Sam Parker News/Hardware Editor	Now Playing: Age of Mythology (PC), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2), NHL 2003 (PS2)

Switch-Hitting

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point in the last few years I got stuck in a gaming rut, focusing nearly all of my personal gaming time on two types of games: PC first-person shooters and PC strategy games. It wasn't always that way, and maybe it's mostly a comment on how many of the best recent games have almost exclusively sprung from those genres (plus RPGs, which I never have time for). In any case, I've wanted to leave my gaming monotony behind, and I've been doing a pretty good job so far.

First off, I finally got a PS2 a couple of months back and rediscovered how fun sports and driving games can be. I used to enjoy them but have never been serious enough to get into the difficult simulation-style games that dominate those genres on the PC. I remember saying a long while back that I wanted more arcade-style driving and sports games on the PC--well, I guess I just found a more direct way to get my way. Getting a bunch of different gaming platforms is always the way to get the games you want as soon as they come out. But then again that does suddenly turn gaming into a pretty expensive form of entertainment.

I was glad to find that Vice City doesn't have too many timed missions, and the races, including some on the water, mix it up a bit.

To be honest, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Vice City. I only messed around with GTAIII enough to drive around and cause mayhem, and, for all my love of shooters, I'm not all that comfortable with games that don't censure players for doing violence to civilians--I more or less stopped playing Hitman 2 after shooting everybody in the embassy. That sort of personality test is the horrible beauty of open-ended game design. Thank goodness the test results don't go in my permanent file. Not as far as I know, anyway.

You're not really stealing cars in Vice City--they're just varicolored playthings waiting to be taken.

Many of the single-use god powers are surprisingly powerful, like this Norse winter spell that spawns wolves near a town center.

I haven't played it enough to get a sense of the balance, but Age of Mythology's combat is intense enough for my liking. Most of all, the units look formidable and the fighting looks fierce. Most of the god powers have the earth-shaking impact you'd expect to see from ancient mythological deities, but while the fact that they're good for just one use per game makes them balanced, I'm the type to hoard one-off abilities until late in the game, for fear of using them too early. Because of the setting, the parallels between Age of Mythology and Warcraft III seem much stronger than with Ensemble and Blizzard's previous games, and there are some things I do miss in AOM. I thought I'd never say it--because I hate manually casting spells--but I miss spellcasters, mainly the autocast kind. Sure, some myth units have cool spell-like special abilities, and some, like the Norse einherjar, even have buffs. But I've really grown to like the magic system in Warcraft III.

The funny thing about Age of Mythology's varied deities is that I already have favorites, mostly determined by the myth units they make available. The alluring thing about variety is the illusion that you can have it all, but you can't. Just like how Vice City's branching missions force you to play certain central missions to unlock a new bunch of parallel choices, Ensemble has made the wise choice in constraining players to a single branch of the tech tree. If, in the endgame, you could not only pick from a dozen human units, but also a dozen myth units, it would simply be chaos. Variety is a fantastic thing for games, but great games force players to make crucial choices in the end.