While there are many different first person shooter titles on the market, many of them are more of the same. This, quite obviously, isn’t a bad thing business wise as each Call of Duty release has effectively managed to sell like hot cakes without changing much in terms of gameplay. However, if you’re looking for something a little bit less conventional while still maintaining the same general game mechanics that we’ve all come to know and love then you’ll definitely want to check out Crytek’s Crysis 2. We all know how graphically appealing the first title is so I won’t bore you with a history lesson but instead remind you that the Crysis 2 demo is out right this instant on the PC. If you weren’t aware this demo is a fully featured multiplayer demo that will let players duke it out on both the Skyline and Pier 17 playing fields.

Seeing how this game has potential to be one of the best FPS releases of the year, if you have a PC that’s up to par, you’ll definitely want to check this out. A direct download link is available here.

For those wondering where the Xbox 360 demo is, expect it to hit the Xbox Live Marketplace later today.

That headline, of course, will require some explanation.  If you’ve ever drank a Red Bull before, especially if you don’t do it often, what you get is kind of a sweetish, cloying taste (that for me put me vaguely in mind of chewable vitamins) followed by an incredibly twitchy sensation as the sugar and caffeine goes burning its way merrily through your endocrine system.  And, either ironically or by design, this is EXACTLY how I’d describe The Conduit, the newest first person shooter for the Wii.

Basically, The Conduit asks you to believe that all those things you scoffed at as merely tinfoil-hat lunacy, stuff like chemtrails and 9/11 being an inside job and aliens and whatever it is they’re doing out at the Denver International Airport, are all in fact very real.  This is already tough enough, but then they’ll follow that up by asking you to believe that the shadowy figures behind all of them actually brought a tinfoil-hat type INTO the conspiracy, and said tinfoil hatter actually accepted his new role.  From there, he’ll be heavily armed with all the latest government hardware and whatever he can manage to pick up along the way from the race of alien marauders who’s looking to set up shop on Earth.  Their technology tends to focus on things that are grown rather than built–their weapons use biomass as propellant and their locks are organic–and the centerpiece of their tech tree is the Conduit, a kind of interdimensional warp generator that seems to be similar to the old Stargate design.  But, as you’ll discover as you go through the game, there’s plenty of sneaky shadowy stuff going on here, and you may not be able to trust your own handlers as much as you’d want to…or even as much as you hope.

I give them all the credit in the world for assembling a sharp, sweet storyline.  Seriously, they clearly put a lot into it and it really is a fantastic story that uses plenty of the things we might find roaming around the internet at this very second.  They’ve got the plot on lockdown, and even the graphics and sound weigh in nicely for a Wii title.  Though everyone TALKS about the so-called Wii Syndrome, in which a game is automatically docked by virtue of being on the Wii, let’s face one indisputable fact–graphically, no game for the Wii has yet been produced that can compete with an Xbox 360 or PS3 title.  This isn’t bias, this is sheer fact, and if someone actually CAN point out a Wii game that CAN compete graphically with, say, Prototype or Haze or Killzone 2 or Fallout 3, then I will cheerfully and publicly retract this statement in the comments section below.

There’s only one other problem with The Conduit, and that’s the twitchy control scheme.  A first person shooter depends heavily on the ability to get the firepower where it needs to go, whether it be into a tank or an enemy’s sternum.  And when I’m trying to line up a shot, it really doesn’t help that the Wiimote will periodically jerk halfway across the screen from one small twitch of the wrist.  This will take getting used to.

But the fact remains–The Conduit just might be, all things considered, the Wii’s best first person shooter.  And if you love a good first person shooter with plenty of action, then you’re going to be all over this game.

I’ll admit up front today, folks, that I actually enjoyed Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood on the Xbox 360 for what it was–a surprisingly well-done, a surprisingly intuitive, first person shooter that brought plenty of action right from the word go, and a story that actually held my interest.  But there are still problems to be had here, and we’ll get into those directly.

First, the plot itself.  A prequel to the original Call of Juarez, this time we’re with the McCall brothers as they fight their way through Georgia at about the same time William Tecumseh Sherman began his infamous March to the Sea.  With Georgia in slowly burning ruins, the McCalls, despite their spectacular valiance, aren’t able to repulse the invasion.  It even gets personal when Sherman’s March takes the McCall family farm with it.  Thus, two out of the three brothers McCall turn outlaw and go off to find the legendary gold of Juarez.  Along the way, they’ll tackle a variety of enemies–an Apache connected to the gold, a Mexican bandit and his lovely concubine, and even the Confederate army they went AWOL from in otder to turn outlaw.  The McCall brothers will thus launch a swath of lawlessness and destruction that will in turn leave its mark on the entirety of the old West forever.

I know, it sounds like an awesome story.  And watching it unfold, it really IS an awesome story.  But this is not where the aforementioned problems come into play.  The problems themselves come in on the actual gameplay end of things.

The controls are solid enough–no real problem there–but the biggest problem is that Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood is so very limited.  For instance, in the first level, you’re mostly crawling around in some trenches, trying to piece together where exactly you’re supposed to go.  Sure, you’ve got a marker giving you some idea where to go, but it’s still tough to tell if you need to take this corner or that corner back there and go around the long way, if you get my drift.

I’m convinced that I’ve become somewhat spoiled by Fallout 3 as I wind up comparing every first person shooter I play to it.  And sure enough, stacked up against an opening act like that, pretty much everything else will have to pale in comparison.  There’s just no two ways about it–you can’t eat a porterhouse steak then go chow down on meatloaf and say it’s on par with the best beef ever.  So what you have to do in response is take everything in isolation.  By itself, Call of Juarez has a decent multiplayer mode with lots of options, plenty of wild action, lots of gunplay and explosivesplay and all the things that make a shooter game solidly entertaining.  The graphics are at least fair, and the sound is solidly done.

And yet I still find myself somewhat let down, because I’ve seen what first person shooters actually can be. I’ve seen the kind of fun that can be had when you put someone behind the gun and let them roam wild and free over a huge map.  Every maze-crawler, every railroad run, every point-a-to-point-b game that follows is just a sad, sorry imitation.  Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood may be good enough for a play, but it’s definitely not as good as it could be.

I know, it’s something of a non sequitur and a pun all at the same time, but basically, when they say Point Lookout, they mean, look out.  Because for some reason, they’ve stuffed some serious baddies in that swampy ground, and it’s not going to be easy to get through.

This time in the greatest first person shooter that man has ever known, you’ll board a riverboat bound for Point Lookout, Maryland (which is, apparently, an actual place, unless I’m being hoaxed.  This is possible as I’ve never been to Maryland, but a cursory net search suggests that there really is a Point Lookout) with a goal in mind before you even get off the boat–to find a young woman’s missing daughter.  Of course, once you’re actually in Point Lookout, you’ll discover that there’s an incredible opportunity to be had here, as there’s virtually no one in sight when you actually get off the boat.  You can loot as you please!  And there’s PLENTY of loot to be had here–you’ll walk into a mostly abandoned seaside town / amusement park complex where there’s only one person, and she’s tending a shop.  But right away, you’ll notice there’s something very wrong with Point Lookout, and it’s not just the psuedonuclear shambles that every other place in the Capitol Wasteland is.  The Point Lookout motel contains scenes of horror even a raider would shrink from.  The Pint-Sized Slasher even makes a bit of a reappearance (he’s not just a newspaper blurb any more!) and the secrets, lies, and mysteries contained in that swamp are more than you could ever imagine.

There’s all manner of new equipment to be had here, but most of it is a little on the mundane side.  An axe, a shovel, a lever-action rifle that fires 10mm rounds and a double-barrelled shotgun will all make appearances, as will simpler things like workman’s coveralls and a Confederate cap, which is somewhat ironic as Maryland was a border state that leaned heavily toward the Union with only a few dissenters.  In fact, a whole LOT of Point Lookout seems to be done in that antebellum style of the Civil War-era South.  The huge manor houses, the relentless bayous…a lot of it just screams Louisiana.

Now, just so you know, I didn’t go in there cold.  I had recently reset my character to get the full experience back when Broken Steel came out, so I was a bit behind, but I took the riverboat at level fourteen, with the full loadout from the Project Anchorage vault.  I had my Chinese stealth armor, I had my Gauss rifle and a laser rifle with plenty of microfusion cells, I even had a Gatling laser, and I was getting chewed up at virtually every turn.  I don’t know how these “swamp people” who seem to have no more armor than their overalls are managing to absorb metal pellets fired at near-relativistic speeds when I’m blowing away Enclave troops in powered armor within three hits with the same hardware.

That’s about my only real gripe here–Point Lookout is some amazing fun, even if I do need to bring the equivalent of a light armored division or maybe Liberty Prime itself just to pacify the populace.  I love the darker tone and the subtle infusion of horror gameplay, something that game companies should definitely take note of.  Imagine this game with ZOMBIES.  And I’m not talking ghouls, but actual zombies.

One thing, however, remains crystal clear–Fallout 3, and by extension Point Lookout, is still the best action RPG I’ve ever played.

Recently, a game landed onto the Xbox 360 that left me a little cold.  It was called Red Faction; Guerilla, and was yet another sequel to the first person shooter original and first sequel.  And when I first laid hands on this one I sighed in the deepest resignation and dragged out my thesaurus hoping I could find a new word for “craptacular”.   Seriously, I’m so very tired of first person shooters.  There are so few good ones.

But then I got it in, and I’ll tell you, I was pleasantly surprised.  Surprised is almost too weak a reaction, but is it really possible to be pleasantly shocked?

Anyway, you play a miner whose focus is in demolitions freshly landed on Mars a while after the earlier events of Red Faction.   The Earth Defense Force, which for some reason isn’t even ON Earth any more, is acting as an occupation force on Mars, backing up pretty much ever evil move that the Ultor Corporation (THQ just loves the name Ultor, I guess) makes.  This is doubly odd since, originally, the Earth Defense Force was a collection of GOOD guys who assisted Red Faction.  So much for that, huh?

So now you’re on planet, and the EDF just wiped out your brother for “crimes”.  No one really bothered to tell you what they were before they blasted him with what looked like a vulcan cannon, or before they came after you and discovered that you had explosives in your trailer (you’re a mining engineer with a demolitions specialty, remember?) so you, in response, joined Red Faction out of necessity and the desire to get payback for your dead brother.

The game itself plays a lot like some other titles, especially Saints Row, Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Mercenaries, and offers many of the same elements.  You can steal cars, which look a lot more like moon rovers and have apparently enhanced suspension to handle the rocky terrain better.  You’ll roam around a map with multiple zones, blowing things up, knocking things down, and shooting holy hell out of the EDF in an effort to wrest control of Mars away from them and put it back in the hands of the people.

There is a truly incredible variety of things to do in this game, make no mistake about that.  Within my first few minutes I had blown up several abandoned buildings, collected scrap from said buildings to upgrade my weaponry and hardware, and shot about thirty five stormtroopers—err…EDF troops.  I do enjoy a game that’s about more than walk from point A to point B and shoot whatever wanders in front of you.  As a result, this may actually be my favorite Red Faction game just by the sheer fact that it actually includes something different to do.

Granted, it’s not that much different from a first person shooter—its biggest difference may well be just a matter of perspective (no pun intended), but with the addition of driving and setting explosives and collecting items, it does elevate the game slightly above its predecessors.  It’s a good rental, no mistake there, but whether or not it’ll be a good buy depends on just how much you like shooter games with some solid action.

I really, REALLY, hate Clive Barker.

It’s bad enough that he unleashes his misery on us in book form and in movie form, but recently, he’s dropped a video game on us too.  Not his first, I know, but it’s no less painful for the fact that it isn’t first.  If anything, it’s actually MORE painful, because he did it to us once already—now he’s come back for seconds.  It’s called Jericho, and it’s out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

Anyway, this time, Clive Barker’s bringing us the story of the Firstborn, which he claims is part of Apocryphal and Gnostic texts (parts of the Bible in case you don’t follow that sort of thing) as the first thing God ever created.  It’s not male, it’s not female, but it’s both beautiful and horrifying all at once.  God, not surprisingly, turned out not to like the thing he made and thus shut it up in the Abyss.  He then followed up with humanity, which turned out much more to God’s liking than the androgynous singularity he’d made earlier.  And then, just to prove that Clive Barker’s grasp on logic is as tenuous as his grasp of sanity or writing a decent book, it turns out that the Firstborn decided to not be banished any more, and so, he wasn’t.  He made seven attempts to break out of the Abyss, and every time, God sent him back, but not without taking a piece of the planet with him.  The empty chunks of earth became fragments of time and space, and then did bizarre things to the world around them.  The U.S. government, as represented by the Department of Occult Warfare, sends in the Jericho Squad to investigate one such singularity, which one of its former members is using as a gateway to bring the Firstborn back into the world.

See, that’s a real mouthful of a storyline until you consider that Jericho is yet another first person shooter.  This is like trying to put a Ferrari chassis around a moped and expecting people to believe you own a Ferrari.  Seriously, they’ve put everything into this—time travel, various occultic stuff…lesbians…yes, lesbians.  They’re part of the plot, even though they’re really not here for anything more than the inevitable “hey look at this!” effect.

And while the game has spectacularly creepy visuals, the gameplay itself is suffering from some kind of mild brain damage, because your elite team of master soldiers dies a lot more often than master soldiers really should.  That may be the worst part about the whole thing—even I have to admit that this is a really impressive story, even if it requires massive suspension of disbelief.  And what do they DO with this story?  They strap a chain gun barrel to it and say “Here, go shoot something.  A lot.”  Great—why do I find myself utterly unable to care?  Maybe it’s because my character is just a gun barrel people talk to.

While this might have made a pretty good movie (or even series thereof), sadly, it doesn’t make a game worth a hill of beans.  There are much better first person shooters out there, with much more action and adventure and fun than this could ever generate.

Today marks one of those days that I’m really, really glad I’m a functioning video game reviewer–I’m going to review a game that I’m absolutely convinced you need to be told about.  Chances are very good that you haven’t actually heard of it, which is why I get the opportunity to use my good offices to fill you in.  It’s called Forumwarz, and it may easily be the most unique game I’ve ever played.

You’ll play as a young forum-goer, like so many other internet users out there, who’s just starting out in the world.  You’re out to make a name for yourself in the world, and as such, you go out and attempt to “pwn” internet forums, a name for causing such disruption that you make a forum uninhabitable.  Along the way, you’ll meet a series of other internet users with a series of different goals and interests who want to employ your skills to advance those goals and interests.  You’ll run into everybody from conservative talk show hosts with bizarre proclivities to furries to indie rock figures and beyond.  But what’s lying beyond all these disparate interests?  Who are you really working for?  You’ll find out in a tale of surprising depth and intrigue.

In fact, you start out so new that your opening rank is actually “Jimmy the Re-Re”.  Please don’t bother with flames—that’s a quote.  In fact, they’ve devoted such detail to this rank that your two attacks as Jimmy are “bash keyboard with helmet” and “drool on keyboard”.  After a little time spent as Jimmy, you’ll be allowed to select a new class of character, each with different kinds of attacks and defenses—you can be a hacker, a troll, an emo kid, a camwhore or a permanoob.  You can even play through the whole game as Jimmy if you’re so inclined, but this is discouraged for all but the most extreme player.

The gameplay itself is unusual, as you select an attack, resolve the result, let the forum get in ITS attack (they’ll try to flame you with varying degrees of success) and then the process repeats until either you or the forum is down in flames.  The closest analogue is a collectible card game.  Every day, you’re permitted four “forum visits” to wreak your havoc, and the number resets at a set time each day.  This may sound somewhat restrictive, but I haven’t told you the best part yet—the game is free to play.

That’s right, the entire first chapter of Forumwarz is free to play.  The second chapter, however, you’ll have to pay to play, and the cost is minimal at best—just ten dollars.  You’d pay more for a Xbox Live title, and instead, you get a game that’s fantastically fun to play, and you can play for days in small installments.  I like to start my day with a round of Forumwarz, and frankly, I think you will too.

Oh, sure…Forumwarz doesn’t have the action and the explosions of some first person shooters and suchlike, but what it does have is clever gameplay and plenty of laughs.  .  It’s almost nice to be able to play a game that I can only play for about a half-hour or so a day instead of taking a few hours at a crack, because the trade-off for that is that I can play it for weeks and still get a great experience with something new every day. Forumwarz is great fun, and in the end, that’s what counts most in a game.

And so, the last addition to the Fallout downloadable content block has emerged, and amazingly, it will change the way you play Fallout 3 forever.  It’s called Broken Steel, and what it’ll do to the game is create a series of changes that are vast and downright unnerving.

This time around, you’ll be able to resolve one of the most frustrating problems with Fallout 3—what happened AFTER you retake Project Purity.  You’ve just made the Capitol Wasteland a better place to live, and quite possibly killed yourself in the process.  Only now, even IF you were the one to take the poison pill yourself, you’ll manage to survive it and carry on the good fight, as our old buddy Three Dog would say.  And now, you’ll be assisting the Brotherhood of Steel (and not those Outcast putzes either—they got their chance in Operation: Anchorage and did they EVER screw it up!)  in three important overarching concepts.

1.    Help get the newly cleaned water out to the various ports and settlements of the Capitol Wasteland.

2.    Blast the godless heathen savage Super Mutants into insensate smoking oblivion, once and for all.

3.    While you’re at it, put paid to those miserable soulless heartless Fascisistic thugs known as The Enclave.

Sound like a plan to anyone else?  Oh yes.  Yes it does.

Considering how many times I’ve railed against first person shooters in these pages, you might well wonder how I live with the hypocrisy of loving Fallout 3, which is a first person shooter itself.  And if you were to ask me that, I’d look at you sorrowfully, shake my head with regret and tell you that Fallout 3 isn’t JUST a first person shooter.  It’s a first person ADVENTURE.  Most first person shooters like to focus on that last word at the cost of everything else, but it’s the rare ones like Fallout 3 that open up a world to you and let you run riot therein.  You can be a hero or a criminal in these games, and the sheer variety of things to do holds my interest with every step.

And indeed, Broken Steel will, as I’ve said, change the way you play Fallout 3.  One, the level cap has been lifted from level 20 to level 30.  Of course, there will also be a collection of new items for you to lay hands on, and you’ll have several new plot elements to tangle with as well.  The already deep, rich story of Fallout 3 gets nothing but enhancement from Broken Steel.

However, as good as this is—there are still some problems here. For those of you thinking the broken level cap will be an opportunity to catch up on those skills you missed, think again.  For some strange reason, the game will give you new skills and perks when you reach a new level.  I’m not terribly pleased about this, but I guess it could be worse.  And there are many folks who will discover, seemingly randomly, that they’re unable to even play the game in the first place—but for those people, it’s not even that much of a problem.  While you’ll miss out on the new items and new plot challenges, from what I understand the level cap will remain broken, allowing you to try out the new features.

As fond as I am of Fallout 3, I’m of the mind that the downloadable content so far has added spice to the original as opposed to really opening up game experiences.  Broken Steel, meanwhile, has done a solid job of opening the world up even further.  All I can say is, after six months of fantastic gaming, great work, Bethesda…and see you in Vegas.

Vikings make great characters for video games.  Their history is one of huge quantities of fighting and destruction, and I say this being of Danish descent myself.  Okay, sure, the Danes didn’t have quite the fighting past of, say, the Norwegians or the Swedes, but we still got our blades wet from time to time.  Anyway, that’s probably part of the impetus behind Sega’s recent release of Viking: Battle for Asgard, now available for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

In this one, you’ll play a local boy named Skarin, who’s about to get a serious promotion from random sword-toting schmuck to champion of Freya herself.  This is actually much like the relationship between Kratos and Athena.  Except, of course, Skarin wasn’t a homicidal psychopath like Kratos.  Anyway, Skarin is now part of the big war between the gods, fighting on behalf of Freya to take out some of the footholds that Hel, goddess of the underworld, has on Earth.  Just in case you wonder, Earth is called “Midgard” here.  For every bit of Midgard that Skarin takes back from Hel, Freya uses her weird goddess powers to make it green and vibrant again, like nothing ever happened.

There are an uncomfortably large number of comparisons available between Viking: Battle for Asgard and God of War—both feature a human elevated to godly champion status, both will feature occasional battles with large monsters that require a series of timed button presses in order to beat, both will have you find small red orbs to recharge your powers and whatnot—the more I play Viking: Battle for Asgard the more I wonder if it really ISN’T just God of War in a Norse mythology skin and with a lower development budget and a whole lot less promotion.

This isn’t to say, of course, that Viking: Battle for Asgard is all that bad a game.  In a lot of ways, it’s actually rather fun, and it does distract from the endless flood of first person shooters out there.  Getting anything other than one of those is actually a cause for some minor celebration these days.  Think of it as God of War with less bloodshed and more fetch questing and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.  Admittedly, it’s still plenty fun to wander around a map and repeatedly jam a blade in things–you’ll get to do likewise with an axe and a whole host of special moves which, for some reason, must be taught to you by ghosts who will require payment in gold first, but there’s room to shake things up here and that’s always a good thing.  Plus, you’ll get to imbue your blade with various elemental powers as part of your agreement with Freya, thus introducing a small note of strategy into things.  Do you freeze the monsters and try to thin out the crowd?  Or just set everything on fire?  Your call!

These are strange days in gaming, when just by virtue of not being a first-person shooter you get a little extra bonus to your originality score.  Granted, this is only one step beyond that—a THIRD person slasher / action game—but still, it’s a step, and a step is better than nothing.

Despite this, you should still be able to get some fun out of this one, especially if you were really into the God of War series and are sort of jonesing for a little of that old god-driven bloodsport.  There’s enough action and adventure to go around, and this should also ensure that you get some fun out of the whole affair.  In the end, that’s better than nothing, if not by a whole lot.

So by now you may have heard about Call of Duty: World at War, otherwise known as Call of Duty 5 for the PC, DS, Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstations two and three.  It’s a game that manages to fuse together the mundane and the unique.  The down side, of course, is that it mostly fuses the mundane to itself to make some horrible ironmongery of stuff you’ve already seen a couple hundred times before.

But before I get right down to business, it’s time for a plot rundown:  we follow a series of different soldiers in all different parts of the Allied forces as they rampage their way across the Pacific Theatre, up into Russia, BACK to the Pacific, back once again to Russia before taking on Berlin, and accomplishing a series of missions, including calling down rockets on Japanese Ha-Go tank forces, handling a Russian T-34 tank and running the guns on a PBY Catalina flying boat.  You will be effectively a part of the last and loudest hours of World War II.

And, in case you didn’t see this coming by the big number five on the title, yes, this is yet another in a long, long, LONG (and growing…) string of first person shooters.  Sure, they’ve got some additions of new gameplay in here—when’s the last time you got to drive a tank in first person?—but let’s face it; there’s only so much variety you can get out of this particular chopped salad mix.  There’s only so many ways you can make the same old baloney taste new and different.

However—if you’re willing to gut your way through a highly realistic, blood-spattered, downright gritty World War II simulation with more gunfire and explosions than even Saving Private Ryan could muster, presented in a format so eye-wateringly predictable that there’s almost no reason to play, then this time around, you’ll get a special bonus.   It’s called Nazi Zombies mode, and, though they may not specifically be members of the Party, the mode itself comprises a series of maps, some of which are downloadable, in which you and possibly some friends attempt to hold a building against a legion of zombies bound and determined to break in.

The down side of that, of course, is like I said: you have to play your way through the ENTIRE CAMPAIGN to get access.  I’m irritated by this.  I’d personally like to see more first person shooters involving zombies (and ZOMBIES, not second-rate 28 Days Later knockoffs like Left 4 Dead, thank you very much), and the fact that these bastards made me slog through a hell of their own making just to get a crack at some zombie killing fun makes me furious to the point of derangement.

So let’s sum it up:  Call of Duty World at War is not really a BAD game, it’s just more of the same.  They offer some excellent graphics, and some fantastic realism, and even some unique features buried in all the warmed over leftover crap that is their primary campaign mode, but let’s face facts—aside from a pretty new paintjob and some fancy bells and whistles, this really is just more of the same. It’s up to you if you want to take another foray into the same crap you’ve been playing over and over for years, but if you love the first person shooter and just can’t get enough, then this is definitely the game for you.