Solo games live on in multiplayer world
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SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 18  - Video game developers,  eager to please all consumers, are increasingly including  features that let gamers play with or against their friends.
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Bungie's follow-up to its wildly successful shooter provides hours of fun, provided you're not too irritated by the ending or the long wait for a match on Xbox Live. By Lore SjÃ¶berg.
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Tycho:  Last year's iteration of Tiger Woods had a fairly serious glitch in multiplayer, in that the game could not be played in multiplayer mode.  Or, it worked sometimes, but there was no way to know how or when - what combination of dances and burning herbs would right this aloof mechanism.  It was most likely the rush of new owners securing tee-times on simulated links, but after a week of trying to use the product without success I decided that I had better things to do than try and contextualize EA's grave miscalculations.    The few times we were able to jump on and actually get in there were the kind of epic, unadulterated "guy fun" one sees lionized in hilarious summer comedies.  Golf as a sport (and as a videogame) has the strong undercurrent of shared misery that one usually finds only in dive bars.  The recently released demo for this year's product - on both PSN and XBL, now - recalled those moments to us, independent of the rage that bookended each round of powerfully communal spirit lodge golf.  This year's product has a huge focus on Gamernet, a kind of user created content initiative that will hopefully see them approach the performance of their online infrastructure with more conviction.     GameFace, their face making thing, has seen a significant jump this year as well - it can take pictures from your console's camera and create actual face geometry, and I understand that photos can even be uploaded online and then brought down on the console for processing.  We were able to get some pretty good results with the earlier versions of the tool, but this is very much appreciated.  Of course, in the wrong hands, every tool is a weapon.     Ubisoft is now saying that Haze is an exclusive exclusive for the PS3, and not one of them timed or partial exclusives one might see in the lesser houses.  Truly monogamous games are rare these days, and this is certainly a surprise, but this thing has been hopping back and forth for months.  There was even a leaked document that showed this "exclusive" being released a week later for PC and 360, though all traces of the document were soon obliterated.  Assassin's Creed was (as you'll recall) a PS3 exclusive as well.  For a week, at any rate.        I'm really excited for Haze, but I'm not sure if that's a universally held belief.  The writer made a good impression on me at E3 several years ago, and Free Radical makes a good impression on me whenever they make a videogame.  It's also a four player co-op experience with a unique, asymmetrical multiplayer proposition that you've probably read about.  But, as with Bioshock, I'm really in it for the story - and, also like Bioshock, I think anything that limits its potential audience is a serious mistake.
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Players hope to connect their separate domains to form a 3-D Internet.
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Dating, negotiating, fragging and making money.  Play and its consequences.
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Tycho:  It took three separate discs and two consoles to finally work out the Goddamn kinks, but we were able to play almost the entire Eternal Sonata demo.  Almost!  I wasn't aware people were still boiling discs, presumably in black iron cauldrons where carrots bob, but I don't want to live a life where boiling discs is normal.
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The summer video game doldrums  are almost here, but a small flurry of new titles over the next  couple of weeks may help tide gamers over until the fall  bounty.
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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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Massively Multiplayer Online games built around battling Cimmerians, sea-faring pirates and classic Order-versus-Destruction factions throw down the gauntlet. A sneak peek at the best new MMOs of 2008.
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Hot on the heels of Microsoft&#39;s reigning king, Halo 2, comes the latest time killer, MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf. The sequel to the popular Xbox Live launch title is in the bag and will be in store shevles December 28.
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Sony introduces two impressive virtual worlds that let PS3 owners hang out and be creative. Chris Kohler reports from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
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Video games are usually a solitary pastime. But that doesn't mean that gamers are anti-social misfits, any more than readers, knitters or crossword solvers. We have friends, siblings, spouses and kids, and when we're not off saving the world on our own, we enjoy playing games with our loved ones.
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Video games with online components or multiplayer capability bring in much more revenue than stand-alone games.
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By Clint Cooper, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.  Dec. 19--Talk about getting up close and personal with your video game.
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Buddy, can you lend a thumb? MySims, Rune Factory and Drawn to Life give gamers a chance to play the selfless card.
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Halo 3's launch marks a milestone on the journey of video games from niche hobby to cultural phenomenon. Yet those who don't play can be dismissive. Can the myths be laid to rest?
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Word over at Penny-Arcade is that Mike and Kara are playing WoW again. My wife and I have also recently gotten re-hooked on the game. Could this mean a renewed interest in the conflict between Panda Attack and the Penny-Arcade Alliance? Considering that there are about 4 Arcadians to every 1/2 of a panda, that means [...]