Just a quick heads up that I am still tinkering with our auto spam filter. The good news is that it’s catching almost all of the crazy boot selling spam.

And believe me they keep trying to sell you some boots.

The bad news is that it catches some legit posts as well. Not a lot but some. I’m trying to find the sweet spot and I honestly have no clue why it says some things are spam and others are not but — and I am basing this on some of your comments — we are not censoring anyone in the comment section. There’s no one reading your comments and then approving them. It’s all automated. My best advice for now is, if you write a long drawn out comment, CTRL-C copy it before posting it so if it does get caught in filter land you can edit it and repost. I can lower the filter guard a bit but if I do that we’re back to Boot-A-Mania.

So, please have some patience and I am publishing the comments that are legit that enter the spam filter.

Rest assured we are not ‘The Man’ and we are not trying to keep you down.

Over at the Mothership, Bill Abner has just pulled the drape off my review of the new Battletech box set that we announced here a couple of weeks ago. This set commemorates 25 years of Hunchbacks blowing the chicken legs off of Mad Cats and mechs running hot and breaking down in the heat of battle. I didn’t play the game until 1989, when my purchase of the second edition foretold of an earthquake in California. When I got this new set, there was an earthquake in Japan. When I get the 50th anniversary set, the earth will be destroyed.

But before then, I think it’s a good way to check out the game if you’ve ever played any of the great Mechwarrior/Mech Commander PC games…or even those ancient ones, Crescent Hawk and all that. Hawken looks great and all, but I’d really like to see a Mechwarrior 5 come around someday.

Funny enough, playing Battletech put me in the mood for some video game mech action…so I rounded up Front Mission for the DS and Front Mission 3 off of PSN. It’s really too bad that all the JRPG garbage spoils those games…I swore some time ago I would never play a game that had a still image of a face while dialogue slowly types out in a text box. I’m still looking for that mech game fix.

We’re working on a review. Here’s a taste for when the game drops April 20th on XBLA.

More info can be found here: http://warisprejudice.com

After sweating out on the greens and fairways of golf courses the world over, my review of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 is finally up at Ye Olde GameShark. Not one to waste perfectly good content, I thought I’d talk a little about the review itself and the review process. Hopefully it doesn’t come off as too inside baseball-y, or in this case, inside golf-y.

I’ve made no bones about the fact that I am not a sports game guy. Not only am I not a sports game guy, but I work for one of the best sports game reviewers around, and work alongside one of the other best sports game reviewers around. This makes the concept of me tackling a “serious” sports game all the more ludicrous. As a result, you get my review, which, as Bill told me last night, right after saying his initial impression was to send it back, is a sports game review done by someone who doesn’t give a lick about sports game reviews.

Reviewing a sports game is an incredibly daunting task. Not only are there a ton of moving points, more so than ever before as game makers add more and more options so they can populate bullet points with marketing speak. (As an aside, the reviewer’s guide that came with Tiger Woods pointed out that the game now has 3D grass. Seriously. 3D grass.) So there’s a lot to cover when you’re reviewing a sports game, just in terms of features, but the other problem is that sports games model activities that you can see, in real life, for reference, at any time. I have no idea how a Collector would act if I invaded their mothership in the hopes of halting a Reaper invasion. As long as the enemies are not complete morons, I have to assume BioWare did a good job with the AI. Not so with a sports game. If something feels hinky in a baseball game, there are decades of information you can consult to confirm said hinkiness. Same goes for any sport. So it’s not just a matter of making sure that a particular mechanic works, but you also have to know if the mechanic is implemented realistically in the greater context of the game.

I can assure you, this never happens with a Pokemon review.

Now, I am familiar with golf and luckily, the sport being how it is, I don’t have to worry about knowing if a franchise progressed accurately or if the AI controlled DB does whatever it is DB’s do. So as sports games go, if I were to attack this review in the same exhausting fashion that Bill does, this game would be a good one to start with.

Problem was, I didn’t want to do that.

That’s not entirely true. More truthfully, I didn’t know that I didn’t want to do that. I certainly played the game as if I were going to approach the review that way. I’d check historical tour scores for whatever tournament I was on. I consulted the official PGA rule book for certain situations. I researched things. With science. All in the intention of doing a full on Sports Game Review, right up until I started writing it.

There are times when getting a review done is like pulling teeth. Other times, like with this one, once you start, it’s all a blur of misspelled words and misplaced commas until the piece is done. I got all of the way to the last paragraph before I realized that what I wrote was not a Sports Game Review, but was instead, a story of my experience with the game. It wasn’t what I had planned on writing, but I really, really liked it and I didn’t want to see it go.

I consider myself a pretty workmanlike reviewer. I think that if you read my reviews, you’ll be entertained and at the end of it, you’ll know if I think the game is a good use of your time and money. Like Consumer Reports, but with more jokes. I don’t think it’s a bad way to review games, but it is a safe way. Sometimes I want to be a little more creative, as with this review, but when those thoughts come up, you have to not only be able to pull off whatever it is you’re trying to do, but still serve the purpose of the review. So when I reread what I had wrote, I almost ditched it because I wasn’t sure I had served the purpose of the review.

There was no mention of the number of courses, or how it’s kind of annoying to have an event on the PGA Tour that requires you to buy a course. No mention of the loading times, or the fantastic new save system that no longer forces you to resume the event in progress once you start up the game. I didn’t tell you about the golfers on the tour, or the different difficulty levels. I didn’t mention the online play or the daily golf challenges available while playing tour events. There’s a lot I didn’t cover and you could argue that I should have, but what I wanted to do, more than anything else, was describe how I felt while I was playing this game. Honestly, all of that stuff that I just mentioned didn’t add or take away from the experience I had one whit, which is why I didn’t add them. That and I wasn’t sure how to take something like a save system and incorporate it into a review that was written as if I were actually golfing and not playing a golf game.

I think it’s important to change your approach to reviews like this, and I should do it more often as it makes you a better writer. It doesn’t always work, but even when it doesn’t the attempt is usually worth it. I’m lucky that Bill is willing to roll with these kind of things as I can see other editors wanting something more straightforward and I wouldn’t blame them, once I got past the crushing disappointment. For me though, this was a game that I saw myself enjoying more and more as I played it and doing the usual point to point review felt like I was doing it a disservice. It may not be easy for Metacritic to grab a tagline from the review, but hopefully the review conveys to the reader what a great experience I had while playing the game.

From what I hear, that’s kind of the point.

Ha! how’s that for a hit trolling title? I’m really getting better at this. In truth, that’s what this story from Computer World suggests. The FBI raided the apartment of two University of Michigan students. The reason? Gold farming in WoW, which is basically tantamount to fraud.

“…potentially fraudulent sales or purchases of virtual currency that people use to advance in the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft.”

The students claim this is all crazy because they don’t even play WoW. Said one of the unnamed students, “They thought we were involved in some kind of fraud. I’m pretty sure they have the wrong people, but they took all my stuff.”

All of that sounds hilarious because it happened to two Michigan students* but further reading revealed this nugget:

Searching for more about gold farmers led me to a Canadian study, Botnet Analysis Report, that also has bizarre tidbits besides focusing on botnets. On page 122 of the Scribd document, it mentioned a “dark universe” where terrorists or “targets of interest” have moved their operations. “Virtual world terrorism facilitates real world terrorism: recruitment, training, communication, radicalization, propagation of toxic content, fund raising and money laundering, and influence operations.” The report claims that inside virtual worlds, terrorists have modified games to make Allied troops the default enemy so would-be terrorists could be recruited and trained.

Cheerful stuff.

The whole thing is worth a read at Computer World . And thanks Game Politics for the link.

*Buckeye humor.

This is more Barnes Wheelhouse territory but it’s a PR so I’m comfy posting it. Mike’s a rabid fan of this game so he’ll be joyous of yet another table to download. Well, in a couple of weeks anyway.

PR ahead:

ZEN Studios is proud to announce Sorcerer’s Lair, the newest addition to the ZEN Pinball lineup on PlayStation Network. The brand new, originally designed fantasy pinball adventure will be available April 26th in North America, and April 27th in Europe. Set in an ancient magical Citadel, players assume the role of a brother and sister duo who find themselves outmatched by an evil Sorcerer. In order to survive the Sorcerer’s arsenal of summoning attacks including skeletons, spiders and ghosts, the pair must uncover secrets that will aid in their offense. Befriended by Whisper, a friendly ghost trapped in the Citadel, the duo are able to end the Sorcerer’s reign and restore the Citadel to its peaceful existence.

“It is hard to believe that Sorcerer’s Lair is our seventh ZEN Pinball expansion – and we truly thank the PlayStation community for their support,” said Zsolt Kigyossy, Managing Director for ZEN Studios. “We feel so blessed to be able to continue work on a game we love so much.”

Featuring three new trophies, multiple modes of play, interactive 3D models, leader board support, and online multiplayer competition, Sorcerer’s Lair continues the rich* pinball tradition established by ZEN Studios.

Developed by ZEN Studios, Sorcerer’s Lair joins Paranormal, MARS, Earth Defense, Excalibur, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Street Fighter II as the seventh PlayStation Network expansion table for ZEN Pinball.

*damn.

MMORPG.com is giving away 5,000 (seriously, 5,000) keys for a free weekend of Rift, the swanky new MMO from Trion which we gave a great review a few weeks ago.

So if you want to take it for a test spin, now’s your chance. I think it’s just a matter of going to the site and asking for a key. There’s like 3,000 left so I assume your odds are “better than average”.

I missed this little piece of news from Monday so let’s go back a few days and imagine this is actually hot off the presses. It’s still interesting, though, and worth talking about.

I’m a huge proponent of GOG (Good Old Games). I remember at E3 a few years ago PR legend Tom Ohle was handing out these annoying little green GOG buttons and all kinds of GOG gear and I had no idea what he was talking about. He gave me a 3.5 inch floppy with my name on it. I looked at him. Blankly. Of course he was talking about a great service for playing old games, DRM free, and about as hassle free as one could expect.

GOG was recently in the news when it announced it would sell The Witcher 2 DRM free, as well. But what about those insane pirate people? Surely they would destroy sales for CD’s flagship game, right? Not according to Lukasz Kukawski, GOG’s PR and marketing manager, when he told bit-tech:

‘What I will say isn’t popular in the gaming industry,’ says Kukawski, ‘but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle? We are making a bold step by putting up this highly-anticipated title without any sort of DRM. We believe it’s going to be a huge success, which should really open doubters’ eyes.’

This brings up a point that was mentioned here in the Anno 2070 story from yesterday. There are people who simply will not buy PC games from UbiSoft due to its draconian DRM. Then when you consider the INSANE story about Dragon Age Origins’ servers going haywire, thus making all legit DLC not function, effectively (temporarily) killing all saved games for a product that people PAID FOR, it’s simply a terrible way to treat legit customers.

Also consider this: Executive Producer Nathan Camarillo spoke to us at GameShark before that game’s release, discussing in part about how pissed they were as a team when the leaked Crysis 2 build hit the pirate circuit. And people stealing games sucks — let’s not sugarcoat that. But– did that hurt the sales of Crysis 2 on the PC? Every chart I see has that game in the top 5 for Steam and Impulse. So how much of an impact did that really have? I don’t know the answer to that but it IS a question worth asking, right?

Watching the GOG sales for The Witcher 2 is going to be…interesting.

If you follow us here at NHS on even a casual basis you know that we’re big fans of The Witcher. After seeing early builds of the sequel at trade shows, it’s easily on the ‘big list of games we really want to play’ this year. And while I am twisting arms and making gentle threats to get our own preview build, the blokes (and by blokes I mean Jim Rossignol) at Rock Paper Shotgun are offering up some hands on thoughts and it is well worth a read.

The preview contains some great stuff and some potential issues. (QTEs? Really?)

What follows are impressions of The Witcher 2 based on the limited preview code that Namco and CD Projekt recently released to the press. It’s the prologue and first chapter of the full game, and as such makes up a healthy chunk of play time. People are saying about ten hours, but I think I spent longer than that with it. I’ll avoid specific narrative spoilers, but I won’t be avoiding game-mechanic spoilers. What that means is that I’ll be talking about how the game works, but not that much about what actually happens. This is not a game where you want to know about the surprises.

So head on over and give it a read. (Feel free to come back though.)

Just got word from Battle Slots developer Phantom EFX that the game has been released early, and is now available at retail and for digital download. If this is an actual case of releasing early to meet demand and not some marketing ploy to make it look like lots of people want the game, then good for them. My love of the demo is well known and I am anxiously awaiting my review copy so that I can see if the full game lives up to my expectations.