Clive Barker has become the mouthpiece for the “video games are art” crowd through no fault of his own. Roger Ebert’s now infamous anti-video game tirade came as a response to Barker’s comments at the Hollywood and Games Summit earlier this year. Besides galvanizing the gaming community against him, Roger Ebert’s assertion that games are incapable of artistic expression established Barker as the counterpoint to Ebert’s point. And though Ebert has continued to confront gamers directly in the weekly Q&A columns hosted on his website, Barker has remained almost entirely silent on the issue, going so far as to tear up his written response after learning of Ebert’s battle with cancer. Because of this, the gaming press has been slobbering over every scrap Barker throws their way. Conveniently, he also has a new game coming out.

His first game, Clive Barker’s Undying, is as unique amongst video games as it would be in any medium – it’s a horror story that’s genuinely frightening. The game puts players in control of Patrick Gallows, an occult researcher summoned to the gloomy shores of Ireland at the behest of his cursed friend. Over the course of the dialogue-heavy plot, players uncover the mysteries surrounding this supernatural curse. A first-person shooter with a fully developed magic system, Undying also features strange, otherworldly platforming sequences that blatantly embarrass Half-Life’s Xen segments. The game is really very good, the sort of critical success and commercial failure that serves as a sure-fire recipe for a cult hit. It’s tense, creepy, and challenging. And it features the only simultaneously phallic and yonic boss encounter in video game history.

Fast forward six years and one cancelled project later, and Clive Barker’s second game is less than a month away from release. Clive Barker’s Jericho, like Undying before it, is a horror-themed first-person shooter. Far darker than its predecessor, the game follows the Jericho Squad, part of the United States’ Department of Occult Warfare, as they fight to reclaim the city of Al Khalid from demonic influence. The game is a squad-based shooter, with players hopping between members of the Jericho Squad on the fly, each of which sports unique weaponry and paranormal powers.

Jericho is being developed by MercurySteam, a Spanish developer whose sole credit is another possessively titled game – American McGee’s Scrapland, the very pretty, if very dull, GTA rip-off. Add mixed impressions from those who’ve played it, and Jericho doesn’t inspire as much confidence as a game from the man that has become an unintended champion of the medium should. At least it looks nice, anyway.

Today, Codemasters released a Jericho demo across all platforms the game will be appearing on (PC, 360, PS3). Eager to see how Clive Barker’s second foray into the world of video gaming turned out, I downloaded the demo despite not meeting the game’s minimum requirements. Though my graphics card isn’t even in the same ballpark as those supported, the rest of my four-year-old machine skirts in just above or below the suggested specs. Sure, it would be an ugly slideshow of an experience, but at the very least I could get a gauge on the overall quality of the game.

Having spent far too much time downloading and installing the game twice, each time from a different source, I can state with authority that Jericho will not run on my PC. Unfortunately, it just crashes almost immediately after launching, giving me a general error message. As I have no way to actually play the game, this is the point where the update loses all momentum and whimpers away with its tail between its legs. I seriously considered continuing from this point, writing as though I had played the game by pulling information from the various impressions and previews saturating the Internet, but for your sake as much as mine, I won’t.

Generally, this isn’t the sort of update I would bother uploading, but seeing as how I just spent the last three hours working on this disaster, I’m going to put it online anyway. The day’s almost done and I have a quota to meet. Just because I can’t run the demo on my PC doesn’t mean you can’t play it on yours. Unless you fail to meet the system requirements too, in which case just ignore the rest of this.

In true Web 2.0 style, I leave it to you, the one reader whose PC can run this game (Jeremy Hahn), to download the demo and continue where I have failed by posting your impressions of the game and whether or not they live up to the persona Clive Barker has had constructed around him. Sure, the demo’s only ten minutes long, ends abruptly with a Shenmue-inspired QTE, and almost certainly offers no real insight into the quality of the final product, but don’t let that stop you from making broad, sweeping judgments. This is the Internet, after all. The Web 2.0 Internet.

Tomorrow: Something less terrible. I promise.

In the last 24 hours, Halo 3 made more money than either Spider-Man 3 or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows did within the same time period. Congratulations on your newest $170 million, Microsoft. No adjustment has been made to take the difference in price between a $10 movie ticket, a $20 book, and a $120 cat helmet into effect. Regardless, be sure to celebrate with a Halo 3-themed Whopper meal and the largest bottle of Game Fuel you can get your greasy gaming hands on. I’ll be doing my part.

THQ announced yet another Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War expansion today. Presumably developed by Iron Lore Entertainment (and not Relic…?), Soulstorm will be the game’s third expansion, bringing the total playable races up to nine, which is ridiculously awesome any way you shake it. The game basically plays like Company of Heroes with less generically boring World War II-flavored action, and is available, expansions and all, on Steam for the cheap. I should probably uninstall my less-than-legal copy and finally buy the thing. You should too, in fact. It is the best RTS since Starcraft, afterall (sorry, Warcraft 3).

Like Mega Man 2 before it, Odin Sphere is a rarity in the video game industry – a genuine labor of love. The spiritual successor to the Japanese-exclusive Princess Crown, Vanillaware has been working on Odin Sphere, in one way or another, since its predecessor’s release in 1997. Nearly bankrupting the developer, the game has finally been released a full decade later, this time arriving on both American and European shores. An action RPG heavily influenced by the best in the beat-em-up genre, Odin Sphere is a 2D graphical powerhouse that feels like an unreleased Super Nintendo game. Though its old school charm and lush graphics make it uniquely appealing, the game is not without considerable shortcomings.

Graphically, of course, Odin Sphere doesn’t disappoint. Gorgeous, hand-drawn sprites populate a world ripped from the most beautifully illustrated storybooks. Characters are composed of smaller individual sprites – an arm, a torso, a wing – that each animate separately. It’s the same technique Bandai has been using in its 2D Gundam fighting games for years, and though it helps overcome the staggering prospect of redrawing every sprite in every conceivable pose, what works for giant robots doesn’t work so well for fantasy creatures. Though the sprites and backgrounds are stunning – unequalled on any platform in terms sheer detail – they animate rigidly, like very beautiful virtual puppets with visible strings.

Ripped from the pages of Norse mythology, you’ll initially take up control of Gwendolyn, one of Odin’s valkyrie daughters. Caught up in a war against the fairies, you’ll eventually uncover a prophecy foretelling the destruction of the world itself. You’ll travel through snow-covered mountains, dense forests, and into the depths of the underworld itself battling dragons, demons, and gods before finally completing the game. However, completing the adventure as Gwendolyn only marks the beginning of the experience. Odin Sphere also has four other playable characters, each of which has their own set of levels to play through. While each character’s storyline works as a standalone tale, their plots intersect with one another, slowly revealing more layers of the game’s complex narrative with each subsequent character’s journey. Every character – playable, major, or minor – is fully voiced by competent, if not always amazing actors.

Regardless of which character you’re controlling, you’ll spent most of your time viciously battling waves of enemies. Each branching, web-like level is comprised of many smaller stages. Each stage is circular by design, requiring you to first defeat all enemies in the infinitely looping space before opening the stage’s exit(s). Though the overall level progression is linear, you’re given a great deal of leeway within levels themselves, as often entire sections of a given level – boss fights included – are entirely optional.

Combat is a simple affair relegated to a single button. While each character has a unique special ability and a host of spells, you’ll mostly just mash the square button to chain together attacks and form simple combos. The beat-em-up-inspired combat is brisk and surprisingly challenging, but offers little depth. In fact, it quickly wears thin, especially as you begin visiting areas and fighting enemies you’ve already encountered with previous characters. Despite each character having their own unique storyline within the gameworld, the levels they visit and the enemies they fight, including many of the bosses, are nearly identical. Additionally, the sheer number of sprites thrown on the screen at times – be it a large number of smaller enemies or a massive, screen-filling bosses – slows the gameplay to a crawl, often dipping the framerate to the realm of near unplayablity.

There is, however, more to the game than just combat. Defeated enemies yield phozons, magical particles that serve both as an energy source for characters’ spells and experience for their weapons. By absorbing phozons into their psypher weapons, characters can increase their overall attack power and learn devastating new attacks, but in order to improve their health, you’ll need to do some gardening. Planting seeds and allowing them to absorb phozons will produce a variety of foods, from berries and apples to, strangely enough, sheep. Eating these raw foods both restores lost health and provides experience towards raising your HP level, and your total health with it. You can also combine foods with other foods or herbs and spices in a café or restaurant to make more powerful food items.

In fact, this sort of item combining serves as the basis for the game’s most interesting mechanic – alchemy. By defeating enemies or uncovering secrets, you’ll find a host of items that you can then combine to generate additional effects. The basis of this system hinges on material, a vial-like item with a corresponding level. The higher the level associated with the material, the better the item it will ultimately create. For example, by combining a level 0 material with a carroteer (a small, carrot creature), you’ll create a healing tonic; or by combining a level 2 material with a cubsbane (a sentient herb monster), you’ll produce a painkiller potion that halves any damage you might take for a brief time. Besides serving as a helpful way to cleanup your always-limited inventory, the alchemy system allows you to transform items that are no longer useful into powerful new consumables. Though it’s an interesting game mechanic, and fun to play around with, alchemy never really lives up to its full potential as each time you start a new character’s adventure, you lose all items earned during the previous playthrough and start over with nothing.

Though Odin Sphere doesn’t completely nail any of its individual elements, the game is almost worth playing based on its fantastic graphics and the developer’s sheer love for their creation alone. But, simply put, the game has problems. For nostalgic 2D gamers eager for the sort of title that just isn’t made any more, the game’s repetition and frequent slowdown are but minor complaints against an otherwise solid package. As a 2D beat-em-up RPG, Odin Sphere is the very definition of a niche title. It will certainly generate a rabid fanbase, and with good reason, but ultimately the game’s extreme repetition and shallow gameplay makes it hard to recommend to all but the most die-hard of 2D enthusiasts.

My 11-year-old, 21-inch standard definition television doesn’t have AV input. No composite, no component. A single loose coaxial connection constantly in danger of falling out of my TV serves as its lone input option. In this HD era, audio and video signals reach my television by first passing through a composite switch and traveling from there to a cheap Wal-Mart VCR which has only one of the two standard audio inputs (a white, but no red hole). They finally reach my television via coaxial cable, passing through a SNES RF switch first, of course. I can only assume the picture I finally see would cause any videophile to vomit violently.

Though this setup is less than ideal when it comes to playing video games, the real problems arise when I try to watch a DVD. You see, some DVDs, seemingly chosen at random as I can find no common link between distributors or copyright holders, are protected by a dutiful soldier on the front lines of the war on piracy called Macrovision. “Designed to deter unauthorized recording of copyrighted materials,” Macrovision horribly distorts the DVD’s video signal if it passes through another recording device – like a cheap Wal-Mart VCR – on its way to its final destination. Macrovision alters the brightness of the image, causing it to pulse between light and dark extremes. Of course, this only affects anything on the DVD you’d actually want to watch. Trailers and advertisements are always wholly unaffected.

I realize the primarily goal of anti-piracy measures is to punish people that legimately buy a product, and to that effect Macrovision is a worthwhile tool. Nevermind the fact that I can take any Macrovision-infested DVD and easily rip it to my computer’s harddrive with no ill effects. I realize that I’m one of a select few that are still forced to run connections through other devices due to a lack of proper inputs, and therefore the number of people with honest intent affected by this problem is minimal, but what percent of piracy involves coping DVDs by running their output signals through VCRs? How many people even own a VCR any more, let alone actually have one set up to watch these freshly pirated DVD-to-VHS conversions?

Developing this Macrovision technology cost someone money. Licensing it for implementation on your newly released (and yet already widely available online) DVD collection also costs someone money. It’s a good thing I’m forced to use my PC’s DVD drive to watch half of the movies Netflix sends me because of this. At least Macrovision’s helping curb that prevalent VHS piracy and doing its part to drive up DVD prices.

Between providing the most in-depth coverage of tradeshow booth babes on the Internet and publicly attacking IGN for ripping off their innovative “top ten list” idea, Games Radar actually went and published a worthwhile feature. The 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Games will henceforth be used as the premiere numerical solution for nerd pissing matches. Replacing the geek code entirely, the GW101 scale determines a person’s worth based on the number of Things You Didn’t Know About Games he or she Already Knew About Games. Me, I scored a 29, meaning I need to go outside more.

The site now uses a small Java script to display a random image at the top of the page. Welcome to 1999.

At this time there are four images to choose from, only two of which I’m really happy with. Alas, “high resolution promotional image” and “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” have only been used in the same sentence once, and you’re reading it. Double alas, the image quality on the DVD, as you may or may not be seeing at this very moment, is shockingly bad even for a standard definition, 480 pixel image. Still, Artie precariously perched above the site is awesome anyway you shake it.

I actually implemented a random image script a few weeks ago and failed horribly. Internet Explorer and Safari would just draw a blank page. Apparently, because I was using the depreciated, not-supported-in-XHTML “language” attribute instead of the “type” attribute, those two browsers would just give up before even getting out of the page’s head. Someone remind me, why XHTML is a good thing again?

The perfect video game: Diablo 3 co-developed by Blizzard North and Flagship Studios. No monthly fee. Monthly patching. So much character customization that it is technically impossible for two identical characters to exist. Simultaneous release on Mac, PC, and all major home consoles. The final boss is Bill Roper’s head on a stick.

The perfect movie: a western staring Kevin Costner, Christian Bale, David Bowie, and a CGI young Clint Eastwood voiced by Kurt Russel. A total running time of just under four hours. No gun is fired until the last 15 minutes.

The perfect TV series: Law & Order: Trial by Transformers. Taking place in the mid-1980s, a young Jack McCoy teams up with Prowl and Nightbeat to bring justice to the streets of Autobot City on Earth. Teletran-1 serves as the city’s DA. All cases, in one way or another, involve the Witwicky family.

The perfect novel: a rogue AI from the future accidentally ends up in 1930s New York. It becomes a Christ-like figure for a community of poor Jews. Every fifth word is a Biblical reference. Every seventh word is an anagram of a Biblical reference. Every nineteen word is “boi.”

I played some Star Fox Adventures today. About five hours worth, to be exact. I hadn’t played the game since the weekend I bought it and subsequently played through it, back in 2002. The game is still graphically very impressive and proof positive that the last console generation ended too early. Anyway, I wanted to write about Star Fox Adventures being indicative of Nintendo 64-era Rareware as a whole and a symbol for the relationship between Nintendo and the British developer. I had also planned to categorize the various widgets and wingdings players collect along the way. I still can, I guess.

As you can imagine, the game wasn’t holding my attention. I would play for a while, take a break to take a shower or look up Japanese Beast Wars Neo characters on Wikipedia, and then play a little more. I’d just pause the game and leave it running, never bothering to turn the GameCube off or actually save my progress. Imagine my surprise when I returned from one such diversion to find that the game had returned to the title screen. With no explanation in sight, I’ll just take this as a sign from the almighty.

Star Fox Adventures isn’t a good game. I’ve collected enough pukpuk eggs, bafomdads, and blue grubtubs to last a lifetime. Actually, now that I’m thinking about all the mean things I could say about this (five-year-old) game (that nobody would care about), I might just go ahead and write my Star Fox Adventures update anyway. This update basically would have served as an excuse to post the following picture regardless of whether or not my game ate itself.

Never one to wallow long in defeat, I quickly moved on to equally productive activities:

Trying to write about Law & Order is a daunting task. The original series has been on the air for 17 years; its 18th season starts this January (look forward to a Law & Order premiere liveblog!). With four other series falling under the Law & Order umbrella – two successes, two horrible, horrible failures – the entire franchise represents an incomparably massive crime drama mythology. There’s a lot to discuss, and simply choosing a starting point is an intimidating prospect. I want to quote Dick Wolf and tell you that Law & Order has done for New York what James Joyce did for Dublin. I want to quote Saturday Night Live and tell you all about the various components of The Sound. But I’m not going to do any of that yet. Instead, I’m going to start with Jack “Hang ‘Em High” McCoy (Sam Waterson), the reason I bothered watching an episode of the series beyond the first.

Jack McCoy isn’t an asshole, exactly. He is a man who believes in justice, and he doesn’t care whose toes he needs to step on, or whose skulls he needs to crush, to see justice done. He is a ruthless executive assistant district attorney. At one point, McCoy has all gay marriages in the state of New York annulled so that a murderer’s confession no longer falls under the protection of spousal privilege, much to the annoyance of his lesbian ADA. In another instance, he stages a fake trial to extract information from a dirty DEA agent, ultimately failing and getting the agent killed. Having been found in contempt more than any other lawyer in New York (and once in a California court!), for Jack McCoy the ends are more important than the means. He’s an unconventional prosecutor that plays by nobody’s rules but his own. Basically, Jack McCoy is the Jack Bauer of the legal world. He even has an estranged daughter.

Additionally, Jack McCoy has taught me more about the American legal system than any other source. Thanks to him, I know what a grand jury is and understand the power of an indictment. I know to always object to hearsay, that most cases end in a plea, and that a prosecutor can get a witness to give the most prejudicial testimony in the world as long as the defense opens the door for it. He’s taught me to shake my head when I yell at people.

He’s also taught me that Law & Order is awesome. You see, McCoy isn’t an anomaly. Law & Order’s entire cast is surprisingly well developed. I expected flat non-characters acting as siphons between viewers and the case of the week. Each character is defined by his or her actions, the actors playing their parts with an almost extreme minimalism, making each morsel of personal information all the sweeter. The main cast, subtle performance building on subtle performance, outshines the often cartoonish guest stars. Though the focus of each episode is unquestionably the case itself, the reoccurring characters – their personal motivations and beliefs – primarily drive the action. A case’s affect on the characters is frequently more interesting than the case itself.

Law & Order is the police procedural that knows it’s a police procedural. Its seemingly rigid format – 22 minutes of detectives working a case, an arrest, 22 minutes of the DA’s office prosecuting the suspect – isn’t quite so rigid. The series often plays with its own format, playing against viewer expectations and easily manipulating the audience. Additionally, episodes rarely end with sterile conclusions. Everything comes with a price, and often the price is too high for the justice system to pay. The district attorney’s office loses many of the cases it prosecutes. Often times, an episode ends with no conclusion at all. The only true constant in the series’ format comes from the “slice of life” segment in the first 30 seconds of each episode, often leading to a crime or the discovery of a crime scene.

The series is also far smarter than it has a right to be. As a mainstream police procedural/courtroom drama with nearly 400 episodes under its belt, Law & Order is a show that uses big words and doesn’t stop to explain them. And just like Jack McCoy, it doesn’t pull any punches, attacking issues “ripped from the headlines” head on and rarely taking the easy approach by choosing sides. It moves at breakneck speed, with no establishing shots or transitional scenes – only white-on-black title cards accompanied by The Sound – and dares the viewer to keep up. This isn’t flashy, substanceless fluff like CSI or banal garbage like CSI: Miami (the #1 show in the world!). The rotating cast of genuinely interesting characters keeps things fresh, and some exceptional writing doesn’t hurt either. Law & Order is an excellent TV series that is taken for granted by most television viewers, but is just as good now as it was 393 episodes ago. Better, even.

Oh, and that Dick Wolf quote? “Crime is a constantly renewable resource. That’s why we have newspapers.” That’s also why we have Law & Order.