Game On

First times are special. First kiss, first hearing of a song, first taste of a certain food – they're special because the second time around they might not be so good. The kiss turns out to be attached to a moron, soon everyone else is listening to the same stupid song and the food gets cold.
The first time I saw the undersea city of Rapture it was spectacular. The plate-glass windows were cracking under pressure and the residents had turned into crazed drug addicts. The decaying art-deco design and claustrophobic atmosphere made 2007's BioShock an unforgettable first-person shooter, and I was anxious to return for this year's sequel.

When we first meet Dante, he is midway through his life's journey, seated in a dark forest sewing a red cross across his bare pecs and up the ripples of his sixpack. It's not exactly how I envisioned the ardent pilgrim from The Divine Comedy. And it's certainly not the Dante depicted scowling down from his tomb in Florence. But the buff, barechested Dante is the ideal hero for a videogame in which the torments of Hell are depicted in robust, fleshy glory.
The designers of Dante's Inferno – the videogame – have taken the theologically bold stance of treating Hell like a real location, and its denizens as demons who can be decapitated and destroyed. The minions of Hell include unbaptized babies who skitter around with blades instead of arms, and obese men who spew gobs of bile and what looks like undigested food. Grim devils tower over the landscape, and Beatrice, Dante's beloved, spends much of the game in the nude.

There are two sides to every story. My life in Divinity II tells a part from both sides of the tale of Rivellon. I was trained in the arts of the Dragon Slayer. Using powers as mundane as swordsmanship and as arcane as mindreading, we scoured the land seeking to eradicate the ancient Dragon Knights.
Holdovers of ancient magic, the Dragon Knights were masters of both land and sky, able to take either human or dragon form. They were fearsome, legendary beings who had once betrayed the Divine of Rivellon, allowing for the rise of an ancient evil that we – fools – had forgotten.
Divinity II allows me to grow comfortable in my role as Dragon Slayer. I explore a glowing, picturesque corner of Rivellon, hacking apart goblins and rooting out corruption among the countryside militia. I creep through caves that glow blue with the light of phosphorescent fungi, and battle ghosts and skeletons in magical laboratories locked deep beneath churches.

The Saboteur must have sounded like a brilliant idea when it was explained to executives at Electronic Arts, the game's publisher. “Like Grand Theft Auto, but set in Nazi-occupied France,” I imagine the pitch. “And the main character can climb buildings and dash along rooftops like Assassin's Creed, but instead of some quasi-mythical organization, he's fighting for the resistance. He can liberate Paris.”
Sean, the game's Irish hero, heaves himself from window-ledge to window-ledge with tireless drudgery. When climbing down, he unfailingly raises his arms all the way up before dropping them to catch the next ledge, resulting in slow descents intermingled with fast falls. On the ground he's not much more graceful. When he jumps, it looks like he's riding a small invisible elevator up and down. He can enter “sneak” mode, which has almost nothing to do with sneaking, but certainly seems to dial down the Nazi's computer-controlled hearing.

Having already exploited most of the good jokes inherent in a robotic space universe, the Ratchet & Clank franchise was forced to exploit all the bad jokes for A Crack in Time. That's a shame. I wanted to laugh more. But A Crack in Time seems much more concerned with dramatizing the series' storyline and unfolding the history of Ratchet & Clank's roles in a universe that – more than ever – seems so fake as to be beyond cartoonish.
Every object in the game looks lit from within, like a backlit beer advertisement – the kind with animated waterfalls. The colors are so intense it's as though a giant bag of Skittles had been torn open, eaten and then another bag torn open and spilled onscreen, scattering lemon, lime, blueberry and cherry colors under the influence of a mounting sugar rush. Even the game's obligatory dirt-colored junkyard level looks as though it were made out of caramel and nougat.

I'm writing this in a sweat – the cool kind of sweatthat comes from several hours of physical activity in the rancid heat of southern California's L.A. River – which despite its name is really a meandering aqueduct of ridges, ditches, basins and bowls. It'san ideal environment for skateboarding, and Tony Hawk RIDE uses it as an early racetrack. Like all the cities and skateparks in the game, it has its secrets and sweet spots. I've been skating through its tangle of asphalt for the past few hours trying to find the best route through the racetrack, and it's making me sweat.

I'm not sure if it's THE flu or H1N1 that I've got, but I'm doing fine now, thank you. I rather liked the term “Swine Flu,” because right now, feeling better, I'm pigging out.
Anyway, it's about as backhanded as a compliment can get, but one of the best things that I can say about Tekken 6 is that it held my attention in the midst of a flame-bright flu while brawling, head-to-head, one of videogaming's greatest icons.

I don't think of DJs as being particularly heroic. Recently, the best-known examples – DJ AM and Samantha Ronson – have been famous for OD-ing and dating Lindsay Lohan respectively – acts that require a certain fortitude, to be sure, but are hardly heroic.
I understand the heroism of guitarists. Guitar Hero gets me standing up in my living room, rocking my hips and scowling at my fingers while I play a plastic “guitar.” Whenever I screw up, the music sounds like crap. And when I'm rocking, I'm synced with the music in a physically interdependent way – like dancing, but in my case more coordinated.

They say the clothes make the man. But on planet Pandora I think it's the guns that make the man. And the woman too. After all, it doesn't matter what gender you are or what you wear when midget psychos begin spewing out of a corrugated-tin shack like demented clowns tumbling from a nightmare car. As the little axe-waving maniacs come giggling, the only thing that matters is having the right gun.
Borderlands describes itself as an RPS – a role-playing shooter, combining a role-playing game with a first-person shooter. The result is a game in which guns define players more than any other statistics. Normally in a shooter, anyone who picks up a shotgun is potentially the equal of anyone else who has picked up the same type of shotgun. But Borderlands randomly generates hundreds of thousands of weapons, each with unique statistics, and scatters them through Pandora's post-apocalyptic landscape.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves begins with a dramatic letdown. Nate Drake, a young treasure-hunting adventurer (sort of Indiana Jones with hair gel), awakens bleeding on a red velvet seat in an old passenger train that is dangling off the edge of a cliff in the Himalayas. Suddenly Drake's seat falls, taking him with it. Tumbling out of the train car's back door, Drake manages to grab onto a rail, leaving him hanging above an icy gray abyss. While the train creaks and moans overhead, it's my job to quickly guide him upwards to safety.