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.

So with the holiday crush looming right around the corner and the dizzying concept of a good month or two where every week brings something new and interesting, I thought I’d hit on what I’m playing and what I think about it at the moment. Y’know, for science.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption – Wii: On one hand, more of the same if you spent any time with the previous two Prime’s for the Game Cube. On the other, it is the definitive shooter for the Wii, and the sort of game that could easily prove every bit as important to FPS games on the console as Halo did when it first arrived. The controls are simply perfect – no other console shooter on the market today (and let’s go ahead and extend that through at least the beginning of the new year) has so deftly mimed the speed, grace, and maneuverability of the mouse-and-keyboard control set up, and as long as Microsoft and Sony stick with their traditional controllers it’s hard to see this same experience ever being available on the traditionally more “hardcore” systems. Nintendo have once again shown not only the potential that lies within their (pardon the pun) revolutionary controller but how well they understand it – Corruption offers up the most satisfying time on the Wii since, oh, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. That’s a bit of a double-edged sword though, of course, as amazing first-party games do little to assure the worries that enough third-party developers will ever come to grips with the motion-sensitive controls enough to keep store shelves full of great new games. That said, there are a number of third-party games coming slated for the next few months and beyond that I’m looking forward to, and the optimistic vote says that this first year of the Wii’s existence has been one of growing pains for a lot of developers out there.

All praise for the controls aside, the gameplay really is more of the same, for better or worse – lots of exploring, lots of backtracking, lots of puzzles to figure out and enemies needing to be killed in a certain way. While the controls add an interesting flair and very little of their implementation here feels gimmicky, it only helps so much when the frustration begins to set in at another progress blocker requiring you to backtrack or another boss with convenient orbs covering his body to shoot. I’m enjoying myself, but I’m also not spending as much time with it as I thought I would be. Make of that what you will.

Picross DS – DS: A simple yet fun puzzle game, and pretty much exactly what I’ve been in the mood for lately whenever I pick up my DS (actually, what I want is another Rocket Slime, but puzzles are usually another itch that needs scratching). Each puzzle is made up of a grid with numbers along the top and left sides. These numbers tell you how many squares within their row or column need to be filled in to create that puzzle’s image. It’s a wonderful logic puzzle and bastard addictive, and that it reminds me of the third Indiana Jones movie’s Jehovah-Starts-With-An-I bit only helps.

Clubhouse Games – DS: I was expecting a collection of simple board and card games, which this certainly is. But it’s also bowling, darts, and a number of other unexpected games each implemented with simple yet graceful use of the touch screen. A number of titles are locked when you first start playing, encouraging you to try things you’ve never heard of or might not otherwise be excited over, and several games have secret modes or skins that can only be accessed by winning a set number of times. Toss in online play and it’s the perfect companion for a long trip – not-quite-mindless fun that’s constantly egging you in to one more round.

Skate. – Xbox 360 (demo): I’ve never really liked the Tony Hawk games, though I appreciate the idea behind them – lots of people want to skateboard, but not everybody has the skill/patience/lack of a job or other responsibilities it takes to learn, so yeah, there’s definitely a place for a skating sim. Perhaps it’s that my sucking in real life tends to transfer to any time spent with Tony Hawk, or maybe it’s Neversoft’s apparent inability to do anything other than churn out skating games and make me lose interest in Guitar Hero III, but something always put me off about the series and, because there’s no real alternatives, skating games in general.

But then there’s the demo for EA’s Skate., which in the hour I played it (the demo has a time limit on it, presumably to keep you from screwing around forever in free play mode) managed to turn a good portion of my sucking into something that, while not yet mad skillz, could possibly get there one day. The tutorial mode is incredibly easy going, with the narrator (who only eventually lapses into annoying hip speak rather than drowning in it from the start) walking you through the basic moves and emphasizing the importance of timing when doing tricks. It’s here where Skate. really shines, as you soon begin to see how even the most complicated tricks are done by flowing in and out of the same moves you learned at the beginning of the game. One control stick moves the board, one moves your body, and the triggers handle your arms. There are the usual time trials and stunt challenges and such, but there’s also lots of opportunities to just, y’know, skate. And it turns out that’s all I’m really looking for in a skating game.

Medal of Honor: Airborne – Xbox 360 (demo): The tired and… tired Medal of Honor series gets a rather dramatic overhaul here: instead the usual linear slog through war-torn Europe, Airborne sees you leaping out of a plane and parachuting into the middle of a battle already in progress. Each battle has a number of things that need doing, and you can choose which to go after first by where you decide to land. The idea here is it’s your battle, and you can fight it the way you want to, by aiming for the green smoke that indicates an area with lots of friendly forces or dropping right into the heat of battle. It’s a good idea in a game that seems to have lots of them – there’s an interesting system in place where you become better with weapons as you use them, which leads to faster loading times, better accuracy, and other skill bonuses – but at the end of the day, you’re playing another WW2 game, fighting another bunch of Nazis for the same handful of towns and villages you’ve probably saved a dozen times before. It really feels like the age of WW2 games is coming to an end – even Call of Duty is making the leap into the modern age, for god’s sake – and it’s hard to tell what’s the greater shame here: that Medal of Honor: Airborne will be largely overlooked as just another Nazi-em-up, or that EA decided to make it one in the first place. For all it’s gameplay twists, I just can’t get excited about another bunch of Nazis waiting around for me to machine gun them down. And maybe that’s the greatest shame of all.

It’s strange when a game that excels on so many levels ends on a misstep. After a week of spending some of each night in Rapture’s wonderfully crafted world, for things to finally come to a head in the form of a by-the-numbers, “wear the boss down, force him to recharge, hit him when he recharges, repeat” boss fight is a tremendous curveball – you don’t expect a game that so expertly defies so many videogame conventions to end on one of the biggest ever, and rightfully so. It doesn’t take away from the rest of the experience, or from the horrifying journey of self discovery (and more than a little self mutiliation) that makes up the last fourth before the big fight, though, and as generic boss fights go it was a good one – I even got to use the l33t hacker skills that saw me through so much of Rapture’s challenges one last time. That said, it was still just a generic boss fight, and it’s presence in Bioshock is genuinely puzzling.

The denouement immediately after was wonderful, though, and completely in keeping with the rest of the game’s dark sense of justice.

There’s at least more than one ending to Bioshock, and which one you get depends largely on how you handle the Little Sisters. To answer the question I sorta-kinda stepped around in my first post on the game: I harvested all but two of them, trading any hope they might have had at being normal again for the maximum amount of ADAM. The two Little Sisters I spared lucked out due to morbid curiousity a brief flutter of guilt after the game’s big moment, respectively, and I like to think they’ll remember me fondly for that. The downer ending I received says different. I’ve no complaints, though – I knew what I was getting in to from the beginning, and sealed my fate with that first push of the “X” button with only the tiniest bit of regret.

The final verdict? Game of The Year, hands down. Quite possibly Game of The Next Several Years, as it’ll probably be a good long while before anybody comes out with its equal. It’s not perfect – there are a few jarring moments story-wise, and while they’re eventually explained (mostly) some exposition from the voice on the other end of your radio wouldn’t have hurt. The hacking mini-game is something you’ll either love, put up with, or hate. It struck me as odd at first, but the more time I spent turning Rapture’s various security devices into my own robot guards of death the more I grew to like it. There are a few other things that could probably be picked at if you wanted to be well and truly annoying, but why would you? It’s a brilliant game, the sort that, in a perfect world, would silence all “games are art/not art” arguments once and for all. It makes me proud of the industry I work in and a little embarassed at the same time, and I hope it leaves a lot of other developers with the same feeling. Should all games be Bioshock? God, no. But in its wake there’s no excuses not take chances, to build on mechanics players are familiar with in exciting new directions. For all it’s art, this isn’t an “art game” like Rez or Shadow of the Colossus – it’s a shooter. The story is there if you want to engage with it, the consequences of your choices there to be weighed if you want to consider them, but if none of that interests you then hey, you still get to shoot stuff and brain folks with a wrench.

Irrational have a lot to be proud of. A company couldn’t ask for a finer swan song, and (in a just world) its universal acclaim and robust sales should help ensure that their new life as 2K-Boston/Australia will provide them with the support they need to pursue future projects without taking away any of the freedom they need to get there. In the meantime, there’s always more of Rapture to see, alternate endings to discover, and different play styles to try. I have Metroid Prime 3: Corruption waiting in the wings as the perfect shooty pallet cleanser, and then it’s back to Rapture for another go.

I genuinely can’t wait.

You spend a lot of time in Bioshock looking for things to keep you alive. The most useful items for this are pretty obvious: first aid kits fill your health bar, and EVE hypos give you more juice for using Plasmids. But there’s more to it than that – in a lovely stroke of world building, the developers have filled Rapture’s ruins with all manner of other things to help you along. Bags of chips, cakes, and bread fill your health while candy bars and coffee up your EVE levels. Cigarettes take away from your health but boost your EVE, while any of the many bottles of liquor lying around cost you a small bit of the Plasmid juice in exchange for health and game world going wobbly for a bit. Drink enough and you can become very, very drunk, stumbling into walls and debris as the room swims around you. Combined with the loss of EVE, it’s a nice bit of balance to keep players from freely imbibing their way to full health meters as they make their way through the game. Or rather, it was.

While running through the caberet-gone-mad area known as Fort Frolic, I stumbled on to a Plasmid called Booze Hound. With Booze Hound equipped, your body learns to process alcohol better, meaning you gain EVE instead of losing it. You can still get drunk, which leaves you extremely vulnerable if any Splicers show up, but who cares? You can still get drunk.

And that’s why, when I was low on health and EVE, I ran for one of Rapture’s bars. Reprogramming the nearby security system to attack any one that wasn’t me, I settled in to the bar’s well-stocked storage room and started grabbing bottles. Somewhere Bobby Darin played on a record player, and from a small window I could watch fish swim past a lonely corpse on the ocean floor. Even with the occasional sound of gun fire as some poor Splicer stumbled in front of one of my security cameras, it was the most relaxing time I’d had since coming to the city.