Game On

So Timbaland – now that we're working together, do you mind if I just call you Timba? – anyway, look, we need to take your career in a new direction. I'm not talking about the tweeny music you're producing with Miley Cyrus or those oldster collaborations with Madonna. The record industry is dead. Forget the cellphone album – that was an idiotic idea. The future is in videogames.
Don't laugh. Music videogames go way back. Haven't you heard of that old electronic game Simon? And a few years ago there was MTV Music Generator 2 for the PS2. It was pretty good. Had players moving blocks of sound around – you know, beats, melodies, snippets of bassline – the same kinds of sounds that you juggle around every day. Real music producer stuff made easy.

Problem: A prisoner, a bully and a lawyer are all in hell – represented in Scribblenauts as an island of dull grey brick floating in flaming lava. Above them hovers heaven – a red-carpeted platform topped with pillars, parapets and a golden castle with an angel hovering overhead. Without changing their lifestyles, I must save the bad guys.
Solution: I decide to try building a stairway to heaven. I open Scribblenauts' virtual keyboard and type “STAIRWAY.” Immediately a small brown wooden staircase appears on the screen. I slide it next to the prisoner and he floats upwards through the air, landing in heaven, followed by the bully and the lawyer.

The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane – or just Arkham to the good citizens of Gotham – is the semi-permanent address of some of the world's most celebrated criminals. The Penguin, Two-Face and The Riddler have all made the crumbling madhouse-mansion their home at one time or another. And most of them have escaped, only to be captured and hauled back by their dedicated nemesis Batman.
But at the beginning of Batman: Arkham Asylum, the most famous inmate can't wait to get back inside. Joker has been caught again by Batman, and he's delighted that his old foe is escorting him back – so delighted that he promptly escapes and rolls out the welcome wagon. Within minutes, Joker has released the institution's collection of psychos and sociopaths. The inmates are running the asylum.

Professor Layton is a British professor of archaeology, sort of Indiana Jones in a top hat. As the hero of a trilogy of games (The Diabolical Box is the second to arrive stateside) he's become popular amongst gamers, a group of people who are eager to solve puzzles, the biggest of which is: Since I own a DS, what do I play on it?Professor Layton's answer to that conundrum is: Puzzles! The Layton games are full of brainteasers – math problems, mazes, logic puzzles and screen searches. They are scattered between episodes in a semi-animated story in which the professor and his chipper sidekick – the eerily unblinking Luke – solve the mystery behind the death of the professor's old teacher.

I've been shooting Nazis for 17 years, and never once have I needed to make time slow down. Or conjure up a mystic barrier. Guns have been good enough for killing Nazis since the invention of Nazis. And they've been good enough for me since Wolfenstein 3D, way back in 1992 – a Gen-X game if there ever was one, the precursor to Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, and the prototype for Halo and Call of Duty.
I'm not sure if the designers of Wolfenstein “The Reboot” meant for it to feel like an aging game from a generation ago, or if they were just being sloppy. On one hand, they use a fairly modern graphics engine (if you consider Quake 4 modern), so the game is light years beyond the big-flat-room appearance of Wolfenstein 3D. But in the new Wolfenstein the mouths on the digital characters chatter like robots. Fire billows in different, contradictory directions while managing to spread nowhere. Beams of light catch on my hand and gun, but I don't cast a shadow. It's as though a modern game were deliberately imitating the artless graphics of an earlier era.

Q: So, Madden, I've got to say that I feel like I've really gotten to know you. You've been around for most of my gaming life. You're a 21-year-old franchise now. Does that mean you're graduating from keggers to legal liquor? Or is Madden 10 just a $60 beer-run to update the team rosters?
A: Football hasn't really changed in the last 21 years, except in the roster. So it's important to have a realistic football game using real-world players. And I think this year that's apparent in more than just statistics. For example, big guys are now actually bigger. They've got bigger heads, more weight. Now when Hefty Mendoza tackles Bucky Underslung – or whatever their names are – it actually looks like a big guy wiping out a little guy.

Monsters have overrun the Snowy Mountains. Herbivorous Popo lumber across windswept ridges, defended by dense coats and scimitars of antlers.

A long ways from punch out. The shortest distance between two points is supposed to be a
straight line. But in boxing, as in life, things are rarely so direct. The
shortest distance between my fist at Point A and my foe's face at Point B might
occasionally be a simple jab. But it might also follow the curved path of a
hook, or the elbow bend of an uppercut. And all of these are woven into the
ducking and dodging of the fighters, tangling a simple line of attack into a
serpentine swarm.

In an attempt to mimic this dance of missed and mixed-up
connections, the controls in Fight Night Round 4 avoid the
direct simplicity of button-pushing. Every major punch is thrown with the
action of the right thumbstick. An angled snap forward throws a straight or a
jab. Swinging it out and then up delineates the action of a hook. Likewise,
down and around initiates and imitates the arc of an uppercut.

Blocks are controlled in the same way, using the same thumbstick
with the addition of a trigger being clutched. As a result, not only does the
action of the thumbstick correspond to the actual actions of the boxer's body,
but the use of one control for both offense and defense also recreates the same
dilemma that a fighter must confront: how to simultaneously attack and defend
with the same pair of fists.  

Take the briefcase and run.I was clear-headed and sane when I arrived, driving Giggs my Toyota Celica and carrying my briefcase Catherine. But on Lospass Island, everything shifted towards the strange. The sun sat perpetually overhead, casting a never-dilating disc of shadow beneath my feet. Trees, lush and tropical from a distance, thinned into non-existence, then emerged obliquely as I passed. And the island itself looked as though a tiny digital image had been enlarged and laid upon the ground, the pixels assuming monstrous proportions, stretching into a blurred and bloated landscape that was only sensible if viewed from far above-say, from a jet plane moments before it exploded.

Every day concluded with that horrific bloom overhead-plumes of flame and a stain of smoke. I knew it was a disaster that I had been summoned to stop, but I couldn't even leave my hotel, the "Flower, Sun, and Rain," with guests blocking my way, insisting that I help them find things they had mislaid-briefcases, balls, cocktails, afro wigs. Only the girl in white didn't trouble me as she glided through my dreams trailing my trail after her pink crocodile Christina. And then the phone would ring, my coffee would arrive and the day would begin again until again it ended-BOOM-up in the bright turquoise sky.

choose the form of your destructor.Dear Garrett,

I cheered when I saw your name listed atop Atari's credits as "Producer" of Ghostbusters: The Video Game. Congratulations on getting such an important job on such a high-profile project, and bravo for playing a part in the development of the defining art form of the 21st Century. It's always great to see a friend succeed.
It must have been a finicky job. I noticed multiple companies credited with the development of the game. Unfortunately, having one company design the main game and another design the multiplayer missions kept the multiplayer gameplay segregated from the storyline in a way that didn't feel Ghostbuster-y at all. Everyone knows the Ghostbusters are a group. Their camaraderie is what made the movie so charming, and I regretted having to play through the campaign with nothing more than computer-controlled comrades on my side.