Qwizdom Q2 Remote

Writing about games as frequently as we do has certainly made the staff of Level Up open to the applications of videogames in a variety of areas. That said, there's nothing like a story about games being used in the educational arena to get our knees jerking furiously in protest. The latest such article to trigger our inner curmudgeon is a New York Times story titled "Students Click, and a Quiz Becomes a Game," about the proliferation of game show-style clickers as a teaching aid throughout U.S. schools.

The games had begun. In a darkened classroom at Great Neck South High School on a recent afternoon, the Advanced Placement physics students sped through a pop quiz, furiously pressing keys on hand-held clickers. A projection screen tracked their responses in real time, showing who knew what through an animated display of spaceships--individually numbered for each student--that blasted off or fell by the wayside with each right or wrong answer.

The students were not competing for grades (it was only a practice quiz), but they certainly acted as if they were.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” yelled a boy from the back of the class. “What’s the next question?” The Great Neck district has been introducing the clickers in an effort to liven up traditional classroom teaching with a more interactive approach. After a successful test at one of its high schools, Great Neck expanded the technology to other schools.

To read the rest of this post, click on the link below.

 Burnout Paradise, developed by Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts

Another year, another set of games to incite email warfare between MTV and Newsweek. Yes, Vs. Mode is back once again, after a brief hiatus which saw the principals take their battle to the pages of Slate. The subject of our newest Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) is Criterion Games' and Electronic Arts' racing game Burnout Paradise. In Round 1 of our exchange, Totilo explains why "It's complicated" is the best way to describe his relationship with the latest Burnout, while we describe how we fell hard, fast and almost completely without reservations in love with Criterion's refreshing new take on its aging franchise. Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: EA sends me a review build in December. I play it in my PlayStation 3. My wife and I love Burnout 3: Takedown, me for the racing, she for the crashes. I drive through a few intersection-triggered events in my first sitting, winning enough of them to unlock the crash mode so that I can let me wife give it a try. But I give crash--Showtime--a go before her and it all falls apart. It seems too easy. I tumble my car farther and farther down a road, causing massive property damage and waiting for the mode to get hard. Surely there must a time limit I'm going to have trouble with or a score threshold I can't easily meet. Not really. It's easy. It reminds me of how Lumines got on the PSP, too easy for too long before any challenge emerged. This is happening in my first un-supervised session. I want out of Showtime mode and put the controller down so that my car goes still and, at last, the mode does time out. This seems wrong, even broken.

N'Gai Croal: It would have been so tempting for Criterion to have made the open world optional and layered a structured event system on top of the game as it exists today. Everyone wins, right? Especially since I'm a fan of developers providing players with as many options as possible so that we can customize the experience to be exactly what we want it to be. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we've all benefited from Alex and his team fully committing to making Burnout Paradise an open world racing title. They've embraced it in ways large, small and highly instructive for anyone who follows in their footsteps. Driving through gas stations to replenish your boost; through auto repair shops to fix your car; and through junkyards to switch vehicles. Taking out cars to add them to your collection. Anywhere, anytime Showtime mode for your destructive delight. Having three different burnout systems--Stunt, Speed and Aggression--which both harkens back to Burnouts past and lets players drive the way they want to drive.

To read Round 1 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

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