Yes, that’s Master Chief anti-gravity surfing on a hoverboard. And yes, he’s doing so in the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3.

Some talented individuals over at UT.PS3 have made some of gaming’s biggest characters playable in Epic’s online shooter. Recognizable faces include Halo’s Master Chief, Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud, and Cole, Marcus, and various Locusts from Gears of War. Mods to play as the nanosuit-wearing super soldier from Crysis and Todd McFarlane’s Spawn are also available.

Hit the link below to download any of the pictured characters.

UT3 PS3 Character DL’s [Master Chief, Crysis Cyborg, Gears Locust, etc.] [GameTrailers Forums via Kotaku]

Additional screenshots:

Regardless of your opinion of his games, there’s no denying that Sonic the Hedgehog is an appealing character; you don’t get staring roles in five different Saturday morning cartoon series on looks alone. Yuji Naka and the developers at Sonic Team have once again hit character gold with the titular hero of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but sadly, his debut game is average at best. The spunky kid in a rooster suit deserves better.

When evil crows attack Morning Land and imprison the six rooster elders in giant golden eggs, preventing them from coaxing the sun out of its nightly slumber and therefore plunging the world into eternal night, it’s up to Billy Hatcher to save the day. With the power of eggs, obviously. Despite his flashy rooster costume, Billy isn’t much good on his own. Sure, he can jump and hang from ledges like the best of them, but any jumping puzzle more complex than a few floating platforms or an enemy crowbeast of any size or variety are no match for the well-meaning kid. Thankfully, his magic rooster suit allows him to push and move giant eggs he would be unable to manipulate otherwise.

Huge eggs of a multitude of sizes and colors litter the environment. By simply walking up to one and pushing, Billy can roll the eggs around the landscape, smashing through enemies and barriers with equal ease. Defeating the monsters of Morning Land – that resemble giant lizards and purple gorillas more than “evil crows” – yields fruit, obviously. By rolling up this fruit into your (completely non-Katamari-like) eggs, they’ll grow in size, eventually becoming large enough to hatch, providing Billy with consumable items, powerups, or Pokemon-inspired sidekicks. With over 50 eggs to roll and hatch, Billy has a genuine plethora of powerups at his disposal, but only a handful are ever actually required to overcome an obstacle. In fact, most of the available hatchlings are borderline useless, and with many of the eggs sharing similar colors or patterns, it’s often difficult to discern the useful eggs from the rotten ones.

Besides smashing and hatching, these giant eggs also provide Billy with additional platforming powers. Sharing common heritage with Sonic the Hedgehog, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg also shares the same sort of breakneck speed. Billy rolls eggs around the world with unmatched quickness and spends a great deal of time blasting through freefloating, giant-egg-sized rings. This is fun. However, it quickly shifts from fun to frustrating once instant death pits enter the mix, which is often. As you might expect, performing precision platforming with a giant egg in tow is clunky and inexact. It’s often difficult to gauge where Billy ends and the egg begins, leading to many missed jumps. Additionally, because the eggs have their own weight and momentum, it’s not uncommon to land a jump onto a tiny midair platform only to have the still-rolling egg drag Billy off the edge with it. Rolling around and hanging on to eggs for dear life as you rocket yourself across the landscape is entertaining enough, but it’s not a mechanic suited to high flying live-or-die antics, as the sort of precision needed for a 3D platformer is sorely missing.

All flaws aside, tooling around behind a humungous egg is fresh and original, but the rest of the game just doesn’t complement this new concept. Billy and his giant eggs seem to have found themselves in a generically standard platforming game; it’s hard to believe Sonic Team built this unoriginal gameworld from scratch to host monstrous rolling eggs. Structurally, the game is identical to Super Mario 64, with Billy collecting Courage Emblems in place of stars as rewards for accomplishing various missions. Billy visits a snow level, some sand-soaked ruins, and a fiery volcano – all locals we’ve seen countless times before in this sort of game. Unfortunately, the simple truth here is once you’ve haphazardly rolled a giant egg through a chicken village in the first level of the game, you’ve already seen the most interesting the game ever gets.

At least the game looks and sounds great. The graphics are bright and colorful with a pervasive cuteness. It might not be the most technically impressive title in the GameCube’s library, but the texture work is clean and the art style is consistent. The soundtrack matches the sunny disposition of the visuals, with catchy, upbeat songs accompanying every moment of the game. Stop rolling eggs for a few moments and Billy will start singing along. Heck, do anything at all – jump, collect an item, run into an enemy’s behind – and Billy has something to say about it and, surprisingly enough, Billy’s constant commentary never grows old, remaining charmingly cute until the end.

Billy Hatcher and the Giant egg has seven worlds in total, a throwaway multiplayer component, and the same GBA-downloadable minigames as Phantasy Star Online. All told, you’re looking at about five hours to beat the game and double that to exhaust the content on the disc completely. There’s little incentive to play beyond the ending cinematic, however, as the game is just too frustrating and unoriginal to bother with for long. Still, there are a few terrific boss battles, some memorable music, and a delightful hero that deserves better than this, but then again, the same can be said of Sonic these days. Do yourself a favor, skip the game and just buy the soundtrack – it’s the same experience without the clunky platforming.

Ever since WOPR asked Matthew Broderick “shall we play a game?” in 1983’s Wargames, an entire video gaming generation has wanted to respond with a resounding “yes!” With DEFCON, the third game from independent British developer Introversion Software, we finally get that chance. The game allows you to play against up to five other opponents in a game of global thermonuclear war, a sick, perverted fantasy to be certain. Played out on a white-on-black version of Dr. Strangelove’s Big Board, DEFCON is a simple but moody real-time strategy game that proves a big budget isn’t a prerequisite for big accomplishment.

Like the 1980s computer interfaces that inspired it, DEFCON is a game defined by its minimalism. Clean vector graphics represent units and structures with stylized flair – dotted vector exhaust trails stream behind fighter jets, fleets of neon-outlined ships do battle on darkly juxtaposing high seas. The soundtrack is made up of distant industrial rumbling and the beeping of unseen machinery; the sound builds and resonates to form a brooding, ominous tension. Just when you you’ve chewed your last fingernail to the stump from anxiety, relief comes from the punctuating blast of a nuclear detonation and the subsequent screams of the dying. Never has so much atmosphere been created with so little.

This same overall minimalism translates to the gameplay as well, creating a very approachable real-time strategy experience. Finding human opponents is as simple as clicking a single button, and when the game begins, all players start with exactly the same number of units and structures. Because there’s no resource gathering or unit building – you start the game with all your weapons ready for war – the game rewards thoughtful use of available tools over speedy reaction times or uber micromanagement. All players are locked to the same timetable, as the titular DEFCON level drops over time, from 5 to 1, with tension and hostility rising as the number lowers. At DEFCON 5, players place their structures and units – radars, missile silos, air bases, and fleets made of up various ship types. As time passes and the game reaches DEFCON 3, air and naval combat is allowed. By the time you reach DEFCON 1, the nukes are in the air.

While this simplicity makes for an engaging first experience, unfortunately the same minimalist approach that aids the overall presentation does little to mask the shallow gameplay. Once you’ve mastered sending your warheads in waves to overwhelm enemy defenses – a technique that should require no more than a game or two to perfect – you’ve already seen the most complex the game ever becomes. With our planet as the game’s only map, and six continents acting as the only playable positions, the only real strategic considerations required from game to game comes from deciding when to transform your stationary anti-air defenses into death-spewing missile silos. Honestly, there just isn’t much here, but then again actual nuclear warfare doesn’t require much thought either.

Pressing the big red button and watching the deathtoll rise, hoping to take as many lives as you can before your own population is decimated by nuclear holocaust, is a sickly engaging activity, but it quickly wears thin. DEFCON is essentially multiplayer only; the only offline option pits you against computer-controlled players with no scalable difficulty settings. Even the added paranoia stemming from lose online alliances isn’t enough to give this game the depth or longevity of any other strategy title on the market. Thankfully, DEFCON is cheap at just $15 through Steam, but even at the low price there’s barely enough meat on these bones to justify a purchase.

With a demo that virtually includes the full experience, it’s hard to recommend a game with so little to offer, especially in a genre renowned for its depth and replayability. Easily activated mods offer new visual themes and maps, but still aren’t enough to classify DEFCON as a successful game. Still, for those first couple of matches, DEFCON instills the sort of tense fear even the best in the survival horror genre can barely imitate. While DEFCON may fail as a game, it succeeds as an artistic achievement and as a social statement. As a game where there are no winners, only degrees of losers, it manages to convey a clear message entirely through gameplay, never resorting to preachy, 30-minute cinematics. From a presentation standpoint, other developers could learn a great deal from DEFCON, but for a rewarding strategy experience, you’re better off randomly selecting a game from the local bargain bin.

Like many, I was quick to write off Final Fantasy X-2 as a gimmick-laden exercise in overblown fanservice. Though positive impressions from trusted sources ultimately swayed me into buying the game, the overwhelmingly negative Internet reaction to seeing Yuna trade in her summoner’s staff for a pistol and a pair of hot pants had already tainted my perceptions. I quickly abandoned the game only a few hours into it. X-2 was too different from its predecessor, too different from the rest of the series. Too much had changed between X’s bittersweet finale and X-2’s bubbly opening, and I was unable to change my expectations accordingly.

When Final Fantasy X-2 was first released in 2003, two years had passed since Yuna, Tidus, and company had saved the world of Spira from Sin. Squaresoft had merged with Enix and Final Fantasy X-2 would be both the last Final Fantasy title released under the Square banner in Japan and the first game in the series published by Square Enix in the United States. Though Square had lost its independence, the people of Spira had gained theirs, free from the threat of Sin and the overbearing religion of Yevon. Spira didn’t lay dormant for those two years; it changed along with our own world. X-2 was born of this change, a game “about the ‘changes’ that [occur] from the chaos after gaining … independence.”

The first direct sequel in series history, X-2 is unlike any Final Fantasy game before it. Though it’s firmly rooted in series heritage, it diverges wildly from the epic cadence and measured linearity of past Final Fantasy games. Like Final Fantasy VI’s World of Ruin built up and stretched out to form a standalone game, Final Fantasy X-2 is an open-ended, freeform affair that resembles a Bioware, Bethesda, or Black Isle title in pacing and structure more than a traditional Japanese console RPG.

Freedom comes with Independence, so it’s no surprise that from the onset all of Spira is open for exploration. You begin with an airship and a world map, able to hop quickly to any point of interest. You’ll visit the same locations that defined Yuna’s pilgrimage in Final Fantasy X, all of which have changed in some way in the preceding two years. Exploration yields tremendous rewards as every town, temple, or travel agency plays host to old friends and new allies, all coping with a changing Spira. Randomly choosing any point on the map leads to some activity worth pursuing – a subquest, a minigame, a cinematic – and just when you think you’ve exhausted this wealth of available content, venturing to clearly labeled “hotspots” moves the main storyline forward, opening up new, world-changing chapters.

The various sidequests build in tandem with the main plot down through these chapters. Each subsequent chapter advances not one plot, but dozens, effectively shifting all of Spira forward and ultimately building towards satisfying conclusions for all the various plot threads at game’s end. And best of all, it’s all optional. Help deter escalading violence between the Guado and the Ronso, prevent the ruins of Zanarkand from becoming a gaudy tourist attraction, assist the Al Bhed in their quest to improve Spira with machina, or not. Final Fantasy X-2 instills the series with an unprecedented amount of choice. There are no moral choices here, however; there is a correct solution to every situation and choice merely comes down to whether or not you pursue an activity, not how you pursue it. The entire experience plays like a meeting of Eastern and Western RPG philosophies, incorporating the best values of each. You get the open-ended, exploration-heavy gameplay of a Western title and the rich, predetermined linear story of an Eastern RPG, ultimately carefully balancing overwhelming freedom with strict linearity just right.

In fact, this ability to balance two competing extremes is Final Fantasy X-2’s greatest strength. The game is initially very silly. Yuna and Rikku have joined up with newcomer Paine to form the Gullwings, a trio of fun loving sphere hunters with girl power to spare. The game opens with Yuna performing a J-pop concert in a packed stadium, a trio of bumbling villains, and a loud, cheerful joy, and it ends in somber reflection and the possibility of hope. It strikes a delicate balance between elaborate Scooby Doo jokes and moments of quiet longing. The music signals tonal shifts and ensures we laugh when we’re supposed to and not when we’re not. The most bombastic brass band ever recorded blasts cheerful theme music and easily shifts to quieter, moodier pieces. Additionally, voice acting that’s much improved over Final Fantasy X’s stilted performances brings dialogue to life, lending X-2 a heightened air of credibility. Final Fantasy X-2 wants us to feel the sheer joy of Spira in the Calm – a Spira safe from all danger – but builds a narrative that does not discredit or undermine the poignancy of Final Fantasy X’s conclusion.

When the Gullwings discover the recording of a man who appears shockingly similar to Tidus, they get caught up in the escalading tensions between The Youth League and New Yevon – two groups wresting for control of Spira’s destiny – and set off a series of events relating back to the Machina War a thousand years ago. Before too long, ancient weapons of ultimate evil arrive on the scene, coming as no surprise to anyone who’s ever played a Final Fantasy game before. With Spira rapidly changing, the characters must decide if they will change with it, and look to the past for answers while avoiding its seductive nostalgia. In this way, Final Fantasy X-2 openly tells us how to best approach and understand it. It’s a Final Fantasy game in mythology and systems, but something wholly different in tone and structure. In order to enjoy it we must change any preconceived expectations we have for a Final Fantasy title and appreciate what X-2 does well – incorporating new mechanics with series mainstays.

While the overall structure of the game varies heavily from past entries in the Final Fantasy series, much of the core gameplay remains largely unchanged. Combat plays as it always has; triggering random battles leads to turn-based combat. However, in X-2 combat comes at breakneck speed. At the default settings, ATB bars refill nearly instantly and enemies continue to act as you cycle through menus to select available options, providing you with barely enough time to act, let alone think. Unless you’re a certified genius with the thumb speed to match, dialing down the overall combat speed is highly recommended. Still, even at its slowest settings, combat in X-2 plays faster than in any previous Final Fantasy title, and it’s a good thing too, as battles come often.

The game also incorporates a version of the fan favorite job system. Tried and true job classes like black mages and thieves return alongside new offerings such as the gunner and lady luck. Each job is highly specialized, focused on doing a single thing and doing it well. Black and white mages, for example, lack any sort of basic attack and the songstress is unable to do anything but sing. As such, you’ll be changing jobs often to fulfill the shifting needs of battle. Rather than equip a character with a single job, you instead equip a garment grid which, besides granting some sort of passive bonus, contains a predetermined number of empty job slots. As long has a job is assigned to an equipped garment grid, the character can switch between jobs at any time. Combat, overall, is very easy, but customizing Yuna, Rikku, and Paine with the various jobs is a great deal of fun, just the same.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the enemies and bosses are reused from Final Fantasy X. Though some of these enemies, and especially some of the bosses, have changed in interesting ways since the last time we saw them, spending another 40 hours rebattling the same monsters is redundant and disappointing. In fact, the entire game looks little different from Final Fantasy X, despite the dramatic changes the world has undergone. Tetsuya Nomura returns as character designer, and once again, his designs are hit or miss. Many of the job designs merge the unique style of the character wearing them with the iconic imagery associated with the base job class in clever ways, but nearly all of the supporting cast is flamboyantly overdesigned. Visually, X-2 feels more like an elaborate mod or expansion rather than a full-fledged sequel, and the frequent, if unobtrusive, framerate hitches don’t do it any favors. While the reused graphic assets allows the developers to better draw attention to the areas where Spira has grown or changed, they make the game feel cheaper than it should.

Despite all the controversy surrounding the game and its broad changes to the Final Fantasy formula, at its heart Final Fantasy X-2 is a love letter to fans of the series. The positive fan reaction to Eternal Calm, a short movie included with Final Fantasy X International detailing the fate of Spira after the events of the game, served as the kernel of inspiration for this sequel. As such, X-2 tugs at the heartstrings of longtime fans at every opportunity. Characters named Shinra, Biggs, and Wedge show up over the course of the narrative and in X-2 we learn more about Cactuar ecology and society than we ever thought we needed to know. For the first time ever, you can replay the game with all of your items and skills using a new game plus feature, and with five different endings, there’s plenty of incentive to do so.

As the world’s premiere RPG franchise, a Final Fantasy title comes with 20 years of history. Because the series is renowned for reinventing itself, players expect a certain level of innovation with each new entry, but condemn a Final Fantasy game that strays too far from the established path. For many, Final Fantasy X-2 seems to wander too far from time-honored series conventions, earning itself mostly negative fan reactions and just over half the worldwide sales of Final Fantasy X. A closer inspection, however, reveals that X-2 manages to balance the narrow tightrope between fanservice and complete reinvention, melding the brand new with more traditional fare. Like the Gullwings themselves, players must free themselves from their memories and accept the change X-2 brings with it. The game categorically succeeds, and if you’re willing to toss expectations aside and take a chance on X-2, you’ll find that it’s a change for the better.

A funny thing happened the other day. I started playing Final Fantasy X-2 again.

Like so much of my PS2 collection, X-2 showed up on my doorstep several days after a late night spending spree aided by Toys R’ Us’ annual buy-two-get-one-free sale. I only spent a few hours with the game before losing interest, but being poor and unemployed leaves me with a great deal of free time to fill with the games I previously shunned.

Before I used NeoGAF to make all my game purchasing decisions for me, I’d generally rely on various blogs for information regarding games I was on the fence about buying. So, when someone called X-2 “the Japanese equivalent of Planescape: Torment,” and someone else referred to it as “a Final Fantasy game for people that hate Final Fantasy” (and in true Internet fashion I am now, four years later, unable to find either quote; they’re certainly not present on the sites I had attributed them to), my interest was piqued. Planescape: Torment is one of the finest games ever made – a statement of fact, not opinion – and though I found Final Fantasy X quite good, stilted, off-key voice acting aside, I certainly felt the series could use some shaking up. So, against my better judgment and the prospect of 40 hours spent with bubbly superheroines dressed in full fanservice attire, I bit the bullet and bought X-2. At the very least, it would serve as a noteworthy addition to The Collection, what with its historical significance and all.

About ten hours into the game, however, I discovered I had been going about the experience all wrong. Understandably, I’d been playing Final Fantasy X-2 like a Final Fantasy game – connecting the dots in the Big, Epic Story – when the game was a very different beast. Discouraged, I abandoned it altogether.

This time, though, I’m doing things right. You see, Final Fantasy X-2 isn’t meant to be played like a traditional Japanese RPG. Heavily influenced by western design philosophies, the main narrative takes a backseat to exploration and character customization. While it’s still very much a Final Fantasy title in aesthetic and mythology, and bears almost no resemblance to Planescape: Torment, X-2 is very much a Final Fantasy game unlike any other Final Fantasy game.

You start with all of Spira, Final Fantasy X’s gameworld, laid out for you; from the onset, you have an airship and access to every area in the game. The means by which you progress through the main storyline are clearly labeled, but exploring the rest of the world reveals the real meat of the experience. Sidequests, minigames, and things to do litter the landscape to such an extent that it becomes impossible to wonder too far without running into something interesting. There is a wealth of content to complete at your own pace – it’s not entirely non-linear, as much of this side content is dependent on your place in the overall storyline – and in this regard X-2 shares some similarities with the Planescape: Torments and Elder Scrolls of the world. However, though you can choose what to do, you can’t choose how you do it. There is a right way to overcome every obstacle. Still, it makes for a nice departure from traditional Final Fantasy fare, all the same.

For the time being, at least, I am really enjoying the game. The counter on my save file tells me I’m 34% through the game, and though I’m a single step away from entering the next chapter in the main questline, I’m too busy digging for treasure in the desert, promoting Open Air Inc., and trying to beat a pair of kids at Sphere Break to care.

Konami has gone to great lengths to protect the integrity of its franchises in recent years. Sure, they’ve completely mishandled the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series (Ganbare Goemon, if you’re a “core” gamer) and there’s that large, brown smudge on their otherwise fine smelling track record called Every Nintendo 64 Game The Company Released, but Konami learns from its mistakes. After disasters like Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure, Konami used the Playstation 2 as the staging ground for a Contra comeback with Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra. The former is a Treasure-developed boss fight hell; the latter is a wacky Smash TV clone with poor controls. Though the upcoming Contra 4 looks to be all flavors of awesome with a side of “it’s about damn time,” the PS2 games, for all their faults, should not be so quickly forgotten. Today, let’s not forget Neo Contra.

Upon first starting the game, players are immediately deafened by the sort of blaring, electronic video game rock that hasn’t been in vogue since the days of the Ocean action platformer. In fact, in a lot of ways, Neo Contra harkens back to a simpler time when video game heroes were muscle-bound meatheads with full heads of hair and a game’s story was written entirely by a Japanese level designer and localized by a PR flunky. Bill Rizer, star of the original Contra, is awoken from cryogenic sleep and teamed with a gun-totting samurai named Jaguar. Together, they must kill the four members of Neo Contra, an elite force that includes the likes of Animal Contra, a pit bull in WWI-style military uniform complete with a Pickelhaube, and the beautiful but deadly Pheromone Contra.

Cutscenes bridge levels, highlight boss fights, and feature an over-the-top absurdity reminiscent of Karamri Damacy. Bill and Jaguar exchange deathly serious dialogue with hilariously named characters such as Mystery G. Our heroes travel between levels by blasting themselves out of volcanoes, riding in the warheads of space missiles, or saddling up on armored dinosaurs. One of the levels even has the characters running along helicopter blades, tiptoeing with alarming speed in order to keep up with their rotating perch. Neo Contra takes the sillier elements that have always been present in the Contra series and ratchets them up to the extreme. Players battle four-legged tongues, surf on torpedoes, and blast boulder-riding robots with arching beams of electricity. This overwhelming, seemingly random wackiness permeates the entire experience, keeping players grinning at both its sheer stupidity and inspired brilliance.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play as well as it looks. Neo Contra is not a side-scrolling shooter like most entries in the Contra series, its PS2 brother in arms Shattered Soldier included. Instead, Neo Contra is a top-down shooter in the same vein as Robotron 2084 or Smash TV (or, more accurately, the top-down levels in Contra 3). That’s all well and good; I love a top-down shooter as much as the next guy. Hell, I even played through Robotron 64. But rather than feature directional firing and aiming via use of the second analog stick or face buttons themselves, players are given only a single fire button that shoots in the same direction they are facing. This is bad. To make up for this, Konami instead allows players to use the L2 button to lock the direction they’re facing – allowing the D-pad or analog stick to be used for strafing – or to use R2 to lock their character in place, thereby allowing for 360 degree aiming. Neither system works particularly well, and players will find most of their deaths coming from enemies standing directly next to them as they are left with no sufficiently quick method to eliminate these threats. Such a glaring control oversight is particularly damning given that Konami’s own Contra 3, released 12 years earlier, at least lets players use the shoulder buttons to rotate their characters, allowing for greatly simplified aiming. And only two of Contra 3’s six levels were top-down.

Thankfully, Neo Contra is a very easy game. Too easy, in fact. Actually, were it not for the lackluster controls, dying in Neo Contra would be a near impossibility. Still, the game is playable, even if its control options prevent it from stranding on equal footing with other games in its genre. There’s a lot to unlock – weapons, playable characters, new levels – but unless you’re completely won over by the game’s presentation, or at least enough to stomach the poor controls, there’s very little incentive to do so.

Everybody knows two things about SimTower: (1) that it exists and (2) that it is impossible to lose. Nobody knows much of anything about Yoot Tower, its sequel. Developed four years after the original, and once again designed by Yoot Saito, best known for wacky and innovative titles Seaman and Odama, Yoot Tower was published by Sega in the United States with little fanfare. Chances are you’ve probably never played it, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing so. Like, now.

On its surface, Yoot Tower doesn’t seem to differ much from its predecessor. Little pixilated sprite people still line up for elevators, turning progressively deeper shades of red the longer they are forced to wait. You still build offices, hotels, condominiums, restaurants, and shops to keep your tower growing and your star rating increasing. For a game a full hardware generation older, its graphical differences are best described as “subtle.” To the untrained eye, Yoot Tower looks like little more than a SimTower expansion.

However, there’s a lot of depth lurking under the surface here. Unlike SimTower, Yoot Tower is a challenging game. It’s brutally hard. Your tower’s virtual residents are demanding. They need restrooms, security, and quick access to other areas in the building. Stars are much more difficult to earn, requiring you to wine, dine, and impress VIPs, and though each star gives access to more structures and tower elements, your residents will be quick to point out that these are simply structures they now need, the sooner the better.

When starting a new tower, you can choose to do so in Honolulu, Tokyo, or Kegon Falls. Each offers unique gameplay with different options and objectives. In Honolulu, you build a bustling beach resort while you erect a massive, office-filled skyscraper in Tokyo. In Kegon Falls, you’re charged with carving a quaint hotel directly into the face of a mountain. Each setting makes for its own unique challenge, with people’s wants and attitudes, the cost of individual structures, and even the season’s effect on gameplay varying by location.

Yoot Tower isn’t the same sort of easy, set your brain to the off position, sort of fun as SimTower. A far more challenging – and therefore rewarding – experience, Yoot Tower is the superior game. Figuring out the intricate workings and relationships of the various available structures is fun, even when you’re $3.5 million in dept. With a host of new, if initially invisible, features over its predecessor, Yoot Tower is the type of deep, difficult game you’d expect from a simulation, even one without “sim” in the title.

Alternate headline: Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel delicious, grunts terrifying

Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa® comes with the promise of change. Surely any MMO with the gumption to consider itself a clean slate for the genre would strive to live up to its name, and for the first thirty minutes Tabula Rasa does. After a short tutorial, players are dropped into the heat of battle, fighting alongside squads of friendly NPCs to retake an alien stronghold: engaging hordes of enemy troops leaping from dropships, planting explosives to detonate enemy turrets, and finally wrestling the heart of the stronghold itself from an alien commander. The action is fast, frantic, and fun. The game plays like a legitimate third-person shooter – exciting and engaging – and combat bears little resemblance to the “math fights” common to MMORPGs. Following a brief pause after retaking the stronghold, and with the force fields defending it now operating fully, players journey into a nearby cave and uncover an alien artifact that unlocks the first hint of their potentially awesome power. With an epic journey ahead of them, players step foot into a wormhole-fueled teleporter, beaming to a nearby planet to begin the game proper.

Here players find themselves thrust into one of several pseudo-instanced continents. Each landmass is identical and holds a considerably large population, but should players find themselves overcrowded, they can instantly hop in a teleporter and travel to a less populated version of the same area. Regardless of which version of the world they choose to explore, players quickly find numerous NPCs with missions they’re too busy to undertake themselves. A human medic needs eight hides from the local wildlife and a lanky alien mystic needs a nearby rune activated in order to drive off a force of hostile creatures. Helpful pointers on the minimap and an active quest tracker help keep everything organized and easily accessible. Missions are fast, rewarding, and entertaining enough, but there’s a real sense that we’ve seen everything here before.

The class and skill systems are suitably interesting. Every player starts as a lowly recruit and by leveling gains access to a branching class changing system. Each level also grants skill points and attribute points, both of which are spent via streamlined, helpful menus. It’s fun, but it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. Richard Garriott is the brains behind Ultima Online, one of the first MMORPGs and still a very unique game today. Tabula Rasa, however, plays like just another Everquest clone. A very good Everquest clone, to be certain, but this is not the new beginning for the genre that its title implies.

Once beyond the introduction, combat becomes much slower and helpful NPCs all but disappear save for vendors and guards. The exciting, twitchy battles against hordes of physically imposing alien soldiers yield to one-on-one matchups against alien warthogs and floating octopi. The missions themselves are misplaced and mispaced, often sending players backtracking through empty areas just to speak with an NPC. It’s not uncommon to leave an area behind only to find a series of missions half a world away that demand returning to where players originated from. Leveling is rewarding, the graphics are great, but this is no different than any other MMO on the market.

One of the most initially interesting features of the game quickly becomes its most cumbersome. Players actually posses a titular tabula which - in what comes as a shock to no one – starts completely blank. By activating various runes, called logos, throughout the game world, players fill in corresponding cells on their grid-like blank slate. In order to use new abilities, players need to have activated the required logos. It’s easy to imagine the interesting possibilities of such a system, but players gain access to new skills long before they find the corresponding logos. Additionally, activating the logos themselves requires no real skill whatsoever. It’s simply a matter of finding the dormant artifacts in the world and pressing the use key. The extraneous system is little more than another grind superimposed on top of a game that already does nothing to distinguish itself from the rest of its grind-heavy genre.

Like Hellgate: London, I had huge – some would say impossibly so – expectations for this game. However, just like Flagship’s freshman effort, Tabula Rasa is a game that flies in the face of its own expectations and legacy. This is not Ultima Online 2, and it certainly isn’t the shining new dawn of the MMORPG. It’s simply another well made post-WoW MMO that will find its market and quietly turn its profit between Blizzard press releases.

I’ve had Killer7 stuck in my head the last couple of days. I wonder why there aren’t more games like it, why the list of “art house video games” is so short. Why do so few developers take the really big risks? The answer, obviously, is that there simply aren’t enough consumers out there to justify such risks, especially early in a console cycle. The video game industry is unique in that every four to five years the entire thing resets. Console userbases shrink to zero. Hardware manufacturers’ potential – and to some extend their relationship with publishers – reboots. Just look at the GameCube’s initial burst of 3rd party support. Last generation’s loser is not necessarily this generation’s failure.

When this reset occurs, the sort of games that sell shift with it. An influx of new technology and a rush to meet launch dates hinders development while an insignificant install base cripples potential sales. Smaller niche titles don’t stand a chance simply because the numbers aren’t there to support them. They aren’t made at this point. Instead, games at the beginning of a hardware cycle tend to be licensed, part of an established franchise, or feature extremely broad appeal, often hinging their success on the desirability of next generation graphical improvements. With so few consoles in existence at this point in the game, publishers need to sell to every console owner they can.

Later in the cycle, we begin to see more original games, with a peak in quality usually hitting just before a console’s violent death at the hands of its offspring. History is filled with fantastic game lineups at the end of a console’s life. As developers master the intricacies of the hardware and the number of consoles in homes hits critical mass, publishers can begin to take larger risks and produce more interesting games. In fact, many of the games considered to be the “best” in a platform’s library are released at the end of the console’s life.

Unfortunately, this continual need to restart console cycles down through the generations is a necessity fueled by technology. The technology used to create video games simply increases too quickly not to try to keep up. If one hardware developer doesn’t, another will. Though Nintendo has certainly made its point with the Wii and DS, the need to buy a new console every four to five years keeps the market from expanding just as much as the fact that Halo is a really, really complicated game. Add exclusivity on top of that – the fact that certain games are only released for certain consoles – and it leaves many non-gamers wondering why they should even take the plunge in the first place. After all, their new piece of hardware is going to need replacing in the time it takes to get a high school diploma, and they won’t be able to play all the games that interest them on only a single console. You don’t need to buy a new TV or CD player every four years. And you don’t need a Sony TV to watch NBC, a Magnavox to watch ABC, or a Zenith to watch CBS.

The “one console future” became a gaming community in-joke prior to this generation, thanks largely to Denis Dyack. Such an idea, however, is also a publisher, developer, and consumer’s dream. Developers and publishers would no longer need to create multiple versions of the same game or worry about multiple consoles cannibalizing their software sales. Consumers wouldn’t need to buy multiple consoles or deal with determining the superior version of a multiplatform title. Of course, a one console future, even if multiple hardware manufacturers produce different versions of the same console, doesn’t benefit the hardware makers at all. Obviously, Dyack’s ideal gaming future, like so many of his half-cocked statements, lacks any sort of real world plausibility.

One thing’s for certain though: truly unique niche/art house/whatever video games cannot exist without an installbase to support them. Under the current model, such games can only exist once a platform has successfully established itself. Then the next generation begins and all the backwards compatibility in the world isn’t going to see games developed for a console sitting in 20 million closets.

Realistically, an art house video game isn’t going to make anybody wealthy even with a technologically stalled, single console market. The very nature of the beast keeps such games from becoming anything more than niche titles. It’d just be nice to see more made, is all. Gaming has so many talented development teams and so few auteurs.