Cut to the chase: Fable II is a bad game. If you like it, you're a bad person. Consider it the ultimate moral judgment in a game that does little else. This is clearly what the original Fable was supposed to be: a go anywhere, do anything RPG where your choices shape your character and the world around you. At first glance they've succeeded. The levels are larger, the combat is better, and your choices of what to do are more varied and interesting. But this doesn't excuse the obvious lack of polish and thoughtfulness in every aspect.

Consider the opening cinematic: with epic Harry Potter-esque music humming, a sparrow flies through the woods and into the gorgeous city of Bowerstone. It perches on a roof, looks around, and craps right on your character's head. You gain the nickname "Sparrow" and a clear message from Peter Molyneux: I will shit on you. Whatever happened to Will Wright's Pee?

"Sparrow" is a beggar child in a world Charles Dickens would have found oppressive. Your older sister runs you through an hour of tutorials only to be shot and killed. You are merely shot and tossed out a tower. The long fall, an old video game cliché, guarantees your survival. Nursed back into health by the creepy narrator lady, you emerge from some gypsy camp as a young adult on a quest for vengeance.

If you so choose. Me, I couldn't wait to tell the main quest to go F itself. The writing in Fable II isn't bad, but it's too grandiose for my tastes. They did the absolute minimum to bond you to your sister and I was glad to be rid of her. What you are supposed to bond to is your stupid dog.

You meet the dog in the intro and he stays with you throughout the entire game. The deal is that your dog will turn good or evil depending on your moral decisions. He'll help out in combat and point out treasure and dig spots in the world. You can be nice or mean to your dog, play fetch, give him treats, whatever. The reality is that your dog can't path find worth a damn, has even less meaningful interactions than the robotic townspeople, and is pointless in combat. Though I'll admit that he's spotted a few treasure chests I overlooked.

Puppy's path finding problem is part of a larger epidemic. The townspeople walk around idiotically, sure, but your player is the top offender. It feels like your shoes are dipped in butter. No matter where you are or what you're doing, your character slides around, maddeningly imprecise to control. Your dog has a similar issue: he gets stuck on all sorts of obstacles. Sometimes he'll warp ten feet ahead and run in circles. Or clip through your character, his snout poking through your knee. If I have problems just walking around in a game, I can't enjoy anything else.

Okay, so I did enjoy the combat. It's been decried as a one button mash-a-thon, but if you're bored you're not doing it right. Your character's sloppiness is less of an issue and changing between melee, ranged weapons and magic on the fly is great fun. The only problem is that it's too easy. So long as you can maintain some range between you and your target, fighting is a cinch. You'll also have these strange brawls where a dozen guys surround you but only one bothers to attack at a time. As you mop up small armies by your lonesome, your incredulity meter rises dangerously.

But combat isn't the main draw of Fable II. Go into the cities and target a civilian. They have names, likes and dislikes, favorite places, differing sexualities, jobs, homes, just like real people. They know your name, will congratulate or condemn your accomplishments, and may even fall in love, marry you and have your children. It's unfortunate that all of them feel less human than Commander Data. Ladies, I ask you: would you marry a man if he did a heroic pose for ten seconds and then a little Russian dance? That's all it takes. You can read a book to get more poses, which seems unnecessary until you realize that "have sex" is a hidden pose. That's right: there's no abstinence education required in this world, as nobody has kids until a book explains the mechanics.

You could probably write a feature list for this game that's longer than a traditional review. There are actually jobs in this bloody game. Be a blacksmith, woodcutter or bartender. Own property and rent it out. Buy low and sell high. It's a cliche to say the list goes on, but here it actually does. Sad that the interface can barely keep up. It's slow to respond at all times and lacks many obvious features. Buying an outfit? You won't know what it looks like on your body until money has changed hands. Is that sword better than the one you already have? Who knows? I rented out a house in Bowerstone and couldn't find it in the local map. How are you supposed to play this mini-MMO if the menu is so tight lipped?

Maybe you're supposed to play Fallout 3 instead. It features a wide open world full of possibility, except the only green you'll ever see is on your LCD interface. Post-nuclear Washington D.C., the "Capitol Wasteland," is a sea of gunmetal gray and dog shit brown. I'll happily call it a worthy successor to the 2D Fallout games. Or the most expensive total conversion of the Oblivion engine ever made. While there's not a single texture shared with the land of Tamriel, you still find rooms full of useless junk, a worthless third person view, sub-Mass Effect characters with that lovely neck problem, and identical controls to our last adventure in the Elder Scrolls universe. All it's missing is Patrick Stewart as the voice of your father.

Ah yes. Fallout 3 has the most fascinating character development I've ever seen. It starts with your birth, in a POV shot of you, the infant, coming out of your mother's womb. Your father wonders aloud if you are a boy or a girl. You, via the interface, answer him and choose your gender. Then the "gene sequencer" finishes determining what you'll look like as an adult, and you go through the requisite cheek depth and eyebrow angle nonsense to shape your face. The screen flashes white and you're a toddler, escaping the playpen to read a book called "You're SPECIAL" and pick your stats for strength, perception, endurance and the rest. Then you're ten, receive your Pip-Boy wrist computer and dialogue training. Then sixteen and taking your GOAT exam to determine your starting skills. It takes about as long as Fable II's intro and tutorial, but it feels better and bonds you to your ever-present father.

When you're nineteen he leaves the vault illegally and you go after him. Your first vista of the ruined landscape is incredibly powerful: the earth is dry and cracked, burnt-out cars litter the road, and houses and schools are shattered skeletons. The atmosphere of this awful place makes a powerful statement against nuclear war. Then again, considering how much fun the game is to play, maybe not.

What you do from here is up to you. Find the nearby settlement of Megaton and begin the search for Daddy-o. Wander around idly. Try and reach the Capitol building (hint: the Super Mutants will kill you). There are lots of quests to do, most of them rather complex and allowing for moral flexibility. I ran into a group of so-called vampires and was able to talk them out of converting a captive. I cleared a city of fire ants - literally giant ants that breathe fire - and helped a scientist reverse his awful mistake. Should you tire of mutilating yourself for nutty Minnesotan researcher Moira Brown in Megaton, go ahead and detonate the unexploded bomb in the middle of town. I doubt anyone would notice one more crater.

Combat is essentially the same as in Oblivion, though guns are obviously the big draw now. Your l33t skills are mostly for naught, as your character's abilities determine your accuracy. Returning from the 2D games, amazingly, is the VATS system, which lets you pause time, pick a specific body part and roll the dice to calculate the hit. It feels remarkably natural, like a RPG version of bullet time. Plus, the cinematic camera is great fun when you score a headshot and a cranium goes flying. Perks like Bloody Mess guarantee dismemberment and contribute nicely to the hellish theme.

Buildings in Fallout 3 fascinate me. I love walking through bombed-out towns, reading scraps of signage and picking through people's mailboxes. There's a town on top of a highway on-ramp that seems like a cool place to live. An aircraft carrier has been converted into a floating fortress. Even the Washington Monument is here, and you can take an elevator to the top. You'll spend a lot of time in grimy sewers and subways, yearning for the desolation above. Like the original Gears of War, you can use your imagination to turn back the clock and see what a great place this used to be.

In the second Gears of War you don't need to use your imagination. Believe it or not, the impressive graphics of the original are even better, showcasing huge cities, complex architecture, and clear textures. Everything looks fantastic: the nearly ruined city of Jacinto, the Locusts' underground caves, the abandoned research facility in the middle of nowhere with all the cobwebs. Some places - especially the research facility - look like what other games only wish themselves to be, Fallout 3 included. I stood in front of a bank of tubes full of green liquid and had to remind myself I wasn't looking at concept art. If we still have room to go up from here, the future is going to be awesome.

So long as everyone keeps their mouths shut. Or rather, Dom keeps his mouth shut. His wife Maria is missing and about once an hour you get ten seconds of moping from the testosterone-fueled dope. This game and Crysis Warhead share perplexingly poor cutscene direction. There's no shortage of cool stuff happening: choppers exploding, people fighting, but the sound effects seem muted and the music only swells up to your shins. President What's-his-face delivered an impassioned speech about striking back against the Locust that compelled me to grab a Dr. Pepper until he was done yapping. At least Marcus' action movie grunts are still fun: "oh yeah," "good to go," "gimme that" and other low syllable phrases never get old.

Gunplay feels the same, but the set pieces are constantly changing. March through a hospital. Tiptoe down a tunnel with a giant drilling machine providing light. Go through the belly of a giant worm and chainsaw through its arteries before the room fills up with blood. Disgustingly awesome scenarios await you. I just hope I can resist curbstomping Maria if we find her.

Can I express my joy with something more mature than an Internet meme?

Nope.

Also this one.

Dead Space is a triumph. I'm supposed to say something about how unusual this is for a publisher like EA, but who else (besides Ubisoft) could conjure a title of this quality? THQ can't even make the menus of its off-road racing game Baja as exciting as the powerfully dull Forza Motorsport. If this is a sign of the "New EA" I'd better divert the funds I was going to put towards that Snickers bar and buy a controlling interest. Sorry. Economic apocalypse joke, not funny. I'm glad to see this original idea and attention to detail has rejuvenated what I assumed was a bland Madden and Need for Speed franchise machine. Did I mention I've already finished the Dead Space animated movie, preordered Dead Space 2, and bought all 37 items of Dead Space content from Xbox Live?

May as well say this upfront: Dead Space is not a very scary game, even though it could be a very scary movie. The team clearly studied System Shock 2 and Resident Evil 4, but they made three serious mistakes. First are the monsters: they suck. Every single one looks like a skinned human being whose bones were put in backwards and given tentacles or claws or a spiky tail or something. Some crawl on walls, others leap great distances or charge you, but none have any personality or even a name. Whenever one appears onscreen there's a dramatic noise as if to say, "we're scaring you now!" After the first two times they may as well pull out Candle Jack.

Which brings me to problem two: these horrible monsters have taken over the gigantic "Planet Cracker" spaceship Ishimura, and job #1 under Monster Captain Fn'Gaaah is to leap out of the ventilation and try to scare the player. They don't roam the halls, guard certain areas, or even spawn from a nest. They just appear when you complete an objective or walk far enough into a room to trip the invisible wire placed by the developer. Then ugly flesh pile #23,782 bursts through a fan and goes "fngaaah!" before he's cut to ribbons. It's sad, really. The cheerful, talented, hard working people of the Ishimura were cut down to make room for these uninteresting blobs of flesh. Imagine a slow-moving version of The Flood from Halo on every single level and weep for a Bioshock Splicer.

Problem three is the protagonist, Issac Clarke. I don't mind that he's a breathtaking non-entity as talkative as Gordon Freeman, but the secondary goal of finding his girlfriend is completely hollow. You see a frightened transmission from her during the opening scene and then nothing for six hours of gameplay. When your commander "motivates" you by mentioning that Nicole may still be alive, I had to look in the manual to remember who he was talking about. The player has no emotional connection to this straw woman. If it was Alyx Vance on that ship I'd be raring to go. Even Ashley Graham created more compassion than this chick. Then again, considering how shallow Issac is, they're probably made for each other.

Maybe I'm making it sound dull. You will get the willies during most of Dead Space regardless of the bland beasties. The lighting is spooky without being Doom 3 dark, the ship creaks and groans ominously, and you'll hear snatches of someone chanting evilly in Spanish, perhaps summoning the space devil. Traditional audio logs are augmented by text and video logs, all well written and superbly acted. The two surviving crew members of your repair ship mean more to you than a dozen Nicoles (which still isn't a lot). If the monster design and placement were fixed it would be pant-wettingly awesome.

But enough complaining. I love Dead Space so much I can forgive its un-scary monsters and uninteresting love interest. There is a lot of real innovation and all of it is good. For one, I can take out my frustration with the monsters in a very exciting way. Your guns née cutting tools - which are uniformly excellent, by the way - can and should cut off the limbs of the aliens you encounter. Don't shoot the chest or even bother with the head. That'll just piss 'em off. Instead, aim for the arms, legs or tentacles. EA dubs it "strategic dismemberment": chopping off limbs reveals a new method of alien locomotion and kills them quicker. Whoever did the animation for this game deserves a medal.

Issac himself animates and controls perfectly; no other word can describe it. There's no quick turnaround button, but since you can walk while shooting, you don't need it. Moving your character through the world should be a game's first priority, but I can't think of a third person shooter that controls as naturally as Dead Space. He even turns his head when watching videos or browsing the holographic interface. Compared to The Force Unleashed, this is complete immersion.

What a delight it is to see a revolutionary user interface in one of my favorite genres. There is no HUD. Issac's health is the green tube on his back, and his ammo count appears floating above each weapon when he readies it. When you press the menu button your inventory appears as a hologram in front of the character. Rotate the camera and you can even see it from behind. We've never experienced anything like this. Of course, you'll have trouble viewing the menu in confined areas, and the "spine as health meter" is apparently a fashion mandate in this universe. Doesn't make much sense unless everyone has a floating camera two feet above their head, but whatever.

For all its other qualities, Bioshock didn't do much with the fact that it was set in an undersea city. You never had rising water, swimming, or air supply issues. Dead Space is very glad to be in space. You'll occasionally enter areas of vacuum where limited breathing keeps you on your toes. There are also zero gravity sections of the ship, allowing Issac (and the monsters!) free rein over the floor, ceiling, and walls. Put the two together and you get breathlessly intense combat. Killing aliens and watching their corpses spin gently through the void spurting blood is just delicious.

There's also stasis and kinesis, borrowed from Max Payne's bullet time and Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun. The developers have mixed it up a bit: stasis only slows down one monster at a time, and kinesis is practically useless. For the fast monsters stasis is a godsend, letting you carefully sever limbs and conserve ammo. Kinesis is used for puzzles and moving tables and chairs out of your way. While you'll find explosive barrels scattered about, there's not enough of them and barely any room to throw them. It's amazing that the central conceit of Max Payne can be turned into an ancillary feature of a modern game. I wonder if strategic dismemberment will show up in Grand Theft Auto 5.

Words fail to express my joy over this game. The graphics are beautiful, the ship design is superb, and the frame rate stays steady throughout the entire game. In more than a few places I had to force myself to move forward, the fear was paralyzing. I don't mind the frequent save spots or guided lines on the ground. They're optional and fit within the universe. Plus, it looks like EA realized that times are changing and it's acceptable to hold the player's hand if he wants to be held.

Not a problem over here. My hands are locked in the shape of an Xbox controller.

Give Mega Man 9 to a child and let him play it for a month. You'll end up with either a gaming prodigy or precise numbers on the stress of a controller cable as it constricts a human trachea. Capcom made this game because it loves its old gamers, and we scream for more as their cat 'o nine robots flails our dignity into a bloody, pixelated mess. No one designs a game this difficult by accident. It must have taken countless play testing sessions to expose humanity's weaknesses. What horrors the Quality Assurance team must have suffered! Was Auschwitz unavailable? The ledges, timings, and attack patterns are designed to unwire Homo sapien’s conditioned response to a platform shooter.

One of the problems with a throwback game is that it tends to hit you in the face. You can’t have a full serving of nostalgia without some unfortunate side effects. For example, which robot master do you take out first? Who knows? Try ‘em all and see which one you can actually reach. I feel like a velociraptor testing for weaknesses in an electric fence. Once the weakest link is broken you’re “free,” but what then? Not only do you have to reach another of the eight robot masters, you have no idea if it’s the right one. Best consult GameFaqs, the modern equivalent of Nintendo Power.

I’ve conquered Galaxy Man and Jewel Man after six hours of controller-snapping frustration. My entry point for the Mega Man series was the third one, and there’s no way it was this hard. I’ll forgive them the silly robot progression, but there’s a thin line between a challenge and a suicide mission and they’ve overshot it by a mile. Scattered along that miserable road are flecks of blue metal.

Warhammer Online has ceased to be interesting. I wonder if it’s the structure: the game is so similar to World of Warcraft in terms of questing that I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new. Of course, the games that do try something new, such as Age of Conan, are awful because they screw up the game mechanics. What would be nice is a peacetime hook, like meaningful player housing or the democracy of A Tale in the Desert, alongside visceral, bloodthirsty combat. Not getting my hopes up.

I’m proud to say that I actually got somewhere in my game. Now there is a character that walks along the screen, collides with objects, and is tracked by the camera. Going from a stateless language like ColdFusion to the what-are-you-doing-this-very-second game programming mentality has been a tough switch. Garage Games’ Torque engine (the crappy 2D one) is a pleasure to use, once you figure it out. Until then you may as well play Mega Man 9.

My list of pointers from last year includes getting a girlfriend. No luck there, but there's still fun to be had. Maybe I'll actually spring for a Space Needle visit this time. Or find some nook in Seattle that I missed last time. Or hell, even take a bus to some other nearby city and wander around there. I feel aimless.

Maybe shopping is the answer (cue horrified gasp from mom). Anybody want any interesting souvenirs? Or any uninteresting ones? I'm all moved into Sephiroth's house and we're having a swell time. I don't feel like I should be driving a thousand miles and flying six thousand more.

Then again, what else am I gonna do? Work on The Villain?

Heh.

Some thoughts:

• Final Fantasy IV on the DS is bad. I love the original more than anyone, but they've done terrible things to it. It's in 3D now, which means the charming hand-drawn art is replaced by blocky polygons. The frame rate is unacceptable. Combat is hard: not because they've ramped up the encounter rate or monster durability, but because the timing has no rhythm. Even the inferior port on the Game Boy Advance was better than this. Plus, the dialogue is awful. You can complain all you want about the voice actors, but they're forced to recite some horrific Renaissance Fair wannabe garbage. At least the superior plot is still intact.
• Gunbuster is excellent. There's two series, six episodes each, and they form a wonderful arc. The second Gunbuster is directed by the FLCL people, another of my favorite shows, so I'm in hog heaven. Giant space robots, absurdly epic battles and perfect imperial marches from the original Gunbuster? Oh, kill me now, people. The ending had me crying, it was such a beautiful shock. I get misty even thinking about it.

Moving next week. What do you do with bulk garbage if you're in an apartment? I've got a dozen bamboo logs I don't want to carry around anymore, plus posters and other junk. Will Goodwill really take anything you give them?

Imagine a book that kills people. Write someone's name in it, picture his face, then wait 40 seconds until he dies of a heart attack. Works on anyone, at any range, every time. This is a decent premise and is executed very well in Death Note, a kind of parallel universe Fate: Stay Night. Instead of Shirou Emiya, the stupidest man on earth, who manages to come out ahead as he dawdles and dithers, we have Light Yagami: honor student, smug and smarmy owner of the titular book. Despite his massive brain and superior reasoning skills, Light paints himself into a corner. He's been murdering enough people to arouse the suspicion of the police, and decides to shake the detective on his tail by murdering him. Sigh. When all you have is a hammer, you begin to visualize every anime character's face as a nail.

Doesn't this sound squeamishly like every teenager's fantasy? Light goes through the thought process you or I might consider when assuming such a responsibility: who gives you the right to choose who lives or dies and blah blah blah. Using the power of mental thinking, or at least market differentiation, Light resolves to use the Death Note to kill bad people and make the world a better place. Or so he believes. Light's "bad people" are criminals (and suspects!) who are unfortunate enough to have their face broadcast on national television. He kills them in their prison cells, while they're taking hostages on TV, or if they try to rape a girl outside a convenience store. I suspect "due process" is the only topic for which this genius ever received a B.

Research is another of Light's neglected skills. Not one to pour over court cases and review evidence and witnesses, he relies on TV and newspapers to find the names and faces of bad people to kill. I dread the day he tires of those sources and turns to Digg. There doesn't even appear to be a minimum offense that earns you the death penalty. If society deems you evil, you're a goner. How many of the falsely imprisoned have fallen under Light's pen?

We'll never know that tragic number, but we do know a lot about the supernatural origins of the Death Note. It comes from the Shinigami realm, a sort of demon-infested afterlife wasteland. Ryuk the demon gets bored and drops the notebook in the human world to see if causes anything interesting to happen. Gee, I think it might. Invisible to the rest of the world, Ryuk follows Light around apparently for giggles. Munching happily on apples, you might the demon was visiting an old college buddy for all the portentous warnings he doesn't deliver. Light's got the whole thing figured out; all Ryuk has to do is float around and enjoy the show.

The real excitement is watching the police react to this creepy bloodbath. What would you do if scores of people died from inexplicable heart attacks, even if they're criminals? If you're Interpol, you throw up your hands, declare defeat, and turn the investigation over to mysterious detective "L". This is the point where Death Note goes from remotely logical to not even remotely logical. See, Interpol cannot contact L. But they know someone who can, this being somehow different from "able to contact L." Mystery detective L talks to them through voice masking on a laptop and describes his devious plan. That the police agree to it is more fantastic than any dimension traveling demons.

Mystery detective L announces a worldwide broadcast for the specific purpose of gaining the murder's attention (known in Japan as "Kira", their pronunciation of "killer"). On live TV, a man named something like "Lucius Langrove" condemns Kira and challenges the assassin to kill him. Never one to back down, Light writes the man's name in the Death Note and calmly watches as he drops dead of a heart attack. Then L's ornate symbol (it's an "L") fills the screen and he announces it's all a sham. The broadcast only occurred in the Kanto region of Japan, where super genius detective L determined the strange killings began. Having determined that Kira is in Kanto, or at least has access to satellite TV and is somewhere on planet Earth, the manhunt condenses to the local police.

Shall we cover the "ends justify the means" methodology by which L intends to capture Kira? Mister Langrove, or whatever his name was, is now dead. Sure he was a death row convict, but his heart attack was broadcast on television. Are the decency standards in Japan that lax? L then announces he's determined Kira is in the Kanto region. We see Kanto shoppers gazing up at the jumbotron, not even slightly alarmed that there's a murderer in their midst. Where's the panic? The lawsuits? And why, oh why, is L shown to be an attractive, androgynous Japanese twenty-something?

A better question might be why Light and L play this idiotic cat and mouse game when they're clearly looking at each other's notes. Light's father is the chief of police, so he hacks into his dad's laptop and can see what L's up to. L, in turn, is a genius detective and guesses what Kira is thinking / doing correctly every single time. Not once does L's theory deviate from what Light himself said five minutes earlier. You'll spend the first disc muttering "oh come on!" as The Infallible Detective and The Uncatchable Killer play Marco Polo with their eyes open.

I could do without L and Light's insufferable smugness, but until Lucky Star disc 2 falls into my lap, this is all I've got to watch. Your pity, I can haz it?

Joel Spolsky was making a point about disabled menu items in applications. Start up Microsoft Word with a blank document and open the Edit menu. Some of the choices (undo, redo, links, etc) are grayed out. You can click them, but nothing happens.

Spolsky believes the menus should look active all the time, but when you click them they should tell you why they won't do anything. Gruber correctly disagrees, saying this would drive users batty. What should happen is that the menu should look grayed out, but with an icon to indicate this menu item is different from every other grayed out menu item. Clicking or hovering over the icon would give the user a brief explanation of what the option does and under what circumstances it would become active.

What bothers me is not that Gruber missed this compromise solution, but that he threw the unhelpful "Windows users are stupid" flag into play. He believes that Spolsky's recommendation is based on the idea that users are stupid. Specifically Windows users, since Spolsky is a Windows developer. Better, says Gruber, to assume users are clever and will experiment with the program to figure out why the menu item was disabled.

Gruber is confusing the user's intelligence with the user's patience. Productivity applications are not games. They are meant to be used to accomplish a task, not explored for enjoyment. When I play Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii and I can't reach a certain ledge, I'll explore the area and experiment with my powers to find a way up. Because I'm doing this for fun, I can press every button on my controller without worrying about what will happen. The game is allowed to be tight-lipped.

Power users and young people like me don't mind mysterious disabled menus. We'll play around and discover because we enjoy it and usually have nothing better to do. But when Dr. Joe Smith, a highly intelligent "curious and clever" senior physicist at Genius Research Center is typing a letter in Microsoft Word, he isn't interested in messing around. He wants to accomplish his task and go home to play with his kids, not the application's preferences window.

Imagine walking down the isle of a supermarket. You spot the box of Fruit Loops you want inside a clear plastic safe with a combination lock. What's the combination? None of the store clerks will tell you. If you're an amateur safecracker this probably sounds like a lot of fun. If you're a mother with two kids jumping up and down next to you, this is a nightmare.

The disabled menu item is the cereal in the safe: you can see what you want, but you have to guess wildly at which number combination will let you get it. The difference in the computer world is that the software developer knows why the menu item can't be selected. He had to write a dozen lines of computer code to tell the menu to gray out that option. Why can't he write a sentence or two to tell the user, in plain language, what conditions would cause that menu item to be available?

The reason is fairly simple: because nobody else does. I'm not aware of a single program that explains why you can't click a disabled menu item. Could there really be nothing in the Mac or Windows APIs that provides for the "disabled with an explanation" menu item?

I doubt there's anyone at Fog Creek Software, much less Joel Spolsky himself, who believes the user is stupid. He likely believes, like all good programmers, that if a program won't let the user perform an action, the program should tell the user why.

Here's the reason I bought a PS3 so many months ago. It's a weird feeling to have the killer app for a system ship so far past the launch date. I imagine to Sony these years were agonizing, but at least they have something good after all the waiting. Metal Gear Solid 4 is an excellent game on many fronts: technologically, artistically, and even conceptually. It pushes past what the standard definition of a game should be. That is, it pushes into the Hollywood realm. Some kind of hybrid between a Splinter Cell-esque sneaker and an X-Files movie, it's hard to tell you're playing a game until the HUD pops up when somebody emasculates Solid Snake.

No, make that Old Snake. Due to circumstances too torturous to describe outside Wikipedia, Snake now looks like an old man. It's about 2014 and the oil economy has given way to the war economy. Private military contractors like Blackwater have effectively taken over the globe and fan the flames of war in third world countries. The UN tolerates this because of the Sons of the Patriots (SOP), a system that acts like DRM for guns, preventing genocide and other atrocities by locking soldiers out of their equipment if they try anything funny. Clearly no one consulted with Cory Doctorow about this, because the bad guy's goal is to take over the SOP system and have a fighting force powerful enough to take over the world. At the point where I am in the game (just past halfway), the bad guy has done so. Whoops. My bad.

Maybe I wasn't sneaking hard enough. There are some strange gameplay choices in MGS4 that don't so much complement each other as counterbalance. You have an awesome stealth suit that can adapt its colors like a chameleon, plus this handy threat ring that shows where the bad guys are. There's also radar and night vision. Sounds like a sneaker's paradise, right? Except for the huge number of guns at your disposal, the enticing Call of Duty firefights that take place around you, and the fact that you can buy tons of ammo even during a boss battle. I chose to sneak most of the time, but it was pretty simple to take out a chopper with a RPG. Which is it, Hideo? Sneak or shoot?

Regardless, you get to play a stealthy pursuit through London and then a Bruckheimer-worthy escape on motorcycle that deserves to stand next to Final Fantasy VII's motorcycle sequence in the halls of gaming history. The boss battles, on the other hand, have been pathetic. I'm playing on normal difficulty and haven't broken a sweat. I feel like I'm doing it wrong, like there's this whole other way to play the game that will lead to better boss resolutions than Drebin giving me a lame sob story about the "hot babe" under the freaky armor. I don't need the colonel to tell me to plug my controller into port 2, and there hasn't been any Snake vs. Tank unfairness (for which I am profoundly grateful). But sometimes it's just boring.

Those times actually do not include MGS4's loooong cutscenes. Seriously. Go make yourself a sandwich. I've played Xenosaga before and I have to say, Xenosaga had much more gameplay on tap. Of course, the quality of the cutscenes is extraordinary: faces look wonderful and lips animate perfectly. The textures aren't 100% crisp and the frame rate fluctuates between 25 and 60, buy you probably won't mind. Overall the graphical detail is somewhere between Halo 3 and Gears of War, which is a nice place to be.

Sadly, there's no mentioning the cutscenes without talking about the voice actors. They are all uniformly talented and passionate about the material. It's just that they are forced to deliver it in the most stilted manner possible. I sometimes talk like this when Sunshine asks me to look something up on GameFaqs and I very carefully recite the steps to unlock something. Imagine an entire game full of people reading strategy guides to each other and you have the new Metal Gear. I also wish that Snake had lost his voice along with his good looks. While David Hayter is a capable voice actor, he's forced to gargle rocks to make himself sound older and instead comes off as a painful imitation of a real senior. Would it have been sacrilegious to find a real old person who can do a good Solid Snake impression? Listening to this guy is like being raped in the ear by a man wearing a sandpaper condom.

Or something like that.

It's hard to define this show. Partly comedy, slice of life, and fantasy drama, it gives off a nice Tenchi Muyo vibe. The timing is razor sharp and the central mystery to the show feels natural and incorporates all the characters. But I worry that it may have started as a hentai game. By the end of the first disc there's just one guy in a town of six women. He doesn't look or act like the generic hentai male lead, but for a broke vagabond he must pack an awful lot of hair gel. A middle schooler runs him down and he recovers and bops her twice on the head, hard. Pursuant to anime law 34.97B, article 2, he has a cold heart that has to melted, but it mercifully happens in the second episode and leaves us with a lukewarm cast to engage in room temperature antics.

Yukito Kunisaki is the travelin' man. Instead of a sensible profession like chimney sweep or guitar playing beggar, Yukito carries a small doll and puts on puppet shows for children. With no strings. "I have a mild telekinetic ability," he confesses, obviously so committed to his quest to not even imagine claiming James Randi's bounty. A bus drops him off in wherever-the-heck-this-is-ville and he's aggressively befriended by Misuzu Kamio. The absurdly long haired blond gives him food, a place to stay, and introduces him to the lovably defective townspeople. Chief among them, of course, is Misuzu herself.

While you get full character names like a mace to the skull, most everything else has to be inferred. Misuzu appears to be fifteen years old and attends remedial high school courses in the summer. Her attention span rivals a gnat, she's exceedingly immature, and loves dinosaurs, whimpering "gao" when she's upset. Looking after her is a single mom who slams her motorcycle into the shed every night and then drains a liquor bottle for dinner. Mother and daughter don't get along very well, possibly owing to their relative poverty.

Can you see why I'm uncomfortable with the idea of having sex with these people? That's not even mentioning the girl with the ribbon on her wrist, the dog Potato, or the emotionally dead girl and her undeniably underage, aggressive companion. They're all fun to watch, but if Yukito laid a hand on anything but their shoulder I'd run for the hills.

Liberty City makes a rough first impression. You step off a boat in the middle of the night, are greeted by your inebriated cousin and have to drive him home through the narrow, butter-paved roads of a nation you've never set eyes on before. Can I go back to the old country and raise goats?

And yet, just as America is the land of opportunity, so is Grand Theft Auto IV the game of opportunity. There is so much to do - and so much of it matters - that the ceaseless cries of "best game evar" begin to make sense. Two hours in, however, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

We can start with GTA's control scheme, which isn't technically bad. It simply overwhelms you, especially if you try and rely on the in-game readout. Every single button is mapped, and all of them perform multiple actions. The left trigger, used for target lock, can be held down halfway for "free look", as though you're using a Wavebird. Firing a gun on foot is the right trigger, but in a car it's the left bumper. Most depressing is how they show this to you in the game. In the pause menu is an Xbox controller surrounded by the usual thin grey lines leading to function lists. These lists change every three seconds. No, really. They're not even cycling between on foot and vehicle controls. Rockstar is actually presenting vital game data in hyperactive animated GIF style. I was stunned; the cell phone interface for missions works great, but did some intern sneak in this truly retarded controller display?

I say the cell phone interface is great, but really it's just simple. Up and down, A to select, B to cancel. You can work it even while driving a car and suffer a realistic level of driver distraction. Sadly, the phone itself is a tiny thing in the lower right of your screen, spitting out low contrast monochrome text. My character has made $14,000 from all the murders and drug deals. I buy thousand dollar suits and body armor by the rackful. Can I please get an iPhone or something?

One upgrade you'll want as soon as possible is a new car. The rides in Liberty City handle so poorly you'll almost want to go everywhere on foot. I spent hours skidding around corners, spinning out, and fiddling with the camera until I got used to it. Everything up to the simulated Mitsubishi Lancer drives like my grandfather's 1984 Pontiac Parisienne. For some insane reason you can also go street racing in this game, an activity painful enough to make you want to slit your throat. It felt like racing shopping carts through Publix with the cast of Jackass at my heels. When you find Mercedes and Cadillac replicas the streets become tolerable. Not good - the best car I've found still drives worse than the starter sedan in Burnout Paradise - but you can get from point A to point B without undue road rage.

Gunplay in GTA is supposedly much improved. I never got very far in the previous ones, but I'm starting to feel like a regular Marcus Fenix now. The cover system works fine, but since enemies can safely blind fire and the cover itself is indestructable the game kind of feels like Full Spectrum Warrior. The guns have a good feel, the recoil isn't punishing and Niko is as calm as Sniper Wolf herself when he gets a rifle. Explosions are big and satisfying, and I've even gotten the hang of shooting out of my car. Easier than using the cell phone, I'm sad to say. My only complaint is that you have to buy body armor often and making a trip to the gun dealer can be a pain. Can't they contract with a dry cleaning delivery service?

My final complaint is that the mini games suck. What you get for bowling, darts and pool would be disgraceful as Flash games, but they make up a large part of your non-murdering activities. Thankfully, Niko is a whiz at all of them. He throws bowling balls straight every time, auto-aligns and hits balls consistently in pool, and throws darts with his sniping arm. I'm finding myself avoiding the social aspect of this game if my "friends" want to engage in sports.

Yes, all your contacts in the city can be your friends, too. Call up the testosterone junkie Brucie and hit a strip club. Catch a genuinely funny nightclub act with your cousin Roman. Sometimes they'll call you, whether you're idling around town or shooting the cops with a duffel bag of cocaine around your waist. Oh, and you can go dating too, thanks to the remarkably deep Internet they built. The world is so rich that it feels like an M-rated version of The Sims.

My favorite open world game of the past few years is definitely The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Even though a lot was scripted and unchangeable, you could still see people walking around from city to city, practicing archery or casting magic spells. The world felt alive, unlike in Assassin's Creed where a woman could be hassled by one set of guards for the rest of her natural life. But GTA4 is the new high bar. People don't just walk around the city aimlessly like in Damascus or Jerusalem. They stop to buy hot dogs. They get on the train. Some of them even jack cars and get arrested by the police! The city feels like a real metropolis, so much that I intend to spend several days just walking around on foot with the HUD off, enjoying the sights and sounds of this digital Big Apple without the smells or the stress. When I'm able to plant trees in Fable 2, my life will truly be complete.

Happily, character and plot are still high on Rockstar's priority list. Niko Bellic is a genuinely likable and sympathetic hero. His descent into the criminal underworld is realistic and well-paced, going from shopkeeper harassment and fist fights smoothly to bodyguard elimination and union struggles. Supporting characters are more than base stereotypes, making every professionally directed cutscene a joy to watch. My favorite is the car dealer Brucie, a buff narcissist who loves to chase tail and take things "to the max, VIP style." He's charmingly obnoxious. Your cousin Roman is obsessed with starting his own business and finding that American dream, as well as the rare American delicacy known as "titty", a word you hear at least fifty times in the first two hours.

I love them all, but I kind of wish I could help out in ways that don't involve murdering people, stealing things or murdering even more people. How much to help that old lady cross the street?

Something's wrong with Fate: Stay Night. I wasn't sure what it was after one episode, so I watched another. Then another. Then another. Then... the disc was over. The production values are so high that you have to shield your eyes and squint to see what the problem is. On the surface the show appears pretentious and arbitrary, but the reality is that it's hardly an anime at all, but rather a fighting game in the guise of an anime. Behold the antidote to Xenosaga: a show where you desperately want the DVD remote to sprout a joystick.

Now, Fate did start out as a game: a hentai game, though it's really not suited to that format. The story revolves around the Holy Grail Wars, which take place every 60 years and involve seven magicians ("Masters") and their summoned heroes ("Servants") battling for control of the Grail. It gets interesting ("needlessly complicated") when you learn that orphaned Servants can pair up with solitary masters and rejoin the fight ("time extended!"). Oh, and Servants can be of different classes, like an archer, lancer, knight or what have you. All you're missing for the full game experience is an onscreen mana counter like in Yu-Gi-Oh.

The last Holy Grail War ended with a glitch. Someone touched the Grail ahead of time and ended up torching half the city. In the wake of the catastrophe is little Shirou Emiya, a boy who grows up under the guidance of Evangelion's Kaji Ryoji and says things like "I want to be a champion of justice" in his senior year of high school. Now for the real surprise: I don't hate him. Shirou appears to be your typical generic male lead, but he's remarkably mature for his age. He remains calm under pressure, helps other people in need and isn't completely flabbergasted by the opposite sex. His only screw-up is agreeing to take part in the Holy Grail Wars.

I can almost follow the kid's logic. Shirou wants to save absolutely everyone who is in danger, and the Holy Grail Wars create a lot of collateral damage. Plus, it's far easier to kill a Master than a Servant, and Shirou's List apparently includes these amoral bloodthirsty mages. Instead of walking away cleanly (he actually had this option!) Shirou plunges himself into the battle to minimize casualties and probably wish for peace on Earth should he touch the Grail. Of course, there is no Fate anime without Shirou taking place, but the sensible kid we're introduced to doesn't look like the fighting type. Maybe he's doing it to spend more time with Saber.

Saber is the heroine Shirou accidentally summons while running for his life. She's a gorgeous blond in the Alice Malvin mold and comes with a suit of plate mail and invisible (for now) broadsword. We don't know much about Servants in the first disc, but Shirou knows even less: he can't use magic to heal her wounds, make her invisible, and is so protective of his guardian that he ends up getting killed for her. Revived by the sexy, sassy schoolgirl sorceress Rin Tohsaka (in the red), Shirou now has to live with Saber and explain her to his older sister and doting junior classmate.

What we have is a promising start. Not a sure-fire winner like Kamichu, but a show that can be enjoyed with less caveats than Karin. The character designs are wonderful - I'd expect nothing less from an ex-hentai title. There's a lot of CGI being thrown around to enhance the battles, and you hear an awful lot of sword/spear clanging from all the medieval weaponry. Sadly, you also have to listen to Shirou forget the facts of life, specifically: you cannot meaningfully contribute to a fight by screaming the names of the combatants.

Sometimes it’s easy to disqualify an anime. It may have an intro song sung by a whiny male artist, feature robot on human dating, or just be an embarrassment to the human race. But usually you have to spend an hour of your life sitting through two episodes to make sure nothing interesting is going to happen. My disqualification du jour is the characters. If I can’t stand the people in the show I kick it to the curb. There are some exceptions: Pani Poni Dash has a huge cast and thus the annoying ones (such as the teacher) are absorbed by the average; and Ninja Nonsense’s tiny ensemble allows the grating Onsokumaru to be softened by Shinobu and Kaede.

Rare cases may actually put their best foot forward, and in Kamichu it’s love at first sight. The first words spoken by Yurie Hitotsubashi are “I became a god” in a quiet, casual voice.  Her friend Mitsue doesn’t believe her at first, but outspoken shrine daughter Matsuri Saegusa defends the new deity immediately. Together they discover Yurie’s powers, help other gods, and interact with the magical creatures that live all around us.

One thing you won’t get in Kamichu is an explanation. They never tell you how Yurie became a god, what those strange creatures are that walk around everywhere, and whether it’s all real or a coincidence. Signs point to “it’s real,” however, as even the ferry operator quickly believes in Yurie’s divinity. I’m fine with this lack of grounding; the last thing you need to worry about in a magical middle school fantasy is somebody’s power level.

For me, the highlight of Kamichu is listening to the auditory details of the voice actresses. Innocent Yurie, dour Mitsue and brash Matsuri emote constantly and adorably. You hear a lot of little squeaks that other shows reduce to one noise (“annoyed grunt”) and I can’t get enough of it. The animation in this little TV series holds up its end, displaying as much personality as big features like Spirited Away. Watch how Yurie descends the ladder, is embarrassed, and then retreats to it. If you haven’t absolutely had your fill of anime that takes place in generic Japanese schools, Kamichu is a rare treat.

Normal shows are ones where I don’t mail the disc immediately back to Netflix after two episodes. Such is Karin, another show taking place in a generic Japanese school, this one featuring a vampire girl (the titular “Karin”). She lives with a family of vampires who, the opening very carefully informs us, only suck small amounts of blood from humans. These vampires prefer blood from people with certain negative personalities, like liars or egoists or those under stress. Your preferred, uh, blood type, is called your blood affinity.

Karin is a bit different. While she sucks blood and has a blood affinity (unhappy people), she can go out in the daytime and is immune to garlic, crosses and running water. The big shock – a genuine surprise at the end of the first episode – is that Karin is a primary a blood discharger. She has nosebleeds that would fill a blood bank. That’s how she ends up bonding with the love interest, Kenta Usui.

My affinity for the show probably has something to do with the fact that it was animated by the folks at JC Staff, responsible for the peerless Excel Saga. Karin is constantly embarrassed, but she has fantastic expressions and will effortlessly go into super deformed mode for a gag. There’s nowhere near the level of audio delights that can be found in Kamichu, but she does her best.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that my favorite part is when Kenta discovers Karin is a vampire. Like another excellent anime, My HiME, the heroine breaks down and starts crying near the start of the series. This is the only emotional release you’ll ever get, except the obligatory “I love you, Male Character” thirty seconds before the end credits on the final episode. It ain’t much, but I’ll take it.

I am not ashamed, however, to admit that I went to the FSU anime convention Freecon last weekend and had a great time. My only other experience with conventions is the 30,000+ juggernaut known as PAX, but that’s primarily a gaming show. This was my first time in an anime con and I’ve suddenly got a taste for it.

The first time I went to PAX I knew I was there for the swag. I circled the convention hall a dozen times and came back with a suitcase full of shirts, buttons and posters: a rich man. In 2007 I went to explore Seattle and stressed my poor little digital camera. Mission accomplished. At Freecon… I didn’t know what I wanted. They had anime viewings, discussion panels, artist alley, dealer booths and a small game room.

I thought I wanted a figurine, but there was nothing from a show I recognized and didn’t despise. I tried to watch some new anime, but – despite the superior selection of JACT’s great anime minds – there was little I hadn’t already seen. The panel I attended was horrible, and not just because it was named “The panel that Man was not meant to attend.” We watched absurdly awful anime from the 80’s and laughed at it. Seemed like a winning formula in Mystery Science Theater 3000, but here… not so much. Imagine thirty people yelling out whatever pops into their head, competing with each other to make the stupidest and least funny remark before some other mental patient says it first. It was nice that you couldn’t hear the show over the cacophony, but both evils were impossible to accept. I left quickly.

Full credit to JACT, however, for the well-run and well-researched hentai panel. I thought I knew what mad sexual depths the Japanese were capable of, but it turns out I had no idea. The black mark on my hand wouldn’t come off for three days, and I cried myself to sleep on Saturday. Bravo.

My favorite was definitely artist alley. Four girls set up tables with their drawings and would even do commissions on the spot. Three themes were prevalent: Invader Zim, Avatar and Kingdom Hearts. Ever wonder what Zim looks like in Sora’s outfit? What’s wrong with y – I mean, wonder no more. I bought two custom drawings from Hihoshi: Mai Tokiha from My HiME and Savannah Vice from my dusty comic The Villain. For a lady no more than 26 pixels high, Savannah turned out great.

I can’t wait to go to another con. Um, just as soon as I can wipe the images of the hentai panel from my brain. Still dirty…