Backseat Driver

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So, why? Ken and Roberta Williams adventure games did that already. Running around a room pressing the action button to make sure I've picked up everything that looks pick-uppable isn't really furthering any concept of fear or suspense. Why not make items sparkle, like they did in Resident Evil 4? You know where the items are -- maybe the player might enjoy the challenge of shambling monsters guarding items, rather than a scavenger hunt on a tiny screen.

Screens bring up another issue that I had with SH:O in particular, and most PSP games in general: use cases. Where is your game meant to be played? By whom, and how? SH:O's item-hunting mechanic will work better on a larger and/or higher resolution screen, which brings me to a use case question. I read that SH:O is being ported to PlayStation 2. Smart move. You sit in front of a big TV, you'll experience the game in a certain way, and there are a lot of PlayStation 2s out there.

SH:O paced me through its environments well, though I ended up hoarding more ammunition than I needed to -- I would have enjoyed opening up on the enemies more often. No one wants to end up without ammunition entering a boss battle. That said, it is rare that I sit down on my sofa all ready to lose myself in a PSP game. I've got three next-gen consoles and a new PC for that, with a stack of games that should be played. Seems to me that handheld games have a different use case and should be played in different time chunks than console games. DS games seem to do this well -- Lumines and Beats on the PSP are great examples of this, too -- but so many PSP games seem like they're designed for a use case that requires the player to sit down and commit a specific long segment of time. The idea of a portable game system is that the games can be played in variable time segments depending on your location, five minutes to five hours (a cross-country flight). Maybe the higher computational power of the PSP makes it tempting to make PS2-like games; maybe the abundance of PS2 content made it easier for publishers to shovel their tech and designs onto the PSP. Despite too often feeling like a drunk perpetually fumbling with keys at the entirely wrong house, Silent Hill: Origins drove me through the game -- but never at home on the couch.

Call of Duty 4 strained my old PC to the limits, delivering a much more graphically pleasing presentation than Crysis at comparable frame rates. Playing COD4 actually made me drop Halo 3 back into my GameFly return envelope -- it was the best shooter since Half Life 2. Now, I'm hardly an FPS player -- you won't find me in demand on any deathmatch ladders. I like open-world games, but COD4 was just so viscerally superior to the allegedly open-world Medal of Honor that it wasn't a contest. I like a good narrative, and like the survival horror games of old, COD4 distracted me so completely that I was only distantly aware that I was on rails. The fiction was more relevant -- I only assume that Penny Arcade's written some strips about the endless WWII themes, because they've been -- well, endless. The game had just enough veneer of tactical simulation to suspend my disbelief. It is very much the shooter version of "24" -- our heroes are insanely martially competent, the enemies are rooted in CNN, and the action is so fast, with lots of intermediate rewards, that you never question the believability of the story. While I played it on a PC, it's no surprise that, like Silent Hill, COD4 aches to be played the same place you'd watch "24" -- on a big HD display.