Not a "Halo" fan? Other games beckon
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Microsoft's  "Halo 3" has  dominated video game headlines this week, but if blasting  aliens isn't appealing there is more on offer in other games,  including role-playing the composer Frederic Chopin.
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To Microsoft and its Xbox, "Halo 3" is more than just a game.
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Even if you don't particularly like video games, you'd best resign yourself to what appears certain to anyone who's spent a little time with Sony's new PlayStation Portable.
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First impressions: Favorite games benefit from high-definition display.
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Technology News, LOS ANGELES - It takes a special kind of person to stay up all night and stand in a line nearly 250 people long just to buy a video game -- but for rabid fans of the first &quot;Halo&quot; on the Xbox video game console, it was well worth the wait
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I spent large chunks of last year playing the same AAA video games everyone else played: "BioShock," "Rock Band," "Super Mario Galaxy" and so on. But if I actually kept track of my gaming hours, I wouldn't be surprised to find that I spent just as much time enjoying the simpler delights of Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade.
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In my own case, the event is the release of Halo 2 shortly after midnight this morning. It&#39;s the sequel to my favorite video game Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the best games ever made for
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The first Halo game sold quite a few Xboxes (we know a few Xbox owners who don&#39;t appear to play any other titles on their consoles), and Halo 2 clocked $125 million in sales on its first day in stores.
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Microsoft Corp  has cemented its reputation among hardcore gamers with the launch of alien shoot-out "Halo 3," but it is still struggling to attract the mass market audience that has flocked to Nintendo Co Ltd's  Wii console.
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Unlike the original game, Halo 2 doesn&#39;t end with a bang so much as a whimper. When you get to the end of the game, as I did tonight (congrats if you beat me, but I have a life, sort of), you discover that
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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While it's not one of the more attractive players in the gaming industry, it might appeal to some investors.
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ATLANTA - For many video game addicts, the buzz on the sequel to &quot;Halo&quot; is louder than a machine gun rat-a-tatting in their ears.
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With Halo 3 being released tomorrow, some are wondering what the future of the video game console war looks like.  Don Reisinger thinks the Xbox 360 will take the day.
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Tycho:  The news that Mass Effect would feature an uncompromising, high-res simulation of alien lesbian sex was sweet, and hot, like spun sugar.  For Gabriel, at any rate.  Some of the community reaction is dedicated to demanding gay parity for the male persuasion of this sexual equation, lengthy treatises by oiled men who crave starborne sodomy.  The rest of the dialogue is just boring.  Boring, terrestrial, and (quite frankly) myopic.         Where are the bipedal crustaceans in this calculation?  The swirling, aroused gasses?  The lonely, sentient space station whose hermetic bulkheads hold secret clusters of erotic delights, provided your character has both the skills and equipment?  Carpe astrum, you Goddamned backwater clowns.  There must be an entire universe of thrilling, dangerous, sometimes razor sharp genitalia that slavers beyond the Horsehead Nebula.      You might have noticed that we're advertising an Everquest game, an act that I'm aware places us in significant rhetorical peril.  If I had not found the game completely electrifying, I would have turned down the buy.  Of course, what I find electrifying has somewhat strange parameters.    I used to enjoy a deeply indie online CCG called Star Chamber, which was eventually purchased by an online CCG company called Worlds Apart (which did, among other things, the Lord of the Rings online CCG).  As does happen from time to time, World Apart was eventually purchased by Sony Online Entertainment, becoming SOE Denver.  Since then, they also delivered a Stargate CCG that we liked enough to advertise.  Legends of Norrath: Oathbound is a game within a game, similar to Final Fantasy's Triple Triad, that you can play against other players directly in the client.  It's tied into the loot systems for both EQ games, so that cards you get in packs are actually equipment and so forth - I find that interesting, but as a person with no investment in those systems it doesn't motivate me.  What motivates me is a rock solid, deeply tactical card game, which Oathbound absolutely is.  It plays in a stand-alone client which you can download, and comes with a fairly elaborate tutorial that is worth playing all the way through.  I had no interest in it, I felt confident dismissing it out of hand, and it won me over.  You may find yourself similarly surprised.    I have a very high opinion of Eurogamer, but I don't know how a person could possibly have reviewed Team Fortress 2 already.  We put time in both at work and at night, and I don't feel like I'm any smarter about the sometimes extraordinary interplay between the game's nine Goddamned classes, which mesh in real time to create some kind of shuddering Chaos Engine.  I have a lot of fun playing it, though the Medic brings me the most joy, so I've focused on it almost to the exclusion of all others.  A healing "gun" - like the repair module present in Tribes, almost a decade ago - is an immensely satisfying way to model that relationship.  Anytime your medical gun is attached to a player, your "Overcharge" ability is building up.  When unleashed, both you and your target become invulnerable to enemy attacks.  It's an incredible siege breaking technique, and it's earned simply by embodying the virtues of your class.  But where to use it, when to use it, I'm still learning this - and what's more, other players are still learning that I can do it.  I always love the early period in these multiplayer offerings, before the hard limits are known, when players seem to be magicians and anything is possible.
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The first Halo game sold quite a few Xboxes (we know a few Xbox owners who don&#39;t appear to play any other titles on their consoles), and Halo 2 has already clocked $125 million in sales -- on its first day in stores.
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New M-rated, non-NFL game will feature off-field political fallout, on-field unnecessary roughness, and post-play partying. At least one sports video game publisher in the industry isn&#39;t bothered by the exclusive