Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless
magazines and newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New
Jersey Pine Barrens.2
5 to Life is an embarrassingly bad game, but
at least it tells you it’s going to suck—and
suck mightily—in its very first scene. The open-
ing cinematic is a ludicrous potpourri of overripe
urban clichés, giving you fair warning that what
lies ahead will be contrived, derivative, and ulti-
mately, insulting.
We’re introduced to the main charac-
ter—a black man named Freeze who has a kid,
a woman, and a home, and just wants to get
outta da thug life, but he has to pull off just one
last job, and then he’s out, for good! We’re sup-
posed to identify with him—and even feel bad
for him—but that’s a bit tough to do after the
game’s first mission, which has Freeze indis-
criminately kill hundreds of police officers.
And, even though 25 to Life tries for balance
by letting you play as the good guys (for those of
you out in Subjective Morality Land, that would
be the police), the developers clearly hate cops,
because they give them the dumbest AI this side
of MS Word Grammar Check.
As someone who’s watched the Godfather
films a dozen times, I’d be a hypocrite to pile on
“gangsta” culture for its exaltation of violence
and crime, but there is a difference. Most qual-
ity mob stories are classical drama with a solid
and consistent, albeit warped, internal ethic.
Tony Soprano is low-brow capo, but his repeated
mantra that “there have to be consequences” is
a rock-solid conservative principle.
Thug culture, on the other hand, tends to
lack any recognizable ethic beyond “get rich or
die tryin’” and “get over here, bee-atch.” Sure,
I think the music, the clothes, the slang, the
entire detritus of urban culture is 10 pounds of
crap in a five-pound bag, but as a middle-age,
middle-class, married, straight, white, conserva-
tive Catholic, suburban male, my opinion on the
subject is probably less than authoritative.
Sometimes you can suspend your better
nature for the purpose of good entertainment.
Grand Theft Auto is a corrosive game, but at
least it’s not a bad game. 25 to Life is both.
It reminds us that clever gameplay is its own
redemption, which leaves this little slice of
viciousness unredeemed.Abandon All
Hope,
Ye Who Enter
HereGAME THEORY
THOMAS
MCDONALDSamsung is bringing single-use digital cameras
and video recorders to market, care of its ultra-
cheap fl ash mem-
ory. Through the
company’s part-
nership with Pure
Digital technolo-
gies, these dispos-
able and recyclable
cameras will sport
a color LCD display
and take roughly
25 pictures, thanks
to 32MB of NAND
fl ash memory.
The video camera
features 125MB of
onboard memory.Throwaway Digicams
Arrive!
Wh at the Heck
is Intel Viiv?
At CES, Intel announced a new
computing “platform” named
Viiv (pronounced Veev ). Uh,
what? According to Intel,
“With an Intel Viiv technol-
ogy-based PC and support-
ing devices, you can enjoy a
growing universe of digital
media content.” Allllrighty,
then. So what is Viiv exactly?
A processor? No. Aha, it’s a
motherboard! Not quite. It’s
basically a platform for media
center PCs, just like Centrino
is a platform for notebooks.
For example, a Centrino
notebook is any notebook that
runs a Pentium M processor,
an Intel Wi-Fi connection,
and one of Intel’s recent
chipsets, usually the 915. Viiv
works exactly the same way.
According to Intel, a Viiv plat-
form consists of the following:
a dual-core processor (either
Core Duo or Pentium D), an
Intel 9XX chipset, an Intel
Pro/100 Ethernet connection,
and Windows XP Media Center
Edition.
Hardware aside, Intel is
also aggressively courting
content providers in order
to offer features such as on-
demand movies, TV shows, and
even music. Intel has already
signed up AOL, DirectTV, and
NBC to provide content for
Viiv-goers, and it has inked a
deal with Google to provide
video for the Viiv platform, as
well. The biggest announce-
ment so far is a new movie
downloading service called
ClickStar, which will reportedly
deliver “premium” movies to
Viiv users within weeks after
their theatrical release.
Skeptics say Intel is tak-
ing the “platform” route to
force vendors to buy the whole
package, rather than pick and
choose parts. Then again, we
have to admit that the Centrino
branding sold millions of folks
Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, so per-
haps the same will be true with
Viiv in the living room.SLI Notebook
Unleashed!
nVidia has pulled the
wraps off the world’s fi rst
SLI notebook. This as-
of-yet unnamed SKU will
boast dual GeForce Go
7800 GTX graphics cards
and, presumably, some insane level of cooling.
It’ll no doubt be great for gaming, and as a lap
warmer. We expect to see SLI notebooks shipping
by the time you read this.Abit Merges with USI
Abit, maker of easily overclocked motherboards, has
pulled out of its fi nancial nose dive by merging with
Universal Scientifi c Industrial—a huge conglomerate
that handles OEM business for IBM.
According to a press release about the transac-
tion, Abit will continue to sell its tricked-out mother-
boards and other hard-
ware, but now the com-
pany will be backed by
a major player in the IT
industry. We can’t help
but think this is good
news for overclockers
and PC enthusiasts.quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
10 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006