Online/Multiplayer

Not so Massively Multiplayer

HIGH Babysitting macho physical fighters with my tiny, old, somewhat sinister looking mage.

LOW Some of the most obtuse menus I've ever seen. Whoever was in charge must be a maze fetishist.

WTF Web 2.0? In my JRPG?

Violence is a Disease

HIGH That revelatory moment when the game's brutal message finally sinks in.

LOW The ending sadly seems to dodge that brutal message more than it should have.

WTF In a late scene set in the prison, your ability to shoot is inexplicably taken away from you.

To be or Not to be like Everyone Else

HIGH The multiplayer.

LOW The battery in my controller going dead while playing the multiplayer.

WTF Everything about the game other than the multiplayer.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is a great game. Too bad it's on the Wii.

We're back! Our first show of 2010 offers looks at Divinity II: Ego Draconis and the Star Trek Online beta. Plus, we answer your letters about adventure games, lazy developers, insta-DLC, and games of the (last) decade. With Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, and Tim "Not Roy Scheider" Spaeth.

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Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.

So it comes to this. The engineer, my favorite Team Fortress 2 class, the one in which I saw a need for some additional items before the medic update even came out, the one that I have almost 130 hours of playtime with, will be the last to get an update. I'm not mad. Really....I'm not.

As promised, I'm continuing to record responses from game bloggers and critics as they come in.

I've already posted my take on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's now-(in)famous "No Russian" chapter. I was not content to simply post my own thoughts on the matter, however. Given the uproar and truly interesting commentary that has sprung up around the game sequence, I wanted to survey a few of my fellow bloggers regarding their own opinions and experiences. I received a handful of responses to my request for commentary: Some authors had played the sequence in question, some had not. Some felt quite strongly in the positive, others in the negative. Some responses were longer pieces, others were short remarks or pointed me towards an existing blog post.