Rock Band is just what it sounds like – picking up the big box version gets you a guitar controller, a microphone, and a drum kit. Throw in another guitar controller for whoever’s playing bass and you have a four-piece band that can all play together in the game’s World Tour mode. I’ll save the comparisons between Rock Band and new standard bearer Neversoft’s Guitar Hero 3 for another post, as wordpress has a vitrol cap for each entry and I want to keep this one under the wire. Suffice for now to say Harmonix’s newest bundle of joy is the only music game you need this year, or probably any other. It’s guitar parts and career mode (guitar, vocals, and drums each have their own solo version of play) along are a better sequel to the previous Guitar Heroes than the most recent official installment, and that’s before you even turn on any of the other instruments.

Playing it with friends – the way god intended – is another experience entirely. Thursday and Friday saw Gallaher, Val, and Gregg came over to create our Thanksgiving-themed bands (named All Tomorrow’s Sandwiches and The Black Fridays, for those wondering). While my drum set wasn’t so much with the working, we managed to spend hours touring Europe while swapping up duties on the other three instruments. One of the best parts of playing with friends – particularly friends with no prior experience rocking out with toy guitars – is watching everybody find their particular strength. Val, for instance, is great on bass (and busting out ‘Sabotage’ when need be) while David handles vocals with aplomb and was the only one who could get the largely broken drums to behave themselves. Gregg stuck to the bass, but somewhere out there is the right amount of Maker’s Mark to get him to pick up the microphone. I suppose there’s always next time.

Rock Band is so damn near perfect that even with a broken drum kit it’s clear that this is everything Harmonix has be building towards since they began making music games. The heads of the company have stated over and over again throughout the years that their ultimate goal is to help people experience their muisc in a new way. Rock Band is that new way, an experience so steeped in cooperation and hanving fun together that no other multiplayer game can really complete. You can compete against each other just as easily, but where’s the lasting fun in that? Give me a band instead, give me four reasonably tipsy friends with plastic instruments and a good sense of humor and I’ll show you the future of co-op gameplay.

More later, including the end of Mario Galaxy and a return trip to Rapture.

First things first: Halo 3 has one of the most fantastic end game sequences I’ve ever played. Never mind that it will be instantly familiar if you finished the original game (or Super Metroid, Resident Evil 4, or any other “the place is coming down and we gotta motor” game endings). If it did nothing else right, the Halo series would still deserve heaps and mounds of praise for the way in which its gameplay lends itself to truly epic – dare I say, emergent? – cinematic moments. Bounding over the crumbling bits of the Halo ring as it prepares to fire, explosions ripping up the newborn landscape around me as mad, doomed zombies (space zombies, mind) try their damnedest to take me down with them…it’s a wonderful end to a series that, for all its faults, never really relied on bosses for its defining moments (and when it did usually made sure you didn’t really think of them as such – enemies that could be called bosses were just another event, the next cool thing in a long line of them being tossed your way in need of blowing up). It’s going to be a good long while before I forget the feeling of my breath seizing up in my throat as a piece of paneling exploded in front of me, forcing my Warthog into a sharp turn that sent its ass end fish-tailing out over nothingness. The way the thing just hung there, teetering on the brink before the front wheels could gain enough grip to pull us up was sheer beauty. Halo 3 is full of such accidental glories, form taking down a Covenant Hunter with a well-placed grenade mere seconds before he pounded me to pulp and being complemented by an AI-controlled ally to Gravity Hammering my way to victory across a heavily occupied bridge, sending tiny Grunts airborne like I was playing the newest and heavily fascist-leaning Tiger Woods game. And then there’s the intentional moments, dropped into the game with palpable glee by the developers – the fight against not one but two towering Covenant Scarabs with the vehicle of your choosing, the opportunity to save a fellow human from a scripted choking by putting a bullet through his captor’s skull, and a dozen more I can’t quite pick out at the moment. Bungie pioneered the idea of focusing battles and the like into “thirty seconds of fun” in the first Halo, and there are a number of bits here that definitely show they still know how to hit the right buttons.

That said, there’s a key phrase in the above paragraph that I find myself repeating a lot when talking about the game: “Despite all its faults”. And don’t let the universal praise and high scores fool you, Halo 3 certainly has them. Putting aside the tatters of story the game gives you (and then completely abandons when it needs to take you elsewhere for the sake of stretching out the solo campaign’s play time), there’s just far too much here that feels like it was lifted from both of the previous Halo games. As with its predecessors, Bungie’s knack for level design starts strong and engaging, creating an opening that’s both educational to new players while remaining challenging for veterans. The deeper you get though, the fresh feeling of this new world starts to fall away before utterly crumbling in the game’s first encounter with indoor levels. From your first step in the human base, anything with hallways and corridors becomes repetitive to the point of being confusing, with far too many rooms only distinguishable from where you just were by the number of dead bodies. After that, I found myself calling levels based on my experience with the first Halo – This next bit will have me in a Warthog. After this, I’ll need to knock out some sort of shield, and then probably fight a tank or something. Some parts of the game are genuinely too dangerous to think too hard about, as doing so might start the cynical part of your brain complaining about how you already played this bit years ago.

And then there are the enemies. The Covenant Elites you spent the first two games gleefully killing are now your allies, and have been replaced by the massive berserker-prone Brutes. This actually changes nothing; while a Brute soaks up more damage than an Elite, they’re also dumber and easier to hit, relying too heavily on special equipment like the new Bubble Shield while hardly ever seeking true cover. It made me long for the more intelligent foes of old, the sort who, as far back as the first game, would use interconnecting corridors to their advantage by trying to flank me rather than waiting around to be shot.

And then there’s the Flood, the zombie menace du jour of the Halo universe since the first one. Tough, fast, seemingly every where at once and able to revive any of their members you kill, the Flood work once, maybe twice as a scary force. With that largely used up in the first game (aside from their arrival in Halo 3, where their crash-landing on Earth leaves the landscape blackened and cracked and the air filled with smoke), they become little more than a nuisance, a constant wave of things to pump bullets into and be killed by until you realize your best hope is to just run. I only stood my ground with the Flood when the game absolutely demanded it; for 99% of my encounters I either ran through them, ran away from them, or let the computer-controlled Arbiter hander the worst of it. They just aren’t worth the ammo, as even at the lower difficulty levels – I was playing at Normal, for what it’s worht – the game is just gong to keep throwing up new monsters to replace the ones you’ve killed. Their appearance in Halo 3 – particularly during your trip into the bowels of one of their ships to rescue your AI gal pal and general Miss Sassypants Cortana – speaks to falling down of imagination; the Flood were originally the answer to “What’s tougher for the player to face than the Covenant”?, and for a while that was fine. The trouble is that two sequels and six years later Bungie are still falling back on the same answer, and it isn’t good enough any more.

The Covenant are worthy opponents – even when led by the Brutes they use offensive maneuvers, defensive shields and specialized weaponry, and have taught more than a few players new ways of looking at their arsenal in regards to how it can be used. Compared to that, the Flood are little more than mindless target dummies, initially impressive due to their sheer numbers and brutality, but ultimately just an irritation to be pushed aside. They reduce all but the most determined and skilled player strategies to just running through a crowd; from “how can I work around that turret position to get a clear shot?” to “well, if I equip something heavy and deadly, run in a straight line, and focus on hitting any bastard that gets in my way, maybe I can push through this bit to the next fun part”. Only there shouldn’t be a next fun part, there should be this fun part, followed by another, and another, and another. It’s all the more frustrating because up until the Flood arrive in all their cut scene glory, that’s by and large Halo 3: big dumb fun that challenges you in ways you don’t expect but never punishes a lack of skill until you ask it to. Derivative? Extremely, and for all the wonders of its massive multiplayer options, even that looks decidedly last-gen when compared to something like, say, Valve’s forthcoming Team Fortress 2. But despite that and all my complaining, Halo 3 is a solid, engaging (and let’s not forget beautiful) game that is a hell of a lot of fun. It does what all great games should do: keeps me engaged in the moment while excited over whatever’s just around the corner. Even more than that that, it makes me excited for whatever’s next for Bungie as a company. Especially if it’s something that comes without the nagging feeling that they’ve run out of ideas.

Unspeakable Words – From James Ernest, he of more Cheapass Games than you can throw a decent-sized table at, comes a word game as simple and fun and skidding down the slippery slope that leads to the gaping jaws of madness. Unspeakable Words is no mere spelling game, see – it’s a spelling game with Elder Gods, sanity checks, and little Cthuhlu tokens representing how few of your marbles are left. Each player has a hand full of letter cards, and each letter card is worth a number of points depending on how many angles it has. On their turn, players use the letters in their hand to spell words that are at least three letters long and haven’t been used by another player. Once the word is on the table, the point value of each card is added up to determine their score for the turn. The first player to a hundred points wins.

The catch is that after a word is put down and the points totalled up, the player has to roll a twenty-sided die for a sanity check. If the die roll is higher than the point value of their word, they’re fine. If it’s lower, they lose a sanity point and stray ever closer to that which man was not meant to know. Simple and addictive, it’s a fun little game that both rewards a well-rounded vocabulary while punishing those trying to show it off. It’s twenty dollars new, but between the great card illustrations (each letter is accompanied by an Elder God) and thirty little Cthuhlu figures, the game’s practically paid for before you even get to play it.

Kung Fu Fighting – Many card and board games encourage a bit of roleplaying to help enrich the play experience, but few reach into each player and coax it out themselves. During a round of Kung Fu Fighting it’s all but impossible to avoid adopting the overblowing speaking style of the vocal dubbing greats or insult your opponents in the most round about ways (“Foolish is the monkey who tells the tiger he cannot have his meat” is quickly becoming a personal favorite put down). In Kung Fu Fighting, each player takes on the role of a Kung Fu master equipped with all the requisite punches, kicks, stances, and weapons needed to avenge any fallen masters dead classmates you might have handy. Each turn you can assume a stance, select a weapon, and launch one attack against another fighter. While stances and weapons bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the party (the rock-paper-scissors balance to the stances is very nice indeed), the real power comes from the modifiers. Why throw a punch when you could run up a wall to throw a Flying Invicible Magnificent Punch? Just like in the movies, each modifier has to be called out loud before you actually say what you’re doing, and just like in the movies the entire thing can be undone with a single well-played block card. If there’s any issues with the game it’s that it can drag on a bit once down to the final two players, as you can all but guarantee your opponent has a few block cards put aside for that Flipping Flying Spinning Sword attack you’re counting on to finish things. But really, when playing a game that lets you pit your Drunken stance against your friend’s Dragon while shouting about the lack of honor he brings to this dojo, who cares?

Munchkin – I thought very long and hard about skipping the description here and going with “Look, just play it already”, but that would be doing the game a disservice. For any and all either too perplexed or too put off by Dungeons and Dragons to ever try a game, here is Munchkin, a card game that sends up that most tried and true of roleplaying games without falling into the same traps as its subject matter. Play is fiendishly simple – there are two types of cards, Doors and Treasures. Players take turns kicking down Doors and facing what’s behind them – either a monster, a curse, or something else – and then either loot the room in the form of drawing Door cards into their hand or collecting Treasure for killing monsters. Each time you kill a monster, you get to go up a level or two, and the first player to level 10 wins.

Were it that easy. Along the way, you have to deal with your friends stabbing you in the back, cursing you, stealing your weapons or other loot, teaming up against you, throwing more monsters at you for you to fight, and generally being the most malicious bastards imaginable in the name of winning or at least making damn sure you don’t. It’s a game where it’s never over when you think it is, where decisions made early on can come back to haunt you in unspeakable ways, and where there’s always something more ridiculous than whatever just happened waiting right around the corner. On one hand, it cuts games like D&D to the quick by boiling things down to their core elements (fighting monsters, getting loot, leveling up) and making their worst elements commonplace (killer GMs, inexplicably hard encounters, greedy players only interested in winning). On the other, it makes you see why these games are so damn popular, emphasizing the group and discussion over all. Hail Munchkin in all its brain-breaking backwards nonsense.