BioShock was a critical darling, mostly because it sat in Ayn Rand's iron lap, so I'm excited to see how its progeny approaches narrative design.

Less exciting is the addition of competitive multiplayer. There's only so much room in the shooter pool for leggy enthusiasm, which is something these people don't seem to understand. In this case it's akin to building a beautiful, delicate garden ecosystem, and then herding a bunch of functionally illiterate cannibals with flamethrowers into its confines. You can't shut these splicers up: they respawn until mom calls them upstairs for dinner.

Still, I'm confident that the single player experience will be hyper-glorious, and will remain so even as the multiplayer servers turn to dust. T-minus six months! For now, though, a very worthy game of the week.

Sometimes I like to just have brainless fun. I know I'm supposed to be featuring some innovative game with an art style that gives you a contact buzz just looking at it, but occasionally I just enjoy a simple game that's fun to play. Right now it's the addictive, top-down shooter Knight Of The Living Dead.

Did I say shooter? It's actually a melee-only combat game where you fight back wave after wave of the undead. You have to outmaneuver the little flesh-eaters without succumbing to their ravenous teeth, and all without the benefit of ranged weapons. It's a pure hack-and-slash situation.

You play as Sir Galahad, whose job it is to hold back the approaching zombie waves. There's not much else to it. You are given special holy powers in the form of cards, which randomly regenerate in the corner. You also level up, giving yourself points in damage, card strength, card regeneration rate and, finally, movement speed. You click with the left mouse button to attack, the right mouse button to use your special a card and WASD to move about the level. It's simple, addictive fun.

There's also a leaderboard where you compete for the quickest time finishing all the waves, and an ultra-hard mode with harder zombies.

Why You Should Check This Out: Knight of the Living Dead is a top-down shooter without any shooting, a melee zombie-kill-fest. You whack back wave after wave of the undead with Sir Galahad's trusty sword and occasionally receive a little help from special holy powers. It's mindless, bloody fun.

I harbor and foster numerous healthy personal relationships beyond these networked silicon landscapes, but as a gamer I am best imagined as an ill-kempt hermit whose wild-eyed fear of strangers is the stony gaze of looming madness. From my mountain crag I glower down upon lesser beings who interface and communicate in odd tongues while scoring endless headshots, flag captures and raid loot. And, as a crazy, disconnected old man stewing in a bitter elixir of pessimism that is my own special recipe, I have, for the better part of a generation, feared that the games I prize were being corrupted by this malignant multiplayer revolution.

It is with equal parts surprise and jubilation that I sally forth from my far less cool fortress of solitude and herald from on high what I see as the return of the single player, story driven experience, only to discover that playing with yourself had never, in fact, gone out of style after all.

At least, in one interpretation of the phrase.

Last week saw the release of the first substantial bits of downloadable content for two of my favorite games in 2009: Assassin’s Creed 2 and Dragon Age. Both are dipping their toes into the shark infested waters -- shoehorning new chapters into a book that’s already been finished. Public opinion has generally been pretty positive when it comes to multiplayer addons like map packs for Gears of War 2 or new cars for the Forza series, but try to insert a little more story into a single player game and the water starts to get a bit choppy. The arguments are generally that the game wasn’t finished when it shipped or even worse, finished content was held back to get a little more scratch on the back end of the deal. Since these are two of the best games of the year and both represent a substantial amount of play time right out of the box, they’ve earned their due.

I’d be a hypocrite to complain about spending five bucks on a couple hours of content as I sip my five dollar latte, so let’s have a look at whether or not these two downloads are worth your time.

This week Sean and Shawn open the show with some Mass Effect 2 talk before handing it off to Wordsmythe, Julian, Pyroman and Lara live from rabbitcon! If you want to submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563.

The ESRB is a parent's best friend, there is no question. In a large percentage of cases, this organization can help you make sound decisions in your game purchases. However, it's far from perfect, and some game content is bringing the gaps in the system into sharp relief.

The ESRB is not really aimed at "gamers" per se. When it was established in 1994, the concept that people who played games would be parents wasn't on anyone's radar. Its true target was and is parents who aren't gamers. And while we have our own troubles with it, there is a prevailing attitude suggesting that any mainstream parent who can pour Pepsi out of a boot without a road map will be happy if only they pay attention to the sign in the game store and the big white letter in the black box.

That's not at all an accurate stance in the real world. The ESRB's age ranges and content labels are applied inconsistently. Even with the context that the ESRB's descriptions of gaming experience provide, the labels are so vague and overlapping that they're almost meaningless on a practical level. The system is missing labels that are vital to making a truly informed decision about issues that some parents are really concerned about. And beyond that, the "T" rating fails to take into account the giant gap in age and development between ages 13 and 17.

Space MMOs -- the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Startship Hyp3rl33t. Its continuing mission to explore strange new collection quests. To seek out new loot and new instanced missions. To boldly go where about 20,000 people have gone before!

While I am counted among those trying out Star Trek: Online in the pre-order headstart, I am unconvinced that this MMO can be much more than an intriguing distraction. Yes, Star Trek is on a cultural high right now, and a high-profile MMO with starship combat is a welcome change from endless swords and sorcery, which is why I've bothered in the first place. Still, the narrative of the universe alone almost demands a whole new approach to the min/max, loot gathering philosophies of the typical massively multiplayer game.

Fortunately, ST:O has nestled itself into one of the quieter weeks of what's shaping up to be a busy February, and gets my nod for game of the week. Also this week, White Knight Chronicles on the PS3.

A brief thank you goes out to those of you using our Amazon affiliate links to help out the site. We will be adding a coming soon section for those of you using Amazon's preorder service.

Don't miss your chance to ridicule us in person. Tune in Saturday Night, January 30th at 8PM Eastern for a Very Special GWJCC, live from Rabbit's basement.

Our cast this week is Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch, Lara "Katerin" Crigger, Allen "Pyroman" Cook and Erik "Wordsmyth" Hanson. The topics? Well, we're fielding questions live in Chat, but we'll also be talking about Boardgames, face-to-face gaming, strategy gaming and "serious" games.

See y'all there. Here's the link at Ustream!

Note: if you want to participate in chat, you'll need to make a Ustream account. It takes but a minute.

Of all the genres I find intimidating, scrolling shooters are the worst. The genre didn't earn the nickname “Bullet Hell” lightly. Modern incarnations are so intimidating to me that I get scared off by their screenshots–walls of multicolored lasers and enemies choking every pixel on the screen. Back in the day I cut my teeth on Gradius, but somewhere along the way, the genre lost me.

The history of the shoot 'em up genre is a storied one–it's a long and gradual path from Space Invaders to Geometry Wars. Genetos tries to map that history inside the game itself. A standard vertical scrolling shooter, your ship moves about at the bottom of the screen, and enemies come at you from the top of the screen. The twist on the familiar formula here is that you start out with a “1st generation” ship. The generations refer to the iteration of the shoot 'em up genre and associated platform. Therefore your first ship is similar to the ship from Space Invaders and it behaves just like it. You start in the “1st generation” level, which is again a variation on Space Invaders.

As you kill enemies, though, you collect pellets which fill up your upgrade bar at the bottom of the screen. Once the upgrade bar gets full, your ship is upgraded to the next generation, which is a Gradius-like ship. Your ship goes through several phases and eventually you'll work your way up to the modern shoot 'em up.

The levels follow a similar progression. You fight enemies scrolling down the screen toward you, and you face the occasional boss. Once you've completed the level though, you move on to the next generation's level. So you go from a Space Invaders-like level to a Gradius one, then to something that would look at home on the SNES. The gameplay evolves too; you start with only a gun, then gain bombs, then bullet time and several other weapons. It keeps the shoot 'em up interesting all the way through.

If you're not used to the genre though, I'd start out on the lowest difficulty setting. This isn't a game that treats you with kid gloves.

Why You Should Check This Out: Genetos is a history of the shoot 'em up genre, in game form. You move from a primitive Atari-level Space Invaders-like ship and enemies into more modern incarnations as you complete more of the game. Your ship, the level, the enemies and even the gameplay morph along with the history of the shoot 'em up genre. It's a trip down memory lane–and a fun, challenging shoot 'em up

One of the thorny theoretical game-design quandaries that developers seem to wrestle with in this day and age is whether or not the interactive nature of gaming changes the rules on defining identities. In other words, because the player’s will can be imparted on a flexible world, does that mean that the player also takes ownership of the identity of the hero, and does the author lose license to force personality onto the player?

This is, of course, pseudo-psychological, self indulgent, post-modern, mumbo jumbo and should be avoided as though each word were burning acid from alien blood on the tender flesh of your most sensitive bits. It is a cul-de-sac of circular thinking that more often than not gets well-intentioned developers into trouble and leaves gaping narrative holes and obtuse story elements in its destructive wake.

I consider it audacious and unreasonable to think that video game story telling is so different that suddenly players will be unwilling to empathize with their character unless that character takes on their personality. I appreciate the potential of this new medium, but my experience has been that for now, the more we stick with good old fashioned story telling the better off everyone will be.