Because these reviews appear on pages that could include a lot of information — a wiki entry, links to wiki entries relevant to that issue, other users’ reviews, etc. — I have kept them quick and engaging. I’ve also taken advantage of hypertext by providing links to any other books/characters I refer to in reviews, so everybody can understand comparisons.

Comic Vine uses a five-star rating system with half-star increments; half a star is the worst possible score, three stars is average, five is the best.

I’ve included a cross-section of reviews below, but the rest can be found here.

Incredible Hulk, vol. 2 #82 — Dear Patricia
2/5

As a down-tempo revenge story, Dear Patricia is a potentially interesting Hulk tale. Unfortunately, Peter David uses magic as a crutch to rush it into one issue.

From page one, magic accelerates the bond between Bruce and Patricia (a charming, beautiful British woman who introduces him to the complexities of left-sided traffic). Although she is witty, Bruce’s almost-instantaneous falling for her is a stretch. Until David explains that they lived together in a previous life or lives. It may fit with the fictional universe, but it’s a cheap escape from having to write a believable romance.

And that’s not the only way magic accelerates this issue. In the absence of an interesting detective plot, Hulk asks a series of suspects if they had Tricia killed, and she “reads their auras” to see if they’re lying. When Bruce, back in his human form, chances upon Tricia’s killer, she magically sees his guilt. This skips over a sensible detective plot — finding clues, putting them together, arriving at a conclusion — and renders meaningless the earlier sequence of interrogations. David doesn’t make clear if or why the person Hulk eventually punishes actually killed Tricia. This isn’t to add some uncertainty, or make a point about Hulk as a character — David just runs out of pages at this point.

Jae Lee’s art evokes a dull British day well, and (despite a few too many Britishisms) Peter David’s dialogue and narrative could probably do justice to this story if only he had one or two more issues to justify Bruce’s feelings for Tricia, and to lead the two on an interesting manhunt. Instead, the two are magicked in love, and practically use cheat codes to avenge an apparently motiveless murder.

Robin Year One #1
3.5/5

After Dick Grayson’s introduction to Batman in Dark Victory, Year One expands on the personal examination of the young Bat-family. No longer mourning his parents’ deaths, Dick settles into high school; Alfred, uncomfortable with the path Bruce has allowed Dick to set out on, helps the young teenager settle into his new life; and Bruce… Well, Bruce stays largely out of Dick’s way until the final pages.

While we don’t get much of a chance to examine Bruce’s viewpoint, this allows Robin to fight crime away from the Bat’s shadow, and spread his wings as Robin.

And he does so in a sharp-looking Gotham of bright, solid colors. It might not be the most obvious fit for Batman’s brooding, cheerless mood, but it fits Robin just fine and is fun to look at.

While I’m prepared to suspend my disbelief just far enough to believe bullets won’t hit him, Robin’s villain-propelling kicks are at odds with his character. He relies on the physical strength of Batman to fight and interrogate henchmen, when it’d be more interesting to see him use his own trapeze artist’s accuracy and flexibility to avoid competing on the brute strength he shouldn’t have at his age. In her Year One story, Batgirl struggled to settle in — at the same stage, Robin is almost ready to throw on Batman’s cowl.

It’s difficult to guess from part one whether the series will take a serious or goofy tone; Alfred’s narration is thoughtful, and the crime Robin investigates here is hardly light fare, but the Mad Hatter and Wacky Races-style Batmobile parked in the Batcave point to a lighter story ahead. Either way, I’m sure it’ll be entertaining.

The Flash, Volume 2 #182 — Absolute Zero
4.5/5

Captain Cold satisfies here in a way the noble Flash can’t. Part of a gang whose members themselves wear non-threatening, silly costumes, Cold works out his disdain for pun-slinging villains at this issue’s climax. Not being a fan of the camper side of comics, I found that vicariously gratifying. He also has the opportunity to avenge his younger sister — a dark daydream, that anyone with a younger sibling, child, or someone they’ve had to protect can empathise with.

The beaten-as-a-child origin isn’t a new or interesting one, but in Cold, it’s mixed with regret at having abandoned his sister in an abusive household. Original or not, he has a convincing motive. The origin of his freeze-blasting pistols is less convincing, though: he adapted some advanced technology he found, without any previous inventive skills.

James Sinclair’s clever use of cold colors — washed out, plenty of blue — is appropriate to a world seen through Cold’s goggles (the purpose of which Geoff Johns elucidates). It’s a visual metaphor that reminds me of Mirror’s Edge — both use colors to inform the characters’ distaste for the worlds they find themselves in.

As a self-contained, excellently presented issue, this is easy to recommend to anyone looking to pick up a few issues from the Flash’s extensive back-catalog.

Dog Wars is the game PETA had in mind when they condemned Mafia Wars’ inclusion of pit bulls. It’s the app Apple has in mind when it cherry-picks content allowed in the walled garden of the App Store.

It’s a dogfighting role-playing game full of unhelpful icons, ugly buttons, and broken minigames. I expect forcing my way through crashes and freezes is what will eventually toughen up my dog, so he doesn’t get his throat mauled by one of Dog Wars’ other players’ pit bulls. Developer Kage Games has recently edited the title’s Market description to suggest it is satirical. It might pull a Hit the Bitch and reveal its true nature after your first fight, but I doubt it. Until earlier today, its blurb advised “if you have a bug up your butt about the game concept, remember: It is just A VIDEO GAME” and made no mention of satire.

As you’d expect, the media and the public are calling for the removal of the app from the Android Market. As gatekeepers to the service, Google has the right and the power to remove apps, but it rarely exercises this prerogative in situations such as this. Dog Wars only comes close to violating the “Illegal Activities” sub-section of its policies. It’d be a stretch to say the developer has used the Market to promote illegal activities. It’s closer to a depiction of “gratuitous violence,” which is also disallowed, but that’s a subjective term that one could apply to violence across all entertainment.

The real reason Google would pull this application would be the same reason Apple pulled baby-shaking andgay-curing apps from its store after it had deemed them fit to enter the garden: popular outcry. Animal rights groups, dog owners, and reformed dog abuser Michael Vick are all rightly dismayed by the game’s content and are petitioning Google to pull it.

While it has failed to eloquently use the freedom of speech allowed on the Android Market, Kage Games has inadvertently succeeded in making an app that tests Google’s commitment to free speech. Of course, the First Amendment only applies to laws the U.S. government makes, not to powerful corporations like Apple and Google based in the U.S. Google has the right to remove Android apps, and the pressure is on to censor this one.

But as Kage Games says in Dog Wars’ blurb, Google is special because of its hesitation to decide what content users can consume. Not hiding your CEO’s political donations or fighting China’s authoritarian censorship are easy decisions to make; free information and criticism of massacre-happy regimes are popular in democratic societies. The real test of anybody’s commitment to free speech is whether or not they will protect speech they don’t like, and nobody likes Dog Wars.

Would you prefer Google clean up the Android Market, rather than taking a laissez-faire stance? Is it acceptable to disadvantage undesirable apps by removing them from the Market when it is often possible to install non-Market apps on Android devices? Does Dog Wars actually work on your phone? I’d love to hear your comments.

This article was originally posted here. It was edited by James DeRosa.

(Photo by Thomas Hawk, Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution — NonComercial 2.0 Generic license.)

It was sent to local authorities across Wales to persuade them of the need for smokefree playgrounds, show how they have worked elsewhere in the world, and answer important questions about the implementation of the policy.

(Translated into Welsh by Pennawd.)

Next, something unexpected happens — words come out of my mouth, sung in lead singer Karen O’s register, and the game tells me I’m “awesome!”

I know it’s exaggerating — I’m playing on a lower difficulty, and my singing is soft to conserve energy and not draw attention to myself. But it’s still encouraging. After a few songs I step up the difficulty to hard, then to expert. I feel my voice getting more accurate as the game gives real-time feedback. With my five gold stars for “Creep,” I can supposedly call myself 99% of Thom Yorke.

I’m not going to say Rock Band’s made me a good singer — that’s totally different from getting a good score, even at the highest difficulty level. But its visual feedback has helped. It’s also let me know that I’m allowed to sing — I can sing — even though I’m not up to a high standard.

I played the original Rock Band in the kitchen of a student flat in Lancaster, with friends on bass, drum, and guitar. Eventually, we started playing our real instruments together in a practice room. I was on guitar (I was already a decent guitar player) and vocals.

Rock Band has helped me get over any anxiety about singing in front of small groups. I wouldn’t have thought, before, to pick up my guitar and sing a song, but Rock Band has got my voice to a standard at which that’s fun for me (and not excruciating for those around me).
Rock Band 3 is attempting to do the same with instruments. The “pro” drums, keyboards, and guitars are all actual instruments. Even that guitar with the buttons can be played through a computer or MIDI device, although it is not as guitar-like as its stringed big brother.

I’ll be surprised if anyone completely masters an instrument using Rock Band alone, but the series is doing more to bring musical performance to the masses than any one band is doing. Motivated kids have been picking up guitars and microphones since way before music games, but by sneaking them into living rooms, Harmonix is showing people who hadn’t thought about it that, actually, musicianship is fun and not as unattainable as they might’ve thought.

This article was originally posted here. It was edited by Layton Shumway.

The Darkness isn’t perfect. I’ve played plenty of first-person shooters with better-designed levels, and the story is almost as cheesy as the comic book it’s based on. But on Unik Gamer – a site written in charmingly broken English, on which gamers arrange their Top 25 lists – I placed it second. Why? Find out in this conversation with…well, myself.

Is The Darkness really the second-greatest game ever?

I couldn’t argue that it’s objectively a better game than those more familiar with “Greatest Games Ever” lists. I wouldn’t either — I’m not interested in “Greatest Games Ever” discussions. I’m more interested in why games are important to individuals.

So what is it about The Darkness that got me, er, you hooked but not the rest of the world?

As I wrote in July, the feeling of being in another’s body is something I notice in games. Protagonist Jackie moves at a human pace with just the right amount of head bob, and he pokes his guns over or around cover.

The atmosphere is thick with ambient music, graffiti, and TVs with substantial programming. Entire movies, episodes of Popeye, Flash Gordon, and Gabby, and a few music videos can all be found by flicking through the channels. To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck, is on in the background of this important scene:

That’s not exactly common in first-person shooters….

It’s full of those moments. You’re strapped to a chair facing the wrong end of a drill bit at one point. People talk about hammering buttons to get Snake through a radioactive tube at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4? That’s how I feel about the drill scene in The Darkness.

The feel of Jackie’s movement, the first-person kissing, and drill torture formed the most intense connection I’ve felt with a game character.

Why do you think it was thrown in the bargain bins so quickly?

That “human pace” I love translates to “painfully slow movement” for others — even Bungie felt Halo: Reach needed a sprint button. Maybe those same people were also bored by the scene in Jenny’s apartment, the adventure-game moments, or stopping to devour the hearts of Jackie’s fallen enemies. (Innocents were spared this indignity — an important detail, I thought.)

The powers that the Darkness (the character) gives Jackie and uses to control him don’t fit that well with the game — you can easily do without them except for a few puzzles that require one power or another. That said, impaling a man on your tail, then holding him at length while he claws desperately at his chest, then throwing him aside is sadistically fun.

Wait a minute…tail? And what are the demonic faces in that screenshot?

Jackie Estacado — a hit-man adopted and raised by the mob — mysteriously inherits dark, evil powers on his 21st birthday. Voiced by vocal-gymnast Mike Patton, the Darkness tightens his grip on Jackie as the human uses these powers to vanquish his enemies. Jackie must take the short-cut to hell — by killing himself — in order to confront this evil power.

Yeah…it sounds bad written like that. The game mixes that mumbo jumbo with a more personal and earthly plot, though.

This is the cheesiest shit I’ve ever seen. And I’m a vegetarian, so I eat a lot of cheese.

Thanks for that image, rhetorical device. But you’re right. So are Max Payne and Twin Peaks, though. They’re cheesy because cheese fits their bombastic, paranoid, paranormal stories. The characters get to be larger than life, thanks to the heightened suspension of disbelief. “Cheesy” doesn’t mean “bad” — boring characters and nonsensical plots make a story bad, whether it aspires to realism or cheesy entertainment.

These Darkness powers are cool — I can throw black holes and summon adorable demons — but as a shooter it’s hardly comparable to Halo, is it?

It’s not the same type of shooter, though. It’s more about experiencing a comic book from a first-person perspective than it is about gun skirmishes. The powers allow you to play around with being a badass demon assassin, and it’s fun to keep your two pistols out and execute henchmen.

It always feels like you’re going somewhere — to talk to a particular mobster, to investigate an orphanage, or to plant a bomb — and you always look cool doing it. The game world is small but open, so you never feel like you’re coasting along like you can in a level-based shooter. The Darkness has direction.

So it’s an adventure game with shooting?

Sort of, yes. There is a quest that involves intimidating a thug and taking a harmonica from him. There;s a lot of talking to people in subway stations.

Who made this?

Starbreeze Studios — the Swedish people behind the Chronicles of Riddick games.

Will there be a sequel?

I’ve given up hoping for one after numerous yesses, noes, and maybe-sos.

You sound like you’re trying to convince people to buy it.

This is a writing exercise to see if I can articulate why I love it and thereby convince myself I’m not crazy for loving it.

So should I play it?

Let’s ditch this flimsy facade of a fake interview, shall we?

OK.

If you like paranormal plots, mobster movies, or melodrama, play The Darkness. If you like first-person hugs in Mirror’s Edge, play it and experience even more interesting uses of the first-person perspective. If you need your shooters to stick to the pace of Call of Duty, don’t play it.

By now, it’s probably cheaper than XIII — that other comic-book shooter that bombed in price faster than a Steam game on the weekend — so check your game store’s used shelves.

This was originally posted here. It was edited by Brett Bates.

Card games have found their way into Red Dead Redemption, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and just about any other game big enough to fit them. But instead of adding some activity to character-driven sections, they usually isolate the scenes and block out the worlds surrounding them. Red Dead Redemption’s outside tables were an ideal setting for Texas Hold ‘Em, but the witty writing from the cut-scenes had gone.

Do you remember playing pool with your cousin Roman in GTA 4? You’d pick him up, drive him somewhere, play some pool, and then drive him back. In the car, you’d share a natural conversation and learn a little about him. In the pool hall, you’d both turn into robots that barely spoke. It was awkward and alienating.

Telltale Games has learned from Hollywood and made a poker game where dialogue is king. Released earlier last week, Poker Night at the Inventory leverages the celebrity status of several famous video-game characters: Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, the Heavy Weapons Guy from Team Fortress 2, Max from the Sam & Max series, and Strong Bad of Homestar Runner.

The characters have great banter. When things get serious, the Heavy tells stories of his kills, to the disgust or amusement of the others. When one of the last two remaining players goes all in, he’ll tremble in appropriate trepidation. It’s a game, so of course you’ll hear the same lines occasionally, but it’s infinitely more natural than any minigame conversation has ever been.

This is how poker (or black jack or horseshoes or any other distraction) in a narrative-based game should work. It doesn’t make sense for poker buddies to ignore each other, and the slow pacing of play is an ideal spot for some idle conversation. If characters can chat on a car trip, in an elevator, or just when you click on them, then why not over a card table?

This was originally posted here. It was edited by Omar Yusuf.

After finishing Mirror’s Edge, I disagreed with the bullet point commonly listed in the con column of reviews: It was too short. At about six hours, I felt the game told its story as best it could without unnecessary fluff. It was an unremarkable mystery/rescue story, but my indifference towards The City and its nefarious goings-on would have turned to resentment had I been forced to parkour my way over many more of its rooftops.

Now compare Grand Theft Auto 4 to the GTA “Episodes,” The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Niko in GTA4 stumbled all over Liberty City, running errands for traitors as if he’d never played a GTA game. Episode protagonists Johnny and Luis, on the other hand, had one problem each to fix. I didn’t tire of them, and I finished their episodes grinning because I had ridden a simple, satisfying story arc. When I had finished with Niko’s revenge, I felt glad to be done with the meandering, 30-hour game.

So people should just stop complaining that games are too short, right? Yes and no.

I find the argument that there should be some sort of golden ratio between price and length hard to swallow because it’s too simplistic. It doesn’t take into account replayability, alternative paths and moral choices, multiplayer, or the fact that coke dealers can get away charging for a 15-minute high.

But when you’re enjoying a game, you want to spend more time in that universe, right? You want to know how Spartans came to be in Halo. You want to know exactly what happened between Anderson and Saren in Mass Effect. You want to know Sonic’s favorite food. (Answer: Chili dogs. Now you don’t have to investigate the comics, choose-your-own adventures, novels, or cartoons.)

The answer isn’t to add 10 hours to a game. That’ll just ruin a story that should’ve lasted six hours, or hide it under too many side quests and tangents — not every game can be Fallout, you know. Instead, you need an entirely new story.

That could be the next game in the series or a chunk of downloadable content. And while those are in development, publishers are increasingly waking up to your desire to explore these universes. They’re commissioning novels, comics, and TV series that are at least as well-written as the games on which they are based.

THQ’s Homefront games (two are planned so far) and novel all tell different stories within the same universe. The novel will follow a Los Angeles journalist during North Korea’s initial invasion of the United States, the first game will focus on a Colorado-based resistance movement, and the second game will feature characters on the other side of the irradiated Mississippi River.

Hopefully, this approach will allow writer John Milius (Apocalypse Now,Dirty Harry, and many more) and colleagues to tell a few self-contained stories against the grander, but less personal, paranoid setting of a communist takeover.

Similarly, the Halo novels explain some of the main series’ mysteries, while the excellent I Love Bees radio drama/alternative-reality game showed us how regular people live in UNSC space.

The common theme here is that instead of extending the story of a game with an extra few hours, writers have kept their universes interesting by exploring different parts of them with different characters. Unlike movies based on games, they’re not trying to cram a game’s story into another container or retell it for a different audience — often the games’ own writers are extending their own fiction for people already familiar with it.

Your enjoyment of these side stories, sequels, and prequels is going to hinge on your investment in their respective worlds. But if you liked a game enough to complain that it was too short, odds are you’ve got time to see what else is going on in that universe.

This was originally posted here. It was edited by Brett Bates.

Before it changed into something more inclusive, the Bitmob Game Club was a feature in which a handful of community writers played a few levels of the same game every week, then wrote about it in their own style. The final series, before everyone got involved with the Rez edition, was going to be about Fallout.

The project never came about, but I wrote my first contribution and left it sitting on my hard drive until today.

The simple graphics encouraged my imagination to fill in most of the game’s scenes, almost like a book or radio drama. Here’s my representation of what the first couple of hours was like in my head.

I stumble across a few dirty tents clustered around a building. A mean-looking dude stands by the entrance to the building.

“Hey, put that weapon away,” he orders because of the pistol in my hand. I acquiesce — not wanting to start a fight — and let myself in.

In the largest room stands a muscular, important-looking man. I greet him.

“Who are you?”

I consider telling him I’m there to join — earning their trust could gain me some equipment. But I’m not sure my companion, Ian, would help me through my initiation. I can count on his loyalty better than these amoral thugs, anyway.

“I’m an explorer.”

“We don’t need those kinds of people around here,” he says. He shoots me dead.

I’m Albert, a charismatic (with 9 CH points to prove it) former vault-dweller. I’m on a quest for a “water chip” to save my dying underground home. The Overseer told me to search a nearby vault for my McGuffin, but I found nothing there. So far, the closest I’ve come to saving them is peering down a dusty well.

Now, I’m back in Shady Sands to collect a reward for solving their radscorpion problem.

It’s late at night, so Doctor Razlo refuses to see me. He doesn’t sleep or anything — he just stands there all night in his shack. I pass the time by burglarizing his home and reading the book I steal. It’s about medicine, a subject I’m already a journeyman of.

Finally, the doctor makes an antidote. I administer it to his patient. (Apparently, Razlo can’t move from his spot.) The guy thanks me, but, really, Ian deserves most of the credit.

When I first tripped over Shady Sands, I suggested he tag along. He shoots two bullets for every one that I can get off. The bastard accidentally hit me once, but I forgive him. Everyone here seems to fight by standing still and taking turns to shoot. That’s rather boring to me, so it’s good having Ian around to quicken it up.

Ian and I have rolled around the wasteland stabbing rats, shooting giant scorpions, and dying a lot.

We got ourselves killed on a slapstick misadventure in Junktown. As I chatted with the Mayor Killian Darkwater, an assassin interrupted us. Ian stood between the assassin and Killian; the Mayor shot back at his would-be killer but also hit Ian. Everyone blasted everyone else and only a couple of guards survived.

We die a lot.

While the debate about freedom of speech, games, and how the law should or should not censor the industry rages on, the folks at Apple have came to their own decision. Apps — which include some of the most creative mobile games around — aren’t protected speech on Apple’s platform. Don’t look for the First Amendment here:

We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store.

App developers must abide by stricter rules than even console developers, who wouldn’t dream of releasing a game with an Adults Only rating. A lot of Mature-rated games wouldn’t meet Apple’s standards.

Sections 14, 15, 16, and 19 of this document indicate that developers may not criticize individuals or religions, show realistic injuries, or do anything Apple decides is “objectionable”: no Russian roulette or fart apps.

Apart from stylistic restrictions on violence that would strike down almost every console game from this generation, this significantly limits the topics game developers can explore. Don’t look for direct satire, violence, or anything Apple declares “over the line.” That freedom, apparently, is only for novelists and songwriters.

“Professional satirists” are exempt from the ban on “offensive or mean-spirited commentary” that targets individuals (but not religions). Amateurs aren’t. Apple wants quality content, but they frown down their noses at homebrew developers. “We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.”

Perhaps this is why Chinatown Wars HD is available on the iPad, but restrictions remain for everyone else.

This attitude can be helpful: Google’s Android Market is a bustling open-air bazaar that, compared to Apple’s shiny department store, makes you rummage around for a decent experience. But Apple’s model isn’t encouraging to young startup companies. If a computer-programming student gets his first App approved, he should get an extra bit of credit for producing something in such a discouraging environment.

So what’s the solution for game developers with something to say? They could independently release games to the few iPhone owners who have jailbroken their devices (a somewhat complicated process that removes Apple’s restrictions but voids customer warranties). This eliminates the mass marketability to the huge number of iPhone owners, though.

Microsoft isn’t much more permissive with their Windows Phone 7 series. Their guidelines outlaw features already in Xbox games such as decapitations, exploding body parts, and prostitution.

That leaves the Android Market. Game developers have been reluctant to jump to Android for financial reasons. But Google has only a few rules, which they rarely police, and even if developers like Gameloft prefer to keep all the profit themselves by independently distributing games, it’s easy for users to install non-Market apps that don’t void their warranties.

Most developers should have no trouble sticking to the rules, and it’d be foolish of Apple not to take a cut of profits from established publishers like Rockstar. But if someone new comes along with something inflammatory they want to say on a small screen — and anything you say about religion is potentially offensive to someone — they don’t have much choice.

They can brave Apple’s approval process and appeal rejection. If they don’t want to risk wasting their time, though, they can put it straight up on the Android Market. So, if you’re an aspiring handheld developer akin to Rockstar, give the cute, little robot a chance. Android needs more interesting games, anyway.

Censorship in mobile games is worrisome. But I can see why some people might think that they aren’t the place for satire and transgression. Please, let me know what you think in the comments.

This was originally published here. It was edited by James DeRosa.