Game On

“My kids are hooked on ModNation Racers,” a friend recently e-mailed me. “They love anything where you get to create your own character.”
ModNation Racers is a go-kart racing game similar to the ones that have made the Mario Kart series a success. Because everyone is pretty much zooming around the tracks in custom-designed milk crates, the intricacies of tire surfaces and engine idle are less important than lobbing bombs at opponents and knowing where the racetrack's shortcuts are located.

Lost Planet was a straight-ahead shooter that distinguished itself with its large, harsh landscape. Set on the snow-covered planet of E.D.N. III, the game made survival precarious. It was only by battling the native life forms and dominant government that I was able to scrape together the energy required to keep myself from freezing.
The sequel, however, has migrated to warmer climates. E.D.N. III has accumulated deserts and sprouted jungles, making it much more like a generic videogame planet instead of, well, Lost Planet. It also makes it possible for me to walk through water and sand with as little effect as when I passed through snow.

One of the most frustrating things about designing a world is that someone will always come along and criticize it. The days are too long. The nights aren't long enough. Weather patterns are erratic. The trees lack variety. Can't I play any poker game other than Hold 'Em? Why do the telephone poles look old and weathered when they've been newly installed? And what kind of cougar stalks somebody who has been firing a rifle for the past five minutes?
The designers of Red Dead Redemption have undertaken videogaming's most ambitious virtual world to date – an outdoor, open-ended Old West circa 1911. And while the game aims to simulate an actual environment, it also makes necessary concessions to videogame flow. The landscape is divided into several distinct climates, ranging from tumbleweed dry to boggy swamps, each within a few minutes ride from one another and all encircled by trains like a giant theme park.

My job is to mess things up. From the moment I parachuted onto the seething little South East Asian island nation of Panau, I've been causing trouble. I joined up with rebels as they seized a nuclear power plant. I jumped atop the white limousine of a politician as it sped down a snowy mountain. I grappled with a helicopter in flight and I sent a soldier's corpse cartwheeling with artillery fire. And whenever I needed another dozen grenades or a spare sawed-off shotgun, I just radioed my black market supplier and he airlifted them to my location like my own personal version of Wile E. Coyote's Acme catalog of chaos.

Silhouetted in cowboy boots and a broad-brimmed hat, with a katana flaring out alongside his duster, the hero on the cover of Red Steel 2 looks like he's ready to kill whatever life is left in the fusion of Western and Eastern imagery – the same mix of cultural clichés that the movie Sukiyaki Western Django did too well and anime like Afro Samurai have done too much.
But there's something elegant about the way that Red Steel 2 presents its cultural mashup. Cacti grow alongside bamboo. Tumbleweeds roll past torii. The breathy tones of a shakuhachi weave among the jangles of a guitar on the soundtrack. The juxtaposition of the two cultures isn't the starting point of the game – it's merely the backdrop to a form of combat that merges the two distinct styles of control made possible by the Wii Remote: shooting and swording.

The first time I saw MotoGP racing was in San Francisco. I had been invited to the launch of the PlayStation 2, and one of the games available for the system was called MotoGP. “A motorcycle racing game,” I thought as I sat down to test it. I revved my engine and accelerated toward the first curve.
As I turned, the bike tilted at an impossible angle. The rider's knee bowed down until it was inches above the racetrack that sped along like a vicious belt of sandpaper. I straightened my trajectory and the rider leaned to the other side as the bike veered across the track. I jammed my thumbstick the other way and the bike spun out of control, sliding sideways and spinning off the track.
For the first time on a console, racing was being simulated instead of sensationalized. Until MotoGP, most racing games made do with a cursory amount of physics. They were primarily distinguished by shortcuts, speed-boosts, banana peels and assault weapons. It took the processing power of the PS2 to make an intense, uncompromising game like MotoGP possible.

My first mistake was deciding to play as a catcher. The “My Player” feature, which joins Major League Baseball 2K10 in addition to its basic “play ball” mode, allows me to develop my own character from a generic nobody into a superstar. I assumed that catcher would be a good position to witness various hitters' styles and learn the idiosyncrasies that can tip off whether a pitcher is winding up for a fastball or a curve.
But the life of a “My Player” catcher isn't that insightful. The game only allowed me to play my turns at bat and my chances to run up and grab bunts. Not only did I not get to watch the entire game unfold, but I had very few opportunities to be an active part of the outfield. Trying to move from the bush leagues up to the big leagues was obviously going to be a long, slow stretch if I stayed behind home plate.

My people are the best people in the world. They are the best people in the world because they love me, their el presidente. And it is only natural that they should love me. After all, it is I who first looked at this little undeveloped island and saw potential. Where bare plains sat, I saw lush farmland. Where empty beaches baked in the sun, I saw the spread of visiting sunbathers' blankets.
I organized builders to construct tenements. I urged farmers to plant crops. Corn and papaya began to fill bellies. Immigrants arrived and I set them planting tobacco and pineapple. I invested heavily in factories where my people could roll and can it all, and our shipping dock grew full of profitable cheaply processed goods.

I knew Heavy Rain was going to be an artsy game as soon as it instructed me to take a piece of paper and fold it into an origami bird. Shortly thereafter I got to see a man's naked ass. By the time the game's female shower scene happened – with the camera swirling around the girl's breasts in intoxicated filmschool closeup – Heavy Rain had sunk so far into pretentious territory that I could tell without looking it had been made by the French.