Certain sects of the gaming populace would have you believe that linearity – be it in story or gameplay – is a dinosaur, on a fated collision course with the meteor that is freeform game design. After all, who wants to be funneled down the same glorified corridor every time they play through a game – having the same conversations with the same characters – when they could be forging new paths and crafting their own unique stories as they go along? Sure, Half-Life 2 was great, but we’re in the age of Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, and Grand Theft Auto now, right? Sitting back and just watching a story unfold without intervening? That’s old news, a musty relic for people who prefer movies… or even books! And man, those people are friggin’ nerds.

Or at least, that’s what I thought until I played Zeno Clash. For the uninitiated, Zeno Clash is a first-person brawler (think Riddick, but minus Vin “I just ingested a sheet of sandpaper” Diesel’s vocals) developed by the mad Chilean geniuses at ACE Team. But such a quick and conventional description doesn’t even come close to doing the game justice. Oh sure, punches and kicks flow as freely as the teeth you’ll knock loose with them, but Zeno Clash’s real star is its strange, unsettling, and yet all at once cohesive world.

In fact, instead of “strange,” let’s try “downright bizarre.” Zeno Clash’s world isn’t some simple paint-by-numbers sci-fi/fantasy videogame setting. Instead, at first glance, it appears to be the result of paint buckets tossed willy-nilly onto a canvas, with colors strewn all about in no recognizable pattern, yet placed on top of a recognizable shape. In more concrete terms, here are just a few of the things that you’ll see in a typical Zeno Clash setting: bird-people, tables with actual human legs, screaming women in diving helmets, exploding squirrels, women with exposed… spinal cords (Yeah, not exactly what you were hoping for, huh?), and purple trees with limbs that twist and tangle like a broken Slinky. And that, my friends, is merely the beginning.

There's a method to this madness right after the break. 

Every gamer has a story. A story assembled from countless in-game experiences, a collage of victory, defeat, heroics, and villainy. There is, however, a schism in the way these stories play out. Ask someone who’s lived out their gaming days in solitude and they’ll tell you of superhuman feats, epic dramas, and non-player characters who may not have been real boys, but were certainly close enough that Geppetto would’ve been hard-pressed to tell the difference. Pose the same question to multiplayer-centric gamers, though, and you’ll get an earful of teamwork, commitment, practice, and good old fashioned competition.

Neither side, of course, is wrong to enjoy games for their respective reasons. It’s merely a case of different strokes for different folks. However, what happens when single-player and multiplayer modes get married and pop out a child? Well, if you ask developers like BioWare and Splash Damage (who are working on fusing multiplayer and single-player with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Brink, respectively), they’ll tell you such all-encompassing modes are just The Next Big Thing. And they may very well be right about that. 

Forgive me, then, for objecting to this holy matrimony.

Clicking the read more link is a single-player experience, but reading and responding to the article is multiplayer! These are important distinctions (no they're not). 

Last week was just full of surprises. (RIP, all.) Thankfully, though, one shining, heroic force swooped in to save the world from snowballing into complete unpredictability. That final bastion of normalcy – that conqueror of chaos -- was, of course, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.

The film – which starred explosions, Shia Labeouf, and explosions (but unfortunately, not Shia Labeouf exploding) – defiantly dodged negative reviews, negative word of mouth, and a near-negative Metacritic score to gross $112,000,000 in its opening weekend. Yep – nothing like a vapid, needless summer blockbuster to restore your faith in the world by destroying your faith in humanity. The movie’s success, though? Not surprising in the least. It’s a loud, action-packed film with more carnage than meaningful dialog. It’s simple, easily digested cheese. People eat that stuff up.

But then, no one expected Transformers to tug at our heartstrings and revolutionize storytelling as we know it. That’d just be silly; I mean, it’s a movie about robots fighting. Clearly, all eyes here are focused on the action – no time to roll them at the plot.

So then, how come we often expect tear-jerking, thought-provoking tales from big-budget videogames with premises nearly as dramatically inhospitable as Transformers? Why do we expect triple-A videogames – which, at this point, are quickly sneaking into movie territory in terms of development costs – to mold angry men, gunfire, and shrapnel into spellbinding tales when our prior buying tastes (see, for instance: Transformers) have shown that all we want is a loose thread to hold the action together? Especially when other story genres (you know, anything that's not action) lend themselves far better to interesting plots, untethered by the need for a five-minute shootout every six minutes?

Transform and roll past the break for more.