Just to follow up on my earlier Rock Band 2 post, more info about the game has been released now that we’ve hit E3, including the 80+ song track list, which is composed entirely of master tracks. There’s something for everyone on there, but personally I’m looking forward to “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “Any Way You Want It,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “The Middle,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “Bad Reputation,” and “American Woman.”

Also, confirming the earlier rumor, you will be able to import “most” of Rock Band’s on-disc tracks into Rock Band 2 for “under $5.”

Finally, if anybody is looking for a present for me, the new premium Rock Band drum kit would not go unappreciated. If, er, you have $300 lying around that you’re willing to blow. On a fake drum kit. For me. Cheers.

Alright, I’m now pretty sure Harmonix has a bug planted in my car. A couple weeks ago, Gen, Jason and I were having a lengthy conversation about what we’d like to see in Rock Band 2. As more and more details become public, it sounds like they basically took every suggestion we made in that discussion and incorporated it into the game. Here are the bullet points:

• Make Downloadable Content backwards compatible. Harmonix has said that all your existing DLC will be compatible with Rock Band 2 (I’m not sure, but that also suggests that anything you buy in Rock Band 2 will be compatible with Rock Band). No need to buy “More than a Feeling” twice. Phew.

• Battle of the Bands: Gen suggested a battle of the bands mode where you could assemble your own band and compete against other bands online. It seems Harmonix will hold regular battle of the band contests, though they don’t spell out how it works.

• Online World Tour: finally, thank god. This was the single biggest missing feature from Rock Band, so it ought to be at the top of the list. Online quickplay was fun, but lacked much of the charm of world tour mode. They’ve also tweaked the mechanics of world tour to allow you to switch instruments and kick players out of your band, which have been sorely needed.

• Import original Rock Band catalog: okay, so this isn’t confirmed, but it’s been rumored in a couple of different places. It would be great if you could somehow play the original songs in Rock Band 2. Some have suggested it will all be available as free DLC, while others say that there may be a way to transfer it from your disc to your hard drive. Either way: that would be killer.

Of course, that’s not all that Rock Band 2 is going to offer. They’ve also redesigned the guitar (hot) and drums, added mini-campaigns, a drum trainer program, and 80 new tracks, all of which are master recordings. This has quickly become my number one anticipated game of the year.

Now comes the tricky part: with redesigned drums and guitar, do I just buy the game, or do I buy an entirely new bundle? I’m still in need of a separate guitar, and the new drums are wireless in addition to being quieter and sturdier—how can I resist? And if I’m going to buy drums, game, and a new guitar, then it should be cheaper to just buy the new bundle.

From a few hours of playing, Boom Blox felt to me like the first really essential Wii game since Wii Sports. My friend and I took turns tearing through the first several levels of a few different single-player game modes, insisting upon replaying every level until we got a gold medal on it. Some types of levels are more interesting than others: Figuring out how to knock down a Jenga-like tower (with optional explosives) in one strike is awesome, but throwing bombs to scare bears away from stealing your gems feels kind of stupid and uninteresting. I’m not sure how likely I’d be to go through the single-player levels again after beating them, but we played for several hours without even getting halfway through, so perhaps there’s enough to keep the average player busy awhile. I guess you can always amuse yourself by throwing things at the cartoon animals standing around if you get bored; they are cute and make funny noises when struck.

Where the game really shines, though, is the competitive multiplayer. (Never mind the bizarre inclusion of a cooperative shooting gallery.) Some games essentially work just like exceptionally elaborate Jenga matches, making the first really appropriate use I’ve seen of the Wiimote’s hyper-precise receptiveness. Some games involve throwing bowling balls at your opponent to knock stuff down. My favorite game mode involved strategically pushing pucks around, trying to slide into high-point areas or knock your opponent’s pucks off the game board. All in all, there was enough to keep players busy for a long time, and coming back for more. Oh, and the music is pretty fun, too.

Like Jason, I’m still working taking my first steps in the larger world of GTA IV. This being my first Grand Theft Auto game, I thought I’d share with you some of the valuable wisdom that I’ve stolen along the way, just like many a sweet ride.

Women don’t seem to care if you pick them up on a date in one car, then mysteriously take them home in a cab.

Virtual people don’t know how to drive either.

Running red lights and driving the wrong way down a street are both fine, as far the cops. But do not, for the love of all that is good and holy, so much as nudge a cruiser with your car, or you are a wanted man.

Always pay your tolls. Cops have quotas to meet.

Car hoods can slow you down. Get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Most problems can actually be solved with violence or, at least, the liberal application of bullets.

Russians cannot be trusted. Especially if they claim they can be trusted.

Insulting cokeheads will make them give you money.

Molotov cocktails and helicopters do not mix. Ever seen a helicopter on fire? Not a good sign.

If you want to succeed at bailing out of moving cars, avoid bailing out directly into walls.

Popping a wheelie is fun and educational. But do it too much, and the gods will punish you by throwing you off the back. Live and learn.

When trying to escape the police, airtugs do not make an ideal escape vehicle.

Of course, there’s much much more to be learned from GTA IV: the perils of steroid juicing, online dating strategies, and the socio-political history and culture of Serbia, but we’ll save those for a future installment.

The other day, I got a handy tip from a guy on the Xbox escalated service number. This was, of course, after getting the goofball treatment from a couple people at the normal number, including one woman who insisted upon transferring me to the Xbox Live division against my protests, which led to me getting “disconnected” while on hold. But the guy at the escalated number was friendly, knowledgeable, and a gamer himself, even hazarding some “unofficial” guesses as to why my game was screwing up.

One possibility, he said, was that recovering my profile a lot might have messed a bit with my Assassin’s Creed save file. And I do recover my profile a lot—just about every time I play on Keith’s or Dan’s machines, which is every couple weeks or so, and then again when I get back home to my own machine.

Now, I don’t know if this is actually corrupting any of my files, but it is a pain in the arse to recover gamer profiles. It requires typing in your gamertag, email address, and password, and if you don’t have a little keyboard attachment, that takes awhile (and shows off your password to all who can follow the cursor). And then it takes a good 5–7 minutes just to load the stupid thing, which doesn’t sound so long, but is kind of a drag when you’re sitting in a room full of people waiting to get their murder on.

One handy solution: Go buy an Xbox memory card, and next time you recover your profile, use that as the storage device. Yes, it’s 20 or 30 bucks out of your pocket, and yes, it fills up a USB slot, but now you can take your profile around with ease and never recover it again. You can still put all your saved games and downloads on your regular hard drive.

Neat trick, huh? Just don’t tell Gizmodo.

So much effort went into making this a totally sweet toy that everyone seems perfectly willing to forgive it for its failures as a game. Hey, neat, you can bowl in the game! But I don’t want to take a virtual girl with boring dialog out on a bowling date. And hey, neat, random stuff just happens in the city sometimes! But that’s a pain in the ass when you’re driving said date home and the cops chase some random dude into the street, who then runs directly in front of your car, scaring your date so badly that she bails into moving traffic and gets killed instantly. Oh yeah, and you can’t just jump back to the quick save you did after picking her up and bowling because there are no quick saves—you have to drive back to your cousin’s apartment and sleep for six hours to save. If you want to undo the weirdly accidental death, you have to jump back in time before the date even started. Great. Time for more bowling!

Well, at least the multiplayer is pretty awesome. Too bad you have to play the single player (at least until the first of the infrequent autosaves), or else it loads the intro credits and cut scenes every single time you turn on the game. Why is that again? Oh, right—because you can only access the multiplayer mode through your cell phone in single-player mode, the most mind-bogglingly stupid game interface decision since trying to quit Assassin’s Creed. Granted, these are my impressions only after a couple days of playing, and I’d normally wait until finishing a game to write up a quick review—but honestly, I don’t know if I even want to bother with the single-player drudgery much longer, knowing how much fun the multiplayer can be.

Remember that time that I was having problems with my Xbox, dealt with a bunch of stupid people (and a couple nice, smart, helpful, honest people), and then got my Xbox back without any complaints? Yeah, well, we knew that wouldn’t last.

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Awhile back, I implored you, the internet, to make me a Mac Dashboard widget that would quickly and cleanly tell me what my Xbox Live Friends were doing at any given time. First, Jacob answered with a mockup, and once again I asked if anybody wanted to help finish it off.

Then, Andrew Baldwin replied, made it work, fixed a bunch of bugs that Dan and I were good at pointing out but useless in helping to fix, and even spruced up the interface after I was already impressed and using the thing. So, what does it do?

• Shows gamer pic, gamertag, game being played, and in-game status of profiles you specify
• Checkbox for whether offline names should be shown (off by default)
• Clicking on gamer pic loads that gamer’s profile in default browser
• Only lists profiles who are set to be viewable to “Everyone” in Privacy Settings
• Allows for scrolling between names with a button, to keep the widget small
• Looks pretty and compact
• Makes me happy

Had I realized sooner that simply asking for things through this blog could bring entire new objects into being, I probably would have been begging you all for sandwiches long ago. This is much cooler, though.

Thanks to Andrew and Jacob for making this happen. Thanks also to Duncan Mackenzie for running and granting permission to use the online service this draws from, which keeps track of Xbox Live profiles’ online status.

So, without further ado: DOWNLOAD THE WIDGET.

(11 old generation games left.) I hope you like jungles, lots and lots of jungles intermixed with long loading times. Far Cry looks rather nice; they clearly spent a lot of time developing the tools to render such impressive scenery (jungle, beaches, a few caves, rain forest, cliffs, swampy jungle etc.) but the gameplay is incredibly repetitive and I feel like some of the levels could have been designed by a program rather than a person. I can not remember the last time I was so aware of how boring the level design of game was, which is striking to me because the levels look gorgeous for a game of this era: they just aren’t interesting in how they are put together.

I can encapsulate the Far Cry experience as such: you sneak through the jungle, you reach a clearing with some manner of mercenary encampment, you can choose to attack or sneak around or just run through really fast, it doesn’t matter there because is another encampment a 5 minute walk away, repeat until you get to a boss fight! They include an assortment of vehicles which is kind of fun but at times feels more like a design decision to let you skips huge chunks of the uninteresting levels. Later in the game you get “feral powers” which apparently was added to the XBOX port and wasn’t in the original PC version of Far Cry. The feral powers make combat a little but more interesting, you can kill people with your bare hands (bear hands?), and see at night and such. In comparison the PC version must have been pretty dull and just a straightforward FPS without them. So a neat mechanic, but I tended to just use the “run very fast power” to skip past areas that were particularly dull.

I couldn’t beat the final boss after a dozen or so tries, but I am sufficiently bored of the game that I have moved it off the “to finish pile.” Usually I wouldn’t bother writing a review for a game I’m so “meh” about but I figure I’d write about these last few last-generation games I have. I had thought about trying to beat all of these before picking up a 360 but given that I have 11 to go and there is at least one 30 hour RPG. (I think my game completion rate since starting grad school is about 4 per year…) Then I thought I should just finish the XBOX games (only 2 remaining in the pile) and then I can unplug that and pack it away, but a recent time sensitive special deal I saw for GTA4 with an XBOX 360 might defeat even that idea.

(12 old generation games left, though Gun was also available for the 360.) Basically Grand Theft Auto in the Old West (”Grand Theft Horse” if you will.) The story of revenge, betrayal, and surprise parentage was pretty good as far as a story for a sand box style video game goes. I enjoyed the visual depiction of the wide open expanses (scaled down to be traversable in video game time) but the town areas felt empty and completely un-populated in way that just seemed lazy from a game design/system resources. Towns are simply places where you can go to accept new mission or hang around outside 3D models of buildings you can’t enter with occasional people you can’t actually interact with. My brother pointed out the somewhat disappointing game mechanic that all the horses are the same and there is no horse that is really “yours” and is faster, better, etc. Every time you start a mission or such you just grab (or “jack”) the nearest horse and away you go.

When Gun first came out there was controversy over the depiction of Native Americans, effectively the issue is that there are several levels where you just kill countless droves of them because people who design games feel that killing many people is the necessary appropriate action one must take before you can accomplish tasks such as crossing a bridge or going to the next town. Using this same kind of logic they later become your friends after you kill droves of ex-Confederate soldiers. (Remember only crazy ex-Confederate soldiers led by an evil villain were disrespectful to native peoples.) Basically the same kind of general disregard for issues of race/culture/class/gender you’d find in most video games. I played this the same week the new and controversial trailer for Resident Evil 5 came out so Gun felt almost quaint in comparison to that…

In short as far as game play goes Gun was generally fun and sufficiently engaging enough that I played the story mode all the way through, but I’m left wanting a bit more; perhaps I need to go watch some more Deadwood or play a game of Deadlands (Jason?).