Also: Alternate alternate realities.

Ginormo Sword is by no means a good game, but I still spent a few hours transfixed by its siren call of RPG minimalism just the same (while on the clock, naturally).

I’m a big fan of RPGs, the actionier and loot pornier the better, and Ginormo Sword is the genre stripped down to its most minimal essence. “Here are some numbers,” it says, “they represent you. Go; make them higher.”

There’s something inherently compelling about leveling up, raising your stats and finding that perfect piece of equipment. There’s a reason people shell out a monthly fee for the right to grind away in their same-y fantasy MMORPG of choice, filling imaginary bars. This shit is fun, yo.

So Meta It Hurts: Ginormo Sword [Rock Paper Shotgun]

The Matrix Online has finally joined Morpheus in the great beyond, joining the very short but always expanding list of commercially-released MMOs that have closed up shop.

Check out Giant Bomb‘s 1-hour long video of the end of the world above, and if you find yourself with an extra five hours of your life to waste, you could do worse than skimming through the other videos of Giant Bomb’s time spent with the game. It all starts out very silly and funny and ends up being genuinely sincere and depressing before the end.

The Matrix Online: Not Like This – Part 01
The Matrix Online: Not Like This – Part 02
The Matrix Online: Not Like This – Part 03
The Matrix Online: Not Like This – Part 04

Replaying Mass Effect as superbitch Renegade Jane Shepard, cutting a bloody path across the galaxy with her lesbian death squad, I’m reminded of the same issue I encountered when trying to play through Max Payne 2 (The Fall of Max Payne) a few months back: Deaths tend to be especially frustrating, potentially costing you multiple hours of progress.

Yes, Max Payne 2 is five years old, but neither game has any excuse. Both were released in the glorious, post-Halo world of modern gaming. So why am I spending time fumbling around with the save system when all I wanna do is play the damned game?

Fact: Halo revolutionized console gaming, signaled the death knell of the PC as a games platform, and crowned J. Allard and Gabe Newell as the king and queen of entertainment. Simply put, no game released before Halo first made games playable in 2001 is worth touching these days.

In those dark, pre-Halo days, we were forced to manage our own saved games. Half-Life taught us to quick save and quick load every five seconds, charging through the entirety of Black Mesa without sustaining a single point of damage. Soldier of Fortune only gave us a limited number of quick saves per level in an attempt to get players to stop fussing around with the F-keys and starting actually playing the game. While active and engaging in its own right, there’s no arguing that saved game file management is significantly less thrilling than shooting fools in the face, be they alien fools, mercenary fools, or alien mercenary fools.

Halo changed all that with its revolutionary checkpoint system, conveniently saving your progress after every encounter. Death means only losing a few minutes of forward progress, as the game restores you with the Master Chief of just a few moments past, giving you another chance to overcome the challenge that did you in. Exiting without saving the game for real causes you to lose all progress and start over at the beginning of the game, even if you’d already cleared to chapter 4 on Legendary by yourself, barely making it past that part with all the dropships on Tsavo Highway.

It’s a system that makes sense. After all, if you’ve already beaten a group of enemies or a difficult boss, there’s no need to prove to the game that you can beat it again just because you forgot to wade through menus and save your game.

Mass Effect is a game with many problems. The much-hyped exploration element is 90% terrible, it features some of the worst achievement design outside of the 360′s launch titles, and the interface is so cumbersome, the game might as well be an MMO. Still, nothing is worse than getting your ass handed to you moon physics-style in another poorly designed vehicle segment just to see your game bumped back to two hours ago, missions undone and dialog trees un-navigated.

It’s 2009 and Bungie only has two Halo games left in them (allegedly). If boss rush and new game+ modes can’t become standard (like in Halo), can we least agree that manually saving your game is the polar opposite of fun can start implementing checkpoint systems in every game we make? I’ll give you your paid content already on the disc, your draconian DRM, and your refusal to embrace digital distribution, games industry, but let’s at least agree that’s there’s more good games than ever available these days (thanks, Halo!); don’t make us waste our time replaying the same content over again in some futile attempt to make death a punishment. Your game has infinite lives and continues, just give up already.

Next up: A look forward to Halo 3: ODST and Bungie’s plan to eliminate used games sales once and for all.

In my attempt to get this site up and functioning again, I accidentally wiped out the last year and a half of content. No big loss, really, but I’ve managed to recover it all through some Google wizardry and may or may not bother re-posting and backdating the whole mess.

The site will probably continue to exist in a half-complete purgatory state for a while as I decide what the hell to do with this/eventually lose interest.

So. The future. Look forward to it?

As Lost winds down its penultimate season, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we will get all the Big Answers to the Big Questions, even if we don’t necessarily want them. For me, Lost has always been an extremely fun, character-driven drama with an obscene attention to continuity and a flare for outlandish mythology.

A large part of the fun is finding the hidden clues buried in still frames and reading through the crazy but always slightly plausible theories fans cook up. If everything wraps up neatly and no room for the interpretation, I’m going to be sorely disappointed, and fear it may end up like so many epics shrouded in mystery that end up revealing too much of their hand (see: The Matrix, 2001, and The Dark Tower).

If the island ends up being a crashed Egyptian spaceship, I’m so not buying the Blu-Ray box set.

LOST 05.12: “Dead Is Dead” (Info Deficient OP Edition) [NeoGAF]

Kojima? Kojima?! Kojimaaaaaaaaaa!

Mega64: MGS4 (with surprise guests) [NeoGAF]

Dispatches by Michael Herr
Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, but Dispatches – a series of very personal short stories set in the Vietnam war – is widely considered to be his greatest triumph, and one of the most groundbreaking nonfiction books of the 20th century (according to Wikipedia!). The book moves at breakneck speed, pummeling the reader with a constant assault of violent imagery, begging you to try to keep up and make sense of it all and leaving you feeling as weary and
disgusted as its writer. Brilliant.
First Sentence: There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.

Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker
The movie is better. And so is the TV series, even at its pathetically amateur philosophizing worst. The comedy mostly falls flat, and the only laughs the book inspires comes from memories of seeing the same or similar material performed with better writing and timing in the film or TV series. Every ounce of originality was mined and improved upon long
ago. I won’t be reading the dozen or so sequels.
First Sentence: When Radar O’Reilly, just out of high school, left Ottumwa, Iowa, and enlisted in the United States Army it was with the express purpose of making a career of the Signal Corps.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Oscar Wao is a rarity among the lady-killer men of his Dominican family — He’s a nerd. He plays Dungeons & Dragons, reads comic books and watches Anime, writes sci-fi stories, and is a hopeless romantic destined to never find love. Oscar is cursed with a fuku – the curse of doom of the new world – and he’s willing to go to any length to escape
its clutches. Absolutely shocking and heartbreaking, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is unquestionably one of the best books I’ve ever read. Just don’t read it before you read/watch Watchmen, there be spoilers ahead.
First Sentence: They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
Winner of the Book I Saw the Most Other People Reading on BART Award, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate history where Israel was destroyed in 1948, leaving the Jewish population stranded in a temporary settlement in Alaska that was just starting to feel permanent. When a child chess prodigy who may
have been the messiah is murdered right under Detective Landsman’s nose, he takes it upon himself to find answers to the questions nobody else cares enough to ask. And thanks to his stubborn tenacity he actually finds them, much to his own surprise.
First Sentence: Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.

The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
As the work of modernist author and playwrite Samuel Beckett and modern cartoonists Jackson Public and Doc Hammer prove, failure is beautiful. The Boy Detective Fails is a celebration of pulp novels, Saturday morning cartoons, and the prizes found at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes. And failure, of course. Meno manages to depress and entertain at the same time, and fills his heartbreaking tale with amusing puzzles and mysteries, asking the reader to do some legwork (and use the decoder dial included in the back cover) to get
the most out of the experience. Fun, sad, awesome.
First Sentence: It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing.

How the Hula Girl Sings by Joe Meno
When a young ex-con and the strange, towering giant of a man he met in prison return to the small town where he originally committed his crime looking to start a new life, they quickly learn that people don’t forgive others as easily as they forgive themselves. A charming story filled with characters looking for a way to move past their mistakes, and an exploration of guilt and forgiveness that suggests the only person someone is fit to judge is themselves.
First Sentence: Out of nowhere, I did what I ought not to.

Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno
Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves, to find a group they can apologetically belong to, but nobody more so than Brian Oswald. Set in a Chicago suburb in the early 90s, Hairstyle of the Damned follows Brian as he struggles to fit in, changing his identity as often as he changes his cloths as he tries to figure out just what “being himself” even means. Written in the pitch-perfect prose of an angsty fifteen-year-old, the book is a funny and nostalgic
look at our continuing quest to figure out just who the hell we are.
First Sentence: The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat.

Previously on The DORK Club:
Whatcha Been Readin’ Part 1

EverQuest is now ten years old, and regardless of your opinions on the game itself, it’s hard not to respect SOE’s genre-defining behemoth. And it seems like EQ only just reached level nine. They grow up so fast!

To celebrate, Sony put together the above video filled with interesting EverQuest facts. Who knew that the world of Norrath was home to 3.5 tons worth of rats, or that there are still over 3,000 items still waiting for players to discover?

Even more interesting is Massively’s EverQuest Turns Ten feature, which includes lists of the 10 things some members of the EverQuest team wish they had known before building an MMO. Specifically, a programmer, another programmer, and an artist.

Cue “this is the coolest thing you’ve seen all month?!” comments.

Oh, well. Timeliness never was this site’s strong suit anyway.

Let’s have it! My favorite games of 2008!

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 does more for the “games are art” argument than supposed art games like Rez and Braid. It’s a game where pain, dread, hopelessness, and wonder are in no short supply, set in a sprawling desolate wasteland ripe for exploration and filled with suffering, humor, and humanity. So much more than just “Oblivion with guns” (though that would’ve been just fine too), Fallout 3 knees the naysayers in the groin and gives us a glimpse of the American dream long after America’s death, delivering the finest roleplaying experience of recent memory. When all is said and done, this may just
be the best game of the generation, and will certainly be the title we’ll still be talking about long after we’ve forgotten about Halo 3.

Burnout Paradise

I’ve never been a fan of open world games. If I wanted to spend long stretches of time traveling between the fun bits, I’d go play an MMO. Burnout Paradise is all fun bits, transporting the fast, frantic gameplay of the Burnout series into a massive open city that never feels as large as it really is thanks to a wealth of hidden treasures and the fact that you’re always going so God damn fast. Every street features multiple challenges and high scores to beat, and every
intersection is an event in a world filled with hidden passageways, alternate routes, and a sense of verticality to rival even Crackdown. Even though the game was released in January of 2008, Criterion has kept people playing year-round with a nonstop stream of free and paid DLC, successfully accomplishing what so few developers and publishers have been unable to do by treating their game as a platform, not a product.

Everyday Shooter

This once PSN-exclusive indie shooter was released on Steam for the cheap in 2008 (so it totally counts), and is even slightly cheaper this weekend. A Robotron-style survival shooter/extended music metaphor, Everyday Shooter features unlockables you’ll be chasing for weeks, levels so distinctly different they feel like entirely new games, and gorgeous stylized visuals. Forget Geometry Wars and its mediocre sequel, this is the downloadable shooter we should all be celebrating.