Let's be real, Burnout Paradise came out in 2008 and it is still the undisputed greatest open-world racing game of all time. Need for Speed 2015 doesn't change that. It doesn't even come close. Criterion, the developers who made Burnout Paradise were bought up by EA some years back and made Need For Speed: Most Wanted in 2012 which came closer to recapturing that old magic than this new game does. But Criterion doesn't really exist anymore and now chasing the ghost of Burnout Paradise is EA's new studio Ghost. The result is a game that tries to strike a balance between that bombastic, over-the-top spectacle of Burnout Paradise and the gritty, tuner-centric realism of EA's Shift games. The game is simultaneously brilliant and stupid and frustrating and gorgeous.

Right off the line I found that the sound is the best part of Need For Speed. I'm a big drum and bass fan, and the soundtrack is rife with some fantastic D&B tunes. The score for the game was done by none other than Photek and the licensed soundtrack has a very eclectic, modern and deep mix. I mean, they got that Rio song by Netsky 6 months before it was even released!

The people who worked on the audio should be extremely proud. Every sound effect, engine note, collision and tire squeal has a pop and weight to it that sounds illustrious in a good pair of headphones. And I can't heap enough praise on the subtle touch of having the music volume raise and lower dynamically with the speed of the car. It's utterly brilliant; perfectly capturing the rush of pegging the accelerator while cranking the volume knob. Inspired.

Visually, Need for Speed is downright resplendent. That's if you like the color palette of blue and pink. The production designers did an amazing job of creating an entire city with distinctly different districts and areas that all look unique and yet mesh perfectly into a cohesive color and design palate. The game operates on a unique dusk/dawn cycle rather than a full day/night cycle. Which means like it or not, you'll be driving at night for the entire game. At the end of the night you'll crest a hill and see dazzling sunbeams dancing through the tree branches as the sun rises. Moments later the sun will sink back below the horizon and plunge you back into eternal evening. The darkness may get a bit monotonous, but there's no denying that the wet pavement reflecting back your tail lights as you drift around corners in the middle of a dark and rainy night is atmospheric as hell. The car models are impeccable and between body kits and decals, the amount of customization you can perform on them is outright daunting.

You just can't talk about the visuals in Need for Speed without mentioning the cutscenes. Attempting to weave a narrative between all of the races and cop chases Need for Speed employs live action cutscenes shot from the first-person perspective. The cutscenes look fantastic. The lighting, set design and the actors all look spot-on as if they belong in the world you've been racing in and extra touches of seeing your customized car composited into the middle of a scene fuse the two elements well. It's admirable from a technical perspective. That being said, the cutscenes are terrible, and not in a good way. The actors did their best with the material and direction they were given but it all boils down to the writing and the fact that there are just too many characters. The narrative just kind of fizzles and doesn't really go anywhere despite having some early potential. The gameplay presents a compelling reason to have five main characters in that each character represents a particular style/aspect of racing, but it's too much to actually build any kind of meaningful character development. Ultimately the biggest problem with the cutscenes is that they ride the line. On the one hand, they could have leaned hard on the realism spectrum, get some racing consultants and portray street racing as accurately as possible. Early on, the game does a good job building tension around the group's suspicion of who could be the outlaw in town baiting cops into chases, causing trouble for all of the other street racers. More of that and less fist bumping, energy drink tossing, bromides could have been something special. On the flip side, they could have gone back to the Razor Callahan camp-fest from Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005) and just get wacky and ridiculous with it. Need for Speed 2015 feels like they couldn't decide how to tackle it so they just toed the line which isn't what anybody wanted.

I would have also liked to have seen a bit more interactivity with the characters. Not only are there cutscenes but lots of phone calls and voice messages while you're driving around. Typically after every race the organizer calls you to commiserate or congratulate. But it would have been a cool touch to include some sound bites for specific scenarios like banging up your ride beyond recognition or getting set upon by the cops and escaping by the skin of your teeth. Just a quick throwaway line to acknowledge the crazy shit that just went down would have gone a long way.

The amount of style oozing out of Need for Speed isn't necessarily all that surprising. All of the EA racing games from the last few years, whether they be from the Need for Speed series or the Shift series have had amazing sound design, art direction and production design. Need for Speed 2015 doesn't deviate and unfortunately, when it comes to gameplay it also doesn't drift too far from the others. Much like its predecessors, driving cars in Need for Speed just feels…off. It's tough to qualify exactly what is going on under the hood here. In the game's garage you have the opportunity to tinker with everything on your car. Swap out tires, change the amount of downforce coming off your aerokit, adjust your suspension, soften your sway bars, but no amount of tuning ever left me feeling completely satisfied with the way my car performed. The game lets you vacillate between drift cars and grip cars and you can change your road-hugging, earth-shoveling grip monster into a loosey-goosey, side-winding high plains drifter whenever you want. The developers even included a handy slider you can use to change from grip to drift (or any point in between) if adjusting all of the minutia is too overwhelming. After all that, however, none of it ever seemed to gain traction. I tried buying better cars and tuning the shit out of the ones in my stable but in the end, every time I'd go out for a ride that dope-ass feeling of driving like unassailable hoonigan was deflated by one or more of the following:

1. Collision detection: you bump a guard rail nine times and bounce back onto the road but on the tenth your car does triple Salchow into oblivion.
2. You coming cruising off that nice straight expressway and into some serious drift territory, you tap the brake and try to kick out the back tires, but either understeer or oversteer yourself right into the guard rail (oh and drift competitions don't add the points your rack up in a drift to your total score if you collide with something).
3. Some asshole hits you. The world is populated with online players and NPC (non-player character) drivers that race around and do events. You'll be minding your own business, doing your thing and a pack of idiots will come around the bend going the wrong way in a one way and wreck your run.
4. You can plow through street lights, mailboxes, dumpsters and electrical transformer boxes like they're made of paper mache, but a small sapling of a maple tree? Fucking impervious.
5. Cops. The cops aren't all bad. The sound design is fantastic for the cop chases. As soon as you get spotted Photek's Heat-inspired score rises up and you feel the tension as you try to outmaneuver and outrace your way to freedom. Annoyances pop up when the cops manage to bust you as you're hung up on something (like a goddamn maple tree) or find yourself going in circles trying to find that ever elusive onramp to the expressway. Ultimately getting chased by the cops wasn't that big of a deal, but touches like not being able to restart an event/race because you're being pursued were lame.

I wanted to love Need for Speed. I wouldn't go so far as to say it’s a bad game. It has so many shining positives but ultimately it has too many gameplay issues holding it back for it to be great. I could feel my enthusiasm slipping like tires on wet pavement, but I hope Ghost gets the opportunity to rev up a sequel. With tweaks and a bit more polish Need for Speed 2 or whatever the hell they would call it could be seriously dope.

Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth is an interesting case study in multimedia franchises gone wrong. Based on the popular, critically-acclaimed Uncharted video game series, Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth is the one and only tie-in novel and follows the hero of the video game series Nathan Drake and his partner Victor Sullivan on another adventure that takes place between Uncharted 2 and 3 (although is a completely standalone work that makes no references to previous plotlines).

A bit of background on the series for those unfamiliar with the Uncharted brand. In addition to the novel, there have been 5 main games to date (2016), a 4-episode motion comic, and a 6-issue regular comic, all of which revolving around Nathan Drake, a modern day treasure hunter. The series started as an homage to the Tomb Raider series and takes massive inspiration from the Indiana Jones film series. Uncharted games do a good job of capturing the pulpy, adventurous spirit of those films.

After the first two Uncharted games the series began to carve out its own identity and formula and while all of the games in the series are considered good or great by critics the most common criticisms tended to call out the Uncharted formula: Drake and Sully (Victor Sullivan) get a lead on a treasure, most commonly located in a lost city. The duo team up with someone who double-crosses them or are conscripted by someone who forces them to find the treasure. Drake climbs on ancient ruins, fights mercenaries or pirates, and kills enough of them to be considered a mass murderer. Drake finds the treasure and in the process has a showdown with the main antagonist. The lost city crumbles on itself. Drake escapes. The anatagonist does not. Drake ends up with only enough trinkets of treasure to fund his next ill-fated adventure.

There-in lies the strangeness of Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth. It adheres to the Uncharted formula in all of the worst ways and ignores all of the best.

Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth is brimming with potential and the real shame is that none of it is effectively capitalized upon. The basic plot involves the legend of King Midas hiring Daedalus to work "magic" as an alchemist and hide the king's gold in a series of labyrinths. It's a hodgepodge of cultural references and myths but it works and the creepy cult members in black robes out to stop the truth from spreading are a pretty great addition. Where the novel immediately falters, however is in the level of violence. I know this is slightly hypocritical given that through the course of a typical Uncharted video game Nathan Drake ends up racking up body counts estimated between 300 - 450 victims per game. However the violence in the games is never gory or gratuitous. It's a ridiculous disconnect that occurs because one of the game's core elements of gameplay is shooting a gun. What fun is shooting a gun without someone to shoot at? The whole thing leads to an interesting, yet well-tread analysis of ludonarrative dissonance in video games. The point being that in a fictional medium, in which there is no need to serve shooting a gun as a required element of gameplay there is an opportunity in this novel for Drake to shed his past as a mass-murderer and focus less on action and more on adventure. Surprisingly, The Fourth Labyrinth takes the opposite approach and ratchets the violence up to a whole new level. Not only does Drake end up killing scores of "bad guys" but the detail and description of the violence is more grisly than ever. The impetus for this particular adventure occurs in the opening chapters when Drake and Sully's old friend Luka is found dismembered. It's a sudden dark turn for the franchise and if finding Luka's head sitting on his chest seems like a bit much it's just the tip of the iceberg as throughout the book throats are slashed, people are stabbed, shot and beaten in colorful detail.

Uncharted games are also known for their spectacular visuals and "set-piece" moments. These are huge action sequences that are amazing to watch and exciting to play. For example, Drake survives a train derailment, climbs out of the wreckage only to have to fight his way out of a horde of enemies, or escape a collapsing building, or a cruise ship capsizing, or a cargo plane crashing into a desert. These amazing moments led to Nathan Drake being referred to as the John McClane of video games (the plucky, unkillable hero of the Die Hard films) and became one of the main draws of the franchise. What ridiculous situation will Nathan Drake find himself in next, and how will he miraculously survive by the skin of his teeth? Which is why it's so strange that The Fourth Labyrinth has none of these moments. These sequences were done in the video games at great cost, often pushing the boundaries of the technology on which the games run. In a film these would be elaborate multi-million dollar sequences. A novel is the perfect medium to top them all as there are no restrictions to the imagination. Yet, nothing.

The set and production design also play a large, jaw-dropping role in Uncharted games as Drake will stumble onto a lost city or an ancient temple and find himself confronted by massive gorgeous statues or breath-taking vistas and archictecture. This is another aspect of the series completely lost in the novel as The Fourth Labyrinth takes place in a series of labyrinths. Underground structures with stone floors, stone, walls and stone ceilings. Imagery about as vivid as a dungeon from the original The Legend of Zelda game.

Christopher Golden is a good writer. His prose is well-constructed and the imagery he conjures is vivid without being overly descriptive. The Fourth Labyrinth was produced in 2011, a ridiculously busy year for the Uncharted franchise. The studio responsible for Uncharted had farmed out development of the PS Vita game Uncharted: The Golden Abyss to Bend Studios and had split their development team for Uncharted 3 to start work on their next big game The Last of Us. I assume that the collaborative environment for telling stories in the Uncharted universe was a bit challenging for Christopher Golden and as a result we receive story with one-dimensional characters and zero character development. It's a shame because telling Uncharted stories in novel form had the potential to capitalize on all of the things that made Uncharted great while shedding all of the criticisms that have held the games back.

Originally published on Neopologist.com

I am religious about backing up my data. If a device lives under my roof and it has a hard drive it gets backed up once a week, with an offsite backup at least once a month.

I've been a Playstation 3 owner since 2008 and shortly after I bought my shiny new toy a friend of mine suffered a hardware failure on his own PS3. This served as a cautionary tale and I began to faithfully make backups every week.

The PS3 backup utility is buried in the system menu on the PS3 Xross Media Bar and it is about as bare-bones as a backup utility can get. It simply copies everything from the PS3's internal hard drive to an external hard drive of your choosing. Or at least that's what I thought.

A couple weeks ago, after four long years of hard work and arduous service, my PS3 finally gave out. It is a form of death informally known as the Yellow Light of Death, much akin to the Xbox 360's similar Red Ring of Death.

For most users this would have been a moment of extreme panic and lament. For myself, however, it was simply an annoyance. I had a very recent backup so when I contacted Sony and set up my "repair" I knew that aside from the $100 fee the only inconvenience would be waiting for my new unit to arrive and then waiting for my backup data to be restored.

I'd never done a full restore of a backup before and I knew anecdotally that certain items wouldn't restore properly (content purchased from the Playstaiton Store, like games would have to be redownloaded), which made sense. But here are a few things that I didn't expect:

1. Swapping hard drives will require firmware on a thumb drive

To compound my problems, not only was I restoring a new PS3, but I also needed to swap back in my 500GB hard drive. The drive was in good shape with no bad sectors but I kept getting an error message when I turned on the PS3. I had forgotten that if you want to swap hard drives, a USB device loaded with up-to-date firmware is necessary. There are plenty of guides for this process, but the one thing they all seemed to omit is if you're having problems getting the ball rolling (aka an annoyingly vague error message) you'll need to initiate recovery mode by holding the power button down when you turn on the PS3 until you hear a second beep to see a list of new options.

2. Media purchased from the 'Video' side of the Playstation Store is gone forever.

I'm still not 100% sure about this one, as I have yet to contact Sony customer support, but from what I have read around the Internet any movies and TV shows purchased from the Playstation Store are gone forever. Apparently buried deep in the Terms of Service it says somewhere that you only get to download these items once. Once you've downloaded them they are locked to that box and if you switch boxes you're out of luck. It's pretty bogus. I didn't own too much stuff, but I had an entire season of Futurama and some other random episodes of shows that apparently I can't get back without re-purchasing.

3. Locked saves are gone too.

It's not too common for developers to use locked saves for their games, but a few of my games used them and those saves did not get backed up. How can you tell if any of your game saves are locked? You can't... at least not easily. The only way I've ever been able to determine it is to highlight a save and hit triangle. If the 'Copy' option is grayed out you've probably got a locked save. Like I said, not too many games use locked saves these days, but all the work I put into unlocking songs and extras in DJ Hero 1 & 2 went down the drain.

4. Your game data is gone.

I knew I'd have to redownload all the games I'd purchased, but what I didn't expect was that none of my game data would make the trip over to the new hard drive. Your game data is separate from your game saves. Game data is all of the "other" stuff that gets saved to your PS3's hard drive. Game installs from disc-based games and downloadable games have to be re-installed. I'd forgotten what a joy it was to load Gran Turismo 5 with it's 40-minute mandatory install.

5. You've redownloaded your games, but don't forget to patch them.

Something else that came as a surprise was that even though I had to download fresh copies of my games, the games weren't patched! Redownloading patches for my disc-based games makes sense after loosing all of my game data, but when I download a fresh copy of a full game I expect it to come fully patched. It took a while to download Burnout paradise, but it took even longer to download all the patches that have come out since its' 2008 release.

6. Your metadata is gone.

This was one of the bigger bummers for me. While I was disappointed to have lost the video content I purchased from the Playstation Store, it wasn't a huge deal to me because I had far more video that I had ripped and copied to the Playstation myself. This was all backed up and restored intact except for one small annoyance that turned out to be a big hassle to fix. I had organized all my videos, games and music into folders. These folders are created and applied on the PS3 and evidently that information is not encoded into the PS3's copy of the file because after the restore my folders were all gone. This may not sound like a big deal, but when you've got 200GB of content heaped into a pile with no way to make sense of it, the only thing you can do is sift through it file by file and place each item into a new folder one at a time. The songs I had on the drive had all been shaken loose of their playlists, TV shows jumbled and all the file names reverted to what they were when I originally copied them over to the PS3.

7. Your trophies are OK

On the plus side, even if your game saves were locked and they didn't get transferred over, your trophies should remain intact. So long as you made a point to go through with that mind-numbing 'sync trophy data with server' every once in a while.

8. Re-registering your device my result in happy bonuses.

It's not all gloom and doom. If you're restoring to a new PS3 or replacement unit re-registering your unit with some services like VUDU or Amazon Instant video may garner you a complimentary credit with the service. VUDU gave me a $5.99 credit (enough for a free HDX rental) and Amazon gave me $5.

Back in 2004 a relatively unknown hip hop producer came up with a mixtape that combined Jay-Z's seminal (and supposedly final) album, The Black Album with The Beatles' classic 'white' album. The mixture went beyond the simplistic crossfading of normal mash-ups in that Dangermouse sampled and re-invented the instrumentation of the Beatles record to create new tracks for Jay-Z's a capellas.

The result was one of the most amazing albums of the year and a copyright lawyers nightmare (or wet dream, depending on what side of the table you sat). In the end, The Grey Album was released as a free download for a limited time.

I remember that album with extreme fondness. To this day when I think of Jay-Z tracks like 99 Problems or Public Service Announcement, I think of The Grey Album versions.

The Grey Album seemed like a once in a lifetime combination, but now, Tom Caruana has stepped from relative obscurity and dropped a bomb blast of a free download on the unsuspecting Internet. Wu-Tang vs. The Beatles.




Many hip hop fans (myself included) questioned the pairing of Jay-Z and The Beatles.  At the time, it hadn't really seemed like Jay-Z had earned his place in the pantheon of hip hop all-stars (despite his constant barrage of lyrics to the contrary) and thought he wasn't deserving of such an honor. Dare I say, Wu-Tang Clan are The Beatles of the hip hop world. A group of hugely talented artists, some how able to keep their super group together long enough to produce some of the most influential albums in the genre, only to break up and go on to create more as solo artists, while one member died early.

After listening to Wu Tang Clan vs. The Beatles, I have surprised even myself with the admission that it is better than The Grey Album. As unbelievable as that sounds, consider that while The Grey Album was limited to samples from the white album and vocals from The Black Album, while the parameters of Wu Tang vs. The Beatles allowed Tom Caruana to pick and sample the very best from The Beatles catalog, the Wu-Tang catalog and even solo work produced from members of both groups. Add in a smattering of interviews with Beatles fans, classic Wu-Tang skits like "Where my killa tape at..." and you have a more cohesive and expansive listening experience.

Don't get me wrong The Grey Album was a fascinating sonic experiment. It remains one of my favorite albums, but it was a much more straight-forward and rigidly defined project, taking one Beatles song and combining it with one Jay-Z track. Wu Tang vs. The Beatles has the luxury of having room to breathe and in the space of one track can run the gamut of resonating like a retrospective homage to a groundbreaking post-modern original remix.

You can download Wu Tang vs. The Beatles for free at: http://wutangvsthebeatles.bandcamp.com/

The worst game I played this year was probably The Transformers (PS2) game from 2004ish.  I was kind of bummed because I really wanted to play it when it came out and it got decent, not great, reviews.  But suffice to say that game did not withstand the test of time.  I made it to the second "zone" and threw in the towel.  It just wasn't any fun, but I really wanted to like it.
 
As far as new games go, Bionic Commando was probably the low point for me.  That was another game that I really wanted to like, but it just wasn't very good and the whole time you're just sitting there thinking of ways that they could have made the game better.

I recently, found myself at a crossroads in my gaming lifestyle.  For most of my video game career I would have described myself as a "hardcore" player without hesitating.  Over the last 5 years or so, I've come to a point where I no longer think "hardcore" is accurate and... I'm okay with that.  Times have changed and now I find myself looking back on the way I used to play versus the way things are going today.

Let me sum up my path from then to now very quickly:

1988 - NES
1991- SNES
1994 - GB
1996 - N64
1999 - PS (used)
2000 - College (stopped playing games... except Tekken)
2002 - Gamecube (cont'd college)
2005 - PS2
2008 - PS3

So there you go.  It wasn't until 1999 that I had my first taste of Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid and Tony Hawk which broke me away from my Nintendo crony-ism.  However, college put a temporary end to playing games, except the occasional Tekken bout.

Even when I wasn't actively playing games, though, I was always informed as to what was going on in the industry.  It was the one hobby that no matter how much I distanced myself from it, I could never fully shake.  From Nintendo Power (1989-2000) to Gamespot (2000-present) and now Giantbomb, even if I was in a period of my life where I was not playing games, I was always watching, always reading.

 In 2002, I threw caution to the wind, bought a Gamecube instead of an Xbox and started voraciously playing again.  I bought new releases the day they came out, burned through them in a weekend and went back for more.  Even through the droughts of not playing, I continued to watch and read coverage of video games.

In 2004, I graduated with a B.A. and went out in the world to find a job, which wasn't available.  Money was tight, so the first things to go were games.  I continued to pay attention to the industry and in 2005, I eventually I got some cashflow and a PS2, having decided to catch up on the old games I had missed before the launch of the PS3 and competitors.

Later that year, I started grad school and the idea of continuing to buy new releases (or even older used games) became laughable.  Money was tighter than ever and I was living on my own in a new town with no friends that played games.  I gave up the idea of being hardcore.  I no longer had the time or the finances to hang with the 1337, and when I really thought about it, I realized I didn't want to anyway.

Without generalizing too much, hardcore players tend to treat video games as commodities.  They collect games as any other collector would seek baseball cards or comic books.  The play most of their games once (sometimes they leave them unopened) and then put them on their shelf like trophies on display.  They don't buy "Greatest Hits" games because they have different color packaging from the rest of their game collection, and they never miss a big new release, even if it's a game with a subject or play style in which they have no interest.

Make no mistake, I am not disparaging hardcore players, I just simply realized that I wasn't cut out to be one and from that moment of epiphany in 2005, to present day it is only now that I have finally figured out what I am after.  I have become something of the wandering soul-searcher of video game consumers.  I'm no longer in search of what's hot, or hyped, I'm looking for games out of which I can derive enjoyment.  A big part of that enjoyment was letting go of my hardcore collectible ownership issues and looking at games more as experiences rather than notches on my bed post.  I strive to be a video game playing zen master, at peace with the games I play, excited about those on the horizon yet completely un-obligated to play anything at all!

I'm not going to espouse the virtues of Gamefly, because really you can insert any similar service and come to the same conclusion.  I have the most basic Gamefly plan, coupled with a free Gametap account and I even use my public library.  I can rent, and borrow games and no longer have to worry about making investments in titles or whether or not I recoup my expense based on my percentage of customer satisfaction.  I don't have to care anymore.  If I try a game and it's crap, I can send it back, delete it, return it to the library and move on.  I don't have to sell it back to Gamestop for pennies on the dollar or worse yet, leave it on my shelf as a testament to my bad decision making skills.

I am able to pursue games that look interesting to me, regardless of review scores.  And best of all, I can sidestep the petty squabbling of purchase justification that comes in the form of fan-boyism.  I am freed from expectation.

If you find yourself getting caught up in the exhaustive lifestyle of being a "hardcore" gamer, take a step back and a deep breath, re-assess and make sure what you're doing is really making you happy.