Wasting time in strange new worlds

I have been remiss in posting about gaming because I have been gaming. Seriously gaming. The kind of Serious Gaming where I keep staying up until 5 a.m., several nights in a row.

As I've been playing Mass Effect, I've been inhabiting new worlds, exploring them, meeting characters and getting to know them, seeing through the eyes of a character myself ...

And as I've played, it's struck me that it's like I'm reading a novel. When I read "The Lord of the Rings," I was doing the same things: Exploring a new world, meeting characters, and seeing through their eyes.

How many of us who enjoy video games have heard other people dismiss our hobby as a waste of time?

But how is engaging your mind with a game you enjoy different from spending the same amount of time passively watching a football game or baseball game? Is it wasted time? Is any time you spend doing something just because you enjoy it the same as wasting the time?

What about the time spent watching TV or movies? Why do so many people who think nothing of spending passive hours enjoying television dismiss video games? I enjoy TV, too, but TV is passive. I can't go to sleep playing a video game, because it wakes up my brain.

Mass Effect elevates the whole "wasted time" debate to a new level of challenge. Many of the people who sniff at video games would never dismiss reading a great book as a waste of time. What they fail to understand is that Mass Effect is like reading a good book.

What Mass Effect makes ever clearer is that video games are an emerging art form. Like movies, they are a multimedia form of storytelling. You aren't just witnessing the story. You are in the story. You live it. Instead of witnessing a character make choices and have experiences that teach him lessons and shape his life, you enact those experiences yourself. You live through those life-altering events, and maybe you learn something, if the game makers have spent much thought on the story.

Was "Beowulf," written sometime around the 900s, considered a waste of time by many during its day? Or was it considered a new art form? What about novels, as a dawning form of literature? What did people think about them? Movies made the transition from technological curiosity to art form in only a few decades in the early 20th century.

Rather than being a pinnacle in gamemaking, Mass Effect suggests the great promise of video games. It makes clear the potential of video games as a medium for storytelling. In future years, in literature classes, will there be a mention of Mass Effect in the evolution of video games as they ascended to respectability? When will the J.R.R. Tolkien of video games emerge with a masterpiece?

In the lifetime of my great grandparents, airplanes went from the Wright brother's dune-hopping powered kite to the technological marvels that fly at Mach 5, and to the rockets that carried men to the moon. Video games consisted of Pong when I was kid, and look at them now. And yet we're still in the barnstorming biplane days of video games.

I look forward to when video games transcend the stigma of "time-wasters" and children's toys and come to be regarded like movies. Sure, there are popcorn movies that just blow up good. Most video games do that, and that has its place. But there are also movies that compel you to think, that move you emotionally or that paint a picture of some truth in life. Games need to become respected as a place for grown-up storytelling. Like movies, games must have a venue for children's fare and a place for mature drama, with cursing and violence and nudity and love and sex and God and compassion and death all being parts of the story, because those are the things that life is about.

But right now, Mass Effect is like a sail on the horizon for what games will become.

Tonight, as I step again onto the Normandy's deck, I'm hoping to make the beautiful blue asari Liara fall in love with me. I had to make a choice between Ashley and Liara, and I chose Liara. I'm eager to find out if I made the right choice.

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My reviews of Ace Combat, COD4 and Conan

My official reviews of Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat and Conan are all posted on the Techcetera blog on al.com now. Take a look at the links and let me know what you think.

Duty calls, and we answer

The invasion of Call of Duty 4 has decimated my gaming time. All other games have fallen back before its unstoppable onslaught. I have lost sleep this week, staying up to ungodly hours trying to get a few more kills for weapon upgrades.

I've added the ACOG scope to my M16 and red dot sight to my M4, ranking up so far to gunnery sergeant in multiplayer. Fortiscule, as usual, is showing up his old man in kill streaks, but I'm the cunning one.

All of us who enjoy shooters will want this game. I've seen the crowd I played Rainbow Six with shift to Halo 3, and now the tide has shifted powerfully to COD4.

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It pleases Crom ...


I have traveled through time.

In the future, I fought as an armored Spartan, fighting alongside my new friend Batsak against Covenant monsters.

Then I traveled the distant past, the age of the sword. I rescued the maidens you see here from pain and death. I slew the giant squid and began the final assault on the dark tower.

Next I arrived in the present day.

I flew among the clouds at Mach 2, firing missiles to chase enemy fighters and raining death on tanks and howitzers.

Now I shoulder an M16 and fight for freedom.

Soon, I will leap forward into the future and face a threat such as the galaxy has never seen.

I am spastic in time, like the hero of "Slaughterhouse Five." Can you guess what the five are in this story?

... Conan, Halo 3, Ace Combat 6, Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect.

See you on the battlefield.

Cleared for takeoff

This is the reason video games were invented, as far as I'm concerned. Look at this picture from Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, due out Oct. 23. I would not have believed it possible for this to be gameplay had I not already played the demo.

I bought my first serious computer to play X-Wing and Falcon 3.0, which came out in 1991 (see image at right). Up to that point, all I had was a floppy-disc churning box that was good for nothing but word processing -- a glorified typewriter. X-Wing was fantastic fun, because it played better than the old booth-style arcade Star Wars game that let you fly a wire-frame X-Wing with a yoke control. But Falcon 3.0 had realistic flight characteristics, with freedom to look around the sky and "padlock" the view of your foe, so you could maneuver onto his "six," the 6 o'clock position on his tail.

As computers and flight sims got better, I advanced to Jane's U.S. Navy Fighters, Jane's WWII Fighters and others. But flight sims seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years. I got tired of the endless rat race of upgrading my PC to play games, and I got tired of sitting in front a PC to play when I'd already been sitting in front of a PC to work all day. I've migrated to consoles for play, but there haven't been any flight games for console that really pulled together the best traits of the genre, such as realistic flight controls, and lots of padlock and view options.

Ace Combat 6 for Xbox 360 might finally be the game I've been waiting for. Judging from the demo on Xbox Live, the flight characteristics are sufficiently realistic, it has good view options, and the graphics ... See the picture at the top. It's absolutely incredible. It just looks real.


I've been telling people, if only they'd come out with a flight controller for a good flight sim on the console. A real joystick, not just a gamepad thumbstick. And here it is, Ace Combat Six: Fires of Liberation with Flightstick Bundle.



We'll be able to dogfight over Xbox Live with this. I really, really hope this game lives up to my high hopes and expectations. I'd hate to have to eject.

Halo 3 highs and lows

I've hit Halo 3 hard lately, playing for an hour or two after work most nights this week. Then Saturday, I played most of the day. Late Saturday afternoon I got into a huge team battle with a bunch of my online friends. It was great fun. The big team battle slayers are super, but I discovered that I don't particular care for one game mode that many of the others seemed to enjoy, Infection. More power to you if you like it. It just seemed pointless to me, because eventually everyone gets infected. It's a depressing little demonstration of how a pandemic could wipe out civilization. Everybody loses.

In other game news, my padawan learner, Fortiscule, just beat a big boss battle in Stranglehold that brought a big triumphant whoop from the den and a earned him 25 gamer points. That game looks dizzying. Congratulations, Fortiscule!