There was palpable disappointment following the release of "Halo 2," and not just due to the 'well, I guess we'll stop here' ending. From the first teaser, the tone of the marketing campaign was that you (well, Master Chief) are the only guy who can defend Earth. Combine that with the "I Love Bees" alternate reality game, which concluded with the characters' lives being interrupted by air raid sirens, and you were ready to save humanity from the Covenant when you walked out of that store on November 9.

The fact that you end up playing as one of them for half of the game was quite a betrayal of expectations. But "Halo 3: ODST..." Well, if you squint and look at it hard enough you might see a version of "Halo 2."

After all, it takes place entirely on Earth, and the player is always fighting the Covenant invaders. You spend a lot more time defending New Mombasa than Master Chief does in the second game's opening levels. Additionally, the radio play you assemble through picking up collectibles really drives home the fact that this is a city on Earth that people used to live in. It also calls back to the excellent pre-"Halo 2" "I Love Bees" alternate reality game's radio drama, and for good reason - some of the same people are responsible.

The game's mechanics are also a callback to the original "Halo." The absurdly fun yet incredibly overpowered scoped pistol makes a silent return, and its balance is no longer a problem thanks to the lack of competitive multiplayer.

You also have a health bar again, and pick up refills for it, just like "Combat Evolved." ODSTs also take fall damage after a large enough drop, just like Master Chief did in his freshman outing.

Of course, there are many things about "ODST" that are the same as "Halo 3," or wholly new to the series. You don't fight elites, for instance, just brutes, and nearly all of "Halo 3's" weapons make an appearance alongside the reborn pistol and silenced "Halo 2" SMG. However, it is curious how many of "ODST's" changes are callbacks to Bungie's original breakout hit.

This post originally appeared at Bitmob.

It seems impossible to write an introduction to this review, especially considering how self-explanatory the title is. Here: "The Beatles: Rock Band" is a "Rock Band" game with the Beatles in it. You have guitar, bass, drums and this time, up to three microphones, and you faux-play music using on-screen guides. It is amazing. If you have any affinity at all for "Rock Band" and the Beatles, you should go to the store and purchase it.

"Well," you say, "that was a shitty review! How about some details and comparisons. What makes it amazing?" Okay.

The rest at Nintendorks...

"Ghostbusters," or as the PR people would put it, "Ghostbusters®: The Video Game," is of course a followup of sorts to the Ghostbusters movies from the 80s. If you don't know what that is, you should probably just stop reading now. This game was built assuming that you thought Ghostbusters was awesome as a child and continued to be funny as an adult, and being unfamiliar with the source material would remove the only reason anyone ever paid attention to this already unremarkable game.

The game takes place a few years after "Ghostbusters II." You are a new hire, which allows all the famous characters to keep referring to you as "chief" and "the rookie" instead of giving your character an identity. You run around various locations in Manhattan, using the sweet proton pack laser beams on various ectoplasmic baddies. The controls are basically that of a first person shooter, and the default setup works fine. Good thing, too, as there are no customizable controls. (This game is no "Conduit," thank god.)

Combat basically consists of blasting ghosts enough to either destroy them or tire them out enough for you to "wrangle" them into those sweet traps that you also wanted the toy of as a kid. There are plenty of variations on this, including tossing various things around gravity gun style, as well as new attachments for your proton pack. The one I got was basically a shotgun.

One issue I had is that the basic beam doesn't really feel like it's hitting anything when you actually hit your target. A health meter starts to tick down, but there is no visible reaction otherwise. It's especially jarring because the environment is awesomely destructible. Overall, the combat isn't quite as engaging as you'd like it to be, but it never really gets annoying or overly difficult, and it would be worth putting up with if the rest of the game was great.

It, unfortunately, is not. Dan Akyroyd's script is wasted on cutscene directing and editing that could be called horribly pedestrian at best, and at worst, simply bad. Either way, it's not good. Don't get me wrong, it elicits a chuckle here and there, and it is indeed a pleasure to see these characters doing stuff again, but timing is a huge part of comedy, and, from what I saw, this game largely fails at it.

I have a feeling Mr. Akyroyd was not prepared for the amount of dialogue necessary for an entire video game, nor does he understand how it should fit into the game. There are one or two movie-type scripted scenes in between each level, and then it's largely all incidental "over there, kid!" type dialogue until the end each section of the level, where you are treated to 10-15 seconds of exposition followed by more of you and one other character running around bustin' ghosts. Basically, there is very little interesting dialogue during gameplay, which is unfortunate, because game writing is at its best when it actually involves the "game" part.

I don't mean to sound so negative - it's not terrible. It's just not good. The good parts are these:

• Cartoon chariacture graphics are vastly preferable to the uncanny valley fest present on the other consoles.
• Original voice actors are largely unawkward and turn in good performances, though it's pretty easy to tell they recorded separately from one another.
• Good level design from what I saw, aside from the Wii-specific level that replaces the streets of New York section early on.
• It is not difficult, which would completely wreck anything it has going for it. You would not play this game for the tactical combat experience, and it knows it.

Unfortunately, it basically boils down to it being just about the sum of its parts. Okay script + okay combat and mechanics + good graphics = okay game.

Wii Sports Resort
Mass Effect 2
Alan Wake
Halo 3: ODST
The Beatles: Rock Band
Tiger Woods Wii, Split Second, Army of Two PSP
Blur, DJ Hero, Span Smasher
Dark Void, Forza 3, Dirt 2, PSP Go

ALSO, here is a video of me playing the Conduit multiplayer, and a podcast where I talk about the whole experience.

Ninjatown the brand is apparently a spinoff of a thing called Shawnimals, which are admittedly amusing cute-ified designs of everyday non-ninja objects. Let's face it – at this point, ninjas are Interneté passé. Nerds on forums have picked the ninja corpse funny bone clean. (I’m hoping this fate does not befall hoboes, which are currently my go-to amusing group of historical individuals.)

Ninjatown, though, is so damn charming it overcomes its ninja cliché roots and is just plain hilarious. Behold, the Ninja Consultant. His skill with charts and graphs will make your troops just that much more efficient. However, unlike its art style, Ninjatown can’t quite pretty up the gameplay enough to make it stand totally above and beyond the myriad of other takes on the genre all over the Internet. Though it is derivative and it brings nothing truly innovative to the table, it’s an excellent execution of the concept and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Ninjatown is a corridor-based TD game, none of this free-form, place your towers wherever you want insanity. Bad guys (in this case, demons who want to steal the ninja cookie recipe) walk down a path, and you have to stop them from getting to the end. Standard stuff.

I am probably not the most skilled TD player around, but I have played a fair amount of them, and Ninjatown is hard. You’ll start to be challenged after only a few levels, and it quickly gets even more challenging, but in a fun way. The fact that the game is separated into levels, unlike the traditional marathon structure, means that the difficulty never feels unfair, and the short levels encourage experimentation with different strategies, which will be required. The game isn’t too cruel to players new to the genre, however; MY GIRLFRIEND had never touched a TD game and was able to progress without too much frustration.

There are a few twists to the gameplay. The old man ninja, seen lurking to your right, gains a number of stylus and microphone based special powers which can be used directly by the player to great effect in the right situation. The maps can also contain various twists on the formula that occasionally stumble, but generally enrich the experience with a bit of variety.

Ninjatown’s greatest strength is its premise. The art is buoyed by appropriately hilarious writing and plot developments, which is augmented by its fun-but-pedestrian gameplay. The tower defense genre is rather appropriate for a handheld, and I hope to see more of them on the DS, but it will be hard for one to top the charming premise present in Ninjatown.

I want to be upfront about the amount of time I spent playing the Wii version of "Samba" - probably only about 30 minutes. I will also be candid on the amount of time I spent on the Dreamcast original and its Japanese sequel - it could probably be counted in days.

For the uninitiated, "Samba de Amigo" was and is a rhythm game about shaking maracas at various positions to the beat of saucy Latin tunage. The Dreamcast version used an accurate but flimsy set of maraca controllers. (I went through three sets!) Unfortunately, what the Wii version gains in durability, it loses tenfold in accuracy. It's simply difficult to make the Wii version recognize where you are shaking your Wiimotes.

The reason for this is that though the input is superficially the same - moving objects in your hand to various heights - it is actually very different. Whereas the Dreamcast original was asking you to position the maracas at various heights along two columns, the Wii version is asking for you to position the Wiimote in different directions.

Example time! In order to hit the notes in the top right circle, the Dreamcast version would have you raise one of your maracas to the top right and shake. On the Wii, you have to angle one of your Wiimotes at a 45º angle pointing upward. This only kinda works because your hand sort of naturally does these angles when you raise or lower them to the appropriate levels. However, the other half the this game's entire design - shaking to the beat a la maraca - breaks that entire idea apart.

The system only works on the level of "okay" when you are trying to learn it, and might work fine for new players on lower difficulty levels, but if you try to get into it and really let loose while enjoying the ridiculousness of shaking around what are now fake fake maracas, you are not going to hit notes consistently, and if you try to play on harder difficulties, you are really not going to hit notes consistently.

It is not hyperbolic for me to say that, personally, this is probably the most disappointing thing ever related to the Wii. Official Sega-brand Dreamcast maracas go forabout $100 on eBay, and on top of that, often ship from Japan, so a good version of Samba de Amigo on a modern console with a durable controller was something of a holy grail for me. And it even supports downloadable content! On the Wii! Holy shit! Too bad it's intrinsically broken at its core.

This failed experiment does provide an interesting perspective on "Samba" the game, though. It does feel very simple in this post-Harmonix world, but this is not a bad thing at all. Through the layer of shit that is the controls, I was still able to catch a glimpse at the gameplay that had entranced me years ago, and hot damn, does it still seem like fun! ...which makes this all the more tragic.

It is hypothetically possible the upcoming Wii MotionPlus add-on might solve the problems that led to "Samba's" gimped, broken control scheme, and just maybe, a poorly-reviewed rhythm game about shaking maracas to Latin music might sell enough in this Rock Band-dominated world to warrant a follow-up that would require rewriting large amounts of the game code to use an add-on device, but I'm not holding my breath.

Unfortunately, failing a song absolutely kills the mood at a party. If players couldn't completely fail a song, then the game would be much more friendly for social situations. Just letting the song limp along with some sort of "assisted help" mode once a player screws up bad enough would be a lot better than the usual "well, let's do something else!" result of people failing at a party.

But would lacking a fail condition make higher-level play worse, assuming that failure-free play wasn't relegated to being an option or just one mode? I know the feeling of just barely scraping by on a song but succeeding is great, but the awesome feeling of totally nailing a song would still remain.

Perhaps the star system could replace failure to some degree? In single player and band world tour mode, you might have to earn a certain number of stars in a set or on a song to pass, but the game never tells you that you suck so explicitly, just that you need to do better. The feeling of just barely scraping by could still be preserved, since you might've just barely gotten three stars, instead of just barely finishing the song.

Hopefully, for the inevitable follow-up to Rock Band, Harmonix addresses these concerns in some capacity. This is one of many design and interface changes that could be made to Rock Band without damaging the core band gameplay, and I feel that the gameplay can indeed rise to new heights if video game-centric design choices like failing a song are revised to fit in with the game's core, augmenting rather than hampering the enjoyment of the full band experience.

The character seems to have the same sort of rules. You have momentum and can no longer turn on a dime. Jumping still kinda sucks, though, and it was hard to tell what fences you could grab onto and get over, and it was easy to accidentally not make a jump over a short object.

b- There's a lot of neat procedural animation, even if the whole game isn't procedurally generated. The game tries to adjust the character so if you are standing with your feet on uneven surfaces, the animations compensate, and you don't clip through or hover over one. It looks neat.

iii. The multiplayer works exactly like Burnout Paradise.

4. The new wanted system works exceptionally well. Instead of a flat star rating, the first cop that sees you and gives you that one-star wanted level has a radius around him, and if you can escape it then you get off. Any other cop that spots you before you escape also has the radius, and as you get more stars, the size of all the radii increases. The size of a helicopter's was too big for me to even see on the minimap.

I've gotten through what I suppose were three missions in Deus Ex. It's astonishing how well it has held up over the years in some ways, but in others it is really dated. The core gameplay can still stand with the best of them – it in fact stands far above many others that have come after it. There are countless ways to perform even the first level's objectives, and this is before you really get into customizing your character's abilities and find all sorts of neat toys. This is truly sandbox gameplay and it's astonishing that this was accomplished eight years ago. The world feels very organic for an Unreal Engine 1 game, thanks largely to the open level design and light RPG elements.

What isn't faring so well in 2008 is the character models. They look silly. (Perhaps they would look better if this computer actually had a dedicated graphics processor.) The presentation overall, however, is very competent, if a little boring. The cutscenes don't feature any kind of flair, like moving cameras or any sort of advanced character animation. However, the writing is amazing, and astonishingly relevant and resonating considering the game was made before the 9/11 attacks. Must play more, as UNATCO, the counter-terrorism agency you work for, is seeming more and more evil of late.

Thanks to Gametap, I was able to find out that Civilization IV runs astonishingly smooth on this hardware. (Frankly, I was amazed it ran at all.) I only played a few turns, and I'm told that it slows down late in the game, but it was very pretty from what I saw, and I could feel the tendrils of addiction creeping out of the monitor and wrapping me in their cold, uncaring embrace. For this reason, I have placed it on hiatus until I can tear a sizable chunk out of The List, at which point I might have a more capable computer that could to the game justice. (A few games on that List this computer could not do justice: Far Cry, Company of Heroes, Rise of Legends.)

Next time (probably): More Planescape: Torment.

I can't imagine how hard it would be to make this game in 3D. The first two areas I've visited have been so lavishly detailed in 2D, but trying to get this amount of artistry in 3D would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The dialogue is another matter – every character or object has dialogue dripping with detail and emotion, fully drawing you into the world. Anything like this would be utterly impossible in the world of voice acting and polygonal graphics, which is a shame. At the same time, a world built in 3D with proper production values automatically gains just that much more in credibility and immersion with the player, thanks to the medium of delivery. It is abundantly clear, however, that the industry has not yet completed its move to 3D after playing this title again. Until art of this caliber (in 3D with voice acting) can be produced for a comparable price as its two-dimensional counterpart, we have a long way to go as an art form.

When you are on the first planet, and the crazy man in the shed is going on about the end of the world, you don't have to listen to him, you can just punch him in the face! It's like your own personal MST3K of a sci-fi movie. I can't wait to get to the part where the weird guy on the citadel asks you for his autograph.

The campaign is, in general, roundly mediocre. It's really the same sort of game that the other Call of Duty games are: Utterly scripted thrill rides through a few different war zones. Sure, COD 4 developers Infinity Ward made the first two, and they were slightly better than the consoled-out spin offs and Call of Duty 3, but they are all riffs on the same formula. Call of Duty 4 has famously jettisoned the series' World War II setting for one in what I can only assume is the near future. The player switches between an American and British soldier fighting in eastern Europe and a Middle Eastern country that is never explicitly named but is clearly Saudi Arabia if you have any amount of geographic knowledge and pay attention during the pseudo-Google Earth setting change animations.

The game's opening credits sequence has the player in the role of an ousted Saudi leader as he is taken through a city and then shot by the revolutionary that has just taken over the country, providing the conflict that fuels the rest of the game. The storytelling technique on display here is one of the game's cooler touches, and there are quite a few interesting devices used to tell the game's story.

The problem is that the story is really not worth paying attention to. It's sub-24 level crap, for the most part, with the same number of contrivances and utterly illogical occurrences. In one mission, where you have to capture a dude as the British SAS unit, you chase the guy across a series of small towns, with your commanding officer repeatedly making sure that you all know that you need to capture the guy alive. Then in the next cutscene, after torturing the fellow and getting some information (because that works), your commanding officer proceeds to shoot the guy in the face.

One problem with the series making the jump to modern day is that it really doesn't make sense to have your character being ordered around by an NPC. In the WWII games, the player is experiencing the Last Great War through the eyes of an anonymous soldier. Modern-day conflicts don't carry the same weight, especially considering the large-scale opposition to the kind of war on display for the American side of the campaign.

Politics aside, it sucks that your character is so helpless that he can't even open doors without the help of other soldiers - you have to wait for them to do it for you. Your character can't do anything that the other soldiers do. You can't push a dumpster down the street for cover, you can't lean out from cover or even take cover in the same way that Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas characters can, and you certainly can't order your soldiers around to intercept incoming enemies.

Speaking of enemies, I hope you like shooting them, because they just keep coming out of these shacks and buildings like they're some kind of terrorist clown car. Your character is really just supposed to move down the preselected path and shoot enemies they see. The idea of saving grenades or other special weapons for large groups of enemies is irrelevant, since there's not a predetermined number of enemies per area - they just keep coming until the player manages to advance past an arbitrary line in the level, or kill an enemy inside the shack/house/damaged building that the other terrorists are apparently budding off of asexually.

The only reason this design works is because the levels are as linear as an arcade lightgun game. It might look like you were just dropped off in a warzone and told to get to a building on the other side, but you can't choose your path in any way, shape or form. You'll be following a preset path, and any attempt to deviate from it will result in you totally breaking the game's scripting or you dying. (In one area, to keep you on a set path, there are signs like the mine field signs in the first two games, but this time they are radiation warning signs - because radiation just stays in tiny pockets throughout the landscape.)

If you're willing to totally turn off your brain and just shoot at things that move in front of you, there are some fairly memorable sequences in Call of Duty 4. One sequence in particular offers a glimpse at another sort of game entirely, where the horrors of war are laid bare in a way I've never seen before. But, the ultrapatriotic 24-inspired Call of Duty 4 is not that game. Too bad.

Other than that, it really sucks when you play Burnout with someone who can't do a challenge, but you don't want to cancel the challenge and be like, yeah you suck let's do another one, but if you try to tell them how to do the challenge you just come off as a condescending douchebag.

The demo for Devil May Cry 4 is... dumb. It might know it's dumb, but it's still written for what seems to be 12 year olds. The giant demon boss at the end assures you that he has conquered fire hell. The combat feels exactly like it did in the last three games, stilted controls and all. Perhaps I've just had enough of throwing guys into the air and juggling them with pistols. Considering I never even finished the first one, skipped the second and only rented the third, that's probably not the reaction Capcom wanted to elicit.

Burnout Paradise has proven me wrong and is totally fantastic. Almost all the misgivings I had about the demo are still valid, but the core design and philosophy behind the final product is so focused and perfect that they don't matter. You can't pick events from a menu, but that's okay because the city is small enough that it's not too difficult to get around, and interesting enough that you want to explore it between events. This also helps you learn your way around the city.

It's also a new standard for online integration, as well as the perfect system for online in an open world title. I'm going to be disappoint when GTA IV doesn't work like this. You can invite a friend or be invited from an easy-to-use D-pad menu, and then the world you are in becomes the online world seamlessly. The host can then decide to make a race event and can set the start and end points anywhere on the map. There's also challenges, which are just little goals like "boost 400 yards on this street" or "do three barrel rolls on that jump" but when four or five people are all trying to do that, hilarious things occur. This also forces you to learn the nooks and crannies of the city. The design is all-encompassing in its scope, and it's far more than the sum of its parts. It actually feels astonishingly new - the series has totally reinvented itself for the second time. That said, it's not perfect. The crash mode replacement sucks really bad and the soundtrack thankfully allows you to toggle off individual tracks. Still, it's great.

Other than that, I got alien laid in Mass Effect. It's starting to wear thin; I'm glad I'm near the endgame. I also played Pokemon Pearl a bit on a car trip.

That is all.

The long-awaited campaign is definitely the most polished in the series to date, though it isn't without flaws. Bungie's level designers are firing on all cylinders here, with only one real dud in the entire lineup. (The eighth level. You know the one.)

The Halo series has always shined in large-scale open-area combat, and Halo 3 is no exception – it ups the ante significantly in both enemy numbers and arena size. Graphically, the game might not be quite as stunning as games like Gears of War or Bioshock, but you see where all that power went when you arrive at some of the title's larger setpieces. There can be dozens of units and vehicles in a single battle, and it's glorious. The battles can happen dozens of different ways, and they really showcase the unscripted nature of Bungie's AI programming and level design, especially when you get stuck at a particularly hard checkpoint. After one death, you might see a few marines decide to take off after a wraith in a warthog, and in another they will decide to go after a fortified turret defended by infantry. It does wonders to keep the game fresh as you play through it, though some ability to control the computer-controlled marines would be welcome.

The game's smaller infantry-based encounters are a little more complicated. On lower difficulties they are a cakewalk; the computer-controlled marines can take care of things alone in many encounters. Walk through; shoot Brutes; carry on. To a player on normal or easy, they are either filler just some fun mindless shooting. On heroic or legendary, they become almost a tactical grind, requiring careful management of ammunition, equipment, marines and enemy attention to survive.

Equipment is one of Bungie's new additions to its formula, and it's a great way to throw a little more flavor into battles. The items integrate smoothly into battles, which is no small feat considering how fine-tuned Halo's combat is. Bubble shields, which form a protective sphere around the player, can be exactly what you need to move back on the offensive, and power drains, which can both remove enemy shields and disable vehicles from movement, and be incredibly damaging at the right moment. The AI uses these items incessantly, but the player generally has to cast a more careful eye on his supplies.

Halo 3 also introduces an impressive array of new weapons and vehicles. Many of these have an art style reminiscent of the brutes, the game's replacement for the elites of the first two games. One is a gun that shoots razor sharp spikes, and a new kind of sticky grenade that functions similarly. Unfortunately, these don't work like Half-Life 2's crossbow: You can't pin an enemy corpse to the wall with a well-placed kill shot burst. A welcome addition is the ability to rip a turret off its stand and fire it while walking around. The game's new vehicles are generally rather unremarkable. A new human air vehicle, the Hornet, functions as sort of an airborne Ghost, as players can strafe side-to-side, and the new Brute Chopper is a motorcycle-esque ground vehicle that can ram stuff to great effect and explosion. All the new weapons and vehicles fit so well into the previous arsenal that you can scarcely imagine the game without them.

The campaign's narrative is unfortunately quite scatterbrained. It seems at times it is trying to evoke this feeling of danger and the idea that the story may end with Master Chief's death, but for most of the game it forgets this and is completely focused on the larger happenings with the Prophets and the Flood.

A gripe of mine is that the character of the Arbiter seemingly has no overt motivation other than "don't die and Brutes suck." Despite the fact that Master Chief meets the Arbiter in the opening cut scene, the two don't really exchange dialogue until the beginning of the next level, and they never exchange anything of substance. Some additional lines might have alleviated this particular narrative problem, but Cortana's story arc in the game builds up to, well, nothing, and it's highly disappointing.

It also fails to cash in any of the emotional potential that setting the game on Earth could bring. One might have walked through a hospital with civilians in it and overheard them talking, or simply flown over a devastated city, but most of the game's Earth time is spent on the African savannah. Only once are civilians involved in fighting: A group of construction workers armed with pistols rush a Covenant battle line. They die. It's underwhelming, to say the least.

I would contend that even Halo 3's prerelease ad campaign, "Believe," offered better look at the sort of human cost of war, and it was far surpassed by Halo 2's landmark "I Love Bees" campaign, which really made you feel like Earth was worth defending. However, humanity has never been the focus of Halo's actual storyline, though, just its ancillary properties, and this is either an odd choice of Bungie's or a failure of their storytelling ability. The story of the Forerunners, the Flood and the Covenant comes to a relatively satisfying conclusion, but what has happened to humanity over the course of the war?

Of note is Bungie's throwback to its old Marathon style of storytelling by including a series of terminals once the player reaches a new location midway through the game. They are reminiscent of Bioshock's audio diaries and are a welcome addition to the game's storytelling repertoire. A casual player can ignore them, unlike extended cut scenes, but they are there for anyone who seeks more.

Halo 3's campaign is designed to have replay value beyond one playthrough. (Most of the game's Achievements are focused around the single player.) It is the first in the series to offer four player cooperative play over Xbox Live, and, like its predecessors, it offers support up to two players on one console. This experience works very well, and can produce many great moments like one player dropping the other on the back of a scarab to blow it up, then scooping the player back off the top, where the two fly away from the explosion dramatically. Having any number of players also opens up great tactical abilities, but the game can be rather hard on the default settings. Players can turn on skulls, which can be found hidden throughout the campaign, to ratchet up the difficulty and make the experience a challenge for four players.

Bungie's other addition to the campaign is scoring, like the arcade games of yesteryear. You get a set number of points for killing an each enemy, which can be multiplied by a headshot or a series of kills in short succession. Additionally, the aforementioned skulls can be activated to make the game harder, but lend additional multipliers to the final score. This is a fun feature to turn on for coop, where players can compete for the most kills, and it would be just as fun alone were it not for the lack of leaderboards, an incredibly huge oversight for a title that online play is woven so very deeply into.

Of course, the rest of the online functionality is really second to none. Halo 2's excellent party system is back and improved, with the ability to switch between the game's various modes as well as party up with strangers you meet online. It remains the single best way to play with friends online, and Halo 3 is a great game to tie it to.

Halo 3 sports a greater variety of matchmaking playlists than Halo 2, and its multiplayer in general is a refinement of its direct predecessor. It has better balance, generally more interesting maps, and another layer of added gameplay thanks to equipment. In short, matchmaking behaves exactly as you would expect it to.

The multiplayer in general is great fun, but not a huge change from Halo 2, despite what some might have you believe. It's mainly balance changes and gametype

The real shining jewels of Halo 3's featureset are the theater system and Forge. The game automatically saves complete replays of every game you play, campaign or multiplayer, and allows you to comb back through them from any angle or speed to capture screenshots or, in the case of multiplayer, short clips of choice moments where you died spectacularly, or made others die even more spectacularly. You can then send these to your Xbox Live friends, or save high-resolution anti-aliased 1080p (in layman's terms, incredibly good-looking) screenshots on your PC from Bungie.net. Saved films can also be flagged using a Bungie.net account linked to your Xbox Live Gamertag, so that the next time you log in to Halo 3 on your Xbox they will automatically download in the background.

These features are incredible. Ease of use pervades the entire system, so that a friend can e-mail you a link to his triple kill from the previous evening and you can click "download" and then watch a full replay of the action from any angle or perspective. Reiterating, this feature is a sight to behold and unmatched in any other game on the market.

Theater mode isn't quite perfect, however. The interface makes it difficult to rewind precisely, and rewinding is completely impossible in campaign mode replays. One also can't fast forward large chunks of time at once, which is quite annoying if you want to capture a screenshot from the end of a two hour campaign session. Still, these features are an incredible technical achievement that is just as incredible for the player. The general polish

The other shining jewel is Forge. In short, Forge is Garry's Mod lite. For those unfamiliar with Garry's Mod, Forge allows players to rearrange nearly everything about a level and then save custom layouts and game modes to share with their friends or on Bungie.net alongside their films and screenshots. Though this may not be as complicated as modding tools for various PC games, this is a huge advance in features for consoles and will extend the the life of the title immeasurably. It, like theatre mode, is a revelation in the world of consoles, and compared to any PC solution it is still a revelation in ease of use.

Halo 3 is a great game. It might not be deserving of all the hype, the barrage of 10/10 perfect scores, and 3.3 million in sales in a mere seven days, but it's an experience few Xbox 360 owners shouldn't miss, and its featureset is a new high watermark in the industry and redefines the term "complete package."

First, though, I need to plug what sounds like it'll be a cool exhibition relating to video games, iDiDx (International Digital In-Development Expo). It'll apparently allow students to showcase any kind of game (and other digital media) they are currently working on. Also, there's a Halo 2 tourney at CyborLAN that will coincide with the expo; feel free to show up and beat me. More info at www.ididx.com.

Anyway, Twilight Princess. This is one of the more complete single-player experiences to come out of the industry in some time. Not many games can really get the epic feel right and still be as long as this title. I've played for about 40 hours, and am nearly finished (I think) but haven't really dabbled in any of the side quests.

However, it should be noted that Twilight Princess is rather derivative of older Zelda titles, but also isn't merely a shiny-graphics version of Ocarina of Time. There are a lot more new items, as well as significant changes in tone and plot and additions like horseback combat. However, if older Zelda titles weren't your thing (heresy!), this one isn't going to change your mind.

This is the part where I talk about Wii controls. The rest of the column applies to the Gamecube version as well. Swinging the remote swings the sword, pointing aims things like the bow and hookshot. Directions on the D-pad serve as shortcuts to items. It all works really fluidly.

The controls do have small problems, though. The sword swinging is far from direct motion mapping. Pretty much any motion becomes a sword swing, and directions don't even come through on-screen. This is particularly annoying in the otherwise-amazing horse combat sequences.

The Wii controls, though not completely perfect, are definitely proof that the Wii remote and nunchuck are up to snuff for more than silly party games; it can be perfectly suitable for big, epic single player games. (A side note: The separate nature of the two sides of the controller really lends Wii games like this to an extremely lazy game-playing position, as you can have both of your hands lazily at your side, raising an arm occasionally to aim an arrow. It's sublime and I wouldn't be surprised if game controllers in future generations can be separated in this fashion, motion controls or not.)

The game itself is a much more plot-heavy Zelda game than titles past. The world is also massive. Fortunately, this massive world does not contain Tingle in a realistic art style. I don't have the space to go into it heavily, nor would I want to spoil it, but I have about three gripes. One: It starts off rather slow, and it takes a while to get into some real action. Two: There's no voice acting. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Three: I can't really think of anything to go here. One good thing of note is that the game doesn't coddle you like many recent titles developed by Nintendo. Hints are not forcibly dispatched.

If, for some reason, you have avoided buying the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in the months between its release and this column, go now. The only reason I wasn't able to give it a look here in the past is that I haven't finished it, in part because of its impressive length, but also because I just don't want it to end. That is the sign of a good game.

Elite Beat Agents is a rhythm game where players have to poke and drag various points on the DS's touch screen in time with music. The core gameplay works fantastically, but what really pushes the game over the edge from good to great is the presentation. Each song has a comic panel-based story to go along with it, and the player's performance in the song affects the outcome of the story. Most of them are extremely silly and surreal, and they're very fun to watch, and the art itself is fantastic.

The best thing about them, however, is introducing story into rhythm games, and the consequence that goes with it. The idea behind Elite Beat Agents is stupid, but really fun: You are a part of a secret government agency (the titular agents) that is deployed whenever someone really needs help. You arrive on the scene, generally in a dramatic fashion alongside your two backup dancers, and dance to some rockin' music until the target's problems are solved. The consequences of losing are much higher than, say, Guitar Hero. Losing a song there means the lead singer shaking his head at you AGAIN, losing a song here means that adorable puppy never makes it home to his owner, or any number of other scenarios.

One thing I must say about this game is that it is hard. This is the hardest (good) rhythm game I have ever played. "Free Bird" on expert has nothing on the insane precision required to best some of the songs on the hardest difficulty here. The main difference is that Elite Beat Agents, like DDR and Samba de Amigo before it, measures exactly how close you were to the beat. A perfect hit will net a 300, while one pretty close but off-beat will give you 100 or 50. On the highest difficulty, you pretty much have to be perfect at it. This is a stark contrast to Guitar Hero, which is mainly concerned at making you feel like a rocker rather than the exact precision of your strumming.

A few items of note. One: It is hard to play Elite Beat Agents with just the DS's speakers. I find I perform much better with my DS on a pair of good headphones or plugged into a set of computer speakers or the line in jack on my stereo. Of course, it is both impossible and pointless to attempt to play this game with the volume down. In-class DS players, be warned. Two: Elite Beat Agents is a fast paced game that rewards extreme precision with the stylus. It is at the very least impractical to play in the car or on the bus. Paradoxically, it is almost a handheld game in name only, and is best experienced with the volume on your stereo up while on the couch.

However, the game is good enough to overcome these restrictions. I have no issue with the gameplay itself, however unforgiving it may be. Play it.

This is in line with actions of the current administration since the Sept. 11 attacks. The Imperial Presidency, to put it nicely. Another adjective might be dictatorial.

You see, when you are in power, you are infallible. It is impossible for you to be wrong about anything. You see, you can arrest anyone, for no reason, and hold them indefinitely, since, you know, you can't be wrong.

Wait, no, I think I have things backwards. These ideas are repugnant and insane. Not even King George had this kind of power when the colonists rebelled against them, and it seems to be one the U.S.'s mainstream political stances today.

Specifically, this stance nullifies the writ of habeus corpus, often called The Great Writ, on the pretenses of national security. This writ allows the accused to face their accusers in a public setting.

Americans should be appalled that anyone in power holds these beliefs. The idea that the executive can hold anyone it wishes for no explainable reason or charge, and can do so indefinitely, and even in secret, goes against fundamental aspects of our theory of government.

One of the main arguments levied by Republicans against things like universal health care is that governments are inefficient and bloated, and cannot efficiently execute things like a private corporation at the whims of the market can. Governments, they say, are bloated, inefficient, and often wrong.

Yet, these same people hold up the idea that the government should be given a monopoly on power over its people, like the same idea doesn't apply. I agree with the idea that governments, when left alone to accomplish a task, will probably accomplish it in the least efficient manner possible. This can be combated, however, with transparency and oversight by the press and the people.

There is no transparency in habeus cases. Detainees are, mostly, complete secrets. The press is occasionally allowed into Guantanamo hearings, but evidence is classified, even for the detainees themselves. Stories about detainees released have trickled out. One is a satirist who jokingly called for Bill Clinton's head because of the Lewinsky affair. Another has nothing to do with al-Qaida. His file, filled with CIA reports, even says so, but he is still unreleased, since he and his lawyer can't even see it.

These are the reasons the writ of habeus corpus was created--so that the wrongfully accused can get reviewed and get out, and, if you're guilty, then we will find you so. You know, through the justice system, and not the whims of the executive.

Skipping back to the top, the idea that "smart lawyers" are required for Mitt Romney to know if he should favor or oppose this idea is ludicrous, and Giuliani? Well, he's just going to use it a little bit, how nice of him.

And transparency? If there was real transparency here, we would all accept the horrible allegations of torture thrown out by released as fact, or know that they are lies. We would know if our government is actually attaching electrodes to people, and pouring menstrual blood on prisoners, and wrapping muslims in the Israeli flag, and putting out cigarettes on prisoners. If these things aren't true, why can't we look and see? Why all the secrecy?

This terrible tear of authoritarianism present in our government has got to stop. Sept. 11, 2001 was a tragic day, but if we throw out all the things that make our country great, then we've given the perpetrators of those attacks exactly what they wanted.