In the universally-praised game Grand Theft Auto IV, you play as a swarthy immigrant recently arrived in a new country, beating up the locals and fighting gang leaders on a quest to pick up some coin and get a date.

I liked this game better when it was called Super Mario 64!

Man, that joke gets funnier every time I hear it. And if you enjoy seeing “jokes” get beaten into the ground as hard as a random drug dealer, then you’ll love Grand Theft Auto 4. Wait, what’s the name of that internet cafe? Tw@? I don’t… let me see it again… ohhhhhh, now I get it. That is rich. And you say that gay people are silly? Man, you have skewered American culture with your biting insight, Rockstar. It’s a good thing this game has body armor, because it’s the only thing to keep my sides from splitting.

So whatever, the game’s pre-adolescent writing — aimed squarely at the Spike TV crowd and folks who think “The Man Show” was too highbrow — has already been criticized here and elsewhere, ad nauseam. Nothing more needs to be said. So I’ll only say three more things about it: this stuff makes Joe Eszterhas look like the Coen brothers. And I’ve seen reviews that compare the story and writing to “The Sopranos,” by which I guess they mean it’s every bit as cliched and stilted as one of Christopher’s screenplays. And although the writing varies from the insultingly amateurish to stuff that’s admittedly competent, when I see reviews describing it as “excellent” and even “Oscar-worthy”, it actually makes me depressed to realize how embarrassingly low the standards of the videogame industry have dropped.

But that’s more than enough of that. Nobody (I hope) is playing this game for the story, so how’s the actual game?

In an interview in New York magazine, the co-writer of GTA IV (and VP of Rockstar) was apparently concerned people had gotten bored with the whole hooker-shooting and murder-simulating angle, and had to stir up controversy some other way:

Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We’re hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies.

And I do have to say that playing GTA IV makes me feel like I’m in a movie. Unfortunately, it’s not Shaft, or The French Connection, or even The Fast and the Furious. It’s Groundhog Day.

Because you’ll play each mission over and over and over again until you get it right. And by “get it right,” I mean “play it the way Rockstar wants you to play it.”

Every mission but the simplest ones — at least so far, about twelve hours into the game — have required me to play at least twice. Once to find out what to do, and another time to actually do it. Each time, it plays out exactly the same. And each time, I go away not with the rewarding feeling that I accomplished something clever, but feeling like I did nothing more than jump through a set of hoops the game designers had set up and then failed to mention until the last minute.

And this is all over the place. The game promises a huge, open experience where you make all the rules. Instead, you have to learn how to drive the cars and bikes their way. You have to find the three or four specific buildings that are useful to you, and not just closed-off facades. You have to learn that holding the Y button down for about .75 seconds will let you get into a cab, but holding it for less than .75 seconds will cause you to try to steal the cab, summoning the police. You have to learn that “tailing” someone means staying an exact distance behind them, as they follow the exact same route to their destination. You have to learn not to run out of your apartment, because you might bump into a cop, who’ll instantly shoot you to death.

Every time I’ve tried to experiment, I’ve been quickly smacked down. Want to shoot out a dealer’s tires so he can’t make a clean getaway? Cops come, I’m killed. Want to find a secret way into a warehouse? There’s only the single conveniently-opened window. Want to just drop a molotov cocktail in there instead of getting in a shootout? Can’t do that, burn to death. Want to run over to kill the bad guy who just cornered me in a warehouse shootout? Better not hit that invisible trigger box, because it starts a cutscene of the bad guys running away, and then suddenly gives control back to me, to be shot dead in one second because I didn’t take cover. Want to get some quick health before going on a mission? The pharmacy and the restaurant with a big sign over each aren’t real, but facades — you need to drive six blocks away to the hot dog cart that’s open at 3 AM.

Reviewers and fans are willing to give the game a pass for all this stuff, because that’s just how games work, and because the world is so huge and impressive and nice-looking. And it really, genuinely is one of the best worlds ever created for a videogame. But that’s exactly the reason the constraints shouldn’t get a pass. The more you pretend to offer an open experience, the more glaring it is when you fail to deliver any part of that, and when you punish experimentation.

This is not a “sandbox” game. Sandbox games let you choose to do a lot of stuff, all of which affects the game. GTA IV just lets you choose to do a lot of stuff. In The Sims 2, you can sit and watch TV, and it ups your Sim’s “fun” motive. In GTA IV, you can sit and watch TV, and it ups your desire to bang your head repeatedly against a table at the lame attempts at parody and satire.

It’s also not the “murder simulator” people would like you to think it is. A real murder simulator would be every bit as morally reprehensible, but would at least let you show a little bit of creativity and initiative. Just tell me who to kill, drop me in this awesome city, and let me figure out how to do it within the time limit. Give me a goal and the tools to do it with, don’t just give me a series of weakly scripted events. Or at least, if you are going to give me a series of scripted events, don’t claim that you’re doing anything more rewarding or satisfying than any other type of game.

So if I hate the game so much, why do I keep playing it? Because the world is impressive, even if it reveals more and more of its limitations the more you drive around in it. But there really are jet planes taking off at the airport, and police helicopters flying randomly overhead, and apartment blocks and parks and tourist attractions and a whole island’s worth of stuff I haven’t yet seen. The game’s got near-infinite potential fun, that’s just not being converted into actual fun. At this point, it would be impossible for the story to win me over, so I’m just slogging through until I get to fire a rocket launcher and fly a helicopter, and see the game’s version of Times Square.

And I’m a little nervous and worried that people are going to take away the wrong lessons from this game. That videogames are all about volume, you don’t need to have really great components as long as you throw in enough different stuff. That writing for a game means cutscenes, scripted events, and dialogue. Or that being “cinematic” means being like a Michael Bay movie. People are talking as if this is the Citizen Kane of games, but I’m seeing Armageddon.

On the plus side, though, the game’s got a decent soundtrack. This is the first exposure I’ve had to David Axelrod, and listening to “The Edge” and especially “Holy Thursday” on the radio are perfect accompaniments to the kind of things you wish you were doing more of in this game. I’d put a comment in here about GTA IV cheating, because the music makes it seem better than it really is, but I guess that’d make me a hypocrite.

In the universally-praised game Grand Theft Auto IV, you play as a swarthy immigrant with a weird accent, recently arrived in a new country. The game’s much-acclaimed, complex storyline has you fighting the locals, occasionally stealing their vehicles, while you wander around an enormous game world, taking on the local gang leaders who are trying to prevent you from achieving your goals of collecting money and getting laid.

I think I already played this game, when it was called Super Mario 64.

It’s a real shame that the game is getting its usual wave of controversy, with immigrant groups and Mothers Against Drunk Driving jumping on the bandwagon for this round. Not because the people complaining are “right” or “wrong,” but because we’ve already been through all this, repeatedly, in the seven years since GTA III was released. They’re games that make you do — and reward you for doing — morally reprehensible things; we know. They still always sell millions of copies, get tons of imitators, and you keep hearing about how influential they are for the next five or six years.

Even Rockstar’s responses are getting tiresome. They make a game where you steal cars and kill hookers, media watchdog groups issue a statement condemning the game, Rockstar responds with variations on the same comments about media over-reaction, politicians looking for publicity jump on the anti-videogame bandwagon, videogame fans write long treatises about freedom of expression.

It’s not even fun anymore to call out Rockstar for being disingenuous in their responses, or to point out that they’re deliberately stirring up controversy to promote sales, because they’ve done it over and over again for the past seven years. It’s not even genuine anymore; it’s just a self-perpetuating machine, a big Bureaucracy of Being Indignant.

And it distracts from what’s really offensive: that they’ve got this phenomenal game world, and they refuse to put a good game in it.

Because the city they’ve built really is outstanding. It’s enormous, and you can go almost anywhere, completely seamlessly. There are fantastic time-of-day and weather effects — fog rolls in off the water in the morning; a storm makes light reflect off the streets, your controller vibrates with every boom of thunder; dusk turns into night and lights gradually turn on. Even taking a subway and passively watching as the train moves through the city is fascinating.

And along the way, you pass case after case of the lamest attempts at “humor” you’ll see in a game. At least GTA III genuinely seemed like something 15-year-olds would think is cool and “edgy”; this just seems like something 30-year-olds would think 15-year-olds would think is cool and “edgy.” It’s 100 million dollars and untold man-hours of development in the service of a morning DJ radio show. I would appreciate seeing something that genuinely offended me; as it is, I’m just kind of bored and annoyed.

I’m not even ten percent into the game yet, and I’ve been wondering how it’s been getting perfect review scores around the board, and I keep getting told that it gets better. That even though I’ve been playing for about 5 or 6 hours, and so far I’ve only taken a horny woman bowling, clumsily shot a gun at some drug dealers in an alley, and tried in vain to catch up to a van and run it off the road, this is only the beginning. But whenever a role-playing game makes you kill rats in sewers for the first 5 or 6 hours, it gets nailed in reviews. So why does GTA IV get a pass?

I already know the answer to that question: it’s for the exact same reason that I bought the game after seeing a coworker drive around aimlessly for 5 minutes. That streaming game world is undeniably compelling. You’ll be driving along and see Coney Island to your left, right down to an accurate representation of the Cyclone. (You can’t actually go into the carnival, of course, but it’s there.) There’s infinite potential there. It always seems like you can and will do anything, even though you’re really just going to be heading from flashing arrow to flashing arrow and watching cutscenes. As bored and disappointed as I’ve been with the actual content, I’m still anxious to get back into the game, because I want to believe it’ll spring something surprising and amazing on me.

I can’t help but think how awesome it would be if they took this kind of technology and money and effort, and made a game actual grown-ups would want to play. And I can’t help but be discouraged at the thought that it would fail, because no one would want to buy it without all the hooker-killing controversy.

And incidentally: it seems like every time I go on a tirade against the game, somebody brings up the awesome feature of being able to sit and watch the hours of fake television they’ve created to play on the in-game TV sets. These are the same people who always say that gameplay is king, old media is dead, cutscenes are evil, non-linearity is the wave of the future, etc. etc. What the hell, people?

I’ve gotten back into the Homestar Runner site lately. It’s pretty cool; y’all should check it out. Especially the new toon they put up today. No, seriously, check it out. That’s about as cool as videogame promos get.

This one is good too:

As is the teaser, which was released on April Fool’s Day:

In case I’m being too subtle, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People is coming out pretty soon, and I’ve been working on one of the episodes. It’s pretty cool to get to work on it, if only because it continues my career trajectory so far. Which has been like:

ME: I’m a really big fan of some thing.
A COMPANY: Would you let us pay you to work on a game based on some thing?
ME: Sure!
Exeunt omnes.

The only downside, and I hope I can say this on my blog without getting in trouble, is that the licensors are kind of jerks. Not the Chapman brothers; they’re pretty cool — it’s those Videlectrix guys. They’re all “Hey look at us we made all these games that were kind of popular over a decade ago!” and expect to just coast on everybody’s nostalgia. Wake up, fellas — those games stopped being popular for a reason. (Plus, they’re totally mishandling the Trogdor license).

But yeah, the guys who make Homestar Runner are pretty cool, even though they seem like the kind of people I hated in high school, because they’re good at everything they try to do, and don’t make a big deal about it. Plus, it’s nice to see somebody prove that you really can make a living doing what you love doing; the only caveat is that you’ve got be really good at it.

They’ve been very closely involved in the making of the games, which is great for two reasons: first, they just get videogames; and second, I doubt anybody other than them could come up with the stuff on their site. The Homestar cartoons are one of the only things I can watch and think, “how did anybody even think of that?”

But the site can be kind of intimidating when you first see it. There are millions of in-jokes and running gags — you don’t need to recognize everything to think they’re funny, but you still get the vaguely uneasy sense that there’s more going on than you’re aware of. To get everybody started, here’s my five favorite Strong Bad e-mails:

dangeresque (dangeresque, too?)
flag day (Strongbadian national anthem)
lady fan (Tweesercize!)
comic (the first Teen Girl Squad)
crying (the one with Li’l Brudder)

And okay, groan, even though it’s been totally played out, there’s dragon for all you lame internet fanboys.

EDIT’D: No wait, I forgot. My favorite of all the Strong Bad e-mails is kids’ book.

Previously on Spectre Collie: about once a month I’ve been squeezing out a lengthy treatise intended to debunk some “myth” about storytelling in videogames. I’m still headed towards making a point with those, more or less, eventually. But they take a long time to write, and sometimes it’s easier just to state the obvious.

This one was perpetuated in that “The Case Against Writers” article I mentioned a few days ago. It was addressed to some degree in the two rebuttals, but I think there’s a little bit more to be said about it. Especially since it’s something I always took for granted, until I stopped to think about it:

Myth 4: Games aren’t like stories because stories are inherently linear, and games are non-linear

Seems to make sense: a player sees most games as a series of choices, each one opening up a new part of the experience. And most designers see their games as interconnected systems with difficulty curves and AI subroutines and event handlers, divided up into chokepoints where a linear chunk opens up a new, larger non-linear one.

But the basic fact is: all games are linear. Each game is a sequence of events that starts when the player puts in the disc (or downloads the game), and ends with him taking the disc out for the last time to go on the internet and bitch about it. I’ll explain my point by arguing with an imaginary belligerent person.

But my game has multiple solutions for each puzzle, and over 100 different possible endings!
That’s great. But the player is still only ever going to see one solution to each of those puzzles, and one of those endings.

That’s what multiple play-throughs and savegames are for. Haven’t you heard about replayability?
Sure I have; it’s still listed in some game reviews as “lasting value,” as if it were a universal goal for all games. The fact remains that unless your players have all suffered some sort of massive head trauma, they’re going to remember what happened the first time they played through your game, or solved your puzzle. They’re not going into each case blind, but knowing how they did things and what the repercussions were the first time. So your multiple endings and branching paths are like deleted scenes and alternate endings on a DVD; they can in some cases give more depth to the story, but they don’t supplant the “real” version.

There’s a brilliant flash game called Cursor*10 that exploits this. It’s impossible to complete the game on one play through, so you have to cooperate with your past “lives” to take advantage of what you’ve already seen.

So this is really just saying that you don’t like branching and alternate endings.
I do happen to think that story branches and alternate endings are a waste of development effort, when they’d be better off just getting folded into the main game.

But that’s not the main point I’m trying to get at here. I’m saying that we’d be better off looking at what branching, multiple endings, and nonlinearity in general are trying to achieve in games, and finding real ways to do it.

So you’re saying that all games should have a linear narrative.
No, I’m saying that all games do have a linear narrative, even if that narrative is as tedious as “first he swapped the red gem with the gold gem, then he swapped the blue one with the green one….” It’s not as if story-telling games are some completely separate entity; the narrative is there, whether you like it or not. You just have to decide how much you want to direct the narrative and how much emphasis you want to put on it.

You would say that all games should be linear, seeing as how you work in adventure games.
Actually, when you’re making an adventure game, you have to think the hardest about keeping the game non-linear. Because the linearity is baked into a story-based game, and there are practical reasons for giving the player a branch or a choice. In multiplayer games, it’s useful for crowd control. In adventure games, it’s useful for keeping the player from being completely stuck and unable to progress until figuring out the solution to a single puzzle.

But as much as we say that there are three things the player can do at this point, there’s still really only one they care about: getting to the next plot point. The player only feels “stuck” because he’s not progressing along the linear path to the game’s conclusion. So is non-linearity in a point-and-click adventure game (or collecting things and jumping on enemies in a platformer, or side quests in an RTS or FPS) really doing anything other than covering for the fact that walking around and clicking on stuff in an adventure game isn’t really all that fun?

This only applies to storytelling games, not strategy or sandbox games.
Not so; my linear narrative with Civilization IV started sometime last year and hasn’t ended yet. I can try different games with different leaders, maps, win conditions, and strategies, but 80% of each game is identical to the ones I played before.

It’s the same with The Sims 2, which has a “story” that’s been going on for years now. I can and do keep creating new characters and new families, but it’s not like each one starts a whole new story. Most of what I do with the new characters, I’ve already done before lots of times, even back to the first game. I’ve already seen at least 80% of the game, so all I’m doing now is adding new appendices to the book, or alternate endings.

You can’t write about storytelling in games in 2008 without mentioning Portal or BioShock. Which is it?
Portal. I’d say that the real writing achievement in this game isn’t all the one-liners, or its ability to start annoying internet memes, but the pacing. They recognized that there’d be a narrative inherent to the game, even if it were “just” a first-person puzzle game with a cool gun. So they piggybacked another narrative on top of the built-in one. The more you play, the more you become familiar with the game mechanic, and the difficulty and complexity increase — much like a story builds up to a climax.

At the same time, you’re finding out more about your character and the world you’ve been dropped into. And the story game is developing at pretty much the same rate as the puzzle game’s “narrative.” They’re not completely in sync, but the genius of the game design is how it smoothly transitions between emphasis on the story narrative and emphasis on the puzzle narrative.

When you’re just wandering around a room looking for a solution to a fairly straightforward switch puzzle, you happen onto a hidden room that delivers your first big story moment. Later, when you’re in a room filled with platforms and switches and light balls and acid pits, the story shuts up for a little while and gives you a chance to think about how to solve the puzzle. And both the story narrative and puzzle narrative reach a climax at the same point.

All of this is either completely obvious, or completely irrelevant. What’s your point?
Just that sandbox games, open-ended games, or simulated worlds that the player is completely immersed in and can interact with, aren’t by themselves the holy grail of videogames. You have to impose some kind of rule set to make it interesting. And a set of rules implies a winner, and a winner implies an ending. Therefore, you’ve got a linear narrative, more or less, baked into every game.

You’ll often hear the claim that games and other interactive entertainment are just stepping stones on the way to the real end goal, which is something like Star Trek’s holodeck. That we’re all just covering up for the fact that we can’t yet build a world that the player can jump into and do anything he wants. I’ll just geekily point out that they only showed the holodeck right as someone was leaving it, or they cut away right after someone entered. And if they spent any time inside, it was when someone was pretending to be Sherlock Holmes and solving a murder mystery, or otherwise telling a story. In other words: a simulation is only interesting if there’s some kind of point to it.

It’s inevitable that we’re going to get more sophisticated AI characters, and more realistic physics systems, and games that in general do a better job of dynamically reacting and responding to what the player does. And still, for the player, it’s inevitably going to be a linear experience. That means that the basics of storytelling, the ones we’ve spent thousands of years developing, are still going to apply: characters, plot, pacing, a dramatic arc, and a beginning, middle, and end.

Last week there was a bit of fallout on the internets from an article titled “The Case Against Writers in the Games Industry”. It was by a game designer named Adam Maxwell, and it basically makes the claim that having a dedicated writer on a development team is a waste; it’s always better to have another game designer who knows how to write.

It’s easy to see why it got a strong reaction; it’s written to provoke a reaction. It dredges up Roger Ebert’s old “authorial control” argument, which has already been shot full of holes for the last couple of years. It makes terrible assumptions about the role of writing and storytelling in game development. Of course, it’s also filled with so many typos, unfortunate word choices, and wacky grammar mishaps, that it’s like porn for people who love irony.

But see, here’s where the problem comes in: I agree with the conclusion of that article more than I do with those of the various rebuttals. The article, and Maxwell’s followup on his own blog, are both so full of wrong that I’m hesitant to say I agree with any of it. But having a game designer who can write well really is more valuable to a studio than someone who writes well but has no talent for, or desire to do game design.

That’s not even provocative; it’s trivially true. Even better than that would be a designer who can write and is an excellent concept artist. And better still would be a designer who can do all that and also be good at character modeling, animation, scene creation, level design, and composing music. Best of all would be someone who can do all that and make shadow clones of himself so that he could get the game finished on schedule.

In a rebuttal to that article, Ron Toland of the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group points out all of the erroneous assumptions, and describes game development as a lot of people working in concert. The designer, writer, artist, animator, composer are all equally important, each contributing his own work to the game, with the end result suffering if any part is missing.

For example: you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who seriously believes that good music isn’t important to a game. And it’s ridiculous to say that having a dedicated composer is a waste, that it’d be better handled by the game designer. Because most people understand that not everyone is equally good at making music. So why do people assume that everyone is equally good at writing?

Another rebuttal came from Kelly Wand, who talked specifically about the game mentioned in the original article. He got slightly less philosophical than the others, talking more about the industry-wide perception of writing in games. The best part is this:

[...] I find it a remarkably revealing insight as to just how derisively they view the creative process in general and the legacy of electronic entertainment in particular. It’s indifference to mediocrity, usually posed as a loaded “either-or” analogy.

That perfectly describes the reaction you get any time you try to broach the topic of storytelling in games. The complaint goes that you can either have a game or a story. It’s either The Sims or Final Fantasy, action or cut-scenes, activity or passivity, players’ fun or the writer’s ego. You hear that there are plenty of games that are perfectly fun without stories, so clearly story and writing aren’t necessary — why do you hate Tetris so much?

Except I’d say it goes past “indifference” and crosses over to open hostility to anything other than mediocrity. I would be encouraged to see more people “indifferent” to storytelling in games; at least it would mean that they’re no longer trying to undermine its importance, marginalize it, and drive it out completely. “Sure, adventure games can have stories in them, but keep it short and simple, dammit. And don’t ever, ever assume that what you’re doing is as important as the game design.”

In the “case against writers” article, Maxwell says that BioShock was “hamstrung” by its insistence on story, which to me is like saying that The Seven Samurai was hamstrung by its insistence on having so many samurai. In that presentation about writing in games I made fun of a while back, the presenter made a list of game types, to help you determine “how much story you actually need.” He listed “story-based gameplay” as its own category, even separate from role-playing games!

And with attitudes like that being so prevalent, I think even the writers are being a little short-sighted about this. Wand ends his rebuttal with the observation that people don’t have to be so fearful that writing is going to “take over” gameplay. That writing isn’t meant to be the “food” of a game; “It’s the salt.” That’s a fine analogy: modest, non-threatening, acknowledging that too much writing can ruin the end result, while at the same time emphasizing that the end result is completely unpalatable if the writing is missing or done poorly.

Wand and Toland’s rebuttals do a good job of defending the role of “game writer” as it exists now, but I think they’re overly defeatist about the potential for game writing to improve. We’re so used to the idea that game design is the master discipline in game development, and that storytelling and writing are the antithesis of interactivity, that we’re willing to argue even to get promoted to “salt.”

As long as we keep thinking of writing as this completely separate discipline, that it’s important to the game but not the “food” of the game, then both writing and game design are going to stagnate. You wouldn’t design PaRappa the Rapper or Rock Band while leaving the music to be some autonomous thing that gets added in later. You integrate it from the start. But while music-based games are still relatively rare, there are tons of games that try to tell stories. So why are we content to keep treating the writing as some separate thing, that doesn’t need to be integrated from the start?

Tons of games try to tell stories, and tons fail, or are mediocre at best. We can add better writers all we want, and we’ll still just end up with grammatically correct descriptions of the ice level, flowery and evocative descriptions of what it means to be a space marine fighting demons, and stirring speeches from our spiky-haired amnesiac hero right before he does battle against the clever-quip-spewing boss monster.

For my part, I’ve worked on more games as “just” a writer (or a writer/content programmer) than I have as a designer. And from a practical standpoint, that’s sometimes a necessity: even fairly short games can require a lot of writing, and there’s just not enough time to do double duty. But I will say that the work that I’ve been most proud of has come from designing the game as a writer would; not from saying, “and another puzzle goes here” but “this section should be interactive with a puzzle works like this because of the way these two characters interact and the way the pacing is building up to this moment.”

That’s less a statement for or against game writers, and more an interpretation of what “game design” is. “Designer” and “writer” in videogames aren’t directly analogous to movies, like we often assume they are. In movies, a screenplay isn’t just dialogue, but scene descriptions and story flow and occasionally even camera direction. You wouldn’t automatically assume a novelist would be a good screenwriter — that’s the fear most people have when they talk about writing overtaking game design, that you’re dragging the tedious elements of one medium into another where it doesn’t fit.

But you shouldn’t automatically assume the director would be a good screenwriter, either. Or that the director can plan out an entire movie, calling the screenwriter in for a couple hours every week to suggest lines for the characters to say. If a game is going to have a story at all, then the designer and the writer need to think of the game as a story.

Or don’t even bother, because we know a stupid, or poorly-integrated, or just-slapped-on-for-the-sake-of-it story when we see one. And those aren’t doing any good for the perception of writing in games.

In case there were any doubt that EA and Harmonix are trying to turn Rock Band into a whole platform instead of just a videogame franchise, the release of the Rock Band music store should put that to rest.

They did such a good job with the design of this thing, it’s almost eerie. It’s cleanly and clearly divided up by individual songs and song packs, organized by artist name, song title, genre, release date, or difficulty. Each listing gives you album art, the album name, genre, and release date, plus a breakdown of the difficulty for each performer in the band. And the biggest thing missing from the Xbox Live Marketplace version: you can listen to a preview of the song.

The only downside is that you can’t download songs in the background, so you might have to listen to the 30 second preview of “Interstate Love Song” by Stone Temple Pilots repeated over and over again while you wait for the whole song to get downloaded. That can cut down on the impulse buys — if it’s a song that you’re not exactly crazy about but want to just give it a spin (like, say, “Interstate Love Song” by Stone Temple Pilots), you might already be sick of it by the time it’s ready to play.

But the whole thing is perfectly — insidiously, even — designed to make you happy to give EA, Harmonix, and Microsoft more of your money. It’s right there in the game menu, with all the slick UI of the rest of the game, so you don’t have to interrupt the faux rockin’. Downloadable content is totally the way to go with these things; I turned up my nose at the “Rocks the 80s” expansion pack for Guitar Hero, even with the promise of “Heat of the Moment” and “The Warrior.” But if I could’ve downloaded those songs, I would’ve hit the “buy” button even before the press release got cold.

And if there were any remaining doubt that Rock Band has rendered Guitar Hero impotent, then that was put to rest by last week’s release of “The Boston Song Pack,” which is all the songs on Boston minus “Let Me Take You Home Tonight.” (”Foreplay/Long Time” was already included in Rock Band).

I’ve already said — repeatedly — that playing “More Than a Feeling” in Guitar Hero is one of those transcendent moments of videogames, where standing in front of a TV and holding a big piece of plastic can make you feel bathed in the light of awesomeness. As it turns out, being able to follow that up with “Peace of Mind” takes the whole thing up another level. (And really — the only reason “Peace of Mind” doesn’t get more credit as one of the best classic rock hooks ever is that it had the misfortune of getting put right after “More than a Feeling.”)

All that said: “More Than a Feeling” in Rock Band just isn’t as much fun to play as it was in Guitar Hero. It could be just that I played it so much in Guitar Hero that I unwittingly memorized it. But I suspect it’s more a difference in what the two games are trying to do.

Guitar Hero was unapologetically and gloriously an air guitar simulator — the notes they called out are the ones you pick when you’re describing a song’s hook and go “Bow now now now now! Doo do doooo dooo do Take a look a-head! Doo do doo doooo dooo!” So you didn’t see much of that “Instead of playing with a plastic toy, why don’t you learn how to play the real guitar?” nonsense — it’s nothing like a real guitar, it’s just about the fun of listening to a song and pretending you’re playing on stage before a crowd, without having to deal with any of that “talent” or “practice” nonsense.

My musically ignorant impression of Rock Band, though, is that they’re trying as much as possible to call out the real guitar parts of a song. (Until the sections of Nine Inch Nails tracks where your guitar inexplicably turns into a piano). Last night I played enough of “More Than a Feeling” on Medium to get 100%, but when I tried it again on Hard, I was sent crying and shamed back to the main menu. I could see and hear how the notes it was asking me to play correspond with goes on in the song’s real guitar part, but they’re not the same as what I “hear” on a casual listen of the song. Plus it was making me play chords and shit.

Either way, comparisons to “real” music are still silly, because these games aren’t about creation, but appreciation. It’s play; you’re enjoying music in a way that you don’t when you’re just listening to it from a record. Which is essentially the promise of interactive entertainment. You could say that Rock Band is better at music appreciation, because it shows you how the different parts of a song interact with each other. You could say that the original Guitar Hero is better, because it gets away from the tedium of “real” music and puts everything into the experience.

I don’t really care as long as they add more Van Halen and Pixies.

Today Telltale announced the finale of Sam & Max Season Two, titled What’s New, Beelzebub?. This is the one where everything goes completely off the rails, leaving everyone confused, horrified, and entertained. As evidenced by the last trailer:

I’m really glad we didn’t do machinima shorts for this season, because it means that time & effort could go into the games and into making these awesome trailers. I still don’t understand how they can crank these things out in just a little over a week.

I’ve already moved on to a different super double-secret project, which is a lot of fun and I’m hoping people are going to love. But I can already tell that season two of the Sam & Max games is going to go down as the coolest and most satisfying project I’ve ever worked on. And that’s saying a lot, because I’ve really lucked out on the cool jobs front.

I’m not going to even try to think up a clever title for this one, since the game in question is so purposefully wry that adding more here would be overkill.

But it’s a good game, and it’s called World of Goo, and you can pre-order it to get a preview copy (for Windows) right now.

It’s been getting a lot of buzz for a while now, getting awards from the Independent Games Festival and mentions on videogame-related blogs all over the place. Anyone who’s even remotely interested in the idea should definitely try the pre-order/preview route, because it completely surprised me.

The concept itself — a physics-based puzzle game — would be interesting enough, but what I wasn’t expecting is the amount of variety they’d be able to get out of it. None of the levels in the first chapter are exactly the same, and it’s remarkable how they managed to take the same basic mechanic and apply it to puzzles that feel completely different.

The entire thing has an extremely slick and professional production, from the graphic design to some terrific music throughout. Best of all, the design doesn’t get in the way of the game, but is all put in the service of making it easy to pick up and start playing — you always know what you’re trying to do, and can instantly start thinking about how you’re going to do it. It’s hard to believe that this was made primarily by a 2-person studio.

Best of all, the game’s coming out for PC and Mac and Linux and the Wii. (Again, the preview copy is Windows only, but a pre-order will get you the Mac & Linux version when it’s released).

It’s an astoundingly well-produced “debut” game (at least one of the 2DBoy boys is involved in the Experimental Gameplay Project and is constantly cranking out new games), and should have every videogame fan looking forward to seeing what they can come up with next.