SOCOM: US Navy SEALs [PS2]
By Susie Vee

The long-awaited network adaptor for the PS2 has arrived, and with it, this much-hyped proof-of-concept game. Online gaming has long been the holy grail of console manufacturers, and after years of promise, both the PS2 and Xbox are poised to jump into the fray within months of each other.

So, how does online console gaming measure up to its long-established PC cousin? In general, the concept has much promise to make network gaming a mainstream pastime, especially when paired with broadband internet access. In the specific case of SOCOM, it’s a slightly sloppy application that will hopefully seem dated by the time the next generation of online PS2 games come along.

As is the fad these days, SOCOM casts you as a member of a US Navy SEAL team. Instead of Quake-style run’n’gun gaming, stealth and teamwork are the order of the day. You success or failure in the single-player game will often depend on the AI of your teammates, and sometimes they’re a little quick on the trigger, so keep an eye on them.

The big gimmick of the game, and part of what makes it so unique, is the included USB headset microphone. You plug this sucker into the USB port on the front of your PS2 (yeah, take a look, there are two of ‘em) and then you use it to communicate with your team.

In the single-player game, your teammates understand a number of voice commands. The voice recognition works fairly well, but the number of things you can ask your teammates to do is limited. Another hassle is that in the voluminous instruction booklet, there’s never a simple chart or list of voice commands the game will understand.

As a single-player game, SOCOM plays like a decent mix of Rainbow Six and Metal Gear Solid. Missions are amusing, and not overly long (since you can’t save during a mission), and there are some nice touches. One we liked was that the game’s ambient sounds will come through your TV speakers, while all communications from teammates or from headquarters will come over your headset.

Graphically, the game looks surprisingly weak, with blocky characters and bland environments. Some of the textures are pretty lo-res as well. We suspect this “dumbing-down” of the graphics is there to help provide a smooth multiplayer experience. But on a 19-inch TV we had a hard time making out characters standing a short distance away from us. On a larger set, the game was much more playable.

The main appeal of SOCOM, however, is the online play. In this mode, you join a server with up to 16 people -- eight per team -- and play either deathmatch or objective-based rounds. With the headset, you can communicate with people on your team, and hopefully, add a little strategy.

In practice, however, getting online and joining a game is a much more time-consuming task then it should be. The online server menu -- run by Sony -- is fairly intuitive, but there’s no help for first-timers. You have to pick a “room” usually by location, then a game, then log into the game. At any point during all this, you can be arbitrarily tossed off the server and have to start again. The game menu also doesn’t tell you what map people in a particular game are playing, making it hard to find your favorites.

We also had the game freeze up on us several times while trying to join a game, forcing a hard reset of the whole console.

Once inside a game, we found that most players used a Rambo-style strategy. There was surprisingly little chatter during the game, and even less teamwork. In addition, lag times left our fellow players caught in a time warp quite a few times, and often led to bad audio quality from the headset.

After many hours of gameplay, while we did find several players who appeared to by *way* too young to be playing this M-rated game, we have yet to run across another girl gamer (or at least any who weren’t too shy to go “on the air”).

If you had a bunch of friends with Network Adaptor and copies of SOCOM, you could have a real fun time working out strategies and using teamwork. Or, you could join a clan, but that may be a bit much for casual gamers. As a pick-up-and-play game, SOCOM loses much of it’s tactical edge, but can still lead to many fun-filled firefights.

SCORE: 8.5