One of the neatest surprises in my life as a gamer came in my brother’s Chevy Suburban, with no game system in sight. The year was 1995, and the Sony PlayStation was just a couple months old. My brother popped the disc for “Warhawk” — the new aerial combat game we were obsessed with — into his car’s CD player, and, just as I was laughing off his dumb joke, the game’s sound track started up. I was amazed. The Blu-ray disc that holds “Starhawk” all these years later won’t work in your car, but in your PlayStation 3 it’s a key to technological wonders hardly less impressive: online fights involving 32 players from around the world duking it out, on foot and in the sky, across huge maps.
Good thing this is so impressive, because “Starhawk” marks the biggest gulf in quality between single-player and multiplayer modes outside the “Bomberman” series.
