Uplink 5

“The Resident Evil Issue”

June 2006

Contents:

• Zombie Dialectics

• Reification and Videogame Culture

• Video Gods and Imperial Monsters at E3

• Escape from City-17

• US Consumers Not Sold on 360

Introduction

Grab your crowbars and ready those flash grenades, fellow zombie-hunters, because Uplink’s Resident Evil issue has arisen from its unquiet grave! This issue focuses on the role horror narratives play in the videogame culture. We also have updates from the worlds of E3, Half Life 2 and next-gen gaming.

Zombie Dialectics

When compared to the other pet nightmares of the contemporary media – giant spiders, killer robots, and that perennial favorite of the Uplink staff, giant radioactive lizards – zombies are probably the silliest monsters ever created. Dim, slow-moving, and wont to give away their position by throaty gurgles, they would seem to be a threat only to humans even dimmer than they are.

Despite this credibility problem, the zombie thriller has become one of the true evergreens of the videogame culture. This isn’t just because the limited power of early game consoles and software made it easier to depict lifeless zombies than realistic human figures. Rather, zombie narratives speak to some of our deepest anxieties about the industrialization and commodification of the body. These anxieties are closely connected to the spread of the sophisticated information, media and communications technologies of the present era. But whereas high-tech ideologists narrate technology in terms of a utopian natural history, i.e. fantasies of harmonious ecological webs and a biologized, consumer-friendly Darwinism, zombie narratives depict technology in terms of a terrifying natural history – the incessant devouring of all by all.

Capcom’s long-running Resident Evil series, created by veteran game designer Shinji Mikami, is a case in point. The “resident evil” in question is a mythical Umbrella Corporation, which develops a virus capable of turning living creatures into mutated horrors. For reasons of their own, Umbrella agents release the virus in the mythical town of Raccoon City, USA. Players step into the shoes of a variety of local town residents or special agents, who must escape from Racoon City, contain the viral outbreak, and find a cure for the virus.

In previous episodes, the series stressed puzzle-solving and atmospherics over combat. Resident Evil 4, directed by Mikami himself, is a step in a new direction. For one thing, the monsters aren’t mutations per se, they are dormant alien creatures, somehow bent to evil purposes by the villain. Mikami aimed for the sort of action-horror hybrid achieved by Valve’s Half Life and Neil Manke’s They Hunger trilogy, by adding plenty of action as well as time-based combat puzzles. While the result is occasionally scintillating, Resident Evil 4 also suffers from some basic game-play issues, which prevent it from becoming a true classic.

To understand why this is so, it’s worth examining the prehistory of the zombie thriller. Many of its basic features can be traced back to early 19^th century British Romanticism, one of the first aesthetic movements to critique (though not always consciously) the intertwined horrors of unchecked industrialism and colonial slavery.

The great-grandmother of all zombie narratives, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817), was a stinging social critique of the early Industrial Revolution. Stitched together from dead bodies by Victor Frankenstein, the monster named after its creator shimmered with the threatening Jacobinism of the early 19th century British craft proletariat.

By contrast, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (1897) swung the horror novel to the other end of the ideological pendulum. The Count was depicted as the literally and figuratively Balkanized scapegoat for the real-life British imperialism which was busily draining its colonies of surplus-value.¹

In the contemporary videogame culture, zombies occupy a unique niche, halfway between the capitalistic vampire and the occult monster. Whereas the vampire remains one of the great late 19^th century figurations of Capital, i.e. an entity which drains the blood or vitality from living bodies while itself remaining curiously disembodied and abstract, the occult monster testifies to the noxious effects of marketization in the form of Adorno’s collective bane or baleful spell.

Like vampires, videogame zombies have an insatiable compulsion to ingest or prey upon the living. Unlike vampires, they can be combated with corporeal rather than magical means (typically, by whacking them on the head). Like occult monsters, zombies are spawned by some sort of mythic doom or collective curse. Typically, this either involves a mad scientist meddling in things best left unmeddled in, or an evil wizard trying to resurrect an extinct deity, depending on the occult shading of the narrative.

What distinguishes the zombie thriller from most occult narratives, however, is not so much the theme of mythic doom, but the zombie’s role as a symbol of the laboring body. Interestingly, this is something encoded in the historical etymology of the term “zombie.” The word originally came from the West African terms “kimbundu” and “-zumbi”, which refer to ghosts or departed spirits. The slaves who spoke Caribbean French and English Creole transformed those terms into “zomba”, the immediate predecessor of “zombie”.

It should be emphasized that the mass-cultural zombie has about as much to do with Haitian voudoun (voodoo) as the werewolf has to do with European Christianity. Voudoun is just one of the many complex admixtures of West African folk traditions and Catholic religious liturgy throughout the African diaspora in the Americas, ranging from Santeria to Macumba. The Hollywood horror films of the 1920s borrowed the Afro-Caribbean nomenclature, but inverted its cultural content, much as 19th century British imperialism transformed the Hindi and Marathi term “thag” (thief) into the generic English word “thug”, thereby displacing its own criminality onto the Indian colonies it plundered for three and a half centuries.

Yet the mass-cultural figure of the zombie was by no means purely regressive. By highlighting the laboring bodies which generated the wealth of the British, American, French, and Spanish Empires in their respective colonies and neocolonies, the zombie also hinted at the potential might of the slave insurrection. Ironically, this was probably more obvious in the horribly racist Hollywood horror movies of the 1920s and 1930s, which cast zombies as threatening black bodies. Only in the 1950s did directors start to refunction zombies into symbols of a carnivorous whiteness, a process which culminated in the mass-produced orcs of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings epic.

Resident Evil 4 gives this micropolitical history a new twist. The game is set in rural Spain, and the zombies are local villagers, infected by alien parasites. This is interesting, because Spain is a prosperous semi-periphery of the European Union, much wealthier than its former Latin American colonies, but only half as rich as France and Germany. The contradiction between Central European industrialism and Southern European agrarianism has long been a key motor of the Spanish and Italian film cultures, everywhere from Luis Bunuel’s classic documentary Land Without Bread (1933) to Sergeo Leone’s spaghetti Westerns to contemporary Italian splatter-gore. Resident Evil 4 takes full advantage of this tradition, referencing Bunuel and the cinema of surrealism in its scenery and monster design.

Put another way, rural Spain is where whiteness breaks down. In the real world, it is where large numbers of immigrant laborers from northern and sub-Saharan Africa work in the rural economy. The gruesome violence of Resident Evil 4 thus has a real-life referent, namely the violence done to those immigrant bodies.

The fundamental limitation of Resident Evil 4 is that it cannot acknowledge the political or cultural struggles of those bodies. They are marginalized by a thoroughly conventional micropolitics, namely the US secret agent narrative (the hero is an ex-cop from Raccoon City named – what else? – Leon Kennedy). Nor does the game develop its potentially rich fund of geopolitical materials. For example, one of the minor boss villains, Salazar, is a glancing reference to António de Oliveira Salazar, the real-life dictator of Portugal from 1932 to 1968.

But Resident Evil 4 doesn’t draw the logical connections to contemporary Rightwing movements. The evil mastermind of the storyline, Osmund Saddler, is just another version of Count Dracula, replete with an outlandish Transylvanian accent. No fictional horror story can compete with the real life horror of the US oiligarchy, which legitimates evil colonial wars with a folksy Texas drawl.

Saddler’s plot to destroy the US by brain-jacking its top leadership has been similarly upstaged by actual historical events. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with US politics knows the monsters of petro-fundamentalism took over all three branches of the US Government a long time ago.

Somewhat further afield, characters such as Jose Sera and Ada Wong never develop into the symbols of the European Union and East Asia they could have been. Sera comes close to being a kind of Spanish Gordon Freeman, but dies before he can develop as a character, and Wong arrives too late in the storyline to make much of a difference. On the other hand, Ashley, the woman Leon must rescue, is believable as a character, which lends the storyline much-needed substance.

This micropolitical and geopolitical confusion is mirrored by Resident Evil 4’s confused game-play. The game cannot seem to decide whether it is a horror survival or an occult action thriller. It oscillates between these genres, without ever quite fusing them into something new. As a result, while the aiming system and the occasional puzzles work reasonably well, movement and combat are often a chore. Arguably, the quicksilver 3D dexterity of Devil May Cry’s Dante has raised the bar for action thrillers to the point that Resident Evil 4 often feels like a tunnel-crawl.

The designers did try to compensate for this. The visual environments are stunning – for example, castles with working catapults, graveyards filled with the unquiet dead, abandoned test labs and the like. The sound-track is not only superbly creepy, it also cues players to the presence of specific monsters.

When you are near windows or ladders, you can press a button and your character automatically jumps or climbs with a flourish, creating a welcome sense of mobility. The designers also employed a variety of quick-reaction techniques – during certain cut-scenes, players must be ready to quickly press certain key sequences to avoid being knocked over or crushed to death. (There are some problems with this, though, which we will return to in a moment). Monster behavior is also varied enough to be interesting – the zombies creep around slowly but occasionally speed up, as if your character was entering and exiting bullet-time.²

That said, there are a number of game-play features which are counterproductive. First, the player does not have a decent melee weapon. Occasionally you can kick a zombie away, but one of the primal joys of the zombie thriller is whacking away merrily at the undead with a Neil-Manke-style wrench or umbrella. (Peel away the layers of technology, and you find most zombie narratives celebrate the visceral thrill of a children’s game of tag.)

Second, Resident Evil 4 has too many instant kill monsters and events. The chainsaw maniacs are a case in point. If they get too close, you die. Period. (By contrast, the kamikaze opponents in Croteam’s Serious Sam series explode when they get too close, but don’t automatically put the player out of commission.) Zombie narratives work their magic through atmospherics and mood – it’s not what you see, it’s what you think you may see around the next corner which matters. This is why the zombie thriller has only one ironclad law: never, ever put an instant kill monster or fatal event in the first fifteen minutes of a game. Resident Evil 4 has two.³

For all these reasons, Resident Evil 4 deserves the label of a good, rather than ground-breaking, game. At its best, it generates the energy of Takashi Shimizu’s made-for-video cult classic The Grudge (2000), a truly flesh-crawling horror narrative which also manages to document the reactionary micropolitics of Japan’s Koizumi-era neoconservativism (hint: spooky, abandoned apartment buildings = collapse of Japan’s real estate bubble).

Like Shimizu’s film, however, the ultimate geopolitical limit of Resident Evil 4 is Koizumi-nomics, that astonishingly limber ideology which retails a fraudulent neo-nationalism to the Japanese electorate and an equally bogus neoliberalism to the rest of the world, all while administering a neo-Keynesianism practically identical to all the other East Asian developmental states. Capcom’s superb Devil May Cry 3 went head to head with that neoconservativism, and defeated it on its own privileged neo-national terrain. Hopefully, the upcoming Resident Evil 5 will do something similar.

– DRR

Endnotes

1. This narrative flexibility is mirrored in the major zombie films, which run the ideological gamut from Rightwing survivalist fantasies such as Boris Sagal’s Omega Man (1971) to Dan O’Bannon’s stinging anti-Reaganite satire Return of the Living Dead (1985). Interestingly, this is true even in the trajectory of a single director. John Carpenter gave the alien invasion and horror film a progressive twist in They Live (1988), but later helmed the above-average, but deeply reactionary, horror film In the Mouth of Madness (1995). In general, the notion of the living dead is as politically ambiguous as the social reality of reification itself. The critique of reification can lead to a progressive critique of capitalism, but it can also devolve into the most reactionary forms of xenophobia.

2. Bullet-time refers to slow-motion action sequences triggered by the player, which allows players to look, react and act in real time, while your opponents slow down. It has become an indispensable element of the contemporary action thriller. John Woo invented bullet-time in his classic Hong Kong thrillers The Killer (1989) and Hard-Boiled (1992), while Remedy’s Max Payne (2001) perfected the technique in the field of videogames.

3. The boss battle with Krauser has an execrable timer puzzle. You have to defeat Krauser with at least thirty seconds to spare on the clock, otherwise the tower crumbles beneath you. This is simply punishing the player, for no apparent reason this reviewer can think of.

Reification and Videogame Culture

No analysis of the role of horror narratives in videogames would be complete without mentioning Konami’s Silent Hill franchise, the premier puzzle-thriller series of the horror genre. In the game, “Silent Hill” is the name of a defunct asylum, which lives on in the afterlife as a haven for a variety of monstrosities. Players must navigate the asylum’s bizarre environments, elude shambling zombies, and solve a range of devious puzzles.

What distinguishes Silent Hill from garden-variety horror fiction is its psychological depth and subtlety. Though the episodes vary in quality – the third is the best of the bunch, due to its scrappy heroine and feminist subtext – each game-world is consistently suspenseful, hair-raising and eerie. Whereas all too many role-playing or action videogames are afflicted with cardboard villains, who alternate between villainous chortles (“Mwa-ha-ha-ha”) and inane comments that “Everything is going according to plan” (e.g. Onimusha 4), the Silent Hill games emphasize that the worst demons are those of our own inner selves.

That said, Silent Hill does share some of the endemic weaknesses of the puzzle-horror genre, including substandard movement and combat controls and erratic scriptwriting. Clumsy interfaces can make encounters with monsters more annoying than terrifying, mostly because it requires so much time for your character to turn and move. Incidentally, Sony’s new motion-sensitive controller may be a godsend to puzzle-horror game designers, because it can translate quick hand motions into movement commands – say, the ability to duck quickly, or to roll left or right.

The issue of scriptwriting is more subtle, but in some ways even more important. Puzzle-horror games require a fine balance between gallows humor and nightmarish revulsion, in the same way that action games must balance slapstick comedy with dire tragedy, or role-playing games must blend heroic fantasy roles with soap opera melodrama. Silent Hill succeeds precisely because it does not rely on gratuitous gore or paint-by-number monsters. Although players do have to tussle with zombies and other monsters, most of the action of the series involves exploring a range of mind-altered (and altering) environments.

The player’s ultimate goal is not to quest for rare treasures or to slay impossibly wicked demons, but to free their character from their own nightmares. In an epoch when the sleep of multinational reason is breeding the monsters of petro-fundamentalism, the cultural motif of awakening has become inconceivably subversive. Silent Hill’s game designers – most notably, director Kazuhide Nakazawa and writer Hiroyuki Owaku, who teamed together to produce the second and third versions of the franchise – do justice to that motif, by allowing the seething discontents of consumerism to gradually percolate up from within the seemingly neutralized, rationalized surfaces of late capitalist reality.

Put bluntly, what makes the Silent Hill games so scary is their terrifying normality. The all-American town of Silent Hill 2 (2001), for example, is covered in an unsettling fog, while the presence of nearby monsters is signaled by static from a portable radio – an occult Geiger counter, as it were. This is an oblique reference to the hateful petro-fundamentalism rampant in so many of the economically distressed small towns of the US.

Similarly, at the beginning of Silent Hill 3 (2003) the player must explore an abandoned shopping mall, which turns out contain a number of waking nightmares. Given that Heather, the teenage heroine of Silent Hill 3, is the stereotypical teen consumer and worker in the retail industry, this is an implicit acknowledgment of the miserable sweatshops which churn out the goods actually sold in malls, as well as a jab at union-busting, exploitative retail companies like Walmart.

It is no accident that Silent Hill 3 also has the most progressive gender roles of the series. We gradually learn that Heather has more than her fair share of repressed trauma, and much of the action revolves around her attempt to work through the multiple layers of that trauma. There is one truly startling moment when Heather is in a room whose walls are oozing blood. An invisible enemy begins to attack her, although she (and we) can’t see anything, and it doesn’t appear as if she is taking any damage. At first, the door seems locked. But when your character looks into a mirror in the room, we see that her body is gradually being covered with cuts and lacerations from the unknown assailant.

This is a stunning allegory of female “cutting”, the slashing of one’s own body with a razor or other sharp object, a syndrome as common among teenagers as anorexia or substance abuse. Only by looking into the mirror does the door open: free your micropolitical mind, and your geopolitical body will follow.

The other great moment of Silent Hill 3 occurs near the end of the game, when Heather is about to uncover the secret behind the religious cult which killed her father. Blood trails start flowing down the walls, suggesting everything from quasi-Freudian anagrams of menstruation or sexual violence, to the faint possibility of an impending psychological rebirth. As it turns out, the issue hinges on an ideological rather than physical pregnancy. In the final battle, Heather must stop the cult from reproducing, or put less metaphorically, stop it from inflicting its grievous woe on the world.

To date, Silent Hill 3 has been the high point of the series. The next game in the series, Silent Hill 4 (2004), does have an improved control and movement system, and the visuals of its claustrophobic apartment, with its suggestive overtones of the “hikimori” or isolation-complex faced by many young Japanese males in their twenties, are especially well done. Unfortunately, the plot involves tracking down a ghostly serial killer on the trail of a mostly helpless young woman, a step backwards from Silent Hill 3’s proactive heroine. Put simply, the male hero is too abstract to identify with, while the villain is too much like a cardboard cutout to truly despise.

– DRR

Video Gods and Imperial Monsters at E3

The Entertainment and Electronics Expo (E3 for short), held in Los Angeles every May, has long been one of the premier trade shows of the videogame industry. Though E3’s importance has declined somewhat, due to the rise of the Tokyo Game Show, Korea’s G-Star and Europe’s CEBIT, the convention is still one of the best places to track the pulse of the videogame industry.

Three things became clear at this E3. First, Sony continues to outclass, outmaneuver and outthink Microsoft – and Microsoft has noone to blame but itself. Second, Nintendo’s new console, the Wii (pronounced “wee”), is going to be a sensational success. Third, Korea and China are powering up the online game sector at an astounding rate.

Most striking of all, Sony downplayed the shrapnel-filled, war-torn combat spectaculars of its previous year’s conference, choosing to focus instead on social gaming and console communities. This drew howls of protest from a tiny but noisy strata of US gamers – dubbed by Professor Brian Cowlishaw as the “X-Treme D00dz” – who think videogames consist of pixellated US Marines blowing up vaguely East Asian lizard aliens.

While the warboys were whining about their wartoys, Sony was showcasing games like SingStar, a karaoke simulation which is a smash hit in Europe, as well as a new motion-sensitive controller. Sony also showed it is taking the information commons seriously, by announcing the PS3 is going to run on a version of Linux, the open source operating system. Best of all, basic online service for the PS3 will be free.

The other tempest in the E3 teapot was the announcement of the price tag of the PS3. A basic system with a 20GB drive will cost $500, while a slightly more accessorized version with a 60GB drive will cost $600. Predictably, the X-Treme D00dz howled that Sony was overcharging them. (These are the same folks who drop $1,000 on a high-end graphics card without batting an eye.)

In fact, the cost of the PS3 is precisely the same as a comparably-equipped 360. The reason is that the PS3 has built-in features – a hard drive, Blu-Ray capability and so forth – which require the purchase of extra accessories for the 360. (Although the 360 won’t play Blu-Ray discs, it can access the roughly comparable HD-DVD standard through a connector.) When you add up all the components, the price tag for a true high-definition gaming system is exactly the same – about $500. Of course, console prices drop like a rock, so consumers will be able to buy a PS3 or a geared-up 360 for less than $400 by the middle of next year.

The stunning trailer for Hideo Kojima’s upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4 provided a foretaste of what high-definition gaming is capable of. The trailer clocked in at fifteen minutes, and featured extensive character development, stellar graphics, and a timely and relevant anti-war message. (The trailer is available as a free download on Fileplanet – note that you may also need to download the free DivX software to play the video).

E3 was about much more than just the arrival of high-definition gaming, though. Nintendo’s Wii was the sleeper hit of the convention, and the company’s presentation and floor show proved that its new motion-sensitive controller is not a marketing gimmick. Rather, it’s the gateway to a whole new way of playing games. Nintendo is pioneering the era of “pick-up-and-play” gaming, which doesn’t require complex interfaces, a steep learning curve, or expensive media equipment. In essence, the Wii is going to be one of the crucial commons for handheld, mobile and collective gaming. To make that happen, Nintendo is releasing development kits for the Wii for less than $2,000, opening up the platform to a truly planetary-wide talent pool.

One other E3 story is worth mentioning here. Every year Gamespot, the game journalism webzine run by CNET, opens a special E3 website, crammed with stories, interviews and streaming videos. The graphical masthead for this year’s website featured an array of cartoonish, tubby monsters, vaguely reminiscent of Godzilla and various tentacled space aliens, stamped with the tongue-in-cheek moniker “Monster Coverage of E3”.

So far, so good. But then geopolitical fate intervened. The US Army ran a series of high-profile ads on Gamespot during the entire E3 show. (This was either a case of total cultural incomprehension, or total recruiter desperation, or maybe both.)

When opening the E3 site in the browser of their choice, viewers saw the main news stories plastered against a generic Army background. An ominous photo of a sniper peered through a viewscope on the right, while snapshots of helicopter gunships and armored vehicles appeared on the left. The Army slogan read, “Strength for now, strength for later.” Today Haditha, tomorrow Tehran.

To its credit, Gamespot didn’t let the centurions of US Empire have the final word. It ran an incredibly gutsy masthead showing a giant tentacle-creature clutching a jet plane, beneath a line of space aliens quoted from Tomohiro Nishikado’s arcade classic, Space Invaders (1979) (look for the banner at the very top of Gamespot’s E3 webpage).

This is only the second politically seaworthy citation of 9-11 this writer has ever seen. The other was a stinging cartoon by French newspaper Le Monde’s virtuoso cartoonist Plantu, which showed two twin towers labeled “Chile” and a suicidal jet plane marked “CIA” – September 11, 1973 was the date of the US-orchestrated assassination of Chile’s democracy.

Someone must have complained about the masthead, because the plane was hastily replaced by a stylized human figure for the duration of E3. (The jet version discreetly reappeared in the live streaming section, where Gamespot provided links to its E3 video downloads, and is also visible in the archived E3 index.)

This is how the gamer culture shows solidarity with the victims of the US Empire. I can’t think of a wittier and more delightful repudiation of the US oiligarchy and its monstrous Terror War.

– DRR

Escape from City-17

Valve Software’s Half Life (1998) was a wickedly subversive fable of interstellar neocolonialism, with Gordon Freeman cast as the accidental Ho Chi Minh of the world of particle physics. While the sequel, Half Life 2 (2004) had a nifty bunch of new features, the storyline had too many similarities to a WW II narrative to work the same kind of magic.

But Valve has returned to the fray sooner than anyone expected. The first of three new episodes, set in the immediate aftermath of Half Life 2, are now available for download from Valve’s online Steam service. The result is a major step forwards for the Half Life franchise, well worth the $20 price tag. Basically, Valve listened carefully to fan feedback, and fixed what needed to be fixed. The excessive driving sequences of Half Life 2 have been trimmed, and the storyline, characters, and game-play have all been honed to razor sharpness. The result is pulse-pounding entertainment, which manages to capture the true horror of the US Empire’s colonial war on Iraq, as well as the desperate heroism of the resistance. The ever-reliable reviewers at Gamespy have a comprehensive review here:

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/half-life-2-aftermath/710990p1.html

And note this chilling vision of the fictional City 17, an eerie fusion of Sauron's Barad-dur and Baghdad (the alien tower in the game is the rough equivalent of the Green Zone):

http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/740/740555/img_3648973.html

Last but not least, for readers with fast connections, YouTube has a variety of free trailers and game-play clips of Half Life 2.

– DRR

US Consumers Not Sold on 360

Back in March, Uplink boldly rushed in where next-gen videogame industry analysts feared to tread, by predicting that Microsoft still didn’t have a videogame strategy and was going to be caught between Nintendo’s motion-controlled hammer and Sony’s Blu-Ray anvil.

Most of Microsoft’s problems are self-inflicted. The Xbox 360 is a powerful platform, but it really should have been launched in spring of 2006, in order to smooth out the final production kinks, and to steal the thunder from the PS3 and Wii. Instead, the platform was released before the silicon, the game software, or the market for HD displays were ready.

The result has been supply shortages, a product plagued with overheating issues, and a scarcity of playable games. This doomed the 360’s launch in energy-efficient, game-savvy Japan, though the 360 has done somewhat better in Europe. The only real success for the platform has been in US markets.

Alas, with typical American arrogance, Microsoft spun this local, temporary success into fantasies of global Empire, boasting they were on track to sell ten million consoles in their first year.

Reality says otherwise. The 360 crashed into a wall in Japan, selling less than 5,000 units in May 2006. (By comparison, Sony sold about 72,000 PS2s in Japan during the same period.) Meanwhile, sales of the 360 in Europe continue to run at about half US levels. While initial US sales of the 360 were promising, Sony deftly answered the challenge with a price cut of its PS2 platform. The preliminary numbers for May 2006 console sales in the US are in from analyst firm NPD, and amazing as it sounds, the PS2’s six-year-old platform is now outselling the immensely more powerful 360: