blood and guts

My introduction to next-generation video gaming happened a few years back when my brothers got their first XBox. They'd had a Sega Genesis before that, but game play on the Genesis didn't strike me as all that far removed from game play on more classic consoles like the now-ancient Atari set (later renamed the Atari 2600), or the equally ancient Mattel Intellivision. The Sega offered about the same game play with better graphics.

Years passed, consoles improved, and I missed most of that. Then along came the much-vaunted XBox and the game that hooked me on it: "Halo" (we're at "Halo 3" now; this is supposedly the last in the series, but I doubt the game's designers will stop there), which took the old "Doom"-style first-person shooter (FPS) and ratcheted it up several orders of magnitude. Encountering "Halo" after years out of the loop was like moving from a 1970s wall-mounted telephone to a RAZR.

You have to love an FPS game where the enemies are powered by artificial intelligence, i.e., they won't necessarily follow the same attack pattern every time you encounter them, and they adapt quickly to changing situations. In "Halo," the creatures you fight (1) use stealth, (2) work in teams, and (3) do their best to avoid your shots and grenade throws, which includes duck-and-cover tactics. As you up the difficulty levels, the creatures also become tougher and think faster.

The game also remembers where corpses are, so that when you move back into a room where you've massacred everyone, you'll see their bodies (and, often, the blood spatter) still in place. The solidity of a video game's universe matters to me; it's easy to tire of games that save memory by making carnage or other scenery changes disappear.

Finally, "Halo," unlike the old Doom games, takes a more realistic view of encumbrance: you're limited to holding only two weapons at a time, which means that you often have to make painful choices as to which weapons you'll take into an unknown area. For a guy whose video game education pretty much stopped at Atari and "Doom II"/"Quake," "Halo" was a revelation.

So I was hooked. Even after playing "Halo 2," which was admittedly pretty good, I still preferred the first "Halo" (in "Halo 2," you're obliged to change characters to complete the storyline, something I resented having to do), and I definitely want an old XBox and a copy of "Halo" when I get back to Korea. Given how old both the console and the game are, I should be able to purchase both for fairly cheap.

Now we live in the Age of Wii. The Nintendo Wii video game system has been out for a while, and for the most part, I've viewed it with only mild interest despite its aggressive marketing campaign. For the first time, however, I really want one. When I get back to Korea after this walk, I'm probably going to get one along with an XBox, and the game I plan to buy for it is "Deadly Creatures." Why?

Because in "Deadly Creatures," you play the role of either a scorpion, or of one of my all-time favorite beasties: a tarantula! YES!

See here. I especially like the section on the over-the-top sound effects.

I owned four tarantulas as a kid, and loved feeding them crickets from the pet store or grasshoppers caught by hand. While "Deadly Creatures" forces you to play both the tarantula and the scorpion, I don't mind this so much: scorpions are pretty cool, too. (Ever seen Cynthia Rothrock's scorpion kick? No? Then... behold, right around 2:20 in this video.)

Yes, ladies, men over 30 are basically just big, hairy, aging adolescents. Most of us, anyway.


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