Game On

Like all buddy-cop/true-love stories, Enslaved begins with the two main characters meeting under less-than-romantic circumstances. In this case, Monkey, a glowering tree-trunk of a man, and Trip, a ragdoll-haired brainy girl, are both slaves aboard an airship that crashes someplace in Brooklyn. Then, while Monkey is unconscious, Trip snaps a headband on him and programs it to electrify his brain if she dies. This, naturally, convinces him to protect her.

I’ve been dropped into so many war zones I no longer notice the details – the golden chains of bullets strung through the air, pings and pops from various calibers of shots, voices screaming in English and whatever non-English my opponents scream…

What's so important about the planet of Reach? Is it the way that all the native grasses sway in unison when the wind blows? Maybe it’s the urban architecture, which has the soulless, open style of shopping malls and airport terminals. Or perhaps it’s the planet’s collection of anti-aircraft batteries, superpowered shield generators, spacecraft launchpads and other significant military installations, none of which seem to be defended by an army of any size or skill.

During the movie that opens Metroid: Other M, Samus Aran, the bounty hunter star of the franchise, is revealed stretched out in the same aqua blue bodysuit in which she ended the original Metroid. Now, however, she wears high heels and hauls quite a caboose. Maybe it balances the linebacker shoulders her suit of armor has developed. Or maybe the designers of Other M thought it would captivate gamers as they watched Samus sashay through the game’s cut scenes.

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.

I'm not Mario. I need to make my shots seriously stronger if I want to send the ball sailing over the sand dunes and water ponds that look like they were salvaged from an overhaul of Everquest. In order to strengthen my swings, improve my putt and increase all of those other golf statistics, I need to spend experience points. But those same experience points also unlock the clothes that I wear. I must chose between spending experience points on better golf skills or a new pair of shoes. In the world of Tiger Woods, it's not easy to be both well dressed and a good golfer.
Mario, that little tricky marionette, always has kid-friendly button pushing and timing games to rely on in his easy-access sports franchises. (He hasn't yet proven that he's mastered motion-sensitive golf for the Wii.) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 makes every swing a tense moment of immobile precision. The left thumbstick controls the golf club's swing backwards and forwards, and in that meager half inch of motion every deviation to the left or right is deducted from the overall power and accuracy of the swing.

Every year, some trend in videogaming comes from behind and delivers an outstanding streak of games. In 2009 there was an abundance of beautiful fighting games: Street Fighter IV for arcade fans, Fight Night Round 4 for sports lovers, DISSIDIA Final Fantasy for franchise fighting, and the decent Tekken 6 at the end of the year. The year before that was all about outstanding PSP games. Now 2010 is turning out to be the year of outstanding racing games.
Every system has its own solid racing title. The Wii has the venerable Mario Kart Wii, but the PS3 is catching up with this year's excellent kart fantasia ModNation Racers. 2010 has also given the PS3 and 360 MotoGP 09/10 for serious bike racing simulation. Split/Second joins the group as an arcade-paced racing game with an abundance of combat and explosions. Crashing airplanes, capsizing ships – the stuff of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay movies as seen from the inside of a racecar in less than five minutes.