Is it just me, or is this world just a lot more interesting than the generic island of Crysis? Video embedded after the break. After you watch it, watch this video, and then this one, which are the artist’s previous demo videos and sort of explain how he did this.

So a friend recently turned me on to a pretty neat site called SwitchGames. It’s not officially launched yet – it’s in “beta 2.0″ – but I kicked the tires and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape and definitely usable.

The whole point of SwitchGames is to serve as a trading community, where you directly swap games with other gamers. You make a list of games you have available for trade, and a list of games you want, and the site recommends trades with its other members. You propose a trade, they accept, and you ship your games to each other. The interface is clean and it all seems to work rather well. You can trade systems and accessories and stuff, too.

It’s free, but not really. Signing up is free, and trades are free (except for your shipping costs, duh). But you get these “badges” for doing things like getting positive reviews and completing a certain number of trades and so on. They’re mostly superfluous, but the “Verified Membership Badge” is important. It means you have paid $1.95 to verify your shipping and billing addresses. This helps assure users that you’re not just on there to propose a bunch of fake trades and screw people over. I don’t expect a lot of people are going to want to trade with people who don’t have that badge. Still, two bucks to verify yourself and then just the cost of shipping to trade is a much better deal than you’ll get from GameStop.

The site even does stuff like print shipping labels for you. Of course, even though almost everything is “free,” there are a few upsells. There’s the aforementioned Verified Membership Badge, and they sell a “SafeTrade” for $5.95 where they guarantee your trade and provide first-class USPS shipping. There’s a YouTube walkthrough of the site/service here.

I’m not here endorsing the service, to be clear. I haven’t completed a trade yet, for starters. But I did sign up, get the Verified Membership Badge, and kick the tires a bit. I thought it looked pretty interesting, and given the amount of GameStop griping I hear from my circle of friends, I thought you all might want to check it out.

Giveaway is all done – thanks to everyone who played! See Updates below.

By some weird quirk of fate, I find myself in possession of not one, but two sealed boxed copies of the truly excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC. This is the best game of the year so far. No joke. Just check out that Metacritic score! I’ve already played through it entirely on the Xbox 360, which is pretty much the same, except the PC version looks sharper at higher resolution and if you have an Nvidia graphics card, it has extra PhysX effects.

Since I have two of these, I”m giving one away! Here are the rules:

1. Go on Twitter and tweet the following:

@jasoncross00 is giving away a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC. Just retweet this! Go to www.jasoncross.org for details.

2. Sit back and wait for me to pick you as the lucky winner! I’ll pick the winner in a couple days. I’d send a direct message through twitter to the person who wins, asking them to contact me with their address so I can ship it off.

One final stipulation here: This isn’t any kind of official sponsored contest thing, I don’t have a lawyer or anything, it’s just something fun I’m doing. And I’m not made of money. So the winner will have to be from the U.S. Shipping it outside the U.S. starts to cost more than it’s really worth, I’m afraid. Even if you’re not from the U.S., feel free to do the twitter thing!

Update:

After giving more than an hour’s warning, I just went to random.org and chose a winner. Tried to contact them via direct message on twitter, but they don’t follow me. So I sent a follow request and we’ll see how that goes.

So for now, the contest is over. If I can’t get in touch with the winner or if they for some reason can’t be a winner (if they’re in the UK or something) then I’ll pick another one. Either way, you all can stop tweeting now. I’ll announce the winner on twitter and update here after they get in touch with shipping info.

Update 2:

The new winner is MichaelBills, an artist. Check out his site michaelbills.com for some of his nifty concept art and stuff. Big thanks to everyone who participated in my shameless and cheap ploy to increase my totally anemic web traffic!

So today is the official release of Turbine’s free to play (but supported with micro-transactions) massively multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons Online. I guess technically that’s “Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited.” I really don’t know if it’s the bees knees or not, but for the sum total price of $0.00 I’ll give it a shot and report back later.

What I do know is that when you go to the site you’re greeted with a very Evony-like marketing message (accompanying this post). Some demonic succubus or something with barely-covered knockers and some sort of demon-thong. All we need is a “Play now, My Lord” and we’re done.

Really, Turbine/Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast? With the absolutely enormous amount of amazingly good Dungeons & Dragons artwork at your disposal, this is what you go for? Ridiculous.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how this experiment in tiered, pay-for-content-but-not-playtime exercise plays out. Right now I’m downloading the client at a fantastic pace, and I’ll certainly roll up a few characters and give the free play a shake. I might even buy a thing or two. If you’re playing, drop a note in the comments and let me know what you think.

Anyway, I’m going to try embedding the episode after the break here. I have no idea how I did – I can’t stand watching myself on video, so I try not to do it.

Evony apparently directly steals graphics from Age of Empires II: Age of Kings. You can find some damning evidence here.

I don’t really have a whole lot to ad to the discussion at this point except, you know, Age of Empires games are owned and published by Microsoft. I’m sure their lawyers will be cool with it. Microsoft’s lawyers are famous for letting stuff like that slide.

I mean, I know which console I think has the best downloadable games. I mean, I love Fat Princess and all, but I generally find a whole lot more games I like on XBLA. That’s personal preference. What can we learn about the quality of the games on these services, statistically? So I headed on over to Metacritic (a site that averages review scores for movies, TV, DVDs, and Games, in case you’re unaware) and found the top 20 games for XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare. Here’s the raw data, with analysis at the end.

Average score of top 10 games:
XBLA:     88.9
PSN:       86.6
WiiWare: 84.4

Average score of top 20 games:
XBLA:     86.7
PSN:       84.2
WiiWare: 81.9

Number of games with a score 85 or higher:
XBLA:     14
PSN:       9
WiiWare: 4

Some analysis on the next page…

I don’t always get behind those experimental flash-based “rethinking what is is to be a game” type games. This one is just too clever and fun to ignore.

Stop whatever you’re doing and go play This is the Only Level. There’s only one level! See that screenshot? That’s it. That’s the level. You press the button to open the door and go to the pipe. And then you play the same level…again. Only this time it’s different. A short phrase in the lower left gives you a clue as to how things are different, and some trial and error is involved, but that’s really what this game is about. It’s about taking a single, extremely simple level and wringing as much gameplay as possible out of it by altering the rules of the environment.

Jonathan Blow would love it.

The graphics look great from a technical perspective, but it’s the the visual design of the old battered Asylum really stands out. I’m not totally enamored of the character design, which seems a little too “sculpted action figure” to me. The real problem is the facial animation. It’s perfectly average by modern game terms, but the voice acting is fantastic, and when the two are together you get the impression that there’s a lot more “acting” in the audio than the video. The result is that wooden marionette syndrome in cut scenes we see in far too many games. Major voices from the excellent Batman animated series are all here, including Kevin Conroy as Batman, Mark Hamill as the Joker and Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn.

But it’s the gameplay I’m so taken with. Combat is dead simple, but there’s obvious depth there. Much like Fable 2, maybe moreso, you use a few simple button presses to string together a fluid series of attacks and counters that make you really feel like a Batman should. It’s like “press X to kick this guy’s ass, then press Y to make that other guy wish he never would have swung his stupid fist at the goddamn Batman.” But you’re not invincible, and when you see guys with guns you need to drop out of the shadows to pick them off one at a time. This only serves to terrify the remaining enemies, which is hilarious. Tap a shoulder button to engage the “detective mode” cowl vision, which is way more useful and less cheesy than I thought. The dialog is good, with the story written by Paul Dini, who did lots of great stuff on the animated series.

There’s some contention about the who RPG-like stats upgrading system. As you fight guys and build up combos and discover secrets in detective mode and so on, you fill up an experience bar. This will be used to upgrade your skills and abilities. If you read game forums, there are some action-only gamers that can’t wait to call you a faggot in Halo 3 who are all pissed off about this, but as far as I’m concerned, they just put peanut butter in my chocolate.

Y’know what? I’m going to go play through the demo again.