Borderlands

Back in 2008 I was playing a heck of a load of Team Fortress 2 and was very much looking forward to Valve Software's upcoming 4 player co-op game: Left4Dead. And I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine about Left4Dead saying that it was a great idea. After all, co-op against zombies by the people who had made my current favourite game ever?

I also remember saying how I wished there was more of a story planned and that I was disappointed with the number of weapons I'd seen in the video footage. To which he replied "But isn't that... like... Borderlands?"

Ever since I've been hankering after the release of this, reading their forums, watching the vids and hoping that it was as good as I was imagining it would be. So now I've had it for a few weeks and I've played it a fair bit so I feel I can now supply that answer: It's marvellous!

Starting at the beginning, lets explain exactly what we have here. Borderlands is a first person shooter at heart: you run, you shoot, you kill the bad guys. However it also has roots in RPG titles in regards to it's "looting" of items, which is basically picking up everything and anything you can find that might be useful. The reason the looting is important is to do with the number of weapons available in the game. Literally thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of unique weapons are possibly attainable and you'll easily come across more than you can remember during a playthrough.

"How is that possible?" you may ask! Well it's all done by having several different weapon types (ie, pistol, shotgun, etc...) that can have several different stats (damage, accuracy, etc...) and also different add-ons (scope, melee weapon, etc...) so with all of the different possibilities it makes sense that there are that many combinations.

So this can drastically alter a playthrough, for instance you might have a really good pistol to start with during one playthrough, but on another you quickly get a great sniper rifle. It changes how you play and thus the gaming experience involved.

Enemies are a problem however, there are approximately 10 standard bad guys in Borderlands (personal non scientific count there!) which can get quite repetitive. I've heard each enemy is also randomly generated in terms of their stats but it wasn't too noticeable. You do, however, get the occasional Baddass bad guy who is far tougher than their standard counterpart. These enemies and any "boss" characters you come across yield far better loot than others, so check their drops carefully! (ooer)

The gameplay itself was one of the high points for me, aside from changing mouse sensitivity to reduce the mouse-smoothing that you can't turn off, movement was nice and looking down the sights of a weapon to shoot felt perfectly natural. In some ways it very much reminded me of the gameplay from Farcry 2, all the way down to the respawning bad guys, although this wasn't quite as bad!

Elven Legacy

Elves have had a mixed reception in the past, from the higher beings in the Lord Of The Rings stories to Evil Glamour creatures in Terry Pratchett books. Not to mention their spooky obsession with Christmas, so With all of these interpretations I'm not quite sure where I stand with Elves in general.

This game has it's own take again; this time they're an extremely proud but surprisingly angry group of peeps. The plot revolves around a mage who has uncovered dark powers that the Elves were guarding and now they need him stopped. Sagittel, an experienced Elven general, takes a bunch of raw recruits along with him to stop the mage...and hilarity ensures...

Ok, well not hilarity, but you should get the idea. There are a couple of attempts at humour but overall I think the story takes the game a little too seriously. Sagittel himself is a little too proud and constantly argues with every other character in the game. This at least means he's consistent as a character, but tedious and predictable to watch.

The gameplay consists of turn based strategy with a hexagonal based battlefield, the kind found in most turn based strategy games. It works well, but then again this is tried and tested stuff. Something I did appreciate was the map controls which I found intuitive and easy to use and didn't interrupt my limited tactical train of thought! Left click on unit, left click on destination, left click on enemy to attack; It sounds simple but some strategy games can really beat around the bush with it all. I did miss having a mini map though when my units were more spread out.

It reminded me very much of my table top games I played in my teenage years. In fact I think I've always preferred turn based battles to real time strategy because of that. I somehow find comfort in being able to move and fire before the enemy has even spotted my units. I'm being generous because, as usual, I'm pretty rubbish at anything that requires tactical thinking.

And that's a total understatement! In short: I'm Rubbish.

That doesn't mean Elven Legacy wasn't enjoyable for me, far from it and contrary to most strategy games I've played, I felt really drawn into the story! The missions all had similar goals, which is almost unavoidable I suppose, the designs were all unique and related perfectly to the situation. But each one really felt like a small part of the journey described in the talky bits between missions. This was mostly due to the detail of the landscape consistently looking like an advanced tabletop war game. It looked especially good during levels where you approach obstacles such as walls and fortresses to conquer.

Graphically there are not massive poly counts or the latest in shaders going on. This wasn't such a problem, I've always been more for playability rather than over compensation with graphics. The "everything must be brown" approach wasn't used here, which I was glad about as I like to recognise the units instantly rather than having to check by clicking or zooming in.

ESSAYS

Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked

Henry Jenkins
MIT Professor

A large gap exists between the public's perception of video games and what the research actually shows. The following is an attempt to separate fact from fiction.

A large gap exists between the public's perception of video games and what the research actually shows. The following is an attempt to separate fact from fiction.

1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence.

According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers — 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester.

2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression.

Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects." This research includes some 300 studies of media violence. But most of those studies are inconclusive and many have been criticized on methodological grounds. In these studies, media images are removed from any narrative context. Subjects are asked to engage with content that they would not normally consume and may not understand. Finally, the laboratory context is radically different from the environments where games would normally be played. Most studies found a correlation, not a causal relationship, which means the research could simply show that aggressive people like aggressive entertainment. That's why the vague term "links" is used here. If there is a consensus emerging around this research, it is that violent video games may be one risk factor - when coupled with other more immediate, real-world influences — which can contribute to anti-social behavior. But no research has found that video games are a primary factor or that violent video game play could turn an otherwise normal person into a killer.

3. Children are the primary market for video games.

While most American kids do play video games, the center of the video game market has shifted older as the first generation of gamers continues to play into adulthood. Already 62 percent of the console market and 66 percent of the PC market is age 18 or older. The game industry caters to adult tastes. Meanwhile, a sizable number of parents ignore game ratings because they assume that games are for kids. One quarter of children ages 11 to 16 identify an M-Rated (Mature Content) game as among their favorites. Clearly, more should be done to restrict advertising and marketing that targets young consumers with mature content, and to educate parents about the media choices they are facing. But parents need to share some of the responsibility for making decisions about what is appropriate for their children. The news on this front is not all bad. The Federal Trade Commission has found that 83 percent of game purchases for underage consumers are made by parents or by parents and children together.

4. Almost no girls play computer games.

Historically, the video game market has been predominantly male. However, the percentage of women playing games has steadily increased over the past decade. Women now slightly outnumber men playing Web-based games. Spurred by the belief that games were an important gateway into other kinds of digital literacy, efforts were made in the mid-90s to build games that appealed to girls. More recent games such as The Sims were huge crossover successes that attracted many women who had never played games before. Given the historic imbalance in the game market (and among people working inside the game industry), the presence of sexist stereotyping in games is hardly surprising. Yet it's also important to note that female game characters are often portrayed as powerful and independent. In his book Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones argues that young girls often build upon these representations of strong women warriors as a means of building up their self confidence in confronting challenges in their everyday lives.

5. Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them.

Former military psychologist and moral reformer David Grossman argues that because the military uses games in training (including, he claims, training soldiers to shoot and kill), the generation of young people who play such games are similarly being brutalized and conditioned to be aggressive in their everyday social interactions.

Grossman's model only works if:

• we remove training and education from a meaningful cultural context.
• we assume learners have no conscious goals and that they show no resistance to what they are being taught.
• we assume that they unwittingly apply what they learn in a fantasy environment to real world spaces.

The military uses games as part of a specific curriculum, with clearly defined goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and have a need for the information being transmitted. There are consequences for not mastering those skills. That being said, a growing body of research does suggest that games can enhance learning. In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee describes game players as active problem solvers who do not see mistakes as errors, but as opportunities for improvement. Players search for newer, better solutions to problems and challenges, he says. And they are encouraged to constantly form and test hypotheses. This research points to a fundamentally different model of how and what players learn from games.

6. Video games are not a meaningful form of expression.

On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a similar decision in Indianapolis, Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner noted: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware." Posner adds, "To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it." Many early games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moved. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds. They allow players to navigate an expansive and open-ended world, make their own choices and witness their consequences. The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space.

7. Video game play is socially isolating.

Much video game play is social. Almost 60 percent of frequent gamers play with friends. Thirty-three percent play with siblings and 25 percent play with spouses or parents. Even games designed for single players are often played socially, with one person giving advice to another holding a joystick. A growing number of games are designed for multiple players — for either cooperative play in the same space or online play with distributed players. Sociologist Talmadge Wright has logged many hours observing online communities interact with and react to violent video games, concluding that meta-gaming (conversation about game content) provides a context for thinking about rules and rule-breaking. In this way there are really two games taking place simultaneously: one, the explicit conflict and combat on the screen; the other, the implicit cooperation and comradeship between the players. Two players may be fighting to death on screen and growing closer as friends off screen. Social expectations are reaffirmed through the social contract governing play, even as they are symbolically cast aside within the transgressive fantasies represented onscreen.

8. Video game play is desensitizing.

Classic studies of play behavior among primates suggest that apes make basic distinctions between play fighting and actual combat. In some circumstances, they seem to take pleasure wrestling and tousling with each other. In others, they might rip each other apart in mortal combat. Game designer and play theorist Eric Zimmerman describes the ways we understand play as distinctive from reality as entering the "magic circle." The same action — say, sweeping a floor — may take on different meanings in play (as in playing house) than in reality (housework). Play allows kids to express feelings and impulses that have to be carefully held in check in their real-world interactions. Media reformers argue that playing violent video games can cause a lack of empathy for real-world victims. Yet, a child who responds to a video game the same way he or she responds to a real-world tragedy could be showing symptoms of being severely emotionally disturbed. Here's where the media effects research, which often uses punching rubber dolls as a marker of real-world aggression, becomes problematic. The kid who is punching a toy designed for this purpose is still within the "magic circle" of play and understands her actions on those terms. Such research shows us only that violent play leads to more violent play.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 launched for the Xbox 360 and PC in North America on Tuesday, and the game's European rollout occurred today. Even in that short span of time, retailer interest has been strong, as Electronics Arts announced today that it has shipped more than 2 million copies of BioWare's sci-fi role-playing shooter worldwide.

Commander Shepard isn't a man to be trifled with.

Mass Effect 2 resumes the solar-system-hopping adventure of Commander Shepard, which began with the events in the acclaimed original Mass Effect. However, this time out, Shepard finds himself indebted to the pro-human Cerberus Corporation, though his focus remains on ridding the galaxy of the mysterious Reaper threat.

BioWare has bolstered Mass Effect 2's on-disc offerings with a batch of downloadable content through its in-game Cerberus Network. Free for those who purchased the Xbox 360 and PC game new, the DLC currently includes a new crew member who can be recruited as well as a bonus mission. Down the road, BioWare has said that it will introduce new weapons like the M-22 Eviscerator Shotgun as well as the Hammerhead hover tank.

Gran Turismo 5 garaged until fall

What we heard: Polyphony Digital certainly isn't trying to set any speed records with the development of its racer Gran Turismo 5. Having initially been revealed in 2005, the game appeared to be on track for a March 2010 release in Japan, with series creator Kazunori Yamauchi saying to expect the Western release a few months later. However, that plan hit the skids last month, when Sony postponed the game's launch in Japan for an indeterminate amount of time.

Gran Turismo 5's cars are fast. Its development…not so much.

Following the game's delay, initial Japanese reports indicated that the game had been bumped back three months in the island nation, signaling a Western launch this fall. That speculation appears to have gained some substantiation this week, courtesy of Sony Computer Entertainment Portugal president James Armstrong.

As reported by GT Planet and translated by GameSpot, Armstrong told Canarias Al Dia that he expects Sony to release the long-awaited GT5 this fall in time for the important holiday shopping season. "We believe that we are launching the product this fall, before Christmas, even though this isn't yet decided," he said.

Armstrong went on to say that while he doubts GT5 will make use of Sony's new camera-based motion controller, he wasn't willing to rule it out. The controller, which is rumored to be named the PlayStation Arc, was also initially slated to be available in Japan in March. Sony has since bumped the device's launch back to this fall.

The official story: "We haven't announced the launch date for GT5," a SCE America representative told GameSpot.

Bogus or not bogus?: Looking not bogus that Sony is targeting a fall release for GT5. However, Armstrong himself noted that the game's launch window is still up in the air, so Polyphony Digital has clearly been given license to take as much time as it needs.