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Xai and Kinzu gaming mouses from SteelSeries

Back in my day, SteelSeries was known primarily for making high-quality gaming mousepads. Well, the times have evidentally changed as SteelSeries has expanded to other markets namely, the gaming mouse market.

What you see above are by no means their first foray into the mouse market but instead an addition. The pictured devices are the Xai and Kinzu Steelseries. The Xai being the higher-end offering at $80 with a 10.8MP per second sensor reportedly up to 5,0001 CPI. The feature that really sets it apart from the Kinzu, however, is that it features an LCD display for on-the-go configuration. The Kinzu, on the other hand, clocks in at $34.99, features no LCD display and a slightly smaller design.

Expect both the Xai and Kinzu mouses from SteelSeries at some point next month.

via Engadget

Project Natal coming to PC as well?

If a recent interview with Bill Gates is anything to go by, the PC may be getting support for the Xbox 360’s Project Natal at some point in the future.

While he didn’t actually confirm that the technology would be used for the PC he said that it is not just for game buts “media consumption as a whole”. Furthermore, he talked about the possibility of using Project Natal in the the office which adds kindle to the fire because (besides pro-gamers and others) who uses Xbox 360 for their work machine?

Anyways, Project Natal is still a ways off which means that a PC adaptation is probably even farther off.

Read (CNET)

New MechWarrior Official

We didn’t have to wait long for the teaser trailer’s hinting to be confirmed; there’s a new MechWarrior in the works. It’s being developed by Piranha Games with FASA co-founder Jordan Weisman on board. So far the title is simply MechWarrior and the game is being developed for the PC and Xbox 360, though fans of the franchise will be happy to hear that they’re definitely going for the battle simulation feel of the originals.

The game will feature intelligence warfare prominently with players getting access to unmanned drones for recon and communication purposes. In the non-xbox games every mech had its purpose and a skilled light mech pilot could defeat larger, more heavily armed opponents. Unfortunately in MechAssault there was a huge balancing issue. No matter how swiftly you ran in the lighter mechs eventually a single shot or two would land and blow you to smithereens. They’re looking to fix that by adding in experience points that you accumulate by piloting specific classes of mechs. The more time you pilot one class the greater your abilities with that type will become.

Bioware Founder Defends Sex Scenes In Games

While the self-appointed cultural crusaders raise an eyebrow at excessive violence, nothing gets them more frothed up and ready to bust heads than sexual content. Recently video games have begun to take the romantic component that some RPG makers have been including to the next level in a more visual format. This stirred up a mildly ricidulous hornets’ nest of controversy when Mass Effect was released, though most of those complaining hadn’t actually played the game.

Bioware’s newest RPG, Dragon Age Origins reportedly contains similarly racy content at some point as well and one can only assume that Mass Effect 2 will allow more boffing of sexy blue aliens (or aliens of some other hue). In an interview Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuck defended his company’s decision, citing that that they’re doing this to reflect real human relationships in a “sophisticated mature experience”. He admitted that they’re not necessary for every game but “in certain types of games it makes sense to have them.”

Do digital recreations of sex scenes, no matter how tasteful, really improve the immersiveness of a video game’s romantic subplots? Public opinion still seems to be split on the matter, so what do you think?

Fuel Game Review–Freedom to Ride

Racing games and I generally do not get along.  I find them somewhat dull and repetitive, even after the initial adrenaline shock wears off.   This left me with something of a quandary as I discovered a racing game that was actually pretty entertaining, and it’s a new one out for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC called Fuel.

Fuel assumes a future in which Al Gore is allowed by Federal law to laugh and point at everybody who can’t produce a receipt for a copy of An Inconvenient Truth.  Seriously, though–it’s an “alternate present” in which the weather has only very recently gone completely insane, turning large areas of the United States into “no-go” zones, or areas where no human being can safely live.  Thus, humans pack themselves into huge megacities, a la Judge Dredd, except these human hives are apparently warm and comforting places powered by wind and solar and biodiesel, and thus everyone lives in Al Gore’s fantasyland.

There are, however, a few mavericks who realize that, the sudden cessation of gasoline usage has left a whole LOT of spare capacity just sort of lying around, and thus, this gives them the opportunity to take it for their own use.  Hey, why not?  Not like anyone ELSE is using the stuff anyway!  So they appropriate large quantities of fuel and use it to stage quasi-legal offroad joyride races.

To that end, you’re dropped into a scale area of roughly five thousand square miles and set to race.  You’ll be able to select various races against other competitors, as well as having an opportunity to engage in “free riding” but more on that in a minute.  First, we have to deal with the races themselves.  In this way, Fuel is a lot like literally every other racing game on the market.  You drive around trying desperately to pass other people and reach the finish line.  In this way, Fuel is just as good as any other.  The graphics are solid enough, the controls are a little twitchy and take a little getting used to but still do fairly well, and the background music is appropriately rock.

Fuel would be a game much like any other if it weren’t for one critical difference–the free ride mode.  Free ride does just what it sounds like it does; free ride allows you to tear around the map in literally any direction you please, pulling tire-squealing turns on roads, donuts on the beach, whatever you like,  There’s even some structure here as your free ride mode allows you to drive to places where challenges are being held.  Completing these challenges nets you extra fuel, which in turn allows you to buy other vehicles.  Plus, you’ll be able to obtain new parts for your livery, find fantastic views at so-called vista points, and just generally run riot all over the map.

Fuel is, therefore, a game of surprising depth and substance, as well as plenty of fun.  For those of you who already like racing games, you may well have found the ultimate in racers right there.  But for those of you who haven’t been very fond of the racing game subgenre, then you may well want to give Fuel a try.  This is the game that just might change your mind about racers.

Aspyr And Mindware Announce Mental FPS

In the video game industry there’s usually a reverse correlation between the uniqueness of the premise and how combat focused it is. Don’t get me wrong, games like the God of War series and Mass Effect definitely have a lot going for them in terms of style and plot, but the basic barebones ideas behind each aren’t terribly unique: fighting monsters from ancient mythologies and shooting various alien creatures in space.

Every once in a while though we get an interesting game that brings an interesting take on one of the standard action formulae. First person shooters are notoriously uninventive, but Aspyr Media and Mindware Studios are teaming up to create an FPS that’ll blow your mind. Or at least blow it up. Some writers have toyed with the idea of psychic therapy, somehow going directly into someone’s mind to fix their issues, but in Dreamkiller you’ll be taking a much more cathartic approach. As psychologist Alice Drake you possess the unusual ability to enter into the minds of your patients and fight their demons with an array of weapons and powers.

The game will be spread over twelve different levels with an overarching plot that hurtles you towards a showdown with an ultimate evil force. It might not be the most unique premise in the world, feeling like the love child of the film The Cell and an HP Lovecraft story but the underlying potential is great. Games that take place in a setting which can completely ignore any laws of physics or realistic dimensions can be incredibly unique and unusual. Do I think this game will live up to its incredible potential? Probably not, but I can certainly hope. The title is set to ship this fall for PC and Xbox 360.

The Sims 3 Proves Piracy Is No Threat To Sales

Before the era of P2P file sharing if you wanted to get a game for free you had a few options. First if you had a buddy with the right knowhow he could send a disc your way with the game and a crack program on it. If none of your friends were quite that delinquently minded you only had one choice: to hunt through ‘warez’ sites which were generally just spawning grounds for popups, viruses and porn advertisements.

Peer to peer downloading programs changed that and Bittorrent has been one of the most popular downloading programs in years. Though the first protests came from the music industry thanks to Napster, the video games industry has gotten in on the act, with many companies complaining that developing for PCs has become nearly impossible due to rampant piracy. Those who do often institute draconian DRM measures, frustrating players and anarchists everywhere.

The Sims 3 was leaked and downloaded over 180,000 times from May 18th to May 21st, yet the DRM-free game has sold over 1.4 million copies in its first week, making it one of the most successful launches in EA’s history. EA has been one of the main proponents of the argument that piracy is killing the PC gaming industry, but their arguments seem to have been invalidated by this.

My guess is that the theory behind piracy goes like this: you’ve got a small subsection of the market who will pirate a game no matter what. Then you’ve got people who are willing to pay full price for a robust, well-crafted experience, but don’t want to pay full price for something that they think might be cool yet is only netting five or six out of ten on the reviews. In the end even if the panic-mongers at EA are right and piracy is a huge problem, the industry will simply evolve into an online focus where verification is built into games and money will be made by subscription fees or optional VIP packages in free games.

Red Faction Guerilla Gets Smashingly Good Promotion

Whatever the review scores say (I haven’t played the game or read any reviews yet), I have to give THQ some major points for their interesting choice in promotions/publicity stunts/giveaways for Red Faction Guerilla. If you’d been strolling the streets of London yesterday you might have seen a car being pounded on by strangers with a sledgehammer.

This wasn’t a case of revenge, random violence or vandalism; THQ had taken a rather odd event most often used for a fundraiser at state fairs and utilized it to promote their newest game. Usually whoever’s running the ‘car smash’ charges a few bucks for a few whacks at the vehicle, but this time taking out your aggression on the automobile was more than free; it was profitable. Inside the car were over a hundred copies of Red Faction Guerilla. Folks at THQ said it was an ‘experiment’ to see how many people would stop in the middle of their day to wail on a car in order to get a free copy of the game, inspired by the game’s incredibly realistic destruction engine. They also get kudos for taking the car in for recycling after the conclusion of the event.

The Peregrine: Bringing Technology Back To The 90s

At E3 Iron Will Technologies is unveiling an innovation of theirs that’ll bring many gamers back down memory lane to a time of bad haircuts, ripped-up jeans and Fred Savage. In his classic film The Wizard where he attempts to get a young video game prodigy to a gaming competition. One of the most tense scenes involved one of the antagonists unleashing one of the most bizarre yet desirable peripherals of the early gaming world: the Power Glove.

It was intended to translate a gamers hand movements into control inputs, but due to its imprecision and lack of dedicated games it didn’t really catch on, and was regarded as a gimmick, but the concept has remained popular. Films like Minority Report, Johnny Mnemonic and others have showed extreme fascination with the concept of controlling a computer via hand inputs.

The Peregrine is an attempt by Iron Will to bring this generally science-fiction concept into real life. MMOs and RTS games are notorious for complex control schemes that require endless numbers of key shortcuts for success and to fumble one in the midst of a raid or skirmish can destroy your slim chance of victory. The Peregrine promises to offer over thirty key shortcuts by tapping your thumb to various points on your fingers. Of course the control options are customizable and luckily for those prone to long, long gaming sessions the sensor disconnects and the glove itself is washable.

Damnation Game Review–It’s Not Just A Clever Title

I hate Damnation.

This isn’t just in general terms—although the concept applies there too.  I hate the thought of anyone being sent to an eternity of fire and torment.  I also hate the game of the same name, now available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.  And why do I bear such a beautiful hatred for this lump of interactive dung?  Read on and see why!

First, the plot—back around the 1860s, when the American Civil War was in full swing, a corporation was founded to take advantage of the situation and hopefully make a few bucks on the side.  The Prescott company, by name, began supplying arms to what seemed like both sides, fueling a massive expansion in technology.  Taking the resulting cash, and along with a couple of choice developments not released to the military, the Prescott outfit stages its own putsch against the Union AND the Confederacy bother, spreading out as the forces of New America, with Prescott—Lord Prescott—as its head.  Now, a resistance, lead by a professor that developed some of Prescott’s most valuable tech and a former Army Captain, has risen up to take back America from New America.

How massive a technological expansion, you may be wondering?  One simple word: steampunk.  Yes, Damnation is a game about steampunk, with clockwork automaton soldiers called Automen, turbine-powered motorbikes, and massive dirigible airships with outboard impeller drives.  Steam powered everything, folks, and some of it actually more advanced than what we have today—that’s the nature of steampunk.

And that’s why I hate this game.

See, Damnation may well be the second steampunk game ever, the first being a much more limited sort of steampunk called Darkwatch.  Damnation represents an amazing story, an alternate history of shocking depth.  Imagine an industrialist today—a Bill Gates, for example.  Maybe a Rupert Murdoch or a Ted Turner or even a Steve Jobs who just one day decided, hey, the government’s populated by a collection of screw-ups, halfwits, dullards and greedheads.  Maybe I should make an army and show them how to do the job right!  That’s exactly what’s going on here.

And when you start adding in fully-realized combat androids (the Automen) in the 1860s, you’ve got a lot of possibilities.  No matter who actually wins that particular conflict the entire world would be irrevocably altered.  From a literary standpoint, Damnation is a triumph.  The hate, meanwhile, comes in thanks to the miserable wreck of a game to which they’ve attached that literary triumph of a plot.  Damnation is a hellish array of horrible graphics, lousy gameplay, cheesy sound, terrible play mechanics, and a complete waste of a deep and amazing storyline.

It’s a third person shooter, that’s the worst part of it.  A third person shooter, with guns that are woefully underpowered for the job, packed with meaningless run and jump “action” segments that add nothing but unnecessary complications.  A third person shooter that looks like hell itself and sounds like the weeping of the damned.

Damnation is exactly what it says on the box, sadly for us all.  Playing this game feels like a jaunt through eternal torment.  And worst of it all, a science-fiction heaven of a storyline hangs tantalizingly over us all, forcing us to play on…or be damned.

I hate this game.

Bionic Commando Game Review–Taking Fun And Completely Destroying It

At the risk of dating myself horribly, I remember when Bionic Commando, now available for PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360,  was an arcade game.  Like in actual arcades.  In case you haven’t seen one lately, arcades were places where people would go to play video games.  Sure, they had video game systems at home–most of them did, anyway–but arcades were the place to go to play the newest, the latest, and the best.  They even had specialized interfaces–racing games would offer you a molded bucket seat with a steering wheel in front, and so on.  But enough of my geriatric doddering–the takeaway here is that I remember Bionic Commando when it didn’t look like a cookie-cutter of EVERY OTHER GAME ON THE MARKET.

This is a direct sequel to the original Bionic Commando, as well as to Bionic Commando: Rearmed, so of course some advancements are to be expected.  The plotline even manages to dovetail successfully with the original: ten years after the original, the “bionic commandos”, of which there were apparently more than one, are facing a sizable public backlash.  Hunted like dogs and in most cases killed, few people remember the legendary Super Joe who once saved the world. But recently, pro-bionic terrorists set off a “weapon of mass destruction” in the middle of Ascension City and proceeded to occupy the rest.  Now, it’s up to Nathan Spencer, former bionic commando, to swing in and retake the city.

Seriously—when was this giant rush started to make almost every game a shooter in which your perspective was either perched over a gun barrel or staring at some guy’s—or on rare occasions some girl’s—pixelated ass?  That may well be the biggest problem with Bionic Commando: sheer mind-numbing unoriginality.  Sure, the plotline’s great but the gameplay is so cookie-cutter as to be downright nightmarish.

The graphics and sound are just fine—if you like technical superiority in your games, then you won’t be disappointed here.  In this case, sadly, it’s just pretty wrapping over a lousy package.

Though in the end, it may be my own memories that are to blame here.  I didn’t have much fun with this game because it wasn’t the Bionic Commando I knew and loved.  Instead I got some pretty third-person shooter with some good action but some really buggy portions too.  I remember when the Bionic Arm would clamp onto nearly anything and let me swing.  I certainly DON’T, however, remember the Bionic Arm being useful in only a handful of situations, and the rest of the time, the arm simply refusing to attach.  It’s like the Delorean of bionic implants—sure, it LOOKS awesome but it really doesn’t perform all that well.  What point is there in only being able to attach onto a limited handful of surfaces?  Bionic Commando, with only a few exceptions, is basically almost two games—a shooter, and a timed button press round of swinging.

And even the timed button presses of swinging don’t always ensure success—more than once my swing indicator told me “Great Swing!”, but what that lying bastard failed to tell me was that it wasn’t good ENOUGH, as I fell into the abyss well short of where I’d intended to land.

So yes, I’m very disappointed with this second-rate retread purporting to be a sequel of a game I enjoyed so very much way back when.  Maybe my memories make me biased, but one thing’s clear, this is an unworthy successor.

Forumwarz Game Review–A Game Possibly Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Played

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.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust Game Review–Well, At Least It Tried

It’s strange, when an old series that you’d thought was long dead suddenly decides to crop up again, from literally out of nowhere.  You’d honestly begun to think that you’d never see it again, and in some cases, you might well have forgotten it ever existed at all.  That was the case with the Alone in the Dark series, and now, it’s the case for a whole new generation of PC games suddenly making their revival into the next-gen console market.  This time, we’ve got none other than Leisure Suit Larry back for more raunchy fun in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

And frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out just what to say about it.

This time around, you’re playing as Larry Lovage, the young horndog nephew to the great scion of the franchise, Larry Laffer, who has recently made good as a cinema magnate.  You’re hired on for a summer job doing grunt work at uncle Larry’s studio, and in the meantime, you’re also out to expose a mole hired by a rival studio to publicly air all of Laffer and  company’s dirty laundry.  In some cases, quite literally.

If you’re familiar with the movie industry at all, it will not surprise you in the least when I tell you this was written by Allen Covert of Happy Madison Productions, convincing me thoroughly that Adam Sandler is out to destroy humanity.  They’ve brought plenty of second-rate B-list star power along to do voiceover work, including Jay Mohr, who’s reprising his seemingly favorite role as a slimeball theatrical agent, not to mention a host of lesser names like Artie Lange, Dave Atell and Carmen Electra.  There are other names in here who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, like Patrick Warburton, Jeffrey Tambor and Shannon Elizabeth, but I guess everybody’s got to have a side project.

The gameplay is the most tedious sort of fetch gameplay—go here, get / do that, come back, repeat until you want to throw things, but considering your character is playing the lowest kind of studio grunt (if his title’s not production assistant I’ll be downright amazed), this actually makes sense.  There is a sense of humor here, but it’ll wind up being entirely too devoted to off-color humor of every stripe to be a whole lot of good.  One particularly funny bit occurs in one of the many loading screens, suggesting that your grandmother would LOVE a copy of this game for her birthday.  My grandmother would shatter the disk into bits and force-feed them to me if I ever actually gave her a copy of this.  I just know better.

You may be interested to note that this is the second recent Larry title (the first being Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude), and also the second created with absolutely no input from original Larry designer Al Lowe.  Maybe this has something to do with why they suck so badly.

But I’ll give it this much, it’s nice to NOT play a first person shooter for once, and in this industry, any game that’s not a first person shooter or a sports game has to get extra credit by virtue of SHEER ORIGINALITY.  Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust might be worth a rental just for a little bit of something completely different and a few laughs, but it’s not going to be something you want to bring home to mother.

Or home to grandma, for that matter, despite what the loading screens suggest.

Dragon Age Origins Getting Low-Tech Version

The world is often bizarrely cyclical. In its earliest incarnation Bioware’s fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins was based off the Neverwinter Nights engine and seemed more of a total conversion mod project than an actual independent title. Neverwinter Nights of course is one of many games to be based on the Dungeons and Dragons pen and paper (and more on occasion) tabletop roleplaying game.

Now Dragon Age: Origins is coming back to, well, its origins. Green Ronin Publishing will be releasing a pen and paper version of the game to accompany the digital adventure this summer. “We’re delighted to be working with Green Ronin to explore more of the Dragon Age universe through a pen and paper role-playing game. We’re excited to deliver Dragon Age’s unique dark, heroic fantasy to our audience in a brand new way – a perfect complement to the landmark game we’re launching on PC, Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 this fall,” said Dr. Ray Muzyka, General Manager and CEO, BioWare and General Manager and Vice President, EA.

The initial release will be a boxed set with more boxed sets and expansion books to be released later. An interesting possibility given that Bioware is including the suite of adventure creation tools is the possibility of user-created adventures being purchased and put out for the tabletop version.

Quantum of Solace Game Review–A High Caliber First Person Shooter

So when I saw that someone had converted the latest James Bond shooterific epic into a game, Quantum of Solace, now available for Playstations 2 and 3, the Wii, PC, DS and the Xbox 360, I sighed the sigh of a man who’d been here many, MANY times before.  I knew without so much as looking at the back of the box that it was going to be a first person shooter and heavily resemble the movie.  This was the case for virtually every James Bond title since Goldeneye’s incredible success, and since then, everyone’s been pretty much imitating Goldeneye.

This time around, there will be some differentiation as Quantum of Solace incorporates events from TWO different Bond installments–Casino Royale and its namesake Quantum of Solace, with a few events unique to the game–Bond is out to recover Mr. White, and fights his way through a small army.  Getting Mr. White back to Siena, Bond discovers that Quantum, an organization Mr. White is part of, has agents that have managed to infiltrate MI6.  From here, Bond proceeds onward through a whirlwind, worldwide adventure, gaining his vaunted Double O status, and ultimately attempting to take down Quantum.

And indeed, what I believed would be the case before I slapped the game in my system was to be—it was a first person shooter that mirrored the events of the movies fairly closely, albeit with some noticeable differences, and I thought that it was going to be yet another in a long string of games that I had already played before.  The unusual thing about the whole mess was that I actually had some fun with this one.  Maybe it was the smoothness of the controls, or the way I got a variety of weapons right out of the gate.  I don’t know what it was, but I both had fun and did NOT get seasick, relative rarities as far as first person shooters go.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?  It’s a first person shooter game.  If you’re not a huge James Bond fan or really into first person shooters then there’s only so much fun you can have here.  Indeed, I started getting bored with the whole thing after I shot up Mr. White’s pocket army at his house.

There is some further help on this one—there are several multiplayer modes to help improve playability and long-term replay value.  A first person shooter DOES make a good party game with lots of action, so there’s some value here, unless you’re chronically playing alone.

Let’s be clear—Quantum of Solace may be one of the best first person shooters I’ve ever played, but still, it’s only the best first person shooter I’ve ever played.  It’s like finding that particular brand of rat poison that makes you throw up the least when you mix it in a milkshake.  Or maybe the particular brand of anvil that hurts the least when you drop it on your foot.  I’ve only seen a handful of really entertaining first person shooters in my time, and admittedly, Quantum of Solace is one of them.  It’s a good rental, but sadly, not much else than that.