Episode 8 - Starcraft II. We gush like pre pubescent teeanage girls at a Justin Bieber concert about the near perfect Starcraft II. We are pretty sure it will unite the world and end hunger. Buy this game now, or later, it doesn't matter, because gamers will be playing it for years.

Episode 5 - We explored the latest installment in the wildly popular Warhammer 40,000 franchise, Dawn of War II and were not sold. We enoyed the game and give it high marks in some areas, but if you are an old PC Gamer you have better options for a real time strategy game. Do not buy it, it sucks.

Episode 4 - Bioshock. Nelson admits to crying at the end of this superior single player experience. We recommend that you buy this game, explain why it does not suck, and analyze the presence of 3 year old girls in the game playing universe. We examine why this game does not suck in spite of the lack of a multiplayer element: it is good enough on its own.

Episode 3 - Battlefield Bad Company 2 review. Mr. Crusty and Nelson explore the latest contribution to the Battlefield franchise. They recommend that you buy this game, explain why it does not suck, and analyze Nelson's mouth breathing. Hate mail and cat farts examined at the end of this installation.

Battlefield 2142
By Nelson and Mr. Crusty
Summary: This is the least suckiest game in the universe. Ever. Until we find a better game. This is the archetypical on line multiplaying first person shooter. And it is the best one we have played so far. We review this 2006 game for the purpose to explain our binary rating system: games either suck or they do not. This is the best example of a game that does not suck and we compare it to all other games.
The Single Player Mode. – The ideal single player mode.
You are a soldier in the 22nd century. The ice age has returned. Geopolitical power blocs have condensed to one or two. You must win specific battles as part of a team to protect your nation’s interest in limited resources. But none of this is meaningful as the game is so well designed the back story does not matter. The only cut scenes this game has is at loadup, and you can skip it. It is interesting to watch for the first time.
Battlefield 2142 (BF 2142) is so good that there is only one distinction between the single player and multiplayer game modes unlike the mass audience FPS offerings on the market in this age: your opponents are AI instead of human beings. Practice on this mode before you go on line to avoid frustration. Come back when you want to practice flying the helicopters, but like all good games, there is no material difference between the single and multi player modes, so we can skip to that right now.
Multi-Player Mode – Superior on line gameplay that is still relevant four years later.
People still spill blood on the BF 2142 battlefield. A lot of them. Interest is waning as the new offerings sate many of the needs fed by BF 2142, but the fact this game still has legs is testimony to its superior design.
The Battlefield franchise may have invented the first person on line shooter. If they did not, they certainly deserve credit for perfecting it. BF 2142 is a significant improvement on the original Battlefield 1942, 2, and Vietnam.
Maps – We could write all day about these maps.
DICE gave these maps some thought. There are nuances throughout the game, they are well designed, and they provide something for every player. They range from contained urban fighting environments to expansive desert landscapes. You can find yourself fighting door to door, or launching a tank strike from 10,000 yards to hit an opponent with the assistance of a spotter. Some maps have both. All maps allow players of every style to have meaningful participation and contributions. These maps are the best maps we have seen to date. Nothing compares.
For example, you can participate in a Titan Mode game as a sniper by making your way to a tower to defend a capture point for 20 minutes by making spectacular headshots on unwary opponents. Later you transport to a titan to either attack or defend in a close combat situation by dropping c4 charges in strategic locations to await foes who are poster children for Darwinism. You shouldn’t run into a corridor without checking for bombs or anti personnel mines in a combat situation. The permutations are numerous. Multiply the last experience by number of classes (4) by number of map types (4) and the number of game roles you can play (3), and whether or not you are on offense or defense (2). By our horribly simple math, that is 96 different types of game experiences within BF 2142.
You won’t be bored with your choices, and you will not have many complaints with this game aspect.
Vehicles
Well thought out and appropriately empowered. Tanks are powerful, but slow. ATVs are quick, but weaponless. Helicopters are moderately fast, and moderately powerful. Vehicle weaknesses are perfectly proportioned to their strengths. Flank your opponents with an ATV, but be prepared to fight with only what you can carry, and never while driving. Bludgeon your way through a front line with a ...

Episode 6 - We explored the world of Champions Online, a decent Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO) with an excellent character build and design system that fails at only one thing: the game play. Disappointed as we may be, we give this a sucks rating. Do not buy it.

Summary: This game sucks, do not buy it. Play the single player campaign if someone gives you the game. The multiplayer totally sucks.
How does a game with a solid franchise, good customer loyalty, and a massive marketing budget crank out a game with horrible on line experiences? Simple, they can. The publishers are probably still riding the whole Pitfall wave they started out with on the Atari, and figure that we would buy this game happily for $60 and be satisfied.
Like all mainstream and first person shooters released to a mass market audience in the last few years, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 has the single player/multiplayer dichotomy. The gaps between the two in this case however, are staggering.
Single Player Play
The first person production values are awesome. I mean you have the voice talent for the Secret Service Guy for Life dude from 24, the protagonist from the Rome series on HBO, and the voice of the latest military recruiting ad campaigns whose name I cannot remember, but he is a good actor as well as a shill for the military industrial complex. I mean, this is some serious voice talent recruitment. Usually you get one or two known voices, but these guys have three. There are probably some I cannot recognize, but the talent in the voice over is good.
The plot in the single player campaign is excellent. The writers took some chances with one of the missions, and you will know which one I am talking about when you play this game.
The weapons in this game make sense too. And it makes a difference which one you pick unlike in some first person shooters where there is basically just four weapons: the pistol; automatic rifle, sniper rifle, and bazooka. In CODMW2, the selection of the rifle you use can make the game quite difficult or quite enjoyable depending on your selection. Pay attention to the sights on the weapon which are indicated when you position yourself to select it. The authors tempered the ammo supply well too, so you actually need to pay attention to how much you use and not just fire blindly into the action.
Vehicle play in this game is immaterial as there are only a few missions where you get in a vehicle, and half the time you do it, it is to go fast in one direction for a few minutes because you are chasing an objective, or being chased. You are a passenger in the other half of the vehicle trips, and I do not believe you can die while in them, rendering your decisions moot.
The AI in this game is quite advanced too. The enemy is not predictable, and not terribly dumb. I never found myself anticipating a computer bad guy, and their use of weapons is intuitive, just as if someone finally said, “Hey, how about we spend some time writing some subroutines into the AI for this game.”
The plot got confusing at times, but you generally understand that you are saving the world, and I believe there were one or two different protagonists throughout the game so you didn’t play one lone wolf who single handedly saved the entire fucking world with a gun, which was refreshing. Here, two individuals saved the entire fucking world with a gun. But overall, I really enjoyed the single player game, which is unusual. Normally, the single player mode in the games I play are just warm ups for the multiplayer. Which leads me to the next section, which if you are still reading this, will be an exercise in how to keep calm while excoriating a multiplayer game.
Multiplayer Sucks Ass
Big hairy blistered ass. Wow did this suck. How did a game team write and produce such a beautiful single player experience and have next to none of it translate to the multiplayer? How? I mean, I am not a computer programmer and could never even begin to write games, so to the extent that makes my judgment hypocricial, it is. But come on!!
I was at an 80’s dance night at a local establishment last week and the difference between the videos produced back then and those u...

Prior to launching our website and podcast, Mr. Crusty and Nelson spent 14 years doing intensive market research into the gaming market using focus groups under actual real world conditions. We followed this up with an exhaustive review of the academic journals on leisure time, game theory, the part of the brain that processes strategic decisions and ethical studies of on line gaming.
Actually no. We didn’t do a damn thing except decide it would be fun to start this project. We were drinking. The amazing thing is that the project survived to sobriety. Also, we wanted to have an excuse to tell our wives that we had to play video games.
Here are our real criteria followed up by an explanation of each:
The best game for geezers to play, of all time, is Battlfield 2142. All other games are either better or worse than the best game ever published in the whole universe. So far we have not found the better game, but when we do, we will let you know. At which point in time, all games will be better or worse than that game.
Games that do not suck have the following characteristics, much like BF 2142:

* Excellent on line gaming experience.
* Success in gameplay is earned through teamwork and smarts.
* A complementary single player experience.
* Usually involves shooting or hurting someone.
* Can be played over and over instead of played once then never again.
* Can be played by someone who has a life with a modicum of effort.

What this means:
Numbers or stars such as 9.5 out of 10 or 4 stars tell you a lot, but game ratings using these mechanics are not always useful. One person’s 9 out of 10 is usually different than ours. Therefore, we have created this relational rating system. You will know whether this game sucks, or does not suck at the end of our reviews. We recommend you play all the games that do not suck, and do not play the ones that do.
In addition to the information on suckiness, you can tell how much we like this game by how far away from BF 2142 it is in our list. We like the games closer to the top of the list than the ones on the bottom.

* Excellent on line gaming experience: Usually denoted by the ability to communicate, different maps to play, different game modes to play, and a reward system where the rewards are hard to earn and meaningful when you receive them.
* Success in game play is earned through teamwork and smarts. You should be able to be successful in the game if you are smart and you play smart versus being able to push the buttons on your keyboard or joystick faster than anyone else. Teamwork must be possible through speaking over your headset. Patience and selflessness should be rewarded more than selfishness and bravado.
* A complementary single player experience. This means the on line gaming experience should be no different than the play in the single player mode. The only difference should be that you play other human beings while on line, and the computer when you are off line.
* Usually involves shooting or hurting someone. Well, we do not play video games to find out what it is like to do the dishes. We want an entry into a fantasy or fictional world where there are no consequences.
* Can be played over and over. Mr. Crusty and Nelson do not have time to buy a new video game each month. Nor do we want to play games that you get tired of every month. Listen to our podcast for more on this.
* Can be played by someone with a life and with a modicum of effort. Mr. Crusty and Nelson have lives, wives, careers, and are overeducated. We therefore have more to do in our day than play games. Gaming is not how we define ourselves. In fact, we are closet gamers. We do not own any apparel that has any reference to a game, a game publisher or a cute saying drawn from gaming pop culture. We want to play games that you can pick up and play for a few hours, put it down,