by living it.

As I got older, so did Tecmo Bowl. After a remarkable sequel in 1991′s Tecmo Super Bowl, the series didn’t see any major upgrades, instead bowing out silently as Madden NFL took over the virtual pigskin crown. But I didn’t fall for Madden. When my friends and I hit the virtual gridiron over the years, we used an old NES. Still do.

…at least, until this week. Tecmo Bowl: Throwback is now available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3′s online stores for $10, and it delivers what my friends and I want: almost nothing new. TB:T sticks to the series’ speed and simplicity to great effect. But it also misses an opportunity to tweak the original formula—or, at least, offer enough customizations for the fans who want an old-school experience—potentially leaving all comers in the dust of fictional Bo Jackson.

This isn’t the first attempt to relaunch Tecmo Bowl in recent years, but 2008′s Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff was relegated to the Nintendo DS. The series has always been better with a buddy, and chaining together DSes wirelessly didn’t deliver the original’s couch appeal (nor did the new one’s wonky online mode). TB:K hit the market with a thud.

Tecmo could have ported that DS version to the couch-friendly Xbox and had a winner by default. For the most part, that’s what players get. Offenses choose from eight plays on each down; defenses try to guess the offensive choice to get a jump on the competition. You won’t find jukes, spin moves, audible calls, or other flair in this control scheme. The defense is stuck choosing one player for each play with solely a “tackle” move, while offensive moves (beyond picking and passing to a receiver) are limited to mashing a button if he gets snagged.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3azs5njfHso

The game’s “2D” mode is a 1:1 port of the two-year-old DS game, even recycling that version’s cinema “celebration” scenes. Click a button, though, and the game transforms from old-school 8-bit into pristine 3D. Hit that button any time—before a play, between plays, during a breakaway run—to switch from teensy, pixelated players to hulking, well-designed brutes. I prefer the upgrade look, as players’ exaggerated animations are smooth, fun, and simple without burdening the original gameplay. They even look sharp through the zoomed-in cinematic scenes, whether players are high-fiving to celebrate or diving for an interception. (Yep, halftime shows have returned, too, but the 3D ones are ho-hum cheerleader dances. No 3D marching bands? C’monnn.)

TB:T’s ruleset, controls, timing, speed… really, everything here has been lifted verbatim from the ’90s version of Tecmo Super Bowl. That’s a solid base, and nostalgics may prefer sticking to the script, but I would’ve loved a few options to fix old quirks, like the field goal gauge or the inability to swap defenders on the fly. Also, the “dive” play, introduced in the Genesis edition, meddles with the series’ popular rock-paper-scissors formula in low-yardage situations. Can’t get rid of it. Something as simple as a “new rules” toggle would have been welcome, especially for newcomers who may scoff at the ancient mechanics. It’s not the game’s only unwelcome lack of customization.

The game opens with a choice of 28 generic teams, but they’re all NFL clubs in hiding. Turns out, TB:T cribs entirely from the 1993 NFL season, which will disappoint those hoping for the 1991 lineup of Tecmo Super Bowl (or, holy moly, the Bo Jackson domination of 1988′s original Tecmo Bowl). If you have an hour to kill and don’t mind typing names with a joystick, you can change all player names manually. And, stupid as that sounds, you probably should.

But you can’t edit stats to, say, turn the lineups’ clock back to 1988 (or forward to 2010, for that matter). The designers stated that they wanted to protect online play, so that nobody would jack their team rankings to 100% (an issue that plagued the DS edition), but an offline-only ability to tweak to our heart’s content would’ve been nice, as would’ve been the ability to change the generic teams’ colors and logos. It’s hard to get pumped about the bright-orange Dallas Cowboys.

Those nitpicks don’t ruin the game, but they do highlight just why the series has been stuck in the past. Without the official NFL license, TB:T feels artificial, and without options to tweak the play, it may feel redundant for purists.

Assuming you’re not hanging on to your NES and running annual Tecmo Super Bowl leagues with friends, though, TB:T is still handily the best option for nostalgic quarterbacks. Its tasteful 3D upgrades go hand-in-hand with a ruleset and control scheme that are still beloved because of brilliant, speedy simplicity. There is one other catch. The DS edition bombed because of its lousy solo play, and the same goes here; the modes are paper-thin, and players can’t crank up the puny difficulty when playing alone. Grab a buddy.