Mass Effect 3 is stellar

I've had my head in the stars all week playing Mass Effect 3, and now my review is posted on al.com! Let me know what you think.

Skyrim review

Everybody please jump over to Techcetera and take a look at my review of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim! It's quite likely to be my game of the year, because I can't quit playing it. Right now, all I want to do is go home and play it some more.

I had an ancient Nord helmet that I found at a tomb, and then I got bogged down with too much gear and sold it, and now I want it back and can't find it! Any ideas? I can't remember which merchant I sold it to, but their stock changes a lot anyway.

I know a lot of you will be getting Skyrim, too. What do you think of it?

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine review

Finally, the long wait is over! Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is finally here, and I LOVE IT. It's what a great game should be. Please take a look at my review, and your comments are welcome!

Here's my review of Space Marine on Techcetera. Please give it a look!

Ready to Enlist in the Space Marines

Pushing forward to our next objective, the next thing on our gaming map is THQ's Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. The free demo came out this week on Xbox Live and PSN, and it is a blast! The multiplayer promises to have incredibly deep customization options, which thrills me, so I hope many of my online friends will join the Emperor's cause.

THQ released an appetizer on Xbox Live Arcade called Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team, which is a top-down shooter. Check out my review of it on Techcetera. It's a lot of fun!

The full game will be released Sept. 6.

Conan the Barbarian Movie Impressions

Conan’s bloody rebirth on the movie screen is a fitting time to renew my Sythbane Squadron blog. I had been looking forward to the new Conan the Barbarian. I enjoyed it greatly on opening weekend, and it vexed me to see snarky reviews by people who have contempt for the genre steer too many people away from the theater. What follows are some of my impressions of the movie. I tried to reveal no spoilers, other than what you might glean from the trailers:

• The new movie reads like one of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. They are fast-paced tales, laced with lurid action, without much emotional depth. They are adventure stories. In this vein, the movie emulates its source material very well.

• Jason Momoa plays Conan with terrific ferocity. In one scene, Conan swipes his palm up the flat of his sword with a bloodthirsty, snarling laugh that I think Howard himself would have cheered! I can think of no one else who looks so much like the great barbarian. Frank Frazetta, my favorite artist, painted the quintessential images of Conan. Momoa doesn’t look quite as gaunt and grizzled as Frazetta’s Conan, but he sure captures his savage spirit. I wish Frazetta had gotten a chance to paint Momoa as Conan!

• Momoa’s Conan is more true to Howard’s original hero than Arnold Swarzeneggar’s, classic though the 1982 Conan the Barbarian is. Too many people think the 1982 movie is the “original,” when the original is pulp fiction written in the 1930s. Arnold’s movie has many virtues, but it is no sacred relic. I disliked how Arnold played Conan as slow-witted. Momoa’s Conan is smart and wily.

• Likewise, Momoa is physically a better Conan than Arnold. Howard often described Conan as having the supple grace and power of a big cat, like a panther. Arnold was awesomely powerful as Conan, but he lacked the barbarian’s fluid, cat-like movement. Momoa is like a deadly dancer with his sword, combining his imposing bulk with lithe lethality.

• The athletic young actor who plays Conan as a boy, Leo Howard, is great! He is expressive, conveying Conan’s intelligence and confidence, as well as his precocious physical prowess.

• Ron Perlman adds an essential Ron Perlman elixer to the movie. He is grand as Conan’s Cimmerian father and combat mentor, Corin. Scenes between the father and son are the most emotionally powerful in the whole movie.

• Some of the slave girls who Conan rescues in the movie are appropriately attired, in the manner of Conan stories. Which is to say, they are appropriately and pleasingly unattired. The actresses are officially credited as “Topless Wenches.” This I applaud. In fact, if the movie was really true to Howard's vision, the leading ladies would have dressed more like the women of Frank Frazetta’s paintings. A Frazetta woman typically looked like she was going to a Brazilian beach wearing a few bronze earrings for a bikini.

• One of the snarky reviews of the movie said it was like being hit on the head for two hours. By this the writer apparently means that Conan isn’t boring. The movie is unburdened by tiresome chick-flick parlor dialogue. Bloody, frenetic action sustains it.


A Few Disappointments

Conan the Barbarian is a satisfying action film, and a solid foundation to restart the Conan franchise, yet there is room for improvement:

• Momoa, while perfectly cast as Conan, rushes across some of his dialogue and is sometimes hard to understand. I would fault the director for failing to recognize this problem and have Momoa deliver Conan’s growls a bit more slowly and deliberately, with suitable barbaric enunciation.

• Rachel Nichols is a beautiful actress who is fiery and splendid as Scarlett in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, but she seems miscast as Tamara in Conan the Barbarian. She could have been made up as a wild, Celtic priestess, but as she was presented, she was too waspish. An actress with a more exotic, sultry look would have been more fitting. There seemed to be little chemistry between Momoa and Nichols, so their characters’ relationship fails to fuel much emotion in the latter part of the movie.

• The young actress who plays the youthful witch princess Marique, Ivana Staneva, was scarier than Rose McGowan. Now, I am a fan of Rose McGowan, but the character wasn’t allowed to be quite scary enough. She looked like a Trill from Star Trek, with her splotchy temples and forehead, which was almost comically distracting instead of scary. And furthermore, the witch princess’ armor is way too demure for a Conan villain. Rose should have worn a much more scanty, sexy witch princess outfit. Once again, I would call the director’s attention to Frazetta paintings and Heavy Metal magazine for inspiration. And to my great disappointment, Rose never once lets her armor down!

• The story needed more epic weight. The story needed to be bigger and grander.

Overall, though, the disappointments are minor. Conan the Barbarian is a fun film. Jason Momoa is born to play Conan. He has the mighty thews. Live, love, go see Conan, and you will be content.

Medal of Honor Dusty G.I. Joe

Here's a G.I. Joe I outfitted recently as Tier 1 operator Dusty in Medal of Honor. Not all the details are exactly right yet. I plan to get some Oakley shades for him to more closely match the character, and his scarf is red instead of tan, but I think this is a good start on a custom video game character. You might recall my customized Ghost G.I. Joe from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in a previous post.

Here's my review of Medal of Honor on Techcetera.

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Here are two more takes of Dusty. I tried a low-saturation shot like the game box cover, as well as a some with and without the scarf. Which do you think looks best?

With scarf:

Low saturation:

Halo: Reach beta - Spartans on the ground!

The Halo: Reach multiplayer beta hit this week, and I've been playing it every night.

Click over to Techcetera and read about my first impressions of the beta. I've been playing several nights with my friends Still Suit and Buzsaw01. We're hoping that some of our Call of Duty friends will join in for a tour of duty in Reach -- hear that, TFH 5, Bama Breeze and Smokin' Buddy?

My clan tag in Halo: Reach is SBS1. My Sythbane Squadron friends are invited to join me!

Here is a slide show of screen shots of me, Still Suit and Buzsaw01 knocking some heads in the beta:

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 veteran



Before I started dropping hammers on people in the Halo: Reach beta, I've mostly been playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

I really like the multiplayer. I recently finished unlocking EVERY weapon in the game. Now I'm working on completing my set of pins and awards, and getting gold stars for proficiency in my favorite weapons.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I can't deny ...

With apologies to the '70s rockers whose hit song I hear in my head every single time I say the name of this game, I bring you my review of EA's Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on Techcetera.

BC2 is a really good shooter. I hope to see some of my Sythbane Squadron friends on the field. We can crew a tank together. It will rock.

Aliens vs. Predator hugs our faces

A couple of my Sythbane Squadron wingmen help with my official review of Aliens vs. Predator this week on Techcetera. Take a look!

Watch for more about AvP coming soon on Sythbane Squadron with impressions from our friend Wyt Tygr!

Reviews on BioShock 2, Dante's Inferno

My faithful apprentice Fortiscule has been busy writing reviews lately.

Click on over to Techcetera and check out his reviews on BioShock 2 and Dante's Inferno.

Last week, we visited a class at Mortimer Jordan High School to talk about how we review games, as a father-and-son reviewing team. Here's an account of our visit.

It was a great experience, and we enjoyed meeting people who share our interest in gaming!

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Coming soon ...

Many thanks to our new Sythbane Squadron contributor, Wyt Tygr, whose work will be appearing here very soon!

Mass Effect 2, Bayonetta reviews

A couple of new reviews are up on Techcetera!

Check out my review of Mass Effect 2. A solid week of gaming went into that one.


Also check out a review of Bayonetta by a first-time reviewer, Sythbane Squadron member "Da Chief."


Gaming season just got busy. This week, Dante's Inferno and BioShock 2 came out, and I just got my hands on Aliens vs Predator to review. This is shaping up to be a superb weekend: I sent Valentine roses to three lovely ladies today, I have plans to see The Wolfman with friends tomorrow, and we have three good games and a new episode of Spartacus to see. Life is good!

Mass Effect 2 Marathon Under Way

My assistant Fortiscule and I have been tag-teaming the Xbox 360 all week playing Mass Effect 2.

We're both hooked on it, and we're leap-frogging each other's progress as we take turns. It's one of the most absorbing games I've ever played!

The Saboteur takes it off

My review of EA's The Saboteur is up on Techcetera. Check it out and leave comments!

A notable feature of The Saboteur is that it offers to let you see topless dancers in a cabaret if you download the nude content with a special code.

Although it seems tiresome to me that they withhold such innocuous content from a Mature-rated game to begin with, it does present an innovative way to please people who might be offended, while also pleasing less-offendable gamers such as me.

My friend Tee Boan has advocated compromises such as this, to give parents and gamers more control, and I must say that it works well for The Saboteur.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand is brilliant blend of blood, biceps and breasts

Spartacus: Blood and Sand is great. I just watched the first episode of this new Starz series on Netflix via Xbox Live. It borrows shamelessly and brilliantly from some of my all-time favorites: Gladiator, 300 and the HBO series Rome.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand is extraordinarily violent, bloody, gritty, vulgar and foul-mouthed. There is unblushing nakedness wherever nudity serves the story, with no pretentious, coy reluctance or shyness. And there is a passionate love at the heart of the tale, driving the entire plot. The combination is shocking, beautiful and engaging.

Although it is visually stylized, often evoking the look of 300, all the elements the show combines help it approach reality more intensely than other films that hold back on any part of the recipe.

These elements are what I've been wanting to see in a video game, especially in a role-playing game. Game makers kowtow to the ESRB by sanitizing games that supposedly are made for an adult audience; no so-called "Mature" game has ever been so bold as to present a story as raw and realistic as Spartacus: Blood and Sand. As long as video game makers surrender to the nannies and sit at the kiddie table, they will never be seen as a mature entertainment medium like film. There is NOTHING in the video game world that compares to this series, no video game rating that really parallels an R rating for movies or a mature show on cable TV.

What a ludicrous, crazy-world joke it is that a game with the kind of content shown in Spartacus: Blood and Sand would never be allowed on the Xbox console. But wait! Hello! I WATCHED IT ON MY XBOX, ON NETFLIX! We can watch the movies on the console, but we can't play games that would appeal to the same audience. Why is that?

Consider these qualities and virtues in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and how they might be applied to a truly mature role-playing game:

Violence and blood. How can a story about Rome's horrific arenas be anything else? The reality had to be much more awful than anything we could possibly stomach, even in this show.

The exaggerated splashes of blood, reminiscent of anime and Hong Kong action flicks, remind us of how shocking it is. For a freeze-frame instant, a gouting splash of blood is shown when a weapon connects, with a greater volume of liquid than would actually be present. Indeed, in the next frame, not that much blood remains in the scene. The fleeting exaggeration is a visual exclamation point, highlighting the horror of the moment.

Vulgar and foul-mouthed. The dialogue is very much like that in HBO's Rome, which surmised that characters would accent their speech in much the same way their counterparts do in modern conversation. The show takes a guess at what such expressions might have been in those times, and translates them for us. I think it adds a layer of realism.

Nakedness. Look at statues and art from ancient Greece and Rome. Lots of nudity. The natural state of human bodies wasn't such a big deal to them. Our society's sensibilities about nudity have been distorted by centuries of mind-numbing Puritanism, and a show like this tosses off that dour, smothering blanket.

Specifically, in a story about life-and-death struggles in the arena, and your wife being kidnapped into slavery, wardrobe malfunctions had to be last on your list of concerns. There would be no coy clucking over nudity.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand doesn't bother with the absurdly contrived camera angles where wisps of cloth or hair always cover "the naughty bits." To my eye, such silly efforts to hide body parts tend to degrade the human body, perversely calling attention to body parts that are too "dirty" to be seen; the underlying presumption is that human bodies are naughty and evil, not beautiful in their natural state.

BioWare does this all the time, and the gamemakers end up looking like 12-year-olds. It's like they want to peek at the Playboy pictures, but they're too immature to openly admire a woman's body or really have a girlfriend. The result of such stunted sensibilities in video games includes stupid scenes like the gauzy love scene in Mass Effect, and the ridiculous bra-and-panties sex scenes in Dragon Age: Origins. Bethesda is guilty of the same sort of pious, immature nonsense in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Fable and Fable II at least included love scenes, but condescended to black them out in the Mature-rated games, to protect our eyes from the evil nudity.

Passion and love. In a teaser for Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a Roman asks Spartacus how many men he would kill men in the arena for the chance to hold his wife again. "I would kill them all," Spartacus replies.

Ah, there it is: The driving force of all drama. The fuel of life itself. Love. Passion. Sex. The engine that propels the story.

If you reduce our motivations to a very primal, basic level, most everything we do is geared toward finding and securing a suitable mate with whom we can procreate and send our DNA onward to the next generation. That is survival. That is how evolution has shaped us into who we are. It is our most fundamental biological imperative.

An integral part of that motivation is the sex part. What we perceive as beauty are signs of good health and suitability in a potential mate. Our sense of aesthetics is built on that reality. Furthermore, our intellect has enabled us to see physical beauty in a sublime light, as an expression of the Divine. Good deal. That explains why I want to see Lucy Lawless naked.


Sex is pleasurable, so we can't help but seek out that pleasure. This drive has served us well, as we stand at the threshold of exploring the stars, yet we spurn it, shun it and try to keep a lid on it. What hypocrites we are, biting the hand that feeds us! We continue to yield to the tyranny of misogynistic, Puritanical dogma and deny sex the respect it deserves.

We tend to show our respect, our reverence, for sex through our art. Go in any art museum and admire the nude statues and paintings. Glimpses of unclothed beauty in a story such as Spartacus: Blood and Sand are simply less formal expressions of that same aesthetic.


Motivation and Purpose

Video game developers don't seem to know what to do with passion, love, sex and nudity. The answer is obvious, and Spartacus said it plainly when he said he'd kill them all to hold his wife again. Sex is motivation. Sex is purpose.

The main character in Bethesda's Oblivion had no apparent personal motivation at all. Fable comes closer to getting the concept, yet falls short: Your character can get married, yet reaps no reward from it. Neither do you reap any reward for your efforts to win love in Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins. How blind can the game developers be? Spartacus told you! To reclaim his beautiful wife, he'd kill them all! Love wins the battles. Love builds the castles.

David Jaffe had the right idea in God of War's sex minigame. When you succeeded at getting Kratos together with some shapely ladies, you were rewarded with red health orbs. Yes, greater health would be a good reward for having sex in any RPG, but the reward should be even greater than that.

Winning the love of your mate should be the prime motivation in an RPG, because that is what life's about. The more immediate reward of love is sex. In a game, the player could be rewarded with a happy scene of naked beauty and conjugal bliss. The long-term rewards of love are endless, with greater health, and the joys of companionship and a family. RPGs should reflect all that as well.

I hope Spartacus: Blood and Sand will inspire video game makers. All the hero wants is love, which is at the root of our most primal drives and desires. Enemies stand between Spartacus and his wife, but to reach her, he will kill them all.

That motivation looks like it will drive a magnificent epic series on Starz. And, if any brilliant game designers are paying attention, it would make for an awesome video game!

Army of Sythbane

Fortiscule and I played Army of Two: The 40th Day all last weekend to complete the campaign and prepare our review.

Take a look on Techcetera!

Applause for Avatar

I just took my family to see James Cameron's Avatar, and it is magnificent beyond superlatives.


As I told a friend, Avatar is so good you won't believe it. You'll BELIEVE IT, which is why you won't believe it. It is so well-done, it kicks you beyond the "wow that's an amazing special effect stage" to being unaware that you're watching a movie and being absorbed in the story.

The story works at many different levels -- sci fi speculation, historical allegory, contemporary political tale, and individual psychological/spiritual metaphor.

Go see it.

Best video games of the year

Our annual video game gift guide, which is our list of the best games of the year, is up on Techcetera.

Big contributors this year are my reviewer apprentice Fortiscule and Mrs. ArcDream.

Fortiscule also handles the review this week on DJ Hero. Check it out!

You'll find a roundup of my reviews and recommendations (which include Fortiscule's reviews, of course) on my al.com profile page.

Are you playing any new games for the holidays? Let me know about it! Email me at Sythbane@gmail.com and let everyone know what you think of the game. We plan to see Avatar this weekend, and we'll be playing the game afterward.

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Old girlfriends in Mass Effect 2

A G4 blog post says that your old girlfriends from Mass Effect might show up in Mass Effect 2, which is interesting. Then the blogger goes on to say he doesn't even remember who his girlfriend was in Mass Effect, Liara the blue alien, or Ashley the regular human lady.

Oh, for crying out loud! How could you NOT remember who you hooked up with in Mass Effect?? A BLUE alien chick with TENTACLES on her head is memorable. Either you remember that you DID hook up with her, or you DIDN'T, which means it was the other girl (unless you ticked her off). How could something like that not leave an impression?

Oh, these jaded gamer youths, for whom romance with a beautiful blue alien is mundane and forgettable! If I meet a sexy blue alien woman, I'm going to write it down.

Dads talk about profanity in MW2

I've posted a column on Techcetera that's a series of letters between me and another father about parenting decisions and video games. He had inquired about the intensity of profanity in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, because he was considering whether to get it for his son for Christmas.

My son Fortiscule and I both love video gaming. We share a lot of fun gaming together, like some dads do with baseball, watching football or fishing. Many of my friends in the Xbox Live community are parents like me. I hope y'all will feel free to chime in with your thoughts as well.

The column is called Dads discuss profanity in Modern Warfare 2.

Spartans On The Ground

Here's the trailer for Halo Reach. This looks absolutely awesome and gives me chills.

Halo Reach first look gives chills

The new trailer for Halo Reach that was shown on Spike TV's VGAs gave me goosebumps.

I'll post it here as soon as it's available somewhere. In the meantime, here's the first trailer, which has a goosebumps moment in it, too.

Halo Reach - Halo Official Site