So what am I playing? Smaller games, mostly, or at least games I can play in smaller chunks. Games like:

No More Heroes
While one of the longer games I’m playing at the moment, No More Heroes is perfect for tackling in small chunks. As Travis Touchdown, otaku with a heart of… something and a beam sword won off the internet, there are eleven professional killers standing between you and being the top-ranked assassin in the world.

Which turns out be perfect for spending a couple of hours with here and there. In about an hour, I can jump into the game, spend some time getting together the money necessary to go after my next target by performing odd jobs for a man who insists on reminding me of the coconut’s godliness, tool around the surreal landscape of Santa Destroy, and still have time to brutally kill the next whackjob in line after an epic, occasionally earth-shattering battle. No More Heroes rewards both long and short form play, perfectly happy to have you for as long as you can spare. I’m ranked number four at the moment, having just killed some sort of magician guy in the middle of his act, and am now a bit down at the idea of running out of such incredibly unique freaks of nature to laser sword into little bits. There’s always hard mode, I suppose.

Rock Band
Rock Band has effected my gaming habits like nothing else since Animal Crossing: Wild World (and both Brain Ages, though for not nearly as long) – I play it every day, for at least twenty minutes a day, and usually first thing in the morning. Looking to replace your morning cup of coffee? You could do worse than a plastic guitar and ‘When You Were Young’ by the Killers.

And there’s more to it than that. My girlfriend and I have a standing date to play as our band Kara & Her Special Destiny in World Tour mode, despite her having that whole “studying for med school” thing looming over every bit of her free time (we’re now in the Hall of Fame, thankyewverymuch). Two weeks ago, in the name of our band moving past the fan cap of 260,000 for playing on Medium, I retaught myself how to play the guitar to make finally breaking through into the Hard difficulty level possible. Nothing in Guitar Hero 1 or 2 inspired the same push, but then, nothing in those games had the chance to play in Tokyo as the carrot to balance out the stick of introducing that orange button. Most importantly, though, is how easy Harmonix have made it to play every day – in twenty minutes I can play four or five songs, waking myself up while essentially learning how to play the game all over again. In two hours on a Saturday, Kara & Her Special Destiny can blaze across the country and end up on Europe’s door step. It’s all about creating as much of a player friendly experience as possible: how I progress and the challenges I take on are almost entirely up to me, making Rock Band one of the most freeing experiences to be found in games.

Team Fortress 2
TF2 continues to enthrall for many reasons, chief of which being it’s still one of the only multiplayer games where I don’t feel ostracized for not dedicating every waking moment of the last five years to the fine art of the headshot. It’s still the premiere team experience, still the one game I’ve been apart of where good communication will win out over a team of experienced but uncooperative players almost every time.

I’ve already talked at length about much of what works with TF2, and believe me, I could go on. Suffice to say that the game has delivered on the greatest promise of its design – while the Pyro is still my first choice for who to play as, the last few months have seen me cozying up to the Soldier in a big way. His slow, methodical pace, the swiss army knife of destruction that is his bazooka, and his ability to switch between offensive tank and rocket firing turret make him an excellent first step of the comfort zone I so often establish in games. More than this, though, is how TF2 lacks any trace of the aforementioned disappointment games, largely because it’s exactly what it says it is. It never claims any of the realism or moral dilemma that other games advertise and never quite deliver on, it doesn’t sell itself as the next leap forward in anything in particular. It’s just a way to play with friends. Granted, it’s one of the most fun, most well-balanced, and most insanely addictive ways to do so, but it’s happy being just that. And more and more often, that’s all I really want.

Call of Duty 4
And the CoD 4, the game I never expected anything from only to get nearly everything I wanted. I just finished plaything through it again for the second time a week or so ago, and it’s every bit as thrilling and fun as I remembered. Great as it is to open up on the enemy with an airborne howitzer, the real appeal is less the gameplay and more it’s bite-sized nature.

Everything about CoD 4 is built to take as you want it. Missions are peppered with generous checkpoints, saving your progress every few minutes at natural lulls in the action. Missions themselves, while made up of intense, edge-of-your-seat firefights, are only fifteen to thirty minutes long, the perfect length of time for blowing off steam between getting home from work and dinner. I haven’t spent much time with the multiplayer (no flamethrowers = FAIL), but by all accounts it’s every bit as good – and possibly better – than the single player campaign. CoD 4 was clearly built from the ground up for all kinds of players, which speaks to great design in and of itself, but more importantly it was built with players with realistic schedules and free time in mind.So what are the trends here? Short games, or at least short play times, as mentioned before. Games that are happy to be games first, giving me the freedom to play how and when I want to. Strong designs that maintain their focus rather than muddying things up with good ideas half-realized. Welcoming experiences built with the understanding that all kinds of people games, and the more accessible you make your design the more of them will come your way. All things to mull over, and possibly even expound upon next week.

Today though, for no apparent reason other than to hijack my iPod for the rest of the day with fond remembrances of the rock that was, Slate has a piece by S-K bassist Carrie Brownstein discussing her experiences with Rock Band. While her initial opinion of the game is more in line with the sort of annoying and missing-the-point statements I’ve heard made by other actual musicians (e.g. “Why don’t you just learn a real instrument?”), she eventually finds a good chunk of the appeal on her own and thus continues to prove that girl bass players are generally the best people ever. Behold the wisdom of one of Olympia’s Finest:

“Not even the creators of Rock Band could possibly believe that playing the game is tantamount to making your own music. There is, however, a sad similarity between Rock Band and some actual bands, and that is the attempt at realness. With so much of music blurring the lines between ersatz and authenticity, at least the Rock Band game is a tribute to rock, rather than an affront. In the realm of fakery, I would choose Rock Band over American Idol or over any of the other flimsy truths masquerading as music. With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.”

See there?  Got it in one. Read the rest of the piece here while I find a nice quiet place for my head to explode from the culture clash of too many things I love at once.

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.