‘MAG’ time - Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Navy Times

‘MAG’ time

The PlayStation 3 boasts a distinguished catalog of sports games and those endless-story fantasy titles — in which you’re an insurance claims-adjuster for dragon eggs, or something.

But PS3 has lagged badly behind the Xbox 360 in first-person shooters. Over the past year, Sony and game publishers have offered two strong, but flawed, efforts at PS3-only shooters, and now there is a third, “MAG,” which succeeds in places where its predecessors failed but still ranks only as a partial success.

“MAG,” which stands for “Massive Action Game,” is an online-only, big-map run-and-shoot in which you do battle for one of three private mercenary companies trying to push the others out of the violence industry. Like two of its PS3-only predecessors — “SOCOM: Confrontation” and “Killzone 2” — “MAG” is visually striking and frantic, but unlike those earlier games, it actually works.

Knock on wood, “MAG” let me access servers every time, played smoothly and didn’t feature any of the Dada-esque glitches (as when you entered games in “Confrontation” with no weapons) that plagued its forebears. That it functions well is all the more remarkable because “MAG” prides itself on its ability to host huge, 256-person megabattles.

On that score alone — an online PS3 game you can actually play! — “MAG” is a big step forward.

Whatever throats Sony and designer Zipper Interactive had to cut, however many megawatts of power the mainframes require, it was worth it. If future titles can build on what “MAG” has accomplished and run well every time, prospects for the PS3 could get interesting.

“MAG” also is interesting because — although it has no single-player campaign mode — it uses single-player narrative elements as you play online. Players have to build experience in order to unlock new team games that advance the story. Veterans can become “leaders” and call in artillery support or poison gas attacks, and technically take command of the players on their team.

A quick digression about that: Having a “commander” who gives orders or at least sets priorities — as in, “Hold these two areas and cede the third to the bad guys so we don’t spread ourselves too thin” — is a wonderful idea for first-person shooters. I often get frustrated in objective-style games when teammates and I scramble pell-mell, gaining and losing posts, because nobody wants to take charge or even suggest working together to win.

The problem is that many video-gamers are selfish, greedy and cowardly: Too often, all they want is to rack up the most kills, so they camp in dark corners, snipe from hidden perches and don’t pitch in to take objectives, run flags, etc. On the flip side, unless you play regularly with a group of people and work out your dynamics about who calls the shots, nobody wants to spend his leisure time listening to some stranger boss him around.

So even though “MAG” created these “leadership” positions to try to bring some order to the game’s enormous battles, they don’t work. Battles in “MAG” quickly turn into Do Lung Bridge in “Apocalypse Now” — bright, loud, dangerous chaos. Nobody knows what’s going on, nobody’s in charge and maybe your side will defend the communications post, but it probably won’t.

Other weaknesses: “MAG’s” weapons are the hardest to use in all of shooterdom. Even when you sight down the barrel, your rifle jumps and shakes too much to hit reliably, and you easily lose sight of your target in the Hollywood muzzle flash. Bad guys are hard to hit anyway because they’re rendered so small and blend in so easily with the detail of the maps.

I also felt like I wasted a lot of time waiting around in “MAG.” When you get hit, the game gives you a minute or so before you expire in which one of your squad mates can come around to patch you up — theoretically helpful for games when your team has a finite number of extra lives.

But nobody plays a video game to be a medic, so you usually sit there watching yourself die, then you have to wait still longer before you can re-enter the game.

In “Modern Warfare 2,” you push a button to rejoin the fight immediately, or you can at least observe your teammates until you come back. But “MAG” can make you feel as though you’re wasting the time you’re already wasting by playing a video game.

Game Review

MAG (PlayStation 3, $59.99, www.mag.com)

• Rated T for “Teen”

• Buy? Rent? Skip? Our verdict: RENT