Film Events

Kane and Lynch are two bickering hit men who can’t seem to get along without one another. Dog Days, their second videogame shooter together, finds them squabbling their way through the byways of Shanghai, with the camera tagging along behind Lynch with the handheld shakiness beloved by cinema verité and episodes of C.O.P.S.. The image, which is continually grainy and spotted with light reflections, often pixelates and glitches like a cheap digital camera undergoing gunfire, which is presumably the effect that the game’s designers were going for.

The same thing happens every day. The sun, rising unseen, illuminates Pacific City with a vague, generic glow. In this unwashed daylight, Pacific City’s buildings, which glower with foreboding imperialism in the darkness, are revealed to be charmless monoliths – a warren of cardboard box offices and oatmeal can towers. An occasional flock of paper scraps churn through the air in the otherwise featureless corners and alleyways. As the light emerges, so do the city’s sanest residents. I say “sanest,” though I would be hard-pressed to defend the mental health of citizens who insist on loitering in the streets like herd animals – a meandering obstacle course that the game admonishes me for mowing down.
Then the same thing happens every night. The streams of citizens evaporate as darkness oozes into the streets along with a dense backwash of mutants: pale, bulbous men studded with bony spikes, and wiry screaming women with frazzled hair. Outnumbering the healthy citizens, the freaks clog every corner of nocturnal Pacific City. Throwing punches at them results in a dense flurry of motion as I flit from one to the next, and it’s a simple matter to leap to the roof of a nearby building and target them with firearms. But that maneuver is likely to summon a carload or two of the game’s gang of human rebels, with their automatic rifles, endless ammunition and ability to track me across rooftops.The same thing happens every year. I find myself leaping from rooftop to rooftop, from skyscraper to street and back up again, as I bounce and climb around crime-infested cities. But unlike the truly epic scale of last summer’s inFamous and Prototype, the feeble heights and featureless skyline of Crackdown 2 present me with limited opportunities for super-powered heroics. I’m no longer impressed that I’m able to leap to the top of tall buildings in a single bound. In Crackdown 2 I’m merely a bundle of offensive maneuvers ricocheting around a mockup metropolis, pretending to save the day and night when all I’m really doing is going through the motions.

The behavior of tourists who persist in visiting Florida during the hottest summer on planet Earth can possibly be explained by the presence of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a Universal Orlando Resort island that boasts several wizard-themed roller coasters, a faux enchanted castle and refreshments such as butterbeer. It just opened and it’s a smash hit.
But for Potter fans with lower tolerances for heat and ride-line congestion, the sensible alternative is LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4, which utilizes four volumes of the novels’ magical locations as blueprints for several hundred virtual wizarding playsets. Although they are woven into the Harry Potter narrative, the game’s levels are basically romps through Harry Potter LEGO toyboxes.

The first foe I faced in Alpha Protocol was a soldier who burst through a door. I was unarmed, so I ran to the far side of a table that was in the middle of the room. The soldier chased me halfway around the table and then reversed, trying to catch me on the other side. I switched directions and the soldier did too. I switched again. The soldier switched. Back and forth we do-si-do'd. For five minutes I outsmarted this trained militiaman with toddler tactics. “All around the cobbler’s bench,” I thought, “The monkey chased the weasel… ”
Alpha Protocol, as it declares boldly on its game box, is “The Espionage RPG,” so I thought maybe the brain-dead soldier was a fluke – an uninformed flunky who was merely teasing me during my training. After all, espionage is about stealth and subterfuge. Surely things would be better as I moved from combat training into actual spy activities. But when I finally found my way to the covert heart of Alpha Protocol, I discovered that the espionage elements of the game are merely mini-games about picking locks and bypassing security systems.