Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.05.2006, Page 23

As I approached a recent interview, and real-
ized that after a lengthy cross-Atlantic f light
I would be expected to hold a coherent con-
versation, I decited I needed a new method
for coping with my fear of f lying—anxiety
medication is pricey and makes one dopey,
alcohol tends to have an effect on the think-
ing process as well.
The solution: the PSP, a personal gaming
unit by Sony. The arguments against buying
a game system when you’re over the age of
20 are many: they are anti-social, they are
dumb, and women, men, professionals, and
even most children will look down as you as
a short attention-span goof for tapping away
at a little gismo.
However, through experience, I can ar-
gue that a PSP can definitely help with social
situations in the same way braces might help
teenagers. True, while you’re playing a PSP
you’re in a wasteland, but the little machine
offers a wholly absorbing distraction that
allows you to get through things like delayed
f lights and turbulence without reacting—it’s
the closest thing you can get to a temporary
lobotomy.
My test with a PSP was fascinating even
before I put the disk into the machine. For
starters, a PSP has a web browser and excel-
lent wireless modem. In a café, I was able to
check email, get songs off of Myspace, and
read the Reykjavík Grapevine online.
The games themselves seemed, at first,
limiting. A PSP is meant to be played in a
somewhat social setting—I did not want to
be the guy playing a sniper game, or, for that
matter, Grand Theft Auto, on an airplane.
Still, I couldn’t resist picking up the adven-
ture title X-Men Legends 2.
X-Men is a platform game, meaning it
is something like Super Mario Brothers, in
which you guide your heroes throughout
maze-type activities, breaking random crap
and fighting bad guys. Designed by Activi-
sion, the game includes digital comic books,
and various side games and distractions—
enough for someone bored with the idea of
actually gaming to keep focused and happy.
Having invested the bulk of two layovers into
X-Men, I have come nowhere near winning
the game or unlocking many characters, and
I have no interest in continuing to battle,
even if I enjoy freezing things as the uber-fey
superhero Iceman. But the game has dis-
tracted well.
The main draw on the PSP, though, is
the selection and quality of the movie titles.
The handheld device functions extremely
well as a digital movie player. Sadly, in our
test run, I purchased Once Upon a Time in
Mexico and Fun with Dick and Jane. The
first ten minutes of each demonstrated PSP’s
incredible resolution, excellent sound, and
intuitive design. Concentrating as one does
on the remarkable screen and sound from
the PSP, the over-the-top explosions of Once
Upon a Time seemed that much bigger—
and, after ten minutes of boring dialogue,
that much more tedious. The same went for
Jim Carrey’s pyrotechnic acting style.
After one month with the PSP, I am
positive the device has a future for travellers,
professionals and people with short attention
spans. At present, though, I have yet to see
game and movie titles for the over 20, not in
need of Visine and brownies, crowd. BC
The Elder Scrolls is a popular series of RPGs
(role playing games) set in its own fantasy
world, albeit one heavily based on a variety
of other RPG universes that all seem to owe
a great deal to the Tolkien mythos. The vast
game world is populated with a variety of
elves, mages, warriors, animated skeletons,
golems, vampires and the like – all playing
major or minor roles in the open-ended story
the player is participating in. In the latest
instalment, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the
sheer scale and detail of the surrounding
environment has been taken to new levels.
The first thing that strikes you about
Oblivion is the fact that your computer sucks.
If you’re not packing some serious NASA-
style hardware, you’re going to be scaling
down the graphics options quite a bit from
the highest settings. That being said, the
Grapevine reviewed the game on an AMD
Athlon 64 with half a gigabyte of memory
and managed to get a decent performance
out of it, but to keep it looking really pretty
we had accept a fairly low frame rate during
some of the larger battles.
Speaking of battles, you’re going to have
to put any pacifistic tendencies aside and do
some fighting if you want to survive in the
world of Elder Scrolls. Granted, the open
ended nature of the game means that you
often have other options: such as using the
powers of persuasion, bribery or stealth. It’s
just that when you are charged by an army of
unholy apparitions wielding magical bolts of
fire and whatnot; negotiations are effectively
over and you’re going to need to whip out a
weapon of some sort. The weapons at your
disposal are hugely varied, but they mostly
fall into two main categories: magical and
non-magical. Magical weapons include
spells, enchanted daggers and such, while the
more traditional medieval tools of destruc-
tion are all there as well. OK, so people in
the Middle Ages may not have actually fash-
ioned weapons and armour from the bones of
trolls, but the design-theme is there.
All in all, Elder Scrolls IV is a fantastic
RPG, but not a game that is going to win
many new devotees to the genre. It’s a hard-
core RPG outing and will no doubt please
the Elder Scrolls fan base no end, packing in
more quests, spells, options and refinements
than you could shake a very large ‘Level 4
Enchanted Stick of Shaking’ at. Just don’t
expect to be pampered or led by the hand
through the experience: this is serious nerd
territory.
It may not be the newest release on the
market, but Battlefield 2 is one seriously
hot game and as more expansion packs are
in the pipeline it’s set to continue to be one
of the most popular online games out there.
Essentially a follow up to the tremendously
successful Battlefield: 1942 and Battlefield:
Vietnam, Battlefield 2 is a modern combat
simulation designed for co-operative online
play. You pick a side, a map and a weapons
class, and then you head out into an un-
predictable and unscripted war zone full of
equally ambitious and bloodthirsty armchair
soldiers as yourself. Your mission, and you
have no choice but to accept it: capture
several strategic points on the map, each
indicated by a f lag and surrounded by angry
enemy soldiers who want your f lagpoints just
as much.
What weapons class you choose can have
a big impact on the way you play the game.
In the original, unmodified game, there are
seven: anti-tank, assault, engineer, medic,
sniper, special ops and support. If you have
a bazooka you are invaluable to your team
when that APC or tank comes rumbling over
the horizon, but your weedy little machine-
gun makes you a liability in a fire fight.
Assault infantry are well armed but poorly
armoured, the engineer and medics fix
vehicles and people respectively, the sniper
obviously snipes, special ops deliver power-
ful packs of C4 explosives and the support
role basically means you carry around a lot
of ammo and a ridiculously overpowered
machinegun that hits nothing but scares the
bejeezus out of everyone nearby. In addition,
you can apply to be ‘Commander’ of your
squad, which gives you option of using things
like unmanned aerial vehicles, satellite scans
and heavy artillery strikes for the benefit of
the grunts on the front lines.
Once you get to grips with the various
classes and weapons available to you, your
next step is probably going to be to play
around with the military hardware that is
liberally scattered throughout the playing
areas. Anyone can jump into anything, be
it an enemy helicopter or a friendly jeep,
and attempt to raise some vehicular hell. Be
warned, though, handling some of the more
impressive machinery (particularly the air-
craft) is trickier than waxing an angry tiger
in heat – so chances are your early forays
into military aviation will simply make you
deeply unpopular amongst your team mates.
Don’t worry, though, someone always has
to be “that guy” who drops the 500 pound
bomb on his team’s victory f lag – just call it a
tribute to the American Airforce.
In conclusion: if you used to play with
toy soldiers and/or simply love the smell
of napalm in the morning, Battlefield 2 is
the online gaming experience for all your
adrenaline junky needs. This isn’t Doom,
so forget about running around dungeons at
50 miles per hour, shooting up supernatural
entities and aliens with ray guns. Battlefield
depicts modern combat, pure and unadulter-
ated military pornography in every respect.
And just like regular pornography, you don’t
have to be pro-war to suspend your disbelief
and revel in the fantasy of being there and
doing that. Repeatedly. GHJ
By Bart Cameron and Gunnar Hrafn Jónsson
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
PSP for Business
Battlefield 2
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