I finally finished Gladius last night at 86 hours played. I haven't been so severely let down by a game in a long time. I had trouble getting to sleep for a while because it annoyed me so much.

(Please note this entry is spoiler-free.)

First of all, the ending was terrible. My dispute is not with how it ended, per se, but rather that the character development that persists through the body of the game does not suit ending given. It's as if the ending was written by someone other than the guy who wrote the character development scenes. The end events immediately preceeding the ending were thrown together as if those two people were made to meet for lunch a month before the game went gold. On top of that, the ending was done such that it seemed like they were seeding for a sequel, but... I have no idea how you can gracefully come off that seed into a sequel without heaping more bad writing onto the pile.

I'm a writer, and if you really want to raise my ire the best way to do it is to be behind some really bad writing.

Secondly, I can't play the game anymore. Once you complete the game, you're locked out from playing single player any more. Your save file loads up the credits, which then exits to the main menu. Sure, I can play multiplayer if I want (which is something I have never done in that game). But I can't go level up and try to pick off those last few battles that I didn't finish or look for a lot of those side quests I didn't find on my first look around.

I stand by my review where I gave Gladius a 9.0, but if I were to revise it now, I'd dock it maybe 0.4 to 0.6 points for a lot of the nickel-and-dime irritants one doesn't discover until this deep in the game.

Here's an idea, let me know if you're with me.

A lot of the news we follow in the day to day here at Gamespot has to do with the new, the fresh, and the up-and-coming. Overwhelmingly, those categories have come to largely exclude the once mighty genre of graphic adventure titles. (Notable exception being the upcoming episodic releases of Sam & Max by Telltale Games to Gametap.)

Graphic adventures, titled so to avoid ambiguity with the increasingly popular band of action-adventures, have long been a staple of the gamer's diet. If you're old enough, you can even reminisce about the day when "adventure" was inseparable with "text".

The fact is, long before twitch gaming grew to the monster industry it's become, there have been gamers everywhere whose idea of a romping good time was largely about puzzle-solving and non-linear, outside-the-box brainstorming. I was among these.

I'm thinking about an Adventure Gaming Appreciation month. A month where everyone who's interested will, as a community, dust off their old adventure games and pop em in. From my own end, I keep a notebook on hand to jot down thoughts, revelations, and solutions as I move forward through the game.

What I'm proposing is a grass-roots cultural festival to show the industry we still love these games. If you're a Gamespot user, add them to your Now Playing lists to increase their rank for that month. Post about them in your journal. Get excited once more about this genre that is rapidly losing market share.

When should we do this? Well, haven't decided yet. October and November are busy months for the new stuff, and December is the Christmas season -- not likely to get much attention in there. I'm thinking January or February, and I'd like to know what you think. I'm going to bounce this idea off a few people and probably, before too long, set up a web site to promote the idea as a recurring event.

So let me know what you think! At this stage, I can use all the input I can get.

I added Gladius back onto my Now Playing list. If you're not familiar, this is a Romanesque-era turn-based strategy game from Lucasarts for the PS2. It's at least a year or so old now, but I've been playing it off-and-on now since just after it came out. Figured I'd finally finish it.

I've already reviewed it, and I stand by what I said in that review. Bottom line: if you're into that genre, Gladius is worth your time. So far it's been worth about 60 hours of mine, and I haven't even finished it. Hell, I just realized I hadn't done any optional quests until the fourth of four regions...

I'm on the soapbox today to stress the important of QA in the business of game publishing. I'm not a Star Wars fan in the slightest, so bearing that in mind, I say with all confidence that I generally find Lucasarts products to be of top quality. There's a couple little things about Gladius that bug me, though, and this is where Quality Assurance and testing enters the picture.

The first bug that annoys me is an AI problem. Consider the class of the Channeler. This is a class that uses a very quick move called Steal Affinity to power most of their moves. Other classes attack (or get attacked) and build up an elemental affinity. This is generally unleashed as limit-break-style attacks, but Arcane classes like the Channeler use it instead for their more average attacks. So if you're a Channeler, you'd case Steal Affinity on a target and that would end that character's turn. Since that move is so fast, that character should get to act again very soon, if not right away.

The problem comes when you have two or more AI-controlled Channelers on the field. What'll happen is that one will cast Steal Affinity on a player that had built up some affinity. Simliar classes tend to have a similar initiative (turn speed) value, so usually the next Channeler then gets to go and will cast Steal Affinity on the first Channeler. When the first Channeler's turn comes up again, what does she do? She casts Steal Affinity on the second Channeler.

This doesn't repeat in an endless loop or anything, it's just artificial stupidity. They'll do this even if they're on the same team as one another and there are other players on the field with affinity built up. The individual Channeler AI is set to seek out the character with the most affinity and cast Steal Affinity on them, even when it's absolutely ridiculous.

This kind of fight happens a fair amount. Channelers were introduced in the second of four regions and you face a fair number. So this happens more than you might think.

Moving on to bug number 2: the reaction camera. Gladius is loosely based on gladatorial combat, which even a history ignoramus should recognize to be a spectator sport. Teams receive combat bonuses as the crowd's reaction to them reaches certain levels on the gauge. When those levels are reached, the camera will often focus on members of the crowd applauding for a moment.

Problem is, in many arenas, the angle on these reaction shots is either focusing on no one at all or is too dark to actually see any detail at all.

Now, the question to ask yourself is how little bugs like this find their way into games that are otherwise fabulous? Or, to more accurately rephrase the question, how don't bugs - which anyone could notice - like this get out of these games?

The answer is through lapses in Quality Assurance and testing. The way the business works, QA is one of the last things on the checklist before a game is released. A nearly completed game is given to testers to play through and find all manner of bugs. But having that game so close to being completed, the corporate offices for many publishers often end up pushing the developers to hurry it up. QA is what gets overlooked in these instances.

Look at who the most successful developers in the business are right now: they're companies who make QA - a phase which is nothing short of arduous for other companies - a priority. Blizzard is a company known for massive beta tests before their products actually hit shelves. Do they find bugs after release? Sure, but they're fixed in good order. Valve is another company with real QA/testing muscle -- Half Life wasn't anything new, but it was so well executed with no such flaws and drawbacks to drag it down.

Success in the gaming industry isn't necessarily about innovation or about bigger and better. A lot of developers and even console manufacturers are forgetting that point right about now. It's about execution. An idea can be totally off the wall and ridiculous, but if you execute it well, it can be a fantastic game. Look at Miyamoto's resume if you're not convinced yet.

When you're developing for consoles, QA can mean a great deal. As of right now, you can't really go back and patch something you put out for a console. Maybe that'll change in the future, but for now, remember developers, test your stuff. In the end, gamers will suffer through the moderate delays and still thank you for your efforts.

The series of complaints about the Wii pricing that have come to the surface are, patently, absurd. Let's break things down, one step at a time.

First of all, it still beats the best price on the PS3 by half. It doesn't matter how you slice it, you can still buy two Wiis for the price of one PS3. Yeah, you may need to buy awn extra controller or something, but you'll need to do that for the PS3 as well. These are non-unique expenses, which people are now trying to nickel-and-dime against Nintendo.

Secondly, trying to justify the inflated PS3 price against the Wii's by claiming that the PS3 is a "true next-gen system" is insane. Unless you're only just now tuning in to our program, Nintendo's never advertised that their next system is bigger and better than anything else. They learned that lesson with the N64*.

Nintendo is aiming to generate a paradigm shift in the gaming industry. They missed the boat on catering to pixel pushers long ago. Their market are people who may or may not be gamers. They want anyone to be able to just pick up the Wiimote and go. So, does their target market care that the PS3's hardware is so much more fab? No.

Footnote on the above, I'll point out that a large chunk of the PS3 price tag is Sony burdening gamers with Blu-ray technology. They're making gamers pay the most expensive costs in a puerile bid to make Blu-ray go critical mass**.

Lastly is the incredibly dense complaint that Nintendo is actually going to be selling the Wii at a profit out-of-the-box. What people don't seem to grasp is that this is actually very good for gamers.

Nintendo is not just selling a piece of hardware. They're selling a service. The Wii connects to the intarweb and things start happening from there. Yes, the XBox 360 and the PS3 also will do this, but here's the difference: while anything Sony of Microsoft build on their platform is based on projected earnings and tie-in numbers, Nintendo will have real capital to work with.

Real capital makes a world of difference! If you don't have real money to move around, any idea you cook up is a risk factor. Risk is a corporate gamble, and miscalculations can turn a company's good fortunes into sour grapes. Look at Sega. I put my dollars down for a Dreamcast, but at the end of the day Sega miscalculated and it sunk their console. Nintendo acknowledges that they're alienating a lot of the third party developers with their new ideas, but since they're selling at a profit the Wii isn't going to choke if they don't get a third party killer app.

When it comes down to it, here's the dividing line between the Wii and the X360/PS3. Microsoft and Sony have gone to extended efforts to capture the attention of developers and gamers alike with their fab hardware. In the next six years, the biggest blockbuster games will be almost exclusively Sony/Microsoft -- if they go to the Wii at all, it'll be as an afterthought. But there'll also be a lot of crap games. This is not unlike what happened with the PS2/XBox versus the Gamecube. The differrence is that Nintendo acknowledges what happened there and is aiming for a solid, consistent level of entertainment. So, if you're gonna be a multiple console owner, their goal is for the Wii to be what you're playing once you've exhausted GTA4 or Assassin's Creed. And if you're not a multiple console owner, they're well on the way to ensuring that the Wii is the only console you take interest in.

* The N64 was titled that because it made use of two 32-bit processors. The marketing kind folks sat down and thought, "Hey. Thirty-two times two equals sixty-four! It works!" Problem is, it doesn't work like that. Two thirty-two bit processors still yields a thirty-two bit system. This logic is comparable to saying one and one makes eleven.

** Critical Mass is an industry term for when a technology has sold enough to Rich People that they can afford to put more money into making production costs lower, thereby making the technology affordable to the Johnsons. When DVD was new, the cheapest player you could find was about $350-$400. Now, any dork with $49.99 can pick up a decent player at Walmart. That's critical mass.

Picked up New Super Mario Bros. for DS this weekend. Review up already. Actually on top of things for once. The real reason I got that review written already is pretty much to justify this posting.

I brought the game camping. My wife and I were there along with a fair amount of our family, including my nieces and nephews. A couple of them have in the last year or so started to recognize that, of everyone in our family, I'm the one whom they can actually talk to about video games and the like.

So it was fun. I'd start playing and gradually I'd have a couple of them start to congregate behind my shoulder. It was amusing for me to listen to their remarks change from, "Geez, you just finished that level. What're you going there again for?" to, "Cool, I didn't know you could do that..." to "Do you think that ghost house might have a secret exit too?" Another amusing point was the observation of, "Omigosh, he's got 47 lives already. He will never lose."

At one point, someone noted that I'd been playing the the game for less than two days and I have complete stars for Worlds 1-4 while one of them's had the game since it game out and they're still struggling with World 6.

I may not be the uncle who can teach you how to throw a perfect spiral, or how to fish. In fact, I'm terrible at both of those things. But I do have some recreational skills I can pass on to the next generation of players...

Completely ignoring the plight of my European gamer brothers for a moment, the launch details for the Playstation 3 is the latest in an increasingly long string of demerits for Sony.

Don't misunderstand me: I have no intentions of buying the PS3 at launch. I don't now and I never have. Whenever a new console comes out, there's always an availability issue. The numbers that are circulating now go beyond the scope of 'availability issue' into downright scarcity. We're talking about Walmart-trampling kind of bad here, and that scares me.

At the rate they're going, Sony will be lucky if they've got a half a million people willing to drop that kind of money on Day One at all...

For the present generation of consoles, my loyalties -- if you would in fact call it 'loyalty' -- lie with Sony's PS2. I started gaming in 1988 with a Nintendo Entertainment System, but as is the story with many people from my generation, Nintendo lost my interest with the miscalculated N64. The reason being? Nintendo stuck with the familiar cartridge format when developers wanted to expand into the promising CD format. This pushed third parties away from the N64 and towards their only competitor, Sony.

Now, I read the news around here and I see similar happenings that are seriously setting my next-gen commitments off hinge. I had been planning to go with the PS3, even despite the hefty price tag. But since that news came out, more has come to light that concerns me deeply.

First and foremost, there's the price tag. Why such a high price tag? Simple. Sony's overloading the device. It's not a console with a shelf-life, it's an extensible computing device. Problem here is that the console business model is designed to have a shelf-life. People do not want to upgrade their consoles with any regularity. On top of that, Sony's using the PS3 to push their Blu-ray technology. Blu-ray has not gone Critical Mass, which is the industry term referring to the point where the player device technology is inexpensive to the point where the average consumer can afford it. Prior to that, a media technology is considered prohibitively expensive. Sony is trying to use the PS3 to leverage the media industry to march to their beat, and it's gamers who are eating that bill.

Of course, any gamer knows that it's the software that makes the console worthwhile. And any hardware manufacturer knows that it's exclusive software that earns you gamer loyalty. Let's talk about software, then.

First blow against Sony is the lost of exclusivity on the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Rockstar's über-violent gang-related series has been Sony-friendly for its entire history. I shrugged the news off and carried on. But now with the recent announcement that Assassin's Creed will, in fact, be cross-platform I have to wonder. It seems like developers are getting scared. Are they thinking that Sony's ambitions are making the bonus marketing through exclusivity a bad business move? Or are they just trying to maximize their audiences?

Day by day, points are dropping out of Sony's column on my score sheet and Microsoft is discretely picking them up. Of the next-gen titles I've been following, only four are currently of interest to me (yes, I'm picky): Dead Rising (X360), Assassin's Creed (cross-platform), Grand Theft Auto 4 (cross-platform), and Final Fantasy XIII (PS3).

With all these factors weighing in, I'm a lot more likely to seriously consider handing my cash to Microsoft instead of Sony in the upcoming future. Sony needs to step carefully.

On the other hand, my current interest in immediate new titles is covering more handheld titles as handheld platforms have leaped in their sophistication. I'm considering pickuing up a PSP for Silent Hill: Origins and the Valkerie Profile remake, and more and more quality software is coming out for the DS.

Still have catch up to do on my reviews, but I've been occupied with other things lately.

I was more than a little amazed to discover that the #1 game for the day on Gamespot the other day was Duke Nukem Forever.

Let me get this out of my system:
Duke Nukem Forever and everyone associated with it is the laughing stock of the video games industry.

I don't care if you're laughing or not, the above statement is a freaking tautology at this point. It's gotten so bad that even John Romero is allowed to laugh at it. Even the guys behind the aptly named Phantom console are laughing at them.

If Take-Two is really in such dire straits that all they can think of is providing investment incentive to 3DRealms for completing a veritable piece of vaporware to get themselves out of the hole, they're in much bigger trouble than you think.

In other news, I'm confronted with the reality of how much I really failed to review during my sabattical. Sigh. Better get to work...

The site that I've been working on for about three months launched last night. It's not gaming related but, feel free to check it out nonetheless.

Meanwhile, I've just gotta get it out there that Square·Enix is really getting on my nerves. I mean, Final Fantasy VIII gave me cause to mount a high horse and stick my nose up in the air at them. (If you don't understand why, don't trouble your head about it; you never will.) I mean, I didn't even play Final Fantasy X just on principle that it was from the same director as FFVIII - and yes, I do know that FFX was supposed to be actually rather good. But I didn't play it and I still won't. Course, it wasn't a bright mark on their record that they took what was supposedly a good thing and reached for a new high in the series' bastardization by giving it a direct sequel. A sequel which, as I understand it, bit hard.

Overall, the end result was that I was more than happy living in a bubble world where I didn't have to give a crap about what Square·Enix was producing. But things are changing and that bugs me. Again.

Seems like they're back on the habit of producing quality titles. Dragon Quest VIII and Kingdom Hearts 2 are really just the beginning. There's a new Mana title on the way for DS too.

It's not just quality titles coming out, but they're actually attoning for past sins. Final Fantasy XII is bulging at the seams with promise. Change, yes, but change at the hands of a crew I trust.

What's more, they're doing all this without alienating the sycophants they collected with the whole FFVIII/FFX/FFX-2 stint. Personally, I haven't seen Advent Children yet and I'm led to believe that it's as esoteric as anything (though I actually understood FFVII) I'm looking forward to borrowing that.

The thing that brings this on is that my attention was recently called to Dirge of Cerebrus, a third-person shooter staring FFVII's Vincent. As a long-term veteran of the Square titles (I've been playing these games since before some of you kids were born), I'm of the opinion that Vincent is the second coolest character the Final Fantasy series has birthed. (The first is FFVI's Setzer, whom I was elated to see in KH2.) I've looked the game over here on GS and I'm thinking it looks not unlike Devil May Cry, only equipped with gothic existential emo as opposed to curt douchebag emo. That latter bit is, oddly enough, an improvement.

My bubble has been popped. I'm once again living in a world where I actually have to care about Square·Enix titles again and it's more than just irritating.