I originally found Toy Soldiers because Microsoft featured it in their booth at CES.  I swung by to look at their games and was seriously impressed by this one. It’s a war game that features planes, tanks, blimps, foot soldiers, bullet cam views, and countless forms of merriment in blowing things up.

It will be sold via the Xbox Live Marketplace for about $15.  They hadn’t given out a release date, but yesterday they said March 3rd.  So don’t call me that day, I’ll be shelling some krauts.

While I was at PAX, one of my fellow panelists turned me on to Max Brooks’ book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It’s an excellent read if you’re into either the zombie genre or just really dark humor. After reading it, I have been recommending the book to anyone who will listen. It’s simply outstanding.

As with most topics I write about here, the subject of zombies has prompted some interesting discussions with friends and colleagues. In the case of World War Z, my only complaint about the book is its reliance on the slow moving, arms raised, schleppy zombie made famous by George Romero films. I, as a matter of preference, would much rather have seen the speedy, violent zombies of 28 Weeks Later / 28 Days Later or the Xbox 360 game Left 4 Dead.

I firmly believe that when the zombie apocalypse (ZA) finally comes, it will look more like the rage virus. Honestly, it would have to. The fact is a slow zombie is simply not that hard to defeat. They’re kind of like cows. You could hunt them with a dent mallet. Granted, if you were set upon by a pack, it may be harder to fight off. However, the spread of the contagion would either have to be immediate or a single mass event would have to hit most of the population at once.

In World War Z, the contagion is slow to spread. Brooks gives the impression that a year or two passes between the first outbreak and the pandemic. That’s simply too slow for a zombie virus to move unless the zombies themselves are so fast, and so hard to kill, that they can rapidly turn new zombies. Compare Brooks’ approach to that of 28 Days/Weeks Later or even the disaster of a film called Quarantine. (If you haven’t seen Quarantine, think of it as the Blair Witch Project of zombie movies – shaky handicam story telling that rapidly becomes painful to sit through.) The contagion in those movies spreads rapidly enough, and the zombies become fast and violent enough to quickly become a problem.

What has been interesting to me is the almost universal agreement on the topic of fast versus slow zombies. Just about everybody I have raised the issue with agrees that fast zombies are much scarier, much harder to kill, and much more likely when the ZA is upon us. I have to wonder, then, why franchises like Resident Evil or the remakes/knock-offs of Romero films generally portray the zombies as stupid and slow.

It seems to me that the future of zombie films has to lie with fast, violent zombies. Purists may disagree, but the only movies I can see remaining true to the schleppy zombies would be flicks like Shaun of the Dead that actually mock the speed.

I’m off to Seattle this afternoon for the Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a conference for gamers and game designers. I’ve never attended anything like this before (despite my love of all things geek, and gaming in particular).

On Sunday I’ll be speaking on a panel about gaming and advocacy. The purpose of the panel is two-fold.

First, we are looking to teach gamers how to advocate for or against policy issues that impact them. It seems not a week goes by that I don’t see an article about some misguided state legislator who has determined that video games are the root of all evil. They typically then go on to craft legislation that seriously impedes the rights of gamers. We hope gamers will begin to take these issues seriously and organize to become a significant political force.

The second purpose for the panel is to talk a bit about how political groups and causes are using games to convey policy messages. Following the Obama team’s use of paid advertising in an online racing game, the use of such tactics is getting pretty advanced. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing from my fellow panelists as well as the audience on that topic.

If I pick up nuggets of wisdom from the panel, I’ll be sure to pass them along via my blog as well as my Twitter feed. Follow me @MichaelTurk (if you aren’t already.)

Finally, it looks like 11 of my 20 readers have voted in the “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?” poll. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll weigh in. I’ll be posting the reply’s over the weekend.

For the last hour or so, I have been discussing character alignment paradoxes with Aaron Brazell (@technosailor on Twitter) on Facebook. It all started with a simple status update.

Aaron is in a Chaotic Neutral mood.

For those who don’t get the reference, chaotic neutral refers to one of nine character “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons. Think of them like a matrix. Lawfulness versus Chaos is essentially your adherence to the laws of society, whereas Good and Evil are your moral/ethical disposition.

Now here’s the problem, and the jumping off point for the discussion with Aaron. I contend that chaotic good and chaotic evil are false choices. Good and evil, just like law and lawlessness, lie on a continuum. That is, there is an order to them. There are degrees between them.

Chaos, on the other hand, is completely random. There is no order at all. Therefore, a chaotic character would be just as likely to be good as evil. As Aaron said, everything becomes situational. A chaotic good character would always tend toward the good. If they are chaotic evil, they would always tend toward evil. By that logic, they have applied order to their own lives. They have chosen a path, and a path, by nature, is not chaotic.

It’s like Johnny Depp’s line from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.

A truly chaotic person can always be counted on to be chaotic, and that means they’re just as lokely as not to swing toward good or evil. As Paul Rodriguez (@pjrodriguez) said, “[A] Chaotic Neutral person might hit you in the face one day and gave you a $100 bill the next and then borrow your car, use all the gas, but [leave] a TV in the back seat.”

That’s pretty much exactly it. In a fight against long odds, a chaotic person would be just as likely to stay with you and fight as they would be to stab you in the leg so they could outrun you in retreat. They’re chaotic, and chaos defies patterns. If they always tend toward good (or evil for that matter) you could always know what they would do within a certain range.

So do chaotic good and chaotic evil exist? I don’t believe they can, and therefore the whole D&D continuum is off. I think the continuum should look more like this:

Anything below neutrality in regard to morals (good and evil) and lawfulness would fall into a base category of Chaotic. You would have no idea what they would do or what their moral leanings would be. I think it would be a much better framework. Frankly, with people stabbing each other in the leg, I think it would make the game more interesting.

So I got back from Vegas last night to find my Wii sports bundle had arrived. So psyched about that. Hooked it up, put the kiddos to bed and started to play around. I really like the tennis, baseball, and boxing. Bowling is alright. Golf sucks… a lot…

I got ready to tee off on the first hole, lined up and took a huge swing only to discover that the Wiimote really doesn’t want or allow you to swing away. The game is really looking for a finesse swing on a very short arc with little movement. Swing away and you overpower the ball with poor results. It’s not like the batting in baseball which actually awards you for vigor.

I’m also kind of irritated by the lack of club selection options. Driver, iron, wedge, and putter are poor choices.

So here’s my question… Are games like Tiger Woods 2008 or MLB 2k8 more accommodating for people who really want to get into the game? I’d really like a game that allows a full swing so I can practice my form. Does anyone have suggestions for a better golf game?