Midlife Crisis, Part 3

The most frustrating thing about having a hobby is that you never really have time for one unless you're unemployed and lonely. For better or for worse, I'm neither. This was the case before I bought my new PC, and it's still the case now that I've gotten most of my games installed on it. There will always be weekends, and I have a few hours of downtime after work each weekday, but it becomes more clear every time a new game is released that I'm going to die of old age before I get to finish every game that I deem worth playing. Such is the price I pay for attempting to have a life on the side.

So far, I've actually spent more time fiddling with my PC than playing games on it. Lately, this fiddling has been the enjoyable kind; I've been installing all the software I need, rearranging my desktop icons like the truly obsessive-compulsive person I am, and more generally setting things up just how I like them. For the first few weekends of my PC's existence, however, I had nothing but trouble.

First, I didn't bother getting a wireless network adapter because a stationary computer should ideally be placed where an ethernet cable can reach it. Unfortunately, I needed the computer to be in another room temporarily. To remedy the situation, I tried using something I already had in my closet — a D-Link wireless USB adapter. It worked pretty well until my network started slowing down or crashing every time I tried to use a lot of bandwidth (i.e., by downloading a Steam game). I'm still not sure what the problem was; maybe there was some kind of incompatibility with the router, or maybe something more complicated was going on. Maybe it was my computer's fault, somehow. Fortunately, I don't really need to figure it out, since I'm using a wired internet connection now and I don't really have any need for Wi-Fi (let alone the D-Link adapter) in the near future.

Other problems included a couple of random blue screen errors (most likely caused by an AMD video card driver which I've updated) and various problems with various games. The original Assassin's Creed, for example, refused to start when I first installed it, and I'm not even sure how I fixed the problem. I'd tried a few things, given up, and turned off the computer, and when I tried launching the game again later, it worked just fine. (Actually, I had to turn on compatibility mode for Windows Vista because I was getting a black screen where the opening cut scene should have been, but that's hardly an issue. As often as compatibility mode fails, it should always be the default first move if an old game does something weird.)

Compatibility mode for Windows 98 / Windows ME was also the initial solution for the Steam version of the original Max Payne, which failed to launch even though the process was visible in the task manager. However, even after the game launched, some of the music was gone and the sound effects were severely messed up. Fortunately, some nice guy created his own patch to fix the problem. It sucks that the original developers of old games like Max Payne aren't willing to invest the time and money to solve these problems themselves (especially when they're still selling these old games alongside their sequels on digital services like Steam), and the amateurs who pick up the slack are true heroes.

I'm reminded of Command & Conquer: The First Decade, a box set of a dozen games from the series. A couple of official patches were released, but not all of the bugs were fixed, so fans started patching it up themselves. The unofficial 1.03 patch, a collection of bug fixes and other features, was absolutely essential for anyone who had this particular Command & Conquer box set. But it's not just the occasional issue with an outdated game that often necessitates a third-party fix.

Now that I have a good computer, my older games don't even come close to pushing the graphics card to its limits, which means most of these games will needlessly run at a frame rate much higher than my monitor's refresh rate. Usually, this just causes screen tearing. In extreme cases, I can even hear what sounds like coil whine, an irritating whistling noise coming from inside the computer (not the speakers). This happens on the main menu screens of F.E.A.R. and some other games, presumably because the computer is able to render thousands of frames per second when there isn't much to display.

Turning on a game's Vsync feature (preferably with triple buffering enabled as well) fixes these problems, but a few of my games don't have a working Vsync feature. Each of the games in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy, for example, has an option for Vsync in the settings, but in all three games it does nothing. It's straight-up broken. The optimal solution would be to force Vsync and triple buffering through the control panel software of ones graphics card, but AMD cards can't do this for certain games on Windows 7, and it's my understanding that both Microsoft and AMD are to blame for that. Even with Vsync set to "always on" in Catalyst Control Center, I was getting stupidly high frame rates in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Then I heard about D3DOverrider, a little tool included in an old freeware program called RivaTuner. It's made to enable Vsync and triple buffering in software that's missing one or both options, and it works like a charm. Despite S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s broken Vsync feature, and despite Catalyst Control Center's inability to fix the problem, D3DOverrider gets the job done. Now I'm getting a fairly consistent 60 frames per second, instead of hundreds of frames in-game and thousands of frames on the menu. No more vertical tearing and more no quiet-but-irritating coil whine.

That other first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe, Metro 2033, has its own share of issues, namely that a lot of useful options don't show up in its menu and have to be toggled on or off by editing a few configuration files in Notepad, and it also appears to have a broken Vsync feature. In this case, not even D3DOverrider appears to be solving the problem. Fortunately, the game's poor optimization means that it doesn't always exceed 60 frames per second at the highest graphics settings anyway, making Vsync mostly unnecessary. People with more powerful systems might have to keep on looking for solutions.

All of this is pretty frustrating, but troubleshooting is to be expected when playing games on a PC, especially when the games are relatively old and the operating system is relatively new. I guess I should just be glad that most of the common problems can be solved.

"But if only you'd bought a console," some would say, "your games would just work." That's the favorite argument in favor of consoles. They just work. But now that the short-lived phenomenon of backwards compatibility has gone out the window with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, I don't think it's a fair argument. Most of the problems with PC games arise when one is trying to have a nostalgic experience by playing an old game on a new system, and the other problems are usually the fault of careless developers.

I guess we should all be glad that PC games work at all, considering that our "gaming computers" are not standardized like all the millions of identical Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. Since I'm not a game developer, I can only imagine how difficult it must be to ensure that a game is going to work consistently on so many hardware configurations. Maybe I shouldn't be so upset that games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. have a few broken features, or that games like Max Payne continue to be sold without being updated for the current version of Windows. On the other hand, it's harder to forgive professional developers for an imperfect product when presumably amateur developers are able to correct the imperfections without being paid.

Update: It seems that, since I originally wrote this post, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was actually updated with a frame rate cap of 60 fps. I'm shocked that such an old game was actually updated, to be honest, but apparently some people with expensive computers were burning out their video cards by leaving the game paused (thereby allowing the game to run at hundreds or thousands of frames per second for long periods of time). Terrifying.

Midlife Crisis, Part 1

I've been wanting a new PC for a while. In fact, I've wanted one ever since I first played F.E.A.R. back in 2005. The game was fantastic, but the computer I was using at the time was only decent, perhaps good, but not great. Those maximum graphics settings were pretty far out of reach; I think I had to settle for medium. (The horror!) Still, I was an optimist. I simply told myself that, someday, I'd have a computer that could easily run the game on the highest settings.

Of course, that wasn't exactly a promise to spend lots of money. I figured correctly that I wouldn't be getting a new computer for several years, and I knew that even a relatively inexpensive PC in the ambiguously distant future would be far more powerful than what I presently had. Then again, when investing in a new PC, one might as well invest enough to play contemporary games on the highest settings as well. So, whether I knew it or not, I was telling myself that someday I'd blow a bunch of money on an expensive toy.

It wasn't until about a year ago that I started to think more seriously about it. By this time, the personal computer had truly become my video game platform of choice, and the machine I had been using for years was starting to show its age, particularly with some of the more recent games. (I suppose I should be surprised that any of these modern games worked at all on such an old system, which had only been given a few small upgrades over the years). Although I'd only encountered a couple of games that simply refused to work at all, it was clear that it was time to move forward.

After some quick research, I decided that $800 would be a sufficient budget for a replacement. I just didn't know what to buy. My old PC had originally been a family computer not purchased by me, so I didn't know much about how to shop for a computer, let alone parts for a custom build. Of course, figuring this out doesn't really take a whole year. If I'd gotten my act together, I might have been done with the whole process by last Christmas, but I procrastinated. The holidays (and then spring and then summer) came and went before I got around to doing the research, setting aside the money, and making the purchase.

At this point, I could just buy one of the new consoles that are coming out later this year, but I've fallen out of love with consoles in general ever since I started playing shooters with a mouse, namely F.E.A.R. and its expansions. (I don't think I can ever go back to thumb sticks for anything requiring precision. Sure, consoles are still great for any genre that really does play better with a gamepad, but you can play those on a PC with a USB gamepad anyway.) Besides, very few of the games I've wanted to play over the past eight years have actually been console exclusives. Enough of them have been released for Windows that, throughout the lifetime of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, I've been content to keep playing on the computer I already owned instead of buying new hardware. Now that I have another opportunity to get on the console bandwagon, I don't think that's going to change.

I can certainly see the appeal in the idea of standardized hardware, though. I've been agonizing for weeks over how best to balance the money I'm spending with the performance I'll get, but console owners don't need to make these tough decisions. I can also see the appeal in the exclusive games if there are enough of them to make a difference. However, I don't want to be stuck on the same hardware for the next eight years with no possibility of upgrading, and I don't really want enough of those upcoming console-exclusive games to justify the purchase of any particular console.

So, a number of weeks ago, I started actively researching PC parts, reading reviews of mid-to-high-end graphics cards and asking for advice in various places. One of those places, for better or for worse, was 4chan. It's worth noting that, on the site's /v/ and /g/ boards, the standard response to any question about PC building is a link to a guide called Logical Increments. I was wary about taking too much advice from a single popular source without going any further down the rabbit hole, but it seems to be a competently written guide, and a good starting place for anyone in my position. As of now, I highly recommend it, but the nature of the site means it changes constantly. I don't know how good it will be any number of months or years from now, if it still exists.

After some further research (which mostly involved lots of careful comparison of benchmarks, reviews, and prices), I did ultimately take quite a bit of advice from Logical Increments, getting a processor and a motherboard presently listed on the site's "Superb" tier and a graphics card which was until recently listed on the "Excellent" tier. Then I added some memory, some storage, a power supply, and a case, as well as an inexpensive optical drive (because I still have plenty of old games on discs), and I was done. Here's the breakdown:

CPU — $194.99
MOBO — $129.99
RAM — $68.46
HDD — $59.99
GPU — $209.99 (before $20.00 rebate)
PSU — $74.99
CD/DVD — $14.99
Case — $59.99

Disregarding sales tax and applying the rebate, this puts my subtotal at $793.39. Most of the components were cheaper than they'd been in previous months, according to their respective price histories, so it looks like I got a decent price overall. Unfortunately, the effect of sales tax (usually a negligible annoyance) was a real bummer.

I made my purchases from three stores — Amazon, Newegg, and NCIX — and while NCIX didn't seem to add any tax to my subtotal, Amazon and Newegg both did. (I think the current rule for New Jersey, though I believe it's going to change soon, is that an online store must charge sales tax if it has a physical presence within the state, so I can only assume that NCIX does not.) After applying the 7% tax to everything but the CPU, RAM, and HDD, my $800 build was suddenly much closer to $850, which I can only bring down to around $830 if I do the mail-in rebate. I'm not sure if I will, though, because I've heard these rebates tend to require that you send in the proof of purchase that is also required to get a replacement under warranty, and I don't want to jump through too many hoops if I need a replacement part. So $850 it is, until further notice. If sales tax had been applied to everything, I'd be looking at $870 (or $850 after the potential rebate), so I guess I should be glad for that.

Did I really get a good deal? I'm sure someone will tell me I didn't. After deciding on my parts, I could have waited months to get the best possible deal on each individual component, but I felt it would be best to buy them all at once. (Keep in mind that I do want to test them all before any of them are too old to return.) I had already considered prices when choosing my components in the first place, and I'd have to do that work again if I waited long enough for prices to start fluctuating away from the low price/performance ratios I'd deliberately sought out, so I just bought the whole list as soon as I was ready. Sometimes prices go down if you wait, but sometimes they go up, and I can't see the future.

Yet, even if I did get a good deal on these parts, I can't help but wonder if it was simply a bad time to buy a PC, given next month's launch of Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The next-generation (and soon-to-be current-generation) consoles are as close as they'll ever be to state-of-the-art. Although this PC will easily crush the outgoing generation in terms of performance, it won't have such a strong lead for very long. It's also worth noting that many games released for Windows are actually ports that were optimized for consoles, so the performance on a PC might be worse even if the console has weaker hardware. Now that consoles are suddenly getting more powerful, I can only hope my PC will be ready for whatever I throw at it.

We also might see further price drops in the AMD graphics card I bought, since a new round of AMD cards have just been released. Everything I bought might be cheaper when Black Friday comes around, as well. Waiting for the holidays might be the best time-for-money trade-off I could have made. However, my experience with Black Friday sales is that the deals aren't as good as people think and everything sells out fast, so I can't even be sure that waiting for late November would have helped.

In any case, there's no sense in worrying about it now. I don't spend money on myself very often, so if the computer works and I enjoy using it, I'll call it a win. I'll admit that $800 plus tax is a pretty hefty price tag, though, especially when I haven't included the peripherals. (For the immediate future, I'll be using the monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse from the old PC.) I haven't even included a copy of Windows (since I'm still trying to decide between 7 and 8).

To put things in perspective: My brother just got a new laptop for around $1000 (and my computer will play Crysis a lot better than his), but the cost of that laptop probably includes an extended warranty. The cost of mine doesn't. I'm putting my faith — perhaps too much faith — in manufacturer's warranties, which might screw me over if one of my parts dies two years down the line. Buying additional protection plans separately for each important component likely would have pushed my budget over the edge. But at least I'll be able to replace a single part without replacing the whole rig. I'm not sure if my brother, or any console owner, can say the same.

All that really concerns me right now is the Sapphire GPU, since I've heard that Sapphire's customer service is somewhat lackluster. On the other hand, I've heard some good things about the quality of their cards. I guess I'll just have to hope mine isn't defective; if it is, I'll just have to hope I can arrange for a new one without too much trouble. If worst comes to worst, and my new PC explodes after a month, I'll just hope I'm selected for beta testing one of the prototype Steam Machines, preferably the one with a GTX Titan. (Please?)

In times like these, the most comforting thought is that what's done is done; my PC is ordered and will be arriving in many parts shortly. At least, that's what I hope. Thanks to the free shipping from Amazon, I might not get to put this beast together until the weekend before Halloween. In the meantime, I'll keep on playing old games and some indie stuff from Humble Bundle. The Binding of Isaac, by the way, is a fantastic game. I regret that I didn't get around to it sooner.

Jumping in Slow Motion: The Game

Last night, I finished Max Payne. (The first one.) It took me a while, because my playing time has been cut drastically by that irritating thing called employment, but I finally finished it.

I'd previously played both games in Remedy Entertainment's newer series, Alan Wake, so I was confident in the developers' ability to create an entertaining third-person shooter. Obviously, though, the two franchises don't really have much in common aside from the presence of firearms, the fact that each game is named after its protagonist, and the amount of time you'll spend looking at the back of each protagonist's head.

Max Payne, for example, is insanely, ludicrously, hilariously violent. It was even a bit awkward, I must admit, to start playing this game less than a week after a particular mass murder which called into question (for some) the effects of violent video games on young people. Personally, I don't think games like this one are harmful at all, but the subject was still on my mind. This is exactly the type of game, I thought to myself, that would start a misinformed media frenzy if it were ever discovered in the bedroom of some kid who had gone and shot a bunch of people.

If someone told me that Max Payne, of all games, might desensitize players to violence and make them more likely to commit violent acts, I'd respond that the game is just too damn silly to have that kind of effect on people. The game doesn't take itself very seriously at all, and while some might say that's part of the problem, there's just no way that anyone could get real ideas about harming people after playing a game in which most of the shooting is done while jumping in slow motion. If a killer in the making were going to get ideas about how to commit a mass murder from a video game (which is unlikely), or if such a person actually wanted to train for such an act using video games (which is extremely unlikely), he or she would probably be found playing a more realistic shooter.

Max Payne has absolutely no respect for the concept of realism, and everything (including the violence and the motivation for violence) is consequently so tongue-in-cheek that, to me, this particular shooter almost seems like a parody of its own genre. (It some parts it even becomes a parody of itself.) Like the gameplay, the story is pretty grim, in a lot of ways — it involves drug use, corruption, government conspiracy, and a ton of murder — but there's enough humor and absurdity in the telling of that story to lighten the mood, just a little, if you're paying attention. More importantly, the ridiculous, contorted expression on Max Payne's unmoving face destroys the serious tone of the opening cinematic. I couldn't hold it in; I had to laugh. In fact, that happened a lot throughout the game, not necessarily because it was meant to be funny but because the stuff happening on my screen was so insane.

The type of carnage that occurs throughout Max Payne is only a couple of steps beyond cartoon violence. There's a bit of blood spray and some flailing when the bad guys fall down, but that's it. They even stay in one piece when they're blown up with grenades, which makes it more hilarious than tragic when a thug tries to toss a grenade at you and ends up killing himself. I should also mention that Max Payne isn't the only one with a goofy face. All of this is due in part to the outdated graphical capabilities of the game, but the developers clearly weren't aiming for realism in any case. The only hint of realism throughout the entire experience is that the protagonist is by no means invincible. If you're playing for the first time, prepare to watch Max Payne die over and over again, sometimes from a single gunshot without any warning.

Part of what made the game interesting for me is that the main character, though certainly a bad ass, is pretty fragile for an action hero. I played through the game on the easiest difficulty setting (because the others are initially locked), and the game still killed me plenty of times. Unlike some other video game protagonists, Max Payne isn't exactly a bullet sponge... and unlike some other video game villains, the ones here aren't always terrible at shooting, so you won't be feeling so great if one of them manages to shoot first. You can fill up your health bar by finding painkillers and eating them like candy — another aspect of the game which is so absurdly unrealistic that it's hard to see it as anything but lighthearted humor — but the painkillers don't work instantaneously. If you start getting hit with bullets, and the guy who fired them isn't already dead, you're in big trouble, and you'll probably be watching your own slow-motion death before you can head for cover.

The reason Max can survive to the end of the game, taking down hundreds of heavily armed bad guys along the way, isn't because he's tougher. It's because of the advantages that you, as a player, have over the game — actual intelligence, the ability to quicksave and try again when you die, and the ability to know what's coming when you do so. The game is very scripted, so it's rather predictable. If you immediately die when you walk into a room because some thug with a shotgun was waiting or you on the left, you'll know to turn left the next time you enter that room. If you get blown up by a grenade that comes flying around the corner as you walk down a hallway, you know that the same grenade will be thrown in the same spot the next time around.

Since playing the game for the first time without dying over and over again is virtually impossible, you'll have to rely heavily on quicksaving. In some places, you'll only succeed through trial and error. You can always improve your reflexes and practice your aiming, but you'll win by knowing where the bad guys are and by turning to shoot them before they appear.

The player also has the ability to jump in slow motion, shooting in mid-air, and this is the game's big gimmick. Having trouble with a particular gun fight? Try using bullet time. While it certainly isn't the end-all game-winning move, as the slow-motion feature in F.E.A.R. was, it's still pretty useful. Then again, the game was designed around it, so it's really all but necessary if you don't want to be hopelessly outgunned. Like quicksaving, it's a crutch, but it's a crutch you'll probably need to lean on in order to beat the game. If you refuse to use those crutches, you'll be putting yourself through a lot of unnecessary punishment.

In any case, despite the occasional frustration, Max Payne was a pretty interesting experience. To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect to like it very much, for some of the game's most noticeable attributes are associated today with bad game design — the scripted enemy behavior, the excessive reliance on a single gameplay gimmick, and what might be called artificial difficulty (in the sense that the player will die frequently through no fault of his or her own and must rely on save scumming to progress). But the game is still fun, in its own way. Furthermore, while much of the game is a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek embrace of senseless ultra-violence, Max Payne is still known for its great writing.

The plot isn't the most imaginative, but the protagonist's monologues — though a bit too heavy on the metaphors — are very well done. They affect the mood and the atmosphere of the game in a way not often seen in shooters, and the neo-noir graphic-novel style storytelling makes the game truly unique.

Obviously, the game is pretty outdated now, so I'm not sure how strongly I should recommend it to the average player. You certainly won't see the beauty in this 2001 game's ugly graphics if you can't compare them to the uglier graphics of the late '90s and beyond. But I hope new and future fans of the series will keep returning to this game despite its visual shortcomings. The franchise is still alive with the past year's release of Max Payne 3, and it's always best to play an entire series in order rather than simply skipping to the newest game.

Then again, I haven't yet played either of the Max Payne sequels, and I honestly can't say whether the latest installment bears any resemblance to the original.

The Appeal of Standardization

For a while now, I've been planning to buy a new personal computer, because the one I have is getting rather old. The problem is that I just don't know very much about building one. I'm not a gaming PC expert, despite the fact that the PC has been my platform of choice ever since I learned that shooters are fun and that playing them with anything but a keyboard and a mouse is like eating tomato soup with a fork. It's wrong.

So when I set out to build a good computer, I didn't really know where to start. I'd like to think I'm not a complete idiot when it comes to computers; I'm quite good at using them once they're assembled and turned on. I even know what a central processing unit is. What I don't know, however, is exactly which one I should buy, given my (arbitrarily chosen) price range.

The same goes for the graphics card. Being a clever guy doesn't allow me automatically to know how good a given graphics card is (in terms of manufacturing quality and qualitative performance) just by looking at the name. I could look it up and read some reviews — and I've been doing that, actually — but there are hundreds of any given computer part from which to choose, and with any source of information I might come across in researching the topic, there are always the questions of accuracy and bias. I'm not inclined to blindly believe everything I read or watch on the internet, especially when there's money involved.

And there is money involved. Since I'm looking to get a computer that's actually up-to-date (i.e., current games playable at reasonably high settings), I'm expecting to spend between $700 and $900 on the whole package. To put it bluntly, a "gaming PC" is not the cheapest toy you can buy. It's several times more than what you'd currently pay for an Xbox 360, for example... but, of course, we do have to keep in mind that the Xbox 360 is a seven-and-a-half-year-old console — yeah, it's that old now — and we can safely assume that my (hypothetical) new PC would be useful for things other than playing games. If I wanted seven-and-a-half-year-old PC hardware, I'm quite sure I could pay around the current price of an Xbox 360 to get it.

In other words, you get what you pay for, so I won't make some blanket statement about PC gaming being more or less cost effective than the console alternatives. (It wouldn't even mean much, since most so-called "PC gamers" play on computers that weren't built or purchased with video games in mind.) The most legitimate reason to prefer consoles over the all-mighty personal computer is to avoid a problem that I'm discovering first-hand: buying a PC is harder than buying a console. Even if you're buying a (potentially overpriced) pre-built computer rather than customizing the perfect rig one piece at a time, it's not like choosing between an Xbox and a PlayStation. There are more choices and more decisions to make.

Consoles are pretty standardized. Everyone with a given console has the same experience, and each of them know that any games they buy for that console are going to work out of the box, exactly as well as they're supposed to work, with no effort. Meanwhile, PC owners tend to prefer the PC exactly because that standardization does not exist. Everything is customizable, everything is personalized, and you can spend as much or as little as you want depending on your needs. Getting games to work can sometimes be more of a hassle, but it's nothing a computer-literate person can't handle.

This is why some PC enthusiasts are dismayed at the announcement that Valve, the company in charge of the popular and influential digital distribution (and digital rights management) platform known as Steam, is making it's own "console." At first, it was just a rumor, which was quickly denied, but now it's been confirmed. (Also read this because Forbes is pretty great.)

This so-called "Steam Box" isn't really going to be a console in the traditional sense; presumably, it's going to play PC games. Then again, I'm betting it will only play PC games purchased from Steam, and Valve boss Gabe Newell has already said the hardware will be a "very controlled environment" (and that anyone who doesn't like it can stick to regular old computers), so what's the real difference between this and a console? I mean, aside from the fact that its library of games will have existed for far longer than the console itself, and the fact that people who want to play Steam games can continue to do so on a regular PC if they so choose.

The PC gaming community is split right now between those who can't wait to buy a "Steam Box" and those who simply don't see the point in owning one. After all, just about everyone who uses Steam already plays games on a PC. (The community is also divided over the issue of whether this kind of PC/console hybrid is good or bad for the future of PC games, which might be designed specifically for specialized console-like computers like this one, if other companies follow Valve's example.) Truth be told, we don't know what kinds of features the "Steam Box" will have. All we know for sure is that it will plug into a TV and that it will work with some sort of gamepad... but a PC can do both of those things, too. Just buy an HDMI cable and a USB gamepad; wired Xbox 360 controllers seem to work well. Even the PC version of Steam is gamepad-compatible now that Big Picture is out of beta.

The idea of a Steam console is still appealing for a lot of reasons. Perhaps some of its support is coming out of ignorance, as not everyone seems to be aware that if you drag your PC out of your bedroom and over to the widescreen TV in the living room, take the HDMI cable out of the cable box and stick it into the PC, and then pull the wired Xbox 360 controller out of the console and stick it into a free USB port, you've effectively turned your PC into a console. (The only downside is that it can't easily be operated with the controller outside of a game or Steam's Big Picture mode, but a wireless keyboard and mouse fixes that right up.) But moving PC gaming to the living room isn't the only benefit. Remember what I wrote about standardization?

People like it. It's why they pay so much for Apple products.

I don't mean to compare Valve to Apple, but if the "Steam Box" is filled with half-decent hardware that can run most of the games on Steam without melting, then buying the so-called console is going to be an easy choice for those who don't want to bother with the difficulties of buying a normal PC — whether that means finding decently priced and compatible parts for a custom-built gaming rig, or narrowing down a million choices of pre-built computers to just one and wondering if it will be able to run that new game without a hiccup. The assumption is that, if you're buying a "console," the games for that console are guaranteed to work.

Buying the "Steam Box" might even be cheaper overall than going out and buying a pre-built computer of equivalent power, since you won't be paying for Windows and all the other things that the "Steam Box" won't have. Getting a Valve-built, Valve-approved console on which to play Steam games is a no-brainer for those in need of an easy solution. The only thing we're left to wonder is why the people who want to buy the Steam Box became "PC gamers" in the first place. Wouldn't they have been happier all along with an Xbox or a PlayStation? Perhaps they only joined the PC side of gaming because Steam itself is already so simple to use.

Unfortunately, simplicity and standardization often go hand-in-hand with restriction, and this isn't something that PC gamers tend to like. (At least half of them don't even like paying for their games.) But regardless of what happens with Valve's upcoming pseudo-console, it's unlikely to damage PC gaming as hardcore PC gamers know it. I think it will, though, give traditional consoles a run for their money. More competition is usually a good thing, and I'm hoping this isn't an exception to that rule.

Sandy & Steam Sale

While a deadly hurricane named Sandy lays waste to the east coast of the United States, threatening to rain all over my favorite holiday (which is now only two days away), Steam has begun its Halloween Sale. Sadly, it lasts only from now until Wednesday, and surely many affected by the storm will be without power for the entirety of the event. I'm still fortunate enough to have power where I am, but the weather has been getting steadily worse since late last night, so that might not last.

For those who can shop online this week, there are some nice discounts. I'm seeing a lot of "-75%" tags. The games currently "featured," however, don't seem to have greater discounts than the other five dozen games on sale. Perhaps the word "featured" just means new or popular, or maybe the featured games are chosen randomly and cycled throughout the sale. After all, the games on the "featured" list make up about a third of the games that are marked down for the duration of this three-day sale.

In any case, you'll want to make sure you check out the "All Halloween Games on Sale" list, located just below the "Featured Games on Sale" list on this page. Otherwise you might miss out something good.

While I'm here, I might as well come up with my own list of noteworthy games, based on my own crazy and possibly worthless opinions. First, I'd like to point out that some of the games on sale are those I mentioned in my last post on Wednesday:

• F.E.A.R. (with its two expansion packs included) is only $2.49, which is just painful for me to look at, since I paid $50 for the game back in 2005, and then bought the expansions separately for at least $30 each. Still, I loved the game so much that I have no buyer's remorse, not even after seeing it go for two bucks and change. Needless to say, I'd argue that F.E.A.R. is worth buying right now, if you're into paranormal first-person shooters. (The rest of the F.E.A.R. series is on sale as well, but I'm not so crazy about those sequels.)
• The Painkiller Complete Pack is going for $7.49. That's a bit more than I paid for the Complete Pack a year ago, but there were fewer games included at the time.) Strangely, only a couple of the games — Resurrection and Recurring Evil — are on sale individually. The result is that buying the whole pack is actually cheaper than buying the first game, Painkiller: Black Edition, alone.
  

  Update: Scratch that. It looks like all of the individual Painkiller games are now 75% off, which means Painkiller: Black Edition is only $2.49. I still think the bundle is a fair price, but if you're unsure of how you feel about this particular brand of first-person shooter, I'd recommend buying only the original game, since most of the sequels are mediocre at best.

• Killing Floor is $4.99, which is normal during any Steam sale, so I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it to get much cheaper. It's also in the middle of its Hillbilly Horror Event for Halloween, which goes until November 6, so all of the zombies are dressed up like... well, hillbillies. It's a lot of fun, especially if you have some friends with whom to team up and play.
• Alan Wake is marked down to $14.99, and Alan Wake's American Nightmare is only $7.49. I've seen them go for cheaper, but you might have to wait until the winter sale for that to happen again.

And a few other things worth mentioning:

• The Walking Dead is down to $14.99. It's not a huge discount, but I've only heard good things about this game, and I've been seriously thinking about adding it to my collection.
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent is currently $4.99, while each of the Penumbra games are $2.49. (Oddly, the Penumbra Collector Pack is $4.99, which is one cent more than the combined cost of the two included Penumbra games.)
• Magicka is $2.49. It's a hilarious game and I love it. I just wish it were better optimized. It tends to run like crap on my computer while much prettier games work perfectly.
• Zombie Driver HD is marked down to $4.99 after a 50% discount. The original Zombie Driver, which I got for $2.49 a while ago, is a lot of fun, and I can only assume that this updated version is at least as good. Unfortunately, it really is just an updated version of the original — not a sequel — so you might want to think twice about getting it if you already have the standard edition. Owners of the original game are supposed to get a 50% discount, but that doesn't seem to stack with the Halloween Sale discount, which is really a shame.
• I wanted to buy Rage, but even with the current discount, it's still $9.99. I'll be waiting a little longer for the price to drop below $5, but I don't expect everyone to be as stingy as I am.
• Each of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games — which are fantastic if you have a decent computer and don't mind installing a couple of bug-fixing mods — are on sale as well: Shadow of Chernobyl for $9.99, Clear Sky for $4.99, and Call of Pripyat for $7.49. (As with the Penumbra series, there seems to be a bug in the pricing of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bundle, which costs one cent more than the price of the included games, Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat.)
• I've been waiting for the Overlord Complete Pack to go on sale for a while, so I just might pick it up now for $4.99. (I've never played it, but it kinda reminds me of a more diabolic Pikmin.)
• The Dead Space games are each $4.99, which seems pretty cool. I've never played them, but you can't go horribly wrong for five bucks. Just make sure you don't buy the Dead Space Pack, since, again, it costs one cent more than the combined price of the individual games. At first I thought this was a bug, but now I think it's just plain carelessness.
• Predictably, the Left 4 Dead series is on sale, as is just about every game with the word "zombie" in the title — and there are far too many to name. Some of them look cute, others look like shovelware. Just beware the deceptive power of tempting discounts on awful products.

I should mention that there are Halloween deals on Amazon and Origin as well. I haven't checked them out in detail just yet, so I can't say whether they're better or worse than the current steam sale, but every option is worth considering. While I might be slightly biased in favor of Steam (because my friends are on it), I encourage you all — as always — to shop around before spending any money.

Games to Play on Halloween

The best holiday is coming up in only a week, and if you're looking to get hyped for Halloween, the only thing better than a cheesy horror movie is a spooky video game. I'm going to list a few of my favorites here, in no particular order.

Of course, the most obvious can go first.

Resident Evil

I'm not sure what to say about the series as a whole. The franchise itself is nothing short of legendary, but I wasn't fond of the prequel Resident Evil Zero, and I've heard bad things about both of the most recent releases, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and Resident Evil 6. This shouldn't be a surprise; any series that stays around as long as this one has is bound to go sour at some point. I did, however, enjoy the hell out of the GameCube remake of the original. It was the first Resident Evil game I ever owned, and on my first playthrough, it scared the crap out of me.

The controls were awful, as they were in every installment in the series prior to Resident Evil 4. The pairing of character-relative controls and fixed camera angles is truly one of the worst things ever to happen to video games — but I have to say that it did, in a pretty stupid way, make the game scarier. Avoiding or shooting a small number of slow-moving zombies probably doesn't sound like a frightening ordeal to anyone who plays the likes of Left 4 Dead, but with such clumsy controls, what would be a walk in the park becomes a nightmare. The character turns too slowly, and aiming for the head involves more luck than skill. The camera angles are uniformly bad, as well. It's frustrating, but effective at making the player feel helpless even with a gun.

What makes Resident Evil most effective, however, is that it doesn't rely on cheap "jump scares" to startle the player. The game is scary because of its expert control of suspense, because you don't know what's around the next corner, and because you don't know how much ammunition you can spare. It's the definitive survival horror, and it does almost everything right. As far as horror games on the GameCube go, the Resident Evil remake is second only to...

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

I've already written quite a lot about Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, another GameCube masterpiece. It's not the scariest game I've ever played — not even close — but it's got a creepy atmosphere, a fantastic story, and some clever gameplay mechanics.

Eternal Darkness is a psychological horror, so it's a bit more subtle and slow-paced than most other horror games, which tend rely on sudden, loud noises and simple shock value to scare the player. It's only going to startle you in a couple of places, and there isn't a lot of blood and gore, but the sanity system will do its best to freak you out in a variety of (occasionally hilarious) ways. More importantly, the game doesn't do a bad job of creating an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

Overall, it's a nice game to get you in the Halloween spirit, especially if you're a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft. And speaking of Lovecraft...

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

I almost didn't include this game on the list, but alas, the power of nostalgia is too great. It's been years since I played it, and I must admit that I never quite got to the end. Maybe I got stuck, maybe it was too hard, or maybe I was so creeped out by my first survival horror experience that I couldn't bear to go on. In any case, I was a lot younger at the time, and I wasn't as enthusiastic about PC games as I am now.

The New Nightmare is the 2001 sequel to the Lovecraft-inspired Alone in the Dark trilogy from the early 1990s — which, unfortunately, I've never had the pleasure of playing. (Or maybe it's more of a spin-off, since another sequel in 2008 apparently retcons The New Nightmare out of existence.) My memory of the plot is somewhat fuzzy, but what I do remember is that the game creeped me out more than a little. While I'm sure the graphics have aged poorly, I'd like to give the game another try, if I can ever find the discs.

The New Nightmare suffered from the same clunky controls that plagued the early Resident Evil games. And, like Resident Evil, it has two protagonists, takes place in a mansion, and involves a lot of puzzles. The similarities are hard to ignore, but there are some differences, namely the replacement of zombies, zombie-dogs, zombie-snakes, zombie-sharks, and zombie-birds with a slightly more creative variety of creepy crawlies, as well as the use of a flashlight to fend off the baddies. Actually, that last part kind of reminds me of...

Alan Wake

I wrote more than enough about Alan Wake in my earlier post on cinematic games, so if you're no stranger to this blog, you're probably aware that I enjoyed the game immensely. The transparently Stephen King-inspired psychological horror/action game earns its place on this list with a spooky atmosphere and a superb story. The two short DLC expansions, truth be told, were a bit weird, and I can't say I really enjoyed the sequel, Alan Wake's American Nightmare (of which the only redeeming quality, in the absence of a decent story, is the intense arcade mode), but the original game is definitely worth a try.

Like many horror games, it's not so scary once you get the hang of killing the bad guys, nor is it as thrilling once you know every plot twist and the location of every precious box of ammunition, but the first playthrough will have its share of potentially unnerving moments.

And those bad guys — whom, in the beginning of the game, consist largely of possessed, axe-wielding lumberjacks in the woods at night — can be really frightening. I think it's mostly in the way they move. Even when you dodge their attacks, you can almost feel the power behind every swing. The way they stumble when they miss, and the way Alan ducks out of the way just in time... there's a real sense of momentum that's absent in the awkwardly animated combat of a lot of video games.

Now just wait until you're surrounded by those guys, low on bullets, with a long way to run to the next safe haven. As in any good horror game, simply running away isn't an option. The bad guys are faster than you, and you can only escape them for as long as you can successfully dodge their attacks without running into a corner. At some point, you'll need to turn around and fight. The same is true of...

Killing Floor

Unlike every other game I've mentioned, Killing Floor is primarily a multiplayer game. In fact, you might say it's exclusively multiplayer, since playing the solo mode is essentially the same as going online and joining an empty server, and since playing alone isn't nearly as fun.

Generally, I prefer single-player games, but Killing Floor — a stand-alone game based on a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 — has become one of my all-time favorites, for two reasons. The first is that it's cooperative. Up to six players team up against a horde of computer-controlled zombies, so unless someone makes a boneheaded move that inadvertently gets the whole team killed, there are no hard feelings between human players. For the most part, everyone you'll meet online is rather friendly. The second reason is that, unlike most multiplayer games, Killing Floor requires a lot of coordinated teamwork.

Forget about spooky ambiance and creepy music. Killing Floor is scary because it's hard. The easiest setting is a joke, but anything above that can be a serious challenge, depending on the collective skills of the team. And with the number of zombies in each wave increasing as more players join, there's little room for weak links. You need to be able to count on your team, and you need to keep them alive, because there's no worse feeling than being the last guy alive with a bunch of monsters chasing after you. Killing Floor is one of the least forgiving video games I've played in recent memory, and it's not for the faint of heart. But I love it. The only first-person shooter I've spent more hours playing is...

F.E.A.R.

Some would argue that F.E.A.R. falls flat on its face as a genuine horror game. It's got a somewhat spooky story, and occasionally you'll hear voices or see the ghost of a little dead girl, but there aren't a whole lot of monsters that jump out at you... at least, not for most of the game. But as a first-person shooter, F.E.A.R. excels and exceeds expectations. A horror-themed game doesn't need to make you crap your pants in order to be fun, and F.E.A.R. certainly is a lot of fun.

The enemy AI is very good; while the bad guys occasionally show their stupidity, they do attempt to flank you, and they're pretty good at flushing you out of hiding with grenades if they know where you are. The way they talk to each other while attempting to take you down also adds a lot of realism. The slow-motion feature, while a bit gimmicky, does add a little something extra to the gameplay, and is genuinely useful (perhaps too useful) even in the most dire of circumstances. The "scary parts" are all scripted, but if you're playing on the highest difficulty, the fear of being shot to death should keep you on the edge of your seat through most of the game.

There are two expansion packs and a couple of sequels, if you want more, but I don't have anything good to say about those. The story stopped making sense in the expansions (which were later retconned), and it became downright silly by the end of the first sequel. Also, be advised that the second sequel is meant to be played with two people. While there is a single-player campaign, it's really just cooperative mode without the second character, who mysteriously and nonsensically shows up nonetheless during cutscenes. If you just want to shoot things, go ahead and play the whole series, but don't expect any of the unanswered questions leftover from the first game to be adequately resolved. Speaking of great games with mediocre sequels...

Painkiller

A moderately fast-paced shooter with a demonic theme and an old-school style, Painkiller is easily one of the most solid purchases I ever made on Steam. The "Complete Pack" (which, at the time, included fewer games than it does now) was marked down to $4.99, and the first game alone is worth at least that much to me. The story is truly awful, and the voice acting is atrocious, but the gameplay is good enough to make up for that. Painkiller is pure; it's a first-person shooter without all the pointless fluff. It's nonstop carnage. It's all you could ask from a first-person shooter unless you really care about character development, and I know you don't.

If you're a fan of classic shooters like Doom, and more modern throwbacks like Serious Sam, this game is highly recommended. I enjoyed the first installment so much that I played through a couple of times before moving onto the others. Unfortunately, I soon came to realize that none of the other games in the series, thus far, were nearly as good — but by then I had already gotten my money's worth.

As of one week from today, there will be half a dozen standalone games in the Painkiller series, plus one expansion to the original, but there still hasn't been a Painkiller 2, or anything which might resemble a proper sequel. Worse yet, none of the continuations I've played have been worthwhile. Painkiller Overdose, apparently a fan-made mod that eventually became an official stand-alone expansion, was decent, but a step down from the original. Painkiller: Resurrection, which attempted a more open-world experience, was sloppy, buggy, and generally awful. Painkiller: Redemption, another fan-made mod that was turned into an official release, more closely followed the style of the previous titles, and was more enjoyable, but it was more of the same, at best. This is also what I expect of Painkiller: Recurring Evil, which I have yet to play. Then there's Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, which comes out on Halloween day, and while it looks promising, it seems mostly to be a (much prettier) remake of the original game.

To make a long story short, I highly recommend getting the first Painkiller, usually sold with its expansion as Painkiller: Black Edition, as soon as it goes on sale. The rest of the series is questionable. You might want to buy the Complete Pack, if you really love old-school shooters, but if you're not sure, you should probably stick with the first one for now. It's a great game to play on Halloween, and while it's easy to pick up and play, it requires some serious practice to master. (You'll want to learn how to bunny-hop, constantly, at all times, forever. The alternative is frustration and death.)

Five Great Games I'll Never Play

So many video games have been made over the past few decades that no single person could ever hope to play them all from beginning to end. This isn't an exaggeration; it's pretty clear that there just aren't enough hours in a lifetime, especially when you consider that a third of a life is spent sleeping while another third is typically spent on other irritating obligations such as a full time job. I'll let you do the rest of the math, since I'm not exactly sure how to estimate the average length of a video game or the total number of video games ever published, but I'm certain that you'd have to dedicate your life to video games in order to experience everything this medium has to offer.

Of course, no single person would really want to play all these games, either, since no one likes every genre and a lot of games are just crap. The list gets a lot shorter when you limit yourself to games which are generally considered to be worth playing, and there's an even shorter list of games that are so highly regarded and well known that they're almost considered mandatory.

I have to admit, however, that I've missed out on a lot of supposedly great classics. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and I've played my fair share of Zelda games, but there are a number of immensely popular games that I've never played, and most likely never will. For your reading pleasure, I present the first five such video game franchises that came to mind, listed in reverse order for dramatic effect.

5: Metal Gear Solid

I grew up with two brothers, and at some point my mother must have lost her mind, because by the time the Sega Dreamcast came out, we each had our own console. Of course, though we weren't sharing them like we did with the old SNES, it would have been silly to keep more than one of the same console in the house, so after my older brother got his own PlayStation, I got a Nintendo 64. He got Metal Gear Solid, and I got Ocarina of Time. Fair enough, right?

I watched him play the game for a while. It was pretty entertaining to watch, although I couldn't tell if it was really fun to play because he was the kind of person who would constantly get mad as hell at any game that presented any sort of challenge, which is probably why he hardly plays video games at all anymore. (That, and having a life.) I was really only interested in the story, even if it was hard to follow, but I never had a chance to play through the game myself.

Every time a new Metal Gear game is released, I think, "wow, that looks pretty cool, I should play it." But with a story-driven series like Metal Gear, I could never bring myself to play the latest installment without playing through all the ones that came before it (useless non-canonical spin-offs, if any exist, excluded). At this point, I'm so many games behind that I don't think I could possibly catch up. Even if I wanted to try, doing so would be quite an investment, since I don't even own a PlayStation 3. (The alternative is to watch a few dozen hours of "Let's Play" videos on YouTube, which would be fine, since the later Metal Gear games have such a high cutscene-to-gameplay ratio that they're practically movies anyway.)

Update: I must have psychic powers or something, because a new Metal Gear game was announced just after I wrote this stupid post. Too spooky.

4: Final Fantasy

I have my doubts about whether it's possible to enjoy Final Fantasy without liking anime, and my history with anime was short and complicated. I thought Japanese animation was awesome when I watched Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist, but when I saw what typical modern anime was like, I was filled with shame and disgust.

Okay, so maybe it isn't quite fair to say that this has anything to do with Final Fantasy, but there's also the fact that I'm sickened by turn-based combat.

The Final Fantasy franchise is so famous and influential that I almost feel like I can't call myself a gamer without having played at least a couple of games in the series. Then again, I don't call myself a gamer because "gamer" is a stupid word, and on the few occasions when I actually watched my Playstation-owning older brother play Final Fantasy VII, I was bored to tears.

And don't get me started on the character design.

3: World of Warcraft

I never liked MMORPGs, and I've always refused to play anything that requires a monthly subscription fee (which is why I don't own an Xbox 360). It's probably no surprise, therefore, that I never bothered to play World of Warcraft, and that I fully intend to die without ever having played it, especially now that the newest expansion looks like an homage to Kung Fu Panda, or a strange attempt to grab the attention of the furry crowd, or both. (Okay, so the Warcraft franchise never took itself that seriously, but really, this is too much.)

I wouldn't say that World of Warcraft is a classic; it's not quite old enough for that. But it is — or was, during the height of its popularity — extremely important in the gaming world. I am, though, a bit surprised that the game ever became as popular as it did, considering its connection to a series of RTS games that the vast majority of WoW subscribers have almost certainly never played. Brand recognition wasn't a factor, for them; the game must have earned its popularity by being fun, or something. I can't say I understand it, but WoW just managed to nail the perfect combination of whatever things make MMORPGs fun for those who don't despise them.

2: Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike, the popular Half-Life modification turned stand-alone game, seems like a pretty big deal. However, at the time of its release, I hadn't graduated from console games to PC games, and the only "modern" shooters I can remember having played at length are GoldenEye 007 and its spiritual successor Perfect Dark. I never even played a first-person shooter online until my brother bought an Xbox and a copy of Halo and needed a fourth player to beat some racist kids at CTF via GameSpy Arcade.

Also, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it wasn't until 2005 (when I bought the PC version of F.E.A.R.) that I realized how much easier it is to play first-person shooters with a keyboard and mouse. The downside is that I haven't been able to go back to console shooters ever since. Awkwardly aiming with my thumbs just feels so wrong, and I don't understand how I ever managed to enjoy it.

The result of all this is that I missed out on a lot of competitive online shooters, Counter-Strike included. After the most recent winter sale on Steam, I did end up with a free copy of Counter-Strike: Source in my inventory, but I'm probably going to send it to someone else instead of playing it myself. I'm sure the game is fun, and that it rightfully earned its place in gaming history, but it's... well, it's old.

Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate old games. But Counter-Strike is a competitive and exclusively online multiplayer game. Forget the fact that I prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS — when I say that Counter-Strike is old, I mean that its online community, while still active, is almost entirely composed of people who have been playing for hundreds (if not thousands) of hours and already know exactly what they're doing. Considering this and the game's competitive nature, I suspect the players in the average Counter-Strike server would be less welcoming to newcomers than the other guys playing another game that came out last month.

Starting Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike: Source now would probably be like joining a random DotA server with no prior knowledge of how the ARTS genre works. (In case you're not getting the joke here, I'll just point out that ARTS players are widely known for being obnoxious jerks who talk trash more than they actually play and who frequently ban people from their servers not for cheating but simply for being insufficiently skilled at the game in question. I even considered putting DotA on this list, as well, since I have no interest in ever playing a game in which being a newbie is a bannable offense, but then I'd have to admit that DotA is "great" in some way, and I cannot.)

If I wanted to break into the Counter-Strike scene, I'd probably be better off buying Global Offensive... but, again, I still prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

1: Sonic the Hedgehog

My first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System. (I was actually born just a few years after the console came out and, by the time I played it, the Super Nintendo had already been released in North America, but my parents were thrifty. I'm sure they saved some money by getting an old console, and I was too young to know I was playing with outdated technology, so everyone was happy.) Although I did, eventually, inherit a Sega Genesis from a member of my extended family, this wasn't until years later, and I only ever played the games that I got with the console. Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't one of them.

At this point, I could have gone and bought the game or one of its sequels, but I wasn't interested in collecting old games at the time, and I had no feelings of nostalgia for the spiky Sega mascot. Running fast never seemed like a very cool super-power anyway. To this day, I've never played a Sonic game, with the exception of Sonic Adventure, and that was only for a few dull minutes.

I can't really say I have anything against the Sonic games, since I've never played them. I am, though, a little freaked out by the fanbase with which I'd be associating myself if I actually decided to put the Sonic series on my to-do list. At some point over the past 21 years, the Sonic franchise began to accumulate one of the worst followings in all of video game history.

It's almost difficult to describe what makes Sonic fans so horrifying. While the most hardcore fans of any video game series tend to be a bit kooky, Sonic fans set themselves apart from the rest with some of the worst fan-art and fan-fiction ever created — loads of it — complete with innumerable attempts at "original characters" which essentially amount to badly drawn re-colorings of the original Sonic design. I learned to avoid sites like deviantART because of this stuff.

Almost all fan-art is horrible, and fan-fiction of all kinds is so uniformly bad that I wish copyright holders (particularly of Twilight, Harry Potter, Sonic and every anime) would try a bit harder to crack down on unauthorized use of their intellectual property. At the very least, perhaps this would put an end to the delusion that fan-art is actual art and that a work of fan-fiction will ever be recognized as actual literature. (Please don't use Fifty Shades of Grey as a counter-example; erotic fiction is trash, and by the time it was published, the novel had no doubt shed all connection to Twilight, which is also trash.) Anyone who uploads poorly drawn cartoons of "[insert name here] the Hedgehog" to deviantART, or writes erotic fan-fiction based on Sonic or any other video game involving anthropomorphic animals, deserves to be sued into bankruptcy.

I know that playing the game would not mean participating in this foolishness, but I just can't do it. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog after witnessing what goes on in the terrifying underworld of Sonic fandom would be like watching Signs after seeing a video of Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix viciously beating a small child to death with a couple of crowbars. (Disclaimer: this never actually happened.)

What Ever Happened to Cheat Codes?

If you've been playing video games for more than a few years, you almost surely remember a time when cheating was a standard feature a lot of games. I'm not referring, of course, to the kind of cheating that gets you permanently banned from your favorite server — the kind that requires exploitation of programming bugs or "hacking" of the software — but rather to the use of built-in cheat codes that developers would include in their games to spice things up and to assist the less gifted among us.

You might even know a few of them after all these years. If you ever played Doom, then IDDQD and IDKFA should be burned permanently into your brain. While invulnerability and instant access to the game's entire arsenal of weapons have the potential to suck all of the fun out of any demon-slaying adventure, the developers trusted us to use these codes responsibly, whether that meant using them only in dire circumstances, only after completing the game without them, or never at all. Some players, I'm sure, preferred instead to use them all the time, but that was okay as long as they had fun doing it.

It wasn't very long ago that the inclusion of cheat codes was the norm, but at some point, they gradually disappeared. Although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to back it up, it seems to me that cheat codes faded out of common existence around the same time that "achievements" became ubiquitous and downloadable content (DLC) became the industry's choice method of squeezing more money out of their customers. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship here, but the disappearance of built-in cheats does seem to coincide with a more general transformation in the way games are made and marketed.

There were cheat codes in the 2005 horror/shooter game F.E.A.R. — one of my favorite games of the past ten years, although I don't like to admit it, since the plot went from mediocre to insufferably bad after the first installment. The same cheats worked in both expansion packs, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate, released in 2006 and 2007, respectively. But the first true sequel, the 2009 game F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, was devoid of cheat codes. Want to be invincible? Too bad.

Instead of cheats, the game had a few dozen achievements to unlock (which, like most achievements, don't really give you anything except a little "congratulations" for performing various in-game tasks which usually aren't very challenging). This, along with the inexplicable removal of several useful features (like dedicated multiplayer servers and the ability to lean around corners) as well as the implementation of digital rights management (which is arguably far more intrusive than a simple product key and disc check), makes the transition from F.E.A.R. to F.E.A.R. 2 somewhat representative, in my eyes, of how video games have changed as a whole.

While achievements are by no means a logical replacement for cheat codes, they have filled the spaces formerly occupied by cheats on websites like GameFAQs. Look up any recent game and go to the "cheats" tab, and you'll likely see a list of trophies, achievements, or other unlockables instead. The page will likely tell you how to unlock each one, but this is information which can usually be accessed in-game. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to list achievements on a cheat site, but achievements must have seemed like a logical replacement for the cheat codes that disappeared around the time that these non-functional "unlockables" emerged.

Of course, cheat codes and unlockables are not mutually exclusive features; many games have had both, and some games (like the Nintendo 64 shooters GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) combined the two concepts by including cheats that had to be earned, not simply looked up and punched in. However, the trend in modern games is to forgo cheats entirely in favor of unlockables, which are more often achievements than anything useful. If a game does have achievements, cheats are usually absent, and vice versa.

I won't say this is because cheating makes the achievements too easy to get — after all, if the developers want to preserve some kind of competitiveness or genuine challenge in achievement hunting, they can just program their games to lock achievements if cheats are activated, as is done in Half-Life 2 — but developers who put achievements in their games likely care a bit too much about controlling the player's experience. They care about "challenging" and "rewarding" the player (which is unfortunate because the gameplay is rarely challenging and victory is rarely rewarding). They don't care nearly enough about letting the player have fun in his or her own way.

But I can't lay all the blame on developers. They're not alone in their belief that cheats can ruin a game, even though the player is free to decide not to use them. A lot of self-proclaimed "hardcore gamers" share this sentiment. I do not.

The fact is that cheats aren't always about gaining an advantage or winning a game with minimal effort. When cheat codes were commonplace, it wasn't unusual for developers to include cheats that had little or no effect on a game's difficulty. These cheats existed either for laughs (see "Paintball Mode" in GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark) or to alter the rules of the game in fun ways that didn't necessarily benefit the player (like the reduced gravity cheat in Vigilante 8), not because we needed them to win. Even when they did have an obvious effect on difficulty, cheats in single-player games were used primarily for screwing around rather than getting to the end of the game as quickly as possible. For players with an ounce of restraint and self-control, cheats add replay value rather than subtract it.

Unfortunately, cheats are unlikely to make a big comeback. Today's developers don't seem to have any interest in hiding secrets in their games, and if they think of anything that adds extra value to their product, they'll most often try to sell it to you on the side. Usually, this means offering "additional" features (such as levels, items, and playable characters) as DLC with a price tag, even when these things are already available at the time of the game's launch and could have been included in the game itself. Occasionally, however, a developer actually has the balls to try to charge you for cheats, whether they're sold as DLC (such as the "Invincible Pack" for Saints Row: The Third) or as unique codes that unlock features already included in the game's files (as in Clive Barker's Jericho and some other games published by Codemasters).

From the back cover of the Clive Barker's Jericho manual. I have no idea if the hotline still works (nor do I want to try it), but it seems that the web page doesn't even exist anymore. The small print at the bottom of the page [not pictured] clarifies that codes obtained via the hotline would cost only what they charged for the call, but that getting codes online would require a "small" payment by credit card or PayPal.

This is pretty horrifying, but the success of the microtransaction business model applied to video games — most prominently to "free-to-play" massively multiplayer online games — has shown that a staggering number of people are essentially willing to pay to win. Since it works for multiplayer, it's not so crazy to think people might be willing to pay extra to gain an advantage in a single-player game as well.

I still think selling cheats is insanely dumb, but people are still going to buy them, just like they'll blindly pay for everything else the publishers take out of the finished product at the last minute and set aside as "DLC" for the purpose of grabbing more cash. (Imagine buying a movie ticket only to find out that the last ten minutes of the film will cost you an extra $3.95. Now imagine all of the people who don't boycott that movie. My point is that day-one DLC is evil and consumers are stupid.)

Since the current attitude of big video game publishers is that anything non-essential should be sold off as "extra" content, cheats might regain some real popularity in the form of DLC, but it seems unlikely. Cheat codes clearly went out of style for unrelated reasons, perhaps for the same reasons that we haven't already seen every major developer jumping at the chance to make some extra money by selling invincibility and extra ammo. Perhaps the most obvious problem with cheat codes is that most video games have gotten so easy that developers think we don't need cheats at all. Again, however, I should point out that it's not about need; it's about fun.

Personally, I'd like it if things would go back to the way they were before. Oh, sure, everyone feels that way, especially the nostalgic, aging video game enthusiasts such as myself, but I have no desire to hold the industry back. I realize that most of the changes made by the industry in recent years were, successfully or not, made for the sake of progress. But cheat codes only have the potential to make a game better — never worse — and the fact that they've almost completely been taken away can only be seen as a step backward.