On July 4th, the United States celebrates freedom, independence, and gratuitous three-day weekends. So I leave you with the above picture of sackboy from Little Big Planet wearing a costume that evokes one of those three things. You can get your own Sacktue of Liberty* from the Playstation Store for the low low price of free.

Have a safe, fun, and happy Fourth of July weekend wherever you are**.

* I wish I was making that up. They actually call it that.
** Except England.

This is where the heavy iron comes into play. In the foreground are various smelters and workshops, including a weapons smithy and cannon foundry. These process the ore I take from the mine in the background, powered by a water wheel. The thick patch of forest off to the right is an important source of fuel for the smelters that process the ore.

Far in the background, in the upper left of the screen, is a monastery. It was here when I arrived. Occasionally, I can petition the monk who lives there for goods. He saddles up his donkey and rides down the mountain path to bring me beer, wine, and stone.

Click the thumbnail below to see a quite lovely larger version:

Up next: cows!

The first half of the year is gone. That means it's time to make a list! How is 2009 shaping up so far? I'd say pretty well, since I had originally intended to make a list o the five best games so far. No such luck.

After the jump are the ten best games of the half-finished year.

In celebration of the 4th of July, Gears of War 2 will be infested with even more tickers (pictured). From a forum post by Gears producer Rod Fergusson:

...to give a little extra bang to Horde we're bringing the Ticker squad (a group of Tickers that all spawn at the same time) into full effect. They'll be showing up a lot more throughout all the waves of Horde and they've completely infested every 10th wave with nothing but Tickers.

Stardock has just posted a few more screenshots from their fantasy strategy game, Elemental. Above is an image from a tactical battle. You can see screenshots of castles and the kingdom map at the game's site here.

Cel-shading is characterized by flat shading on solid areas and a dark outline around the edges of objects. By recalling traditional animation and comic books, it's a great way to bring a touch of child-like innocence to your artwork. To me, it looks a bit out of place in earnest games like Gearbox's upcoming Borderlands or Ubisoft's XIII. But it works wonders for fantasies like Dragon Quest VIII and the last Prince of Persia. Kudos to the developers at Stardock for using it to present Elemental's fantasy world.

Rather than bloviate about Dawn of Discovery, the (mostly) wonderful new city builder from Ubisoft, I'm just going to use the "postcard view" to show you some of the places I've been. Above is a typical starting harbor, with a couple of fishing huts to the left, a warehouse in the center, and a harbor master's office to the right. As a city grows, this area will develop into a bustling harbor. But in the early days of a game, this is what your center of commerce looks like.

Look closely and you can see the busy fisherman. Or better yet, click the thumbnail below, which I heartily recommend. Dawn of Discovery is definitely a game that looks better fullscreen.

Tomorrow: heavy industry

Are you ready for a videogame based on a thirty-year-old movie about some kids goofing around over half a century ago? I haven't seen Grease (not pictured) since I was too young to remember anything but Olivia Newton John stirring strange feelings in new places. But I'm sure whatever rhythm-based Nintendo DS and Wii game the publishers at 505 have in store will sell better with some sort of license. This one was probably cheaper than Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, or Xanadu.

Read the press release breaking news here, where you'll learn that the Grease license is "cherished" and that fans will respond with "nothing less than total delight". Do you hear that, fans? Partial delight is not acceptable.

The above video is a cautionary tale about what can happen when you put real people where actors dare. Keep it in mind as you read Variety's dire warning about something terrible slouching its way towards an August release.

YooStar, a startup company that debuted in January, is getting ready to launch a system that lets fans insert themselves into classic movie scenes and act "alongside" the movie stars for $170. In a nutshell, YooStar wants to be "Guitar Hero" for movies.

The next update for Dawn of War II will add eight new multiplayer maps, a hearty spectator mode with referee options, and a list of balance changes as long as a lictor's flesh hook. And although the update isn't due until later this summer, you can start playing it today as of 2pm Pacific time.

Developer Relic details here how to download and install a beta version of the update. You can freely move back and forth between the beta and the official version of the game. Take a look at the full list of changes here.

This Craig's List entry promises to make you better at Starcraft.

I'm 100% full blooded Korean, meaning I have been gifted with unparallel talent to master any video game, particularly, Starcraft: Brood War...I'm offering my expertise in Starcraft to be taught to non-Koreans that wishes to have the skill of a Korean player. I have advised and coached many professional gamers such as Im Jae Dong, Park Myung Soo, Ma Jae Yoon, and more. Boxer and I were great friends until he started using my dropships to gain his fame. I started training other players to be on par with Boxer and eventually surpassing Boxer. He is no longer the best player thanks to my contribution to rest of the players. I did not compete in pro gaming because they KTF did not agree with my seven figure contract demand.

The lessons promise the following outcomes:

Bragging rights, that you're as good as a Korean in Starcraft
You will be called a hacker because you're so good.
Korean girls will be intrigued that you're such a good Starcraft player.

(Thanks StGabe!)

That picture up there is both a screenshot from Dawn of Discovery, a quite lovely city builder released last week, and a metaphor for how the publishers at Ubisoft are treating its North American release. The church is the game: grand, serene, majestic. The burning shantytown is Ubisoft's support: unsightly and well on its way to being a forgotten smoldering ruin that will lower the property value of the lovely church.

For starters, the documentation is pathetic. This is a richly detailed game with a thin manual and no in-game reference for all the various buildings, populations, resources, and interface elements (the previous games in the series, called "Anno ", shipped with a cute in-game reference called the annopedia).

Since Ubisoft maintains a message board with sections for each of their games arranged alphabetically, you'd think you could just check between Chessmaster and Driver. No such luck. Dawn of Discovery doesn't appear on the list. Instead, if you look hard enough, you might stumble across a post directing you to the English language section of a German forum for the series as a whole. If you don't leave, and instead ask a question about Dawn of Discovery anyway, the community manager will politely tell you to go away.

So if you have questions about Dawn of Discovery, here are a couple of tips: The big long word with "name" in it means "username". "Ubermitteln" means "enter". "Abbrechen" means "cancel". "Passwort" means "password".

But the more dire problem is that there is apparently zero support for Dawn of Discovery's online features. The game has a truly wonderful system of achievements and medals. These give you points to spend on unlockables tracked across all your games, such as unique buildings for your cities, as well as coats of arms, portraits, and titles for your profile. This all hooks into an online server, where you can upload screenshots and even saved cities.

So once I realized that the button on the main menu labeled "Gateway to the World" was a button and not just a bit of decoration, I gladly started over my profile. I gave up the gems, awards, and unlockables I'd earned and even reset my progress in the campaign. I really enjoy Dawn of Discovery, so I'm happy to start over so I can plug into the online community, called the "Anno Portal" by the button in the game that will take you there.

Once I had reset my profile, I pressed the button to visit the community site. Here is a screeshot of it:

After a bit of hunting around online, it turns out the site is actually working. You have to track it down yourself. Apparently, the "Gateway to the World" button in the game is like one of those fake doors Wile E. Coyote paints onto the side of a cliff.

Come on, Ubisoft. This is a really swell city builder. How about giving it some of the love it deserves?

So there's something else out in there in the Badlands after all. This summer, Red Faction: Guerrilla intends to revisit the irradiated wastes out east where Marauders were hiding the mysterious nanoforge.

THQ Inc. today announced plans to release three downloadable content packs for Red Faction®: Guerrilla™, starting with Demons of the Badlands scheduled to be released on August 13th, 2009. Demons of the Badlands will feature a destructive single-player mission arc that takes place in a new Mars landscape outside of the game's expansive world.

So in closing my week-long trial run with the Alienware M17, I leave you with four things that bugged me at first, but that I eventually learned to love and accept. These aren't necessarily pluses or minuses. They're just observations. And one of them is probably too anthropomorphic, because I don't think the M17 is sentient enough to plot murder. That would require one of the more expensive CPU options.

Read about the M17's quirks after the jump.

You'd think the iPhone's interface would be a natural for a real time strategy game. So why not try adapting an early and relatively simple RTS to the system?

As you'll see in the cringe-worthy video above, that's not quite what happened. Instead, using an emulator, the terrible Playstation version of Command & Conquer was crammed unceremoniously onto an iPhone. Well, the top half of an iPhone not occupied by the big fat icons standing in for a Playstation controller.

And as anyone's who's played Command & Conquer can tell you, this is not the game you want to try to play with two layers of interface and a teensy screen between you and action.

I sort of feel sorry for kids who have to play watered down non-violent shooters. What they really want to play is Halo, but they're stuck with paint ball shooters or something with the Nerf (tm) license. Or something literally watered down in the case of Water Warfare, which is available as a Wiiware download this week from Hudson Soft, the folks responsible for the passable alien bug killing shooter, Onslaught. Until The Conduit was released, Onslaught was one of the better instances of how to use the Wii controls to do a shooter.

Water Warfare is an awfully earnest name for a game. I actually entertained the thought that it might be some sort of modern naval combat sim in which I had to position Arleigh Burke cruisers along picket lines, deploy sonar buoys, and skirt under thermoclines. The above screenshot disabused me of that notion.

But still, Water Warfare? If I was making a squirt gun shooter, I definitely would have tried to work in the word "squirt". In fact, the press release stumbles across a far better name for the game:

In this fast-paced non-violent game, players can run around playgrounds and beaches and soak each other with squirt guns. With different types of guns, bonus items, and offline and online multiplayer, there's tons of squirt gun fun to be had!

For the most part, I think videogaming is in a very healthy place, commercially and creatively. It's easy to find stuff to gripe about -- in fact, I could argue that it's my job -- but as a guy who's been deeply into videogames for 20 years, I'm thrilled with the state of the industry.

So if I were pressed to come up with one issue that I find most troubling -- the #1 Worst Thing about Videogaming, if you will -- it would be the way we exclude women. And I'm not just saying that because I really wanted to find some excuse to use that picture up there. I'm saying that because I think it's an important obstacle to videogames growing up. We need to stop reducing women to sidekicks, damsels in distress, or just breasts. We make too few games that reach beyond our boyhood fantasies. And when we do, we partition women into their own separate category. Many women look at us and shake their heads and go about doing whatever they were doing. They see us for the silly boys we so often are. Although it's getting a lot better, it's still a big problem with a lot of room for improvement.

But that's why I consider the NPD Group's recent report really encouraging. According to Gamespot:

The industry-tracking group revealed new figures that show 28 percent of all console video gamers are female in 2009, up from 23 percent last year. NPD attributed the five-point rise to the Nintendo Wii, which it believes has attracted a large number of new female gamers.

Check out Michael Hickox's excellent stop motion animation of various 80s arcade hits, rendered with Legos. No offense to Mr. Hickox's fine work, but those are some of the least convincing space invaders I've ever seen. However, what a great Pac-Man presentation! Bravo.

(Thanks Offworld.)

Yeah, it's expensive, it's heavy, and it sucks down battery power like it's going out of style. But at the end of the day, I don't care. I'm getting the Alienware M17 laptop. And here's why.

After the jump are three reasons I've decided I love the M17.

That's the GameDr up there. I have no idea how to say its name. "Game Doctor"? "Game durr"? "Gammederr"? Whatever it's called, is it a crutch for weak parents, or an insidiously effective device I'm glad I didn't face when I was a kid?

The GameDr Video Game Timer is an easy-to-use electronic time management device for video game systems and other electronic devices. Parents simply set the time allowed for video game play and when the allotted time is up, the game timer automatically powers off the game system. Players even get 10-minute and 1-minute warnings so games can be saved. Take the stress out of managing the amount of time your child spends playing video games with the game timer!

(Thanks Blue's News.)

Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker began its limited release this weekend. If it's not already at a theater near you (i.e. if you don't live in Los Angeles or New York), it's hopefully on its way. The movie follows a bomb disposal squad in Iraq tasked with finding and disarming IEDs. Along with HBO's superlative Generation Kill, it's not really about the events of the war so much as the effect of the war on the men deployed there. Hurt Locker is to war movies what The French Connection was to cop dramas.

And guess what game gets some prominent screen time. The original Gears of War (the movie was shot in 2008 before the release of Gears 2). One of the three lead characters is playing the game when either a Corpsman or a psychiatrist comes up to conduct an impromptu therapy session in the wake of a traumatic event. There are several seconds of game footage and you can clearly see the Xbox 360 and controller.

You might consider this just a contemporary take on how today's soldiers spent their idle time, sort of like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, playing volleyball and glistening in the sun. But instead, Bigelow is a shrewd enough filmmaker that she's intentionally making a point that this is part of how soldiers in combat deal with stress: violence as recreation. The movie opens with the observation that "war is a drug". So it's no coincidence that the scene is about playing Gears of War as a way to deal with a traumatic event. Rather than turning to the man trained to help him, he has his nose in a videogame.

To Bigelow's credit, it's not played like a value judgment so much as an observation. Like so much of Hurt Locker, it's subtle and effective.