Even though We <3 Katamari is the best game in the Katamari series, it really shouldn't have ever existed. Like the original Wario Ware, a large part of Katamary Damacy's charm stems from its inherent newness. It's a hugely original experience, and we should all thank the powers that be at Namco for giving the quirky game a chance outside of Japan. Unfortunately, its success has lead to a string of lackluster sequels, with each subsequent entry making the series feel less and less exciting. At this point, I find myself wishing it would hurry up and go away already. Still, We <3 Katamari is excellent, a relic from an age when the series was still relevant and a new Katamari game was something worth looking forward to. You know, two years ago.

This article and this update may not survive the night, as The Host prepares to upgrade to new servers, transferring all the site’s data from a backup made at an indeterminate point today. Don’t worry, I’ll repost it just as soon as I notice it’s gone.

In early December, I had an interview for a job that involved dealing with gaming mods as part of its responsibilities. Had I got the job, I would have had a company blog to do with as I pleased. In a pathetic exercise in wish fulfillment, I brainstormed a few ideas I could turn into posts there, figuring that if they decided I wasn’t good enough for them (and let’s be honest with ourselves here, things were clearly pointing in that direction), I could use them as the basis for updates here.

So! A top ten list! I hear everyone on the Internet loves those. Let me clearly define my terms by reminding everyone that “top” is a random combination of objective quality, historical significance, and personal bias.

“Enough talk! Have at you!” Etc.

10. Battlefield: Galactic Conquest (Battlefield 1942)
In retrospect, covering the team-based, vehicle-heavy gameplay of a Battlefield or Tribes game with a fresh coat of Star Wars paint seems like a no-brainer. And yet, before Galactic Conquest, nobody had bothered, including LucasArts. The mod allowed players to relive famous battles from the original trilogy and Clone Wars, making for some shockingly effective fantasy fulfillment. Best of all, there were no Jedis in sight, just two teams of 32 players each, a whole mess of Star Wars vehicles, and tried-and-true Battlefield gameplay. The mod was such an obvious use of a famous license that LucasArts saw fit to royally rip it off, leading to the wildly successful Star Wars Battlefront series (and the wildly annoying Star Wars Battlefront PSP ads).

9. BTmod (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)
In their rush to get the game out the door within the Xbox 360’s launch window, Bethesda made one obvious oversight: An interface designed to work with a control pad and look great on a standard definition television doesn’t always measure up when ported to the PC. Some clever mod makers quickly answered the call, greatly shrinking the size of on-screen text and optimizing the game’s interface for PC players. While the list of changes doesn’t sound like much – weapon durability now shows up on the main HUD, map and inventory screens are enlarged – this short list of seemingly simple changes had a huge impact on the game, greatly reducing the time players spent fumbling through cumbersome menus. Of course, the mod was also only available on the PC, further cementing the PC version of Oblivion as the definitive version of the game, even without achievements.

8. Garry’s Mod (Half-Life 2)
When it was first released, it was hard to imagine the point of a mod that allowed users to spawn and manipulate objects and characters in the world of Half-Life 2. Sure, it was fun to crucify scientists, but outside of making funny screenshots, what was the use? Oh, how naïve we were. Garry’s Mod has become an indispensable tool for machinima makers, leading to hilarious interpretations of bad fanfiction and crazily complex virtual Rube Goldberg devices. It’s also proven itself as a welcome addition to any map maker’s arsenal, allowing mappers to enter and edit their maps from a first-person perspective. The mod’s become so successful, in fact, that it now costs $9.95 through Steam, joining the short list of mods that have gone retail.

7. Natural Selection (Half-Life)
Natural Selection managed to out Alien vs. Predator every Alien vs. Predator game, pitting heavily-armed space marines against monstrous aliens. Blending real-time strategy with a first-person shooter, Natural Selection featured the sort of bird’s-eye-view commander gameplay made popular by Battlefield 2 a full four years before EA’s behemoth hit store shelves. The mod was an Alien fanboy’s wet dream, featuring tight, claustrophobic corridors soaked with xenomorphic goo that played host to an endless online battle between the resourceful space marines and the efficiently deadly aliens. The Half-Life 2 sequel can’t come soon enough.

6. CTRaid (World of Warcraft)
Before The Burning Crusade, serious World of Warcraft raiding guilds had three requirements for new members: (1) you needed to be level 60, (2) you needed to have mostly decent gear, and (3) you needed CTRaid. The interface mod improved on Blizzard’s default raiding interface by adding ready checks, main tank targets, and built-in boss mods. Blizzard has since pilfered CTRaid’s most interesting features, reworking them into their default interface. Still, for the first couple years of its life, no World of Warcraft mod was as popular or as necessary as CTRaid.

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The Sandman might just be the best comic series ever made. It’s certainly won more praise and critical accolade than any other comic series, and stands as the only comic book to ever hold a place on the New York Times Best Seller List or win a World Fantasy Award. In fact, it may be the only comic to ever win a World Fantasy Award, as the following morning the organization changed its rules so that a lowly comic book could never win the award again.

The series ran from 1989 to 1996, every word of it written by Neil Gaiman, who has since gone on to bigger, though not necessarily better, things. In those seven years, Gaiman crafted a genuine literary comic book, merging history, myth, and fantasy into a dreamscape that included the best elements of the real world and make believe. The series is now collected in ten (actually eleven) books, presenting the monthly issues more or less in the order they originally appeared. While Preludes & Nocturnes, the first book in the series, is far and away the weakest, even in its humble beginnings we can see the masterpiece that The Sandman was destined to become.

This first book introduces us to Dream of the Endless, perhaps better known as The Sandman. Pale, scrawny, and infinitely morose, Dream is the very embodiment of that which all good little goth boys and girls strive to be. In 1916, he is accidentally captured by a British occult society trying to imprison Death, and he remains their prisoner until the chance to escape finally presents itself in 1988. The world suffers in Dream’s absence; many fall under a mysterious sleeping sickness, never waking from their slumber. As Dream reminds the only man left to punish for his 70 years of captivity, all of humanity is lucky they did not succeed in incarcerating his older sister, Death.

Dream returns to find the Dreaming in ruins. He spends the rest of the book tracking down the three powerful artifacts he needs to rebuild his kingdom – his pouch of sand, his mask, and his ruby – that were stolen from him during his imprisonment. During his quest, he earns the ire of Hell and enlists the help of a few DC superheroes, including John Constantine and Martian Manhunter, and battles with JLA villain Doctor Destiny. While they mostly play as temporary sidekicks, the superheroes feel strangely out of place in a world where truly horrific acts are possible. The terror Doctor Destiny unleashes in a small town diner over 24 hours, for example, draws attention to just how impotent most comic book villains’ schemes really are. Thankfully, Gaiman gives up shoehorning The Sandman into the DC Universe after Preludes & Nocturnes, opting to populate his world with his own characters instead.

Gaiman admits in the book’s afterward that Preludes & Nocturnes represents his exploration of various horror subgenres. The dark, ornately framed art certainly matches its subject matter. However, even as Gaiman struggles to find his voice, Preludes & Nocturnes is already laying the groundwork for The Sandman’s future. Dream’s trip to Hell in particular sets up multiple future plot points and hints there’s more to The Sandman than simple horror. Similarly, Dream’s visit with the Hecateae, the three weird sisters from Norse Mythology, Macbeth, and Harry Potter, suggests the series’ more literary aspirations. And as we watch 72 years fly by in the book’s opening chapter, we see Gaiman’s first attempt to merge the narrative of the series with the history of reality.

In many ways, Preludes & Nocturnes also sets up the series’ ending, though realistically, it’s impossible to realize this through a first reading. Looking back, however, it’s easy to see the seeds for the series’ eventual conclusion, and even easier to respect Gaiman for beginning the series with a clear indication of where he wanted to take it, even if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d get there. At several points during the book, Dream comments on how much the world has changed during his incarceration. The Dreaming, obviously, lies in ruins, but other places have changed in Dream’s absence too. The Wood of Suicides in Hell, once a tiny grove, is now an endless forest, and Hell itself is now ruled by a triumvirate, with Beelzebub and Azazel sharing equal power with Lucifer. In the mortal realm, two world wars and rapid technological advances have left their mark on the world. Even the Justice League of America is now the Justice League International, with embassies throughout the world. The fact that the world could change so much without him wounds Dream’s pride, and there’s a sense, even now, that Dream must change with the changing world.

But immortals tend to get stuck in their routine; billions of years of life would do the same to you. The book ends with Dream accompanying Death on her daily duties, but Gaiman’s Death is like no other personification of the grim reaper. With no sickle or shroud, Dream’s sister is a bubbly, down-to-earth goth girl who stands in seemingly stack contradiction with her assigned task. But then again, shouldn’t Death herself cherish life more than all others? Here, the book finally comes into its own in its last 23 pages. Dream confides in his sister that a part of him doesn’t want to return to his duties, and that his quest to escape his captives and retrieve his tools instilled in him a sense of purpose he had never before experienced. Death reminds her gloomy brother that they are Endless; they don’t need to be worshiped like gods to survive and they will exist long after life has left the world. As such, they have a task to do, and nobody else is going to do it for them.

Dream takes Death’s words to heart, and the series only improves from here. The Sandman quickly sheds the strictly linear, MacGuffin-driven plot of Preludes & Nocturnes in favor of more interesting possibilities. Often times, Dream plays but a minor role in his own series or doesn’t show up at all. Instead, dreams themselves become the leading protagonist, as the series shifts between reality and fantasy, history and legend, and manages to build a cohesive narrative out of seemingly unrelated stories. Superheroes are replaced with Greek myths, Egyptian gods, and historical figures – who are far more interesting than musclebound men in spandex anyway – as The Sandman rises above the juvenile trappings of its medium. Gaiman describes the first book in his series as “awkward and ungainly,” but even in its rough beginning it’s easy to see the first hints of The Sandman’s inevitable greatness.

The movie industry has a predictable release cycle: The beginning of the year is a dumping ground for terrible movies; from Labor Day to about the middle of August, the studios release their “sure things” – vapid blockbusters designed to wrangle in viewers based on star power and the special effects; and family friendly comedies, prestige pictures, and Oscar bait saturate the release calendar between Thanksgiving and the new year. The video game industry has a release cycle that’s just as predictable. It’s simple, really: everything releases in November.

Maybe, at some point in the future, video game publishers will understand that nobody has the time to play 60 AAA titles in one month. Hell, few people have the time to play 60 games, regardless of their quality, over an entire year. The “core” gamers, as Microsoft has so eloquently named them, lament the shortening of the video game. Sure, I spent 100 hours with Oblivion just like everyone else, and more or less loved every minute of it (except around the 12 hour mark when I figured out how the leveling system works and realized that my thief, though very good at speechcraft and sneaking through the shadows, didn’t stand much of a chance against a pair of ogres). However, I see twelve, ten, and six hour games as a blessing rather than a curse. Shorter games means there’s time to play more of them, and allows developers to craft tighter, cleverer experiences. Look at Portal, arguably the best game of the year (hint: there’s no arguing about it), which clocks in at three hours at most, and proves that if a development team is talented and dedicated enough, they can compress an entire gaming experience into the length of a feature film without any major compromises.

You see, gaming is a unique medium in that nearly all its fans keep backlogs. There are simply too many good games to do otherwise. Nobody has a backlog of films to see, unless you count a Netflix queue, but at three or four hours maximum, tearing through a movie backlog isn’t a considerable feat. The way the games industry works, however, forces people to buy all their games in November and then spend the rest of the year playing through them. There’s even a site called The Backloggery that allows users to keep track of their backlogs in full social networking, Web 2.0 glory.

I don’t own any of the next gen consoles, though not for a lack of wanting. The closest I get is with my blue DS (not Lite). And despite this, I have only just now, two years after the Xbox 360 heralded the beginning of the current generation, finished working through my backlog. Or rather, finished working through as much of it as I can stand. Of course, there are still a handful of last generation games I would like to play through like God of War 2 and Contra: Shattered Soldier.

It’s no wonder the minigame collections that define the Wii’s software library are selling so well. While they are obviously more approachable because of their simplified controls and interfaces, they also don’t require the obscene time investments of more traditional genres. Developers like to bitch and moan about the rising cost of video game development, but maybe they should be spending their time cutting all the fat they pour into games instead. I’m not saying every game should be a slim Portal-esque experience – I welcome an epic RPG as much as the next guy – but either publishers need to stop dumping all their games that are worth a damn over the same four weeks at the end of the year, or they need to start allowing their developers to build more streamlined experiences, including ones that don’t involve minigames.

As you know, I recently bought Dawn of War and its first two expansions through Steam as part of my on-going pledge to keep PC gaming alive, so long as my consumer dollars somehow benefit Valve. (Confidential to Atari: Maybe you could put Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansion up on Steam so I don’t have to deal with Direct2Drive? Thanks in advance!) As such, you poor bastards will be forced to read through painfully uninteresting Dawn of War updates. Sure, you could just ignore them and press your back button, but let’s be honest here: This is about as good as the Internet ever gets without someone getting naked.

So, without further ado, I present The DORK Club’s First Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War Mod Roundup of Happiness, Rainbows, and Broken Dreams: Be Gentle It’s My First Time Edition. I’ll refrain from using bullet points to mask my poor organizational skills.

Dawn of Skirmish

What that boring screenshot so effectively communicates is that this mod brings some welcome AI improvements to Dawn of War. Most notably, it makes it not suck. But the mod also greatly optimizes the AI, allowing for some noticeably improved performance for poor folks like me with pathetically outdated PCs.

Interestingly, Dawn of Skirmish is included with nearly every other available Dawn of War mod. It allows the AI to actually use the more interesting abilities of various races and for some extreme customization, including providing the AI with resource bonuses or allowing them to ‘dance’ entire armies in and out of melee range. It’s more or less perfect for people like me who are too afraid to deal with all the scary Europeans that dominate the game online.

Inquisition: Daemonhunt

I know next to nothing about the Warhammer 40k tabletop game. I know it involves tables, their tops, and is restrictively expensive. I also know it involves many different playable factions, some of which aren’t represented in Dawn of War. Daemonhunt tries to rectify this by bringing the Daemonhunters to the PC game.

Sadly, it’s not particularly impressive, despite the tremendous amount of work that went into it. It’s easy to see where other races’ units have been hijacked and modified to fill out the Daemonhunters’ ranks, with none of their individual units feeling wholly unique. Still, there are some impressive features, including an AI that actually play the race well, entirely new building architecture, and a handy little structure that slowly saps the health from any unit within its range.

Witch Hunters – Adepta Sororitas

Despite still being relatively early in development (the public beta was just released on December 2, 2007), Witch Hunters is already hugely impressive. The race’s character models and textures are more detailed than those of any other race from vanilla Dawn of War, and unlike Inquisition’s Daemonhunters, the Witch Hunters’ units actually feel entirely new. Because they are. Many of the units can even use extremely powerful faith abilities, assuming your squads meet reinforcement requirements.

Sadly, the entire mod will be rendered moot in March when Relic/IronLore’s official version of the Witch Hunters, called The Sisters of Battle, make an appearance as a playable race in Soulstorm. They certainly won’t look as good, however.

Depending on how lazy I am, expect another mod update later in the week. With any luck, it should prove just as uninteresting for everyone who reads this site.

Yesterday I cracked open the copy of Gitaroo Man I got for Christmas. As I’m sure all of you remember, despite how much I try to forget, Gitaroo Man placed 26th in the hilariously lengthy titled The DORK Club Five Year Anniversary Feature: Top 25 Video Games of ALL TIME, which according to Nintendopedia and Filibuster Cartoons, is just as respectable a list as EGM’s. Take that, The No. 1 Videogame Magazine^TM. Yikes, three sentences in and we’re already lost on a tangentially related digression. Moving on.

A little over 24 hours later and I’m still stuck on the game’s third level, a musical showdown against Mojo King Bee, a funky bluesman dressed as a honeybee. The game isn’t really difficult by any standard; I just completely suck at it. I have no trouble with brutally challenging games like Contra 4, God Hand, or Dragon Quarter, but when it comes to rhythm games I’m all left feet, or another appropriately clever metaphor. I’m also notoriously bad at Space Channel 5 and its sequel, failing to ever clear the first level in either.

Unfortunately, the problem here isn’t just that I’m bad at these games, it’s that I really, truly love them despite being so awful at them. I enjoy their kooky music and their crazy scenarios, but lack the skill to see them through. If only there was a spectator mode that played the game for you, allowing you to enjoy the music and visuals without having embarrass yourself by getting bested by a man in a bee suit for the dozenth time. Sure, a video game without interactivity is about as entertaining as watching TV, which is to say, not very. But it’d be nice if the games that deserve it (i.e. awesome games I’m terrible at) included the option to play through them without having to, you know, play through them.

Okay, you’re right; it’s a terrible idea. Somebody come over and play through Gitaroo Man for me so I don’t have to watch the entire game on YouTube.

God Hand was a critical failure, as much as an average score of 75% is considered a critical failure in the 7-9 scale of video game reviews. IGN’s infamous 3.0 review is especially hateful.

However, in the year since its release, the game has developed a cult following, earning praise in message boards and blogs (just like this one!). Sure, this doesn’t do Clover Studios any good now; the poor little developer is dead and gone (and simultaneously alive and well as the poorly-named PlatinumGames). Still, as a commercial and critical failure with a rabid group of posthumous followers, I knew going into it that I would would absolutely love the game. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent my review from being long and rather boring. You win some, you lose some.

There are people in this world that don’t love Contra 3 like the masterpiece it is. They label it a “boss fight hell,” pointing out that the game is little more than an exercise in rote memorization as though it were a bad thing. And while I respect their right to have and defend their opinion, these people are utterly and absolutely wrong.

Contra 3 has a reputation for being an especially difficult game, but truthfully, it isn’t really difficult in any traditional sense. It doesn’t take skill to complete the game so much as a good memory and a lot of time. As the second game I ever purchased for my then-gray Super Nintendo, I spent a great many days playing through the game after school. At this point, I can virtually play through the thing with my eyes closed.

I line up jumps with pixel perfect precision. Every playthrough, I use the same pixels. Bill Rizer’s leg lines up with a background element just so as the first boss emerges at the end of level one; I always pose him with both guns held triumphantly in the air as the screen scrolls to the right after the UFO miniboss in level three. I know the exact point I need to stop posing and start shooting in order to get the force field power-up about to hover over my head. There is a certain way to play each and every level – a path foretold by the game’s designers requiring you be here at this point and there two seconds later. Learning the steps to this dance might not be particularly entertaining, but once you know the routine and play through it backwards and forwards in a Zen-like trance, you can begin to make it your own.

You begin to diverge from the established steps. Instead of ending this level with the crash grenades and the spread shot, you end it with homing missiles and the laser instead. You start in the lower right of level five rather than the middle left. As the alien heart boss explodes in the final level, you shoot into the ceiling with your machine gun rather than burning circles it the air with the flamethrower. And as obviously pretentious as this is, herein lies the greatness of Contra 3.

Because the events of the game are so predetermined and can be played through with such extreme accuracy, the real fun in the game comes from pushing the boundaries of the designers’ path. Soon your actions become the steps in your own dance – a 2D ballet of Mode 7 violence – such that everyone who plays Contra 3 with any sort of seriousness develops their own rhythm and moveset.

Contra 3 is a great game, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

Contra 4 is also a great game. A better game, maybe. While I can understand why someone wouldn’t like Contra 3, it’s hard to imagine someone displeased with Contra 4. The game is essentially Contra 3 with a more interesting power-up system, twice as much on-screen real estate, and, thanks to the fact that nearly every enemy fires projectiles, significantly less focus on mechanical memorization. Sure, it helps to some degree, but eventually you need to stop memorizing and start learning how to play the game.

Contra 4 is also a great reminder as to just how fantastic a 2D game can be, and that any 2D experience can be just as entertaining and rewarding as a 3D one. 2D is to video games what black and white is to film: a stylistic choice considered obsolete with technological advancement. At this point, 2D games are almost entirely relegated to handheld consoles, but both the DS and PSP are capable polygon pushers in their own right. It saddens to me to think that with the next generation of handhelds, this sort of game will be all but dead.

Enjoy them while you can, kids.

Well, this certainly came out of nowhere. Internode, a gaming site on the Internet, has a stand alone demo for Soulstorm, the upcoming Dawn of War expansion, available to download at pathetically slow speeds. I guess the game is closer to release than I thought. It will be on store shelves on March 7, 2008, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

I just recently bought Dawn of War and its first two expansions during the Steam holiday sale. It was only $3.00 cheaper, but I’ve been putting off buying the game since I was in the beta in 2004. As I’ve said before, it’s totally the best RTS since Starcraft; Warcraft 3, Company of Heroes, and Rise of Legends be damned. Oh, hello Google. Didn’t see you there.

Later today: A Contra 4 review and a seemingly endless spew of Contra 3 nostalgia, depending on how much time I waste on this demo.

For those of you with something better to do all day than endlessly refresh news sites and Internet forums, Hulu is a joint venture video site from NBC Universal and News Corp. The site was initially billed as a YouTube-killer, especially after NBC went to such great lengths to remove all of its content from the Google-owned site. However, Hulu takes a very different approach to online video, featuring clips and full episodes from past and present shows on Fox, F/X, NBC, Bravo, USA, and The Sci Fi Channel, among others. Users cannot upload clips of their own.

Currently, the site is only available to US Beta testers, of which I am one. It features an interesting enough selection of shows, from current Internet clip heavy hitters like Family Guy and The Office to cult classics such as Firefly and Arrested Development. The movies themselves are extremely high quality, even when blown up to full screen, and remain entirely free thanks to short, 30 second advertisements from Cisco, Ford, Burger King, and Intel. Despite only being accessible to beta testers, these very same testers can embed any video in any page they want. OPENhulu, for example, mirrors all of Hulu’s content as embedded video. And look, here’s the dual-titled Master and Commander: On the Far Side of the World:

Yes, it’s the TV edit. No, I don’t know why.

Besides its two massive media backers and big name sponsors, Hulu is also kept afloat thanks to a $100 million investment from Providence Equity Partners, which is almost certainly as soulless and evil as their name makes them sound. Clearly, NBC Universal and News Corp. are pulling out all the stops to support this new venture and have obviously sunk a great deal of cash into the site. While it’s nice to see generally clueless media companies embrace the Internet so whole-heartedly, it makes many of their arguments in the on-going writer’s strike all the more transparent. And frankly, for all its polished, user-friendly appeal, Hulu doesn’t match piracy havens like YouTVPC or TV Link in terms of content or accessibility. Not that The DORK Club condones that sort of thing. Of course, at this point in time, both of the aforementioned sites are good and dead, their creators hauled off to jail.

At this point, Hulu just seems like too little, too late, a desperate ploy from networks that honestly don’t understand why their viewership continues to dwindle year after year. All of Hulu’s content can still be had commercial free, at a higher quality, from a variety of other sources. All this site really allows us to do is legally embed full episodes of shows into our pathetic, poorly trafficed sites.

Ultimately, I guess that’s as useful as anything else on the Internet.