Game On

First in a series of novels, Game of Thrones has been through the proverbial entertainment media ringer. It’s been a comic book, a board game, a card game, an HBO series and, finally, a video game. The books were a hit, the HBO series is doing well, but the game… well, it could draw comparisons to Dragon Age, The Witcher or Elder Scrolls, except that it just doesn’t measure up to the standards set by either.
The setting is the land of Westeros, and while that seems a decent enough environment to base a game – and it is wonderfully envisioned by the developers, Cyanide – there are only two story threads that the game tracks. The first is the story of Ser Mors Westford, a knight of the Night’s Watch working from Castle Black in the shadow of the Wall. Mors is a foul-mouthed veteran with a gruff appearance and demeanor.

To borrow a line from a song from bygone days, “everything old is new again.” It seems that retro gaming is alive and well…and its name is Diablo III.
For those who remember Diablo II, well, D3 is the same game—sort of. Graphics have been updated, the story has some changes, but by and large, this is a point-and-click dungeon crawl. Twelve years ago, Diablo II was the benchmark of dungeon crawls and many games tried to emulate that formula—some with marginal success, and others – well, not so much. Blizzard did it the best and D3 is a prime example of continuing to hit that benchmark.

Come with me to a strange and magical world. No, not the Kingdoms of Amalur. I’m talking about the real world of videogames – the big business extravaganzas of interactive entertainment. It’s a world that our hero, Curt Schilling, hopes to conquer.
Schilling is the superstar pitcher who retired from baseball in order to create videogames, and Reckoning is the first game from his company 38 Studios. For his initial delve into the dungeon of digital entertainment, Schilling has assembled a team of veteran warriors, each of whom is credited on Reckoning’s cover.

Tekken Hybrid is a triple-threat, with two games and a movie on one discount-priced disc. One of the games is a remastered, fully unlocked version of the original Tekken Tag Tournament – more on that in a moment. The other is a preview (called a prologue) of the upcoming sequel that will arrive in America later this year.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Prologue is a stand-alone, four character fighting game that features two leggy young girls in schoolgirl uniforms (well, sort of) who can kick and punch with the best of them, and two towering, intricate demons with horns, wings and superpowers. It’s the sort of juxtaposition – innocence and extravagance – that animates most anime cartoons.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is an updated version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and it makes me wonder what the next version is going to be called. Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.5 perhaps? Or maybe, We’re Totally Serious, This is the REALLY Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
What does “ultimate” mean? For starters, it means that players can select from all 48 of the game’s characters from the beginning – no need to unlock them. Considering that most fighting games make me play the same basic fights for about a dozen hours before giving me access to the coolest characters, I’m willing to call this game “ultimate” just for saving my time.

This should be called Ratchet & Clank: Play With Your Kid Brother. The duo of cat-like critter and his mini robot sidekick are a natural fit for co-operative multiplayer gaming. In All 4 One, Ratchet and Clank are joined by Quark (a green, jutting-jawed cartoon space hero) and Dr. Nefarious (a green-brained evil robot). Instead of fighting each other as per usual R&C procedures, now they all get to be heroes in a new galaxy.
The new galaxy is clearly much cheaper. The graphics in this new galaxy are terrible. Giant monsters look like twisted balloon animals in a windstorm – over-inflated and over-animated. A small child character with a voice provide by a frightened child refugee from the casting department guides my adventure as I jump and blast my way through this low-rent digital world.

This is the seventh time that Mario has jumped into the go-kart circuit. At first, cartoonish races in zippy little vehicles were perfect for the not-too-complex Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64. Then Nintendo started developing gimmicks to make the formula feel fresh. Double Dash (with two-player cars) and Mario Kart Wii (with motion-sensitive steering) felt desperate. There have been some high points (most notably Mario Kart DS, which took advantage of the system’s wireless networking), but for the most part, the Mario Kart circuit has been running downhill.
The bells and whistles this time around the track are provided by the Nintendo 3DS’s glasses-free 3D display. Curves are easier to anticipate in 3D, and targeting my opponents with turtle shells and bombs is more intuitive now that I can see how far they are ahead of me. But these aren’t major changes. Kart racing is so fast and frantic that there’s rarely any reason to look too far ahead. I appreciate the better perspective the 3DS gives me, but I don’t really need to see in 3D when I’m dealing with something right in front of me.

Every year around the holidays I need to escape. Maybe it’s the relentless Christmas marketing. Maybe it’s the way the cold wind makes my face sting. Maybe it’s the long nights. But every year I find something that I need to get away from.
And so I open a videogame. I find a quiet corner and pull a DS out of my pocket. Or I sneak downstairs on a sleepless night and turn on the PlayStation. Within minutes, I’ve abandoned this artificially heated, oversold and crowded holiday season, and taken up residence in another world.
Videogames create imaginary worlds – worlds so real that we can walk through them. We can race around them firing weapons and driving cars. We can fly above them, or stay on the virtual ground examining every detail. And this season, no game creates as magical and detailed a world as Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Rated Mature; PS3, 360, Windows PC).

The two-dimensional world of classic Mario is the perfect place for 3-D. The ground stretches out flat and even. Hills climb upward like staircases. Cliffs and ledges are square, tidy drops that descend forever into nowhere. Overhead, the flat blue sky is interrupted by clouds so solid that Mario can run across them like fluffy white tabletops. The colors are primary and flat, as though they had been filled in by someone using a small box of crayons, and the sunlight shines brightly from overhead.
Super Mario 3D Land looks like a storybook, and the 3-D effect provided by the Nintendo 3DS turns it into a pop-up book. Mario has been moving around in three dimensions since the advent of 3-D modeling. But I haven't been able to see him and his world in 3-D until now. Instead of the free-flowing landscapes of Super Mario 64 or Mario Sunshine, however, Nintendo has elected for Mario to make his 3D-display debut in game that resembles the classic Super Mario Bros. The simple landscape, with its flat contours and staggered layers, is an ideal match for the 3DS's diorama-like display, where things don't reach out as much as they recede into the distance.

This looks fake.
We are advancing down a road alongside a river. The air is chocolate-milky with dust from gunfire and from the bombing of bridges further downstream. The riverbanks and roads look prefabricated, as though they had been poured from plastic. The soundtrack layers gunfire on top of gunfire, some sounding slow and explosive, some whiney and long-lasting, stopping suddenly when one of my comrades’ bullets finds its intended head.
My squad and I move with a lifelike fluidity, except that we often seem to be doing those movements a fraction of an inch above the ground. As we run beneath light poles, I see my comrades cast shadows onto the ground. But as I pass the same place, no trace of me blocks the light. As I run across the cracked asphalt of the road, my view floats along evenly, as though I were already dead, stalking across the battlefield like a ghost, untroubled by footsteps and uneven terrain.