I watch animé. That, Lego blocks, and video games are the three child­hood vices I never out­grew. It’s just that my hob­bies have matured along with me. I now pre­fer games that are rated M even though I still enjoy those that are rated E. I now pre­fer Tech­nic sets over LEGOLAND Space sets. I now pre­fer animé that deal with mature themes (e.g. Say­onara Zetsubou Sen­sei, Seirei no Moribito) over those that are juve­nile (Poke­mon). I wish more ani­mated shows in the US were more like those from Japan.

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So I was skim­ming through the lat­est EGM (Issue 210), when lo and behold, I come across a pre­view about Cross­fire. Along with Army of Two and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, this trio of games make-up the genre of buddy games. With all the advances in tech­nol­ogy the gam­ing indus­try pro­duces year after year, it floors me that it took them this long to pro­duce games that are coöper­a­tive by design, where the single-player mode is the alter­na­tive rather than the default. Unfor­tu­nately in this ini­tial release, the num­ber of play­ers are lim­ited to two. My gam­ing bud­dies and I would love to have more coöper­a­tive, adventure/action games. At least this bud­ding genre gives me hope.

I’ve never been a huge fan of MMOs. From a gamer’s per­spec­tive, the whole idea of a game with­out end is great in the­ory (like eat­ing pizza for the rest of your life), but sucks in prac­tice. That’s not to say it’s bad from the publisher’s point of view. In fact it’s quite lucra­tive. With­out an end (goal), there’s very lit­tle sense of accom­plish­ment built into MMOs. There’s no pay­off in the form of end-game cred­its and cutscenes for the time and money invested. So the player is forced to set goals for them­selves within the lim­its of the game. For example…

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