In the past five years or so gaming has been building momentum as an organized competitive sport. (Spare me, please, the debate about whether gaming is a sport.) Tournaments of real-time strategy games like Starcraft are nationally televised in South Korea, and there are even professional gamers who earn upwards of six figures per year from winnings and endorsements. But even as contemporary gaming becomes more mainstream, the gaming heroes of the past have slipped into obscurity. Truth be told, they never really climbed their way out of obscurity.

One of the biggest of these old school arcade champions is Billy Mitchell, a hot-sauce salesman who held the Donkey Kong high score for over 20 years. In the documentary The King of Kong, which was screened last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, Mitchell must face his first serious challenger for the Donkey Kong crown.

Gamers with beta keys for Halo 3 can begin playing at midnight on May 16.

3.

Just the sight of that number in the signature Halo font sends chills down the spines of millions of gamers around the world. Those chills turned to conniptions this morning when Bungie, the creators of Halo and the guardians of all that is awesome in the universe, announced the dates for the highly anticipated Halo 3 multiplayer beta test. Beginning at midnight PDT on May 16 and ending at 11:59pm PDT on June 6, gamers who have procured beta keys will be able to download the game files to their Xbox 360 and begin playing.

There will be three maps included in the beta — Snowbound, High Ground, and Valhalla — and each will be playable in several different game types, although exactly which game types have not been revealed. Some of the mysteries of Halo 3‘s multiplayer will be revealed, including the new use of the X button, which apparently deploys special items like trips mines, a portable gravity lift, and the bubble shield. The shield has been the topic of much speculation since it was first shown in the remarkable “Starry Night” ad that aired during last year’s Super Bowl. Exactly how it works — does everyone get one or is it a pickup, is it on a timer or does it disappear after it absorbs a certain amount of damage? — is still not known, but Bungie has finally confirmed that it exists in the game and will be usable in the beta. However, Bungie has been clear that not all game elements new to Halo 3 will appear in the beta, so there will still be plenty of surprises when the full game is released this Fall.

This morning Bungie also released a short documentary about the making of Halo 3 multiplayer. Titled Is Quisnam Protero Damno!, it shows players using some of the new abilities like trip mines and the bubble shield. It also shows a new feature: instant replays. In Halo 3, you will be able to record snippets of each game and play them back, complete with customizable camera angles, slow motion, and freeze frame. The documentary is now available for download on both Bungie‘s website (www.bungie.net) and Xbox Live.

There have been a few different ways to enter the beta test, most of which are now closed; but if you don’t have your key yet it’s not too late: specially-marked boxes of the new Xbox 360 game Crackdown include a beta key. Thankfully, Crackdown is great fun in its own right, so it won’t feel like you’re spending $60 just for the Halo 3 beta. But as any die-hard Halo fan will tell you, $60 is money well spent in return for three glorious weeks of Halo 3. That’s 528 hours of Halo, a mere 11¢ per day!

Guitar Hero III to have a new developer; new multi-instrument Rock Band video game due out by year’s end.

Guitar Hero publisher RedOctane released yesterday Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360. This is the first time the wildly popular GH franchise has appeared on an Xbox console. The game comes bundled with a special guitar controller for $90. You can also purchase the guitar controller separately for $60. Microsoft and RedOctane have already announced that extra songs will be available for purchase on Xbox Live Marketplace, although they have not announced release dates or pricing.

Guitar Hero has been at the center of considerable drama in the past few months. This shouldn’t be surprising considering how lucrative the franchise has been: GHII has already grossed well over $100 million on the PlayStation 2 alone. On Monday, RedOctane’s parent company, Activision, announced that it had settled a lawsuit against three former RedOctane employees who had been involved in developing the GH franchise. The three left RedOctane last year to start their own company, Lodestone Entertainment, to compete with their former employer by developing their own rhythm game. The settlement prohibits Lodestone from creating any drum-, guitar-, or synthesizer-based games for the next year. They are also prohibited from marketing Xbox 360 controllers for Guitar Hero II until six months after the game’s release.

Last September, the developer of the first two GH games, Harmonix Music Systems, was purchased by MTV Networks. A short time later, RedOctane announced that Guitar Hero III would not be developed by Harmonix (Tony Hawk developer Neversoft is taking over the franchise), leaving many to wonder what the acclaimed developer of one of gaming’s most popular franchises would do next. On Monday, Harmonix and MTV announced that they are working on a game called Rock Band. The game will allow up to four people to play songs together either on the same console or online via Xbox Live or the Playstation 3‘s Playstation Network. There will be four different controllers: lead guitar, bass guitar, drums, and a microphone for the singer. Harmonix has confirmed that the Guitar Hero II controller will be compatible with Rock Band, so you won’t have to buy a second lead guitar.

With the backing of both MTV/Viacom and publisher Electronic Arts, Rock Band is sure to have a fantastic list of licensed songs and plenty of downloadable content. However, no song list has been released, and Harmonix has not commented on the price. Rock Band is expected to release by the end of this year.

One of the best-looking real-time strategy games I’ve ever seen. The campaign offers a nice mix of mission types, and the focus on combat instead of resource management and base building keeps you in the thick of the action. A no-brainer for any RTS or WWII buff.

This is hands-down the weirdest rhythm game around, but it’s also one of the most compelling. Who knows what the hell is going on? It’s so awesomely fun, you simply won’t care.

You’ve probably never heard of it, but this online multiplayer game is a combination of Clue, Murder on the Orient Express, and Doom. With fantastic art direction and some of the most complex gameplay I’ve ever seen in an online game, The Ship is innovative, funny, and well worth a try.

More zombies than you can shake a boomstick at, and more ways to dismember them than you’ve ever imagined possible. My personal favorite is the lawnmower; but with so many zombicidal possibilities, there is something for everyone.

The friend who recommended this game to me said, “It’s the only game that comes to mind that even adequately — and it does more than just that — simulates melee combat in the first person. The staggering blows you receive, the big wind-ups with a fire axe or a head butt, all put you right there — 100% immersion, baby.” It’s also creepy as all hell. Be sure to empty your bladder before playing.

Another Tom Clancy series that was starting to show its age got a major next-gen tune-up this year. Everything from the realistic character animation to the incredibly detailed HUD make this one of the most immersive combat sims of recent years.

The R6 games were starting to get a bit stale for me, but Vegas blew the doors off this dusty old franchise, sometimes literally. The graphics are stunning, the new cover mechanic is arguably better implemented than in Gears of War, and on the Xbox 360 you can map your own face onto your character. Do you hear me, people? You can use your own damned face!

Half the fun is in comparing your strategies with your friends, because each mission can be completed in so many different ways. The missions themselves are cleverly written and often quite funny. As good as Splinter Cell: Double Agent is, Hitman wins for best stealth game of the year.

It’s amazing that what seems like just another Star Wars game could melt this cynical old gamer’s icy heart, but LSW2 did and I’m a better man for it.

As I wrote in my review, this game isn’t quite the Second Coming most reviewers make it out to be. It is, however, the best game of the year.

PSYCHONAUTS: This is one of the best games ever made. Even though it came out in 2005, I’m mentioning it because it was just made backward compatible for the Xbox 360. If you haven’t played it, do yourself a favor and go pick up a used copy. Trust me.

written by Slayve (who would like to thank his friends from WTF Clan, Mopap and Komar, for their help in compiling this list)

Developed by Epic Games, the makers of the very popular UNREAL TOURNAMENT online multiplayer games, GEARS OF WAR has quite a pedigree: It was designed by game prodigy Cliff Bleszinski (a.k.a. CliffyB), co-creator of the UNREAL franchise, and was built using Epic’s new UNREAL 3 graphics engine, which has become one of the driving forces of next-gen game development. GEARS (exclusively for the Xbox 360) is published by Microsoft itself, and they have been hyping the hell out of it, in part to counter the hype around the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. So is it worthy of the hype? To read the almost universally glowing reviews of the game, one would think so; but the game has some serious flaws that most reviewers neglect to mention. Because the game has been out for a few weeks now, and has been reviewed by scores of publications, it would be redundant to simply cover what it does well. I’m going to skip all the fanboy adulation and get to the juicy bits — the stuff they screwed up.

GEARS is a third-person action game, meaning that you do not look through the eyes of your character but actually see him on screen most of the time, the one exception being when you zoom into an over-the-shoulder view when aiming your weapon. Bleszinski calls GEARS a “stop-and-pop” game, as opposed to the more traditional “run-and-gun” first-person action games like HALF-LIFE and HALO. Success in GEARS requires that you be more methodical in gunfights. If you just go running into an area and try to Rambo your way through, you will be put down quickly and brutally. Your enemies use cover to avoid your attack and are smart enough to flank you if you stay in one spot for too long. The artificial intelligence is pretty good, but it does have its limitations. For instance, if you find an angle on an enemy who is behind cover, he will not react when you start shooting him, he’ll just stay crouched behind cover until you’ve killed him. You can also sometimes approach an enemy with your chainsaw out and he won’t try to evade you, apparently assuming that you’re just offering to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. Overall, though, GEARS has decent AI and most skirmishes are extremely tense and satisfying.

In the single-player campaign, you will usually have one to three computer-controlled teammates to back you up, but don’t expect much from them other than some amusing banter. For the most part they will keep out of trouble and even occasionally kill an enemy or two. There are a few basic commands you can issue to them, but they really just amount to attack, defend, and regroup. You will rarely, if ever, use these commands. Considering that you’re almost always fighting in a squad and that using squad tactics is very useful in this type of combat, it’s too bad there isn’t at least a basic positioning system like in the GHOST RECON games, by which you can command individual soldiers to take positions on a map to establish cross-fire zones and enable flanking maneuvers. But to the extent that your teammates rarely get in your way or make mistakes that cost you a life, they work well enough.

The control scheme is almost elegant in its simplicity, but it is not perfect. Most special moves are controlled by the A button. If you are near cover and hit A, you will slide up to the structure and crouch behind it to avoid incoming fire. However, there are objects here and there that look like cover, but pressing A just puts you into a roll instead, which can have fatal consequences if you were counting on that cover in the midst of a heated fight. This happens because if you hit A when you are not near enough to cover, you will dive in whichever direction you were moving. There is a slight dead zone where you are too far from cover to slide into it, but close enough that diving forward will bash your head against the wall and then have to hit A again to take cover. For the most part, though, the cover mechanic is implemented so smoothly that it won’t take long before you’re moving like a seasoned veteran. Indeed, the natural flow of your character’s movement and the very solid, connected feel of the controls is one of the best aspects of GEARS OF WAR.

Although the graphics are very impressive, much of the level design feels contrived in order to work with the cover mechanic. You have never seen so many waist-high walls in your life! Granted, the environments you fight in are mostly in ruined cities, so the fact that there is a lot of debris strewn around is not necessarily out of place. However, the way the debris is distributed around each area looks deliberate rather than organic, and this detracts from how good the game looks otherwise.

The physics engine also leaves something to be desired. Common objects found throughout the game are interactive, so you can kick bottles and vases around when you’re bored (not that you ever will be). The physics of their movement are pretty dicey, though, as objects will often go flying off in a direction and at a velocity inconsistent with the action that set them in motion. This is really just a nitpick, to be honest, since it doesn’t affect gameplay at all. The worst aspect of the physics engine is what happens to enemies after they die. Their bodies can be interacted with somewhat by shooting at or walking over them. The problem is that they have absolutely no weight or stiffness to them, which often causes them to pile up into ridiculous contortions. This is especially disappointing after killing one of the more difficult and impressive creatures in the game, the Berserker. These blind creatures hunt by scent, and their thick skin makes your weapons useless against them. A couple of the game’s most exciting sequences involve you trying to lure a Berserker outside so you can use the Hammer of Dawn on it. But after killing this incredibly nasty and tough character, you can walk over to him and his body will bounce around like an empty rubber suit. Needless to say, this is rather anticlimactic after working your butt off to kill such an impressive monster.

Easily the weakest aspect of GEARS OF WAR is the storytelling. It is not unusual for action games to scrimp on story. Ironically, GEARS has an interesting story behind it, the only problem being that the developers don’t actually tell that story. And it’s not for lack of trying — GEARS has some of the longest cutscenes I’ve ever seen in an action game. Unfortunately, these cutscenes are so poorly directed that they end up just wasting your time and disrupting the rhythm of the game. Some of these scenes go so far as to show a few minutes of you and your squad fighting waves of enemies, which is pure torture because the whole time you’re wondering why they won’t just let you do the fighting. This is a game, right, not a movie?

There is a fairly long scene that you can access by leaving the game on the menu screen for a few minutes before loading a game. This scene explains some of the backstory of who these monsters are that are emerging from the ground and destroying human civilization; but you have to wonder, Why wasn’t this the opening scene of the game? Even worse, there are hints at a fairly complex backstory for the lead character, Marcus Fenix, but by the end of the game you have very little understanding of who he is. This isn’t all that surprising — the mysterious hero is fairly common in action games. Whereas many games keep their heroes mysterious because the developers were too lazy to create an interesting main character, it’s obvious that the developers of GEARS have created a compelling lead character but have simply forgotten to tell us who he is. This is the most frustrating thing about GEARS OF WAR — they clearly spent the time and effort to craft a decent storyline with a solid lead character, but in the end opted to tell so little of that narrative that it ends up feeling like your typical bargain-basement action story meant for nothing more than to take you from point A to point B with very little context. It is a huge disappointment and keeps GEARS OF WAR from being a truly outstanding game experience.

Where GEARS will find its most lasting value is likely in the multiplayer options. You can play the entire single-player campaign in co-op mode, either split-screen on the same console or over Xbox Live. As much fun as the campaign is on your own, it is much more fun when played with a friend. You are finally able to pull off some of the tactical moves that the limited squad commands prevent you from doing with the computer-controller teammates. The only serious problem with co-op is that you can have only one checkpoint saved between single-player and co-op. Clearly the developers don’t understand how people play co-op. For instance, I was playing the game solo for a few days before a friend bought it. In order for us to play co-op, I had to give up all of the progress I had made in the game in order to start at the beginning with him. This is a terrible save function that makes playing co-op much more limiting than it should be. You should be able to save several different solo and co-op campaigns so you can pick up where you left off with any of your friends without it impacting your own solo campaign. There is also the problem of multiple players on the same console — with only one checkpoint save per game, how do you manage more than one player per console?

Finally, there is the “Versus” mode, which pits two four-player teams against each other in deathmatch-style games. These matches are organized by rounds, and the first team to win a certain number of rounds (determined by the host) wins the match. This sets up a nice dynamic whereby the first couple of rounds see both teams testing each other’s strategies to find their enemy’s weaknesses. Matches tend to be fast, bloody, and extremely tense. This is undoubtedly one of the very best online games around, but it, too, has some serious problems. The server browser is very clunky and sometimes buggy. Servers fill up so quickly that by the time the server list is loaded, many of the games in the list are actually full. Some people have also encountered a glitch that prevents them from getting into any online matches. I encountered this problem and was told by Microsoft that it is an issue they are aware of and to just keep trying. (I eventually found a trick posted in the Xbox Live forums that usually circumvents this problem, so at least I can play now.) Obviously this isn’t a widespread problem, though, because Microsoft recently announced that GEARS is now the most popular game on Xbox Live.

The problems don’t stop at the server browser. Once you’re in a match, if someone drops out for whatever reason, that team is now undermanned. There is no way to let another player into the match to even the teams. This can be extremely annoying if, as has happened to me, you’ve been playing a match for 15 to 20 minutes, the score is tied, you’re in the match-winning game, and you lose a player. With teams of only 4 players, losing even one can be devastating. There is also no way to create a party so you can stay with friends from match to match. This is especially surprising because GEARS is published by Microsoft, which also published HALO 2, the undisputed champion of online console games. HALO 2 uses a party system that allows you to stay with the same group of people as you move from match to match. Considering that HALO 2 is two years old, it seems unforgivable to release a major new Xbox Live game without that basic functionality.

GEARS OF WAR is certainly one of the best action games on any console, but it does not quite live up to the hype of its being one of the most innovative action games ever. The cover mechanic is very well implemented and breathes life into a genre that has been getting a bit tired in recent years. The sights and sounds are beyond compare, and the solid co-op and multiplayer components will keep this at the top of gamers’ playlists for many months to come. However, given that it does those things so well only makes the botched storytelling and buggy online interface that much more frustrating and perplexing. We can only hope that the inevitable GEARS OF WAR 2 will see the developers focus more on the story to give us some emotional context for all that gloriously gory death.