MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Noted game developer Warren Spector has a long list of things that game designers can do to improve storytelling in video games. But one of those the force behind Deus Ex and Epic Mickey wants is to improve the quality of non-combat artificial intelligence characters.

These computer-controlled characters are just too dumb, especially in comparison to the more refined and flexible combat A.I. characters that try to kill you as the player. Once the non-combat characters are fixed, game designers will be able to make big leaps toward better stories in games, and that could lead to a wider audience — and a less bored community of hardcore gamers.

Spector spoke at an interactive storytelling conference at the Computer History Museum. The event was sponsored by the Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The aim is to guide the next generation of video game creators. Spector’s annoyance with non-combat AI is a pet peeve.

“Can we please start working on non-combat A.I.?” he said in his keynote speech. “We spend all of our cycles in each new hardware generation to create graphics people expect. But how do we make characters act better?”

If you’re a male character and you walk into the women’s bathroom, the characters around you should be smart enough to react to that. If you spill a drink, and it splashes on another character, that character should react, Spector said. More difficult still are tasks like creating A.I. characters who act like spurned lovers or would-be lovers. (The AI experts are working on this).

Creating better stories in games might seem like a solved problem, given the success of titles like Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead, and BioShock Infinite. These have been huge commercial successes.

“If that was enough, I would not be here wasting your time,” he said.

But these are still the exceptions. Spector spent most of his time talking about what game designers can learn from other media such as movies, TV shows, comic books, and tabletop role-playing games — and how they should avoid the pitfalls of those media and truly exploit what is unique and different about video games.

Borrowing from other media has its dangers. He said that cinematic games remove the control of the story from the player and place it in the hands of the game designer. Sometimes it works, like in Heavy Rain, but often it bores the player and fails to exploit one of the advantages of video games: the notion that every player can create or experience their own version of the story.

“When you [as gamer designer] take control of the story, you remove control from the player,” he said.

He noted that David Cage’s Heavy Rain had enough story in it for the equivalent of five movies. Games tend to have six or more hours of game play, requiring a lot more story material than two-hour movies.

Games depart from movies in offering players choices. They can branch in different directions and deliver consequences for the choices. Players can learn a lot about themselves that way.

“Games offer the chance for players to find themselves,” Spector said. “Why would we deny them that? I tell designers is your job is to get yourselves off the stage so players can get on it.”

Spector recently stirred a controversy when he said that there was no need for Bethesda to create another first-person shooter game based on Wolfenstein. He didn’t repeat that notion, and in fact he clarified those remarks later.

But he said, “I am saying there is more we can do. Janet Murray observes that games include more building blocks of storytelling than any single medium has ever offered us. How can we not use it?”

Those building blocks include words, images, sound, space, skill, thought, and choice.

Here’s some of Spector’s other suggestions for improving storytelling:

• Characters have to be better. He had high praise for Elizabeth, your constant companion in BioShock Infinite, but he says mainstream media still views a lot of game characters as flat.
• Create worlds, not sets. Spector said, “Games are about telling a story through the exploration of space.”
• Create the equivalent of a virtual dungeon master. Much like in Dungeons & Dragons games, where you had a smart human game master, stories should be changed on the fly and adapt to the player’s level of success. To make a game feel real, the game has to change in response to a player’s choices and progress.
• Tell deeper stories. “Stories should be more than just what happens on the surface,” he said. There should be a subtext, or something below the surface. “Don’t waste my time as a player,” he said. “In Deus Ex, it is about what do you want the world to be like.”
• Games can transport players to other worlds. You can immerse the player in those worlds, respond to the player choices, and repeat the actions in different ways in real time.
• Ask questions. Game developers can raise questions for gamers to answer. Spector said, “The question is how much authorship do you share with players? How much creativity do you set aside to let the players express theirs?” Game designers don’t, however, have to answer questions in the same ways that movies or TV shows do with their story plots.
• Make games about more than skill. Older players won’t be the best at mastering game controls. If you reduce the skill required to play a game, you can reach more people.
• Game stories can vary from the roller-coaster game (where you feel like you are on rails, restricted from moving off a linear path) to sandboxes, (like Civilization), where you can do anything you want. A hybrid of the two can work, where the game designer defines the end points to Act I, II, III, etc., and then lets the player figure out how to get to those end points so they can progress to the next part of the story.

To inspire game designers, Spector said, “We are living through the birth of a new form of storytelling,” quoting Jonathan Gottschall, a literary scholar.

“Video games have been around for 40 years, but you have a chance to drive it and change it as a medium,” Spector said. “That chance comes along once or twice a century.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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A new trailer for Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls, the developer’s PlayStation 3 follow-up to the cinematic Heavy Rain, premiered tonight at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. It’s the second time a video game has participated in the festival, following L.A. Noire two years ago.

The trailer lays out the basic premise of Beyond, but it also gives us plenty more footage to whet our appetites for the title’s October release.

Ellen Page (who starred in films like Juno and Inception) stars as Jodie Holmes, a young girl mysteriously linked to an entity she calls Aiden, who she can talk to telepathically and rely on for help throughout the game. Beyond covers 15 years of Jodie’s life — from her early years to her troubled adulthood — as she tries to figure out her place in the world (being able to talk to a spirit isn’t really a recipe for normalcy, after all).

The trailer begins with Jodie calling a friend, Nathan Dawkins (played by Willem Dafoe), who serves as her surrogate father after her parents apparently abandon her. We see glimpses of Jodie’s childhood, including a vicious scene with her father calling her a monster, as well as her training with the CIA.

David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream and the game’s director, joined Page and other members of the cast to show off more than 30 minutes of the game’s footage tonight. Look out for more coverage around that soon. Beyond: Two Souls debuts on the PS3 on Oct. 8.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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All right, quick-time events. You’ve served your purpose. Please exit the premises, or I’ll have you tased. Yes, that means now. Yes, Tasers hurt. A lot. How do I know? Well, I’ll tell you this: Never take your pants off when you’re — wait a minute; quit stalling. And stop crying. You’re embarrassing yourself. Look, you’ve had a good run, but let’s face it: You were a stopgap at best. No, you don’t get a severance package. Stop giving me the finger; it’s juvenile.

Best I can tell, game designers have used quick-time events in the same way that rednecks use duct tape. They asked themselves how they could best convey complex in-game cinematic moments in a way that still engages the player, and (after three beers and a hearty shrug) decided that a series of predetermined button presses at just the right moment could hold the whole thing together while they waited for a part to come in the mail.

Unfortunately, it took over a decade to get the part, and in the meantime, they had company over and had to make the duct tape look attractive, so they decided to draw some designs on it. Then they forgot it was there for a while, and by the time the part showed up, they’d already started doing meth and had completely forgotten what the damn thing was for and — OK, this metaphor seems to be getting away from me. Let’s take a step back.

I don’t know that quick-time events were ever intended to be a permanent solution, but they’ve certainly become pervasive. If you have a narrative-heavy video game, then by god you’re going to have some quick-time events. How else are players supposed to feel like they’re part of an interactive storytelling experience? Actually control it? Madness.

Not that we can really blame game designers. They’ve been grappling with the magnificence of their own creation. Utilizing a relatively new artistic medium to tell stories in ways never before told isn’t exactly a precise science. As graphics, physics, story quality, acting, control, and every other aspect of game creation has improved and evolved over the past decade, the delivery method for these cinematic moments has remained decidedly unchanged.

My reaction to quick-time events in modern games is akin to watching a prerendered trailer. The hero does amazing things that I’m completely incapable of doing once it’s my turn to guide the action. This disappointment was one of the very reasons I joined the masses in uproarious applause after seeing the first demo of Watch Dogs last May. I knew it was gameplay all along, but it wasn’t until the protagonist entered a car and sped off into the night that I realized Watch Dogs was a sandbox game. At any point the player could have veered off in a completely different direction, handling the presented situation in her own way. The inherent cinematic elements of the game would then turn those choices into something amazing.

Source: Sega AM2

More amazing than dodging cardboard boxes by pressing “A”? Witchcraft!

Time is eventually going to make a fool of quick-time events (there’s a really bad pun in there somewhere). They served their purpose for a while, sure, but we seem to have broken through the barrier that was preventing us from experiencing in-game narrative in a truly unique way. We’ll have it all: The cinematic benefits of quick-time-event-driven experiences like Uncharted or Heavy Rain and the gameplay mechanics of a sandbox title. No more strings to hold us up. The player is left in complete control of the cinematic aspects of gameplay. The story will be written for us, but the nature and quality of the action will be a direct product of our play style.

And that would seem to be rub, wouldn’t it? To break the chains of Hollywood’s linear storytelling guidelines while utilizing its refined means of character conveyance. The story must be told to us, but we must simultaneously tell ourselves the story. We must control the actions and decisions of the character but not in such a way that completely derails a well-crafted tale.

Or at least be tricked into thinking that we’re in control.

In February, Gabe Newell took to the stage with J.J. Abrams to discuss methods of storytelling in film and video games. In the midst of some awkward scripting, bad jokes, and clips of movies that everyone has seen and games everyone has played, there was one absolutely brilliant insight from Gabe Newell in regards to Portal 2.

We had to spend a bunch of time with the Portal 2 ending … to the point where not only did it seem possible that you could to shoot a portal to the moon but [that] it was the obvious choice, and yet the player felt incredibly creative for coming up with that as a solution … . When players are constantly trying to optimize, we give them a focus that allows them to isolate on the variable that we want them to optimize.

I felt clever when I shot that portal to the moon. There was no other decision to make, but for some reason it was my decision. Though, I do like Newell’s use of the word “allow” when speaking of manipulative methods of controlling the player’s decisions — quietly making us tell Portal 2′s story with our own hands. Still, this is a beautifully conceived, brilliantly executed replacement mechanism for the shoehorned monstrosity that is the quick-time event.

Source: Forbes

You magnificent bastard.

Part of me can envision a world in which quick-time events still have their place. A world in which the iPhone generation saddles its withered, girdled frame to a dusty old 3D TV in the game room next to the ping-pong table and mindlessly presses square, triangle, circle, or x while they wait for that hot nurse to bring them their meds. They hope that their grandkids are coming for a visit today, but a combination of dementia and — “Ooh, look at that Nathan Drake and his toned buttox! Hey, Skyler! You remember the good old days when games were really games and not these brain-operated whatevs that the kids are using these days? Lawl!” Then their colostomy bag bursts. And while that might sound a little depressing, fret not: It’s pizza day in the commissary!

I just made myself sad. I’m going to go do something youthful and reckless while I play with my smart phone.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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At 57, Warren Spector is a famous and unemployed game developer. At last week’s DICE Summit, Spector gave a talk about his art form and acknowledged the “elephant in the room.” Disney had just shut down his video game company, Junction Point Studios, the maker of the Epic Mickey series.

He isn’t talking about exactly why that happened, but it’s no secret that the studio’s second release, Epic Mickey: The Power of Two, didn’t sell well. Spector made a lot of comments about how he felt like the oldest game designer, though he noted the presence of many “gray beards” in the room listening to his talk. Spector was understandably downbeat during his presentation, and he intimated that he felt like he was the oldest person still making games. But he found some silver lining in his tired but wise message.

“I worked with an amazing team on amazing projects,” he said. “I got to visit Disneyland as a contributor to the company.”

Quoting inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Spector said, “When one door closes, another opens. Another aphorism is more relevant. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine.’ Bob Dylan said it in 1965, and it is still true today. I have seen so much chaos in the last 35 years, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Being unemployed has given Spector a chance to reflect on the past. Lots of console-game developers are closing now. But Spector remembers how people thought gaming had no future when arcades died out. When the PC supplanted the Apple II, fans thought that was the end of games as well. Massively multiplayer online titles were going to put an end to single-player releases. Spector has heard it all, yet the interactive-entertainment industry continues to grow and spread out in all directions.

After Junction Point shut down, a programmer asked Spector if he wanted to retire. But Spector knew he wouldn’t.

“I still have stuff I want to make,” he said. “It was an eye-opening question. I am close to an end of a career. I’m not ready to retire yet.”

Spector believes, like Quantic Dream’s David Cage, that developers should grow up and figure out how to reach wider audiences with more diverse content. But he disagreed with every solution that Cage recommended in his own DICE talk, such as creating games with meaning.

Showing a slide of a violent scene, Spector said, “Some games should not be made.” He acknowledged that a time existed when he was young where a title only needed “transgressive adrenaline rush and spectacle.” Now he wants content that is relevant to him today, with intellectual offerings like Cage’s Heavy Rain and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead.

Spector said, “I have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords. I really don’t need to go there anymore. I want content that is relevant to my life. That is set in the real world.”

“If we are going to reach a broader audience, we have to think beyond teen boys and girls, about things that are relevant to normal humans,” he said.

Right now, games appeal to people who have a lot of time and the ability to master skills best done by 16-year-olds.

In his 50s, Spector feels confident in his abilities and doesn’t give a damn what others think. Emotionally, he’s in a good place. But he recognizes that time is scarce.

“You don’t have time to make mistakes anymore. You value passion over analytics,” he said.

He said that it’s OK to rely on others and slow down. It’s OK for him to think about helping others accomplish their goals and give back.

“Know thyself but be careful,” he said. Spector explained that you don’t want to work on a certain kind of game for 30 years because that is your habit. You have to think about what else you can do.

“You should push aside those geekish things quicker than I did because you don’t have as much time as you think,” he said.

And he has come to appreciate the importance of the word “legacy.”

He said, “Leave something behind. Most people who are working for 30 years. You are creating something new and different the world has never seen. Think of your legacy.”

What will he do when he is in his 60s?

“I cannot wait to find out,” he said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Cage, the chief exec of movie-like game developer Quantic Dream (the makers of alternative titles such as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain), is making an ambitious game dubbed Beyond: Two Souls, which received accolades last year at the E3 game trade show. He gave a talk at the DICE Summit about the “Peter Pan syndrome,” or how the game industry’s refusal to grow up as other industries have.

“The ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ describes a person who is socially immature and anxious at the idea of becoming an adult,” he said. “They refuse to grow up.”

As evidence for this, Cage pointed to the list of the 30 best-selling games of all time. Nintendo had 21 of these, such as Super Mario Bros., mostly directed at kids. The Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto series accounted for a number of the game on the list. And the lone casual title was Kinect Adventures.

This means that the winning genres are kids, casual, and violent action games.

If you compare the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D to Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012, you see the tremendous evolution of realistic graphics. But the games, he said, are pretty much the same.

“You kill people before they kill you,” Cage said. “We use the same paradigms. You master this system to beat the computer or your friends. Same worlds. Same games. No surprise, we have the same audience.”

Cage said the game industry should change because the landscape is changing quickly, with big changes in digital distribution that brings more competition. On top of that, the competition for entertainment time in a world of many platforms is getting even more fierce.

Cage’s prescription for the game industry follows.

1. He said we have to make games for a wider audience.

2. Change our paradigms. “We cannot keep doing same games all the time,” he said. “Violence and platforms are not the only way. We have to decide that as an industry.” He added, “If the main character can’t hold a gun, designers don’t know what to do. How do I play?

3. Remember the importance of meaning. He asked, “What do we have to say?” He said games should address real-world themes like politics or homosexuality, should let authors in. All real-world themes should come into use.

“It will leave an imprint and keep you thinking about it after you have finished,” he said.

4. Become accessible. “Let’s focus on minds, not on thumbs,” he said. “Who cares how fast you can move your fingers?” He said the journey is important, not the challenge.

5. Bring other talent on board. Like filmmakers.

6. Establish new relationships with Hollywood. Games shouldn’t just be licensed products. “This is not the right way to build a relationship,” he said. “Games can be a respected medium now. Time has come for a constructive, balanced new partnership.”

7. Changing our relationship with censorship. “Sometimes I use violence, sometimes I use sex,” he said. “Now I have someone looking over my shoulder saying what you can’t do. If it is OK in a film, why is it not OK in a game?” The answer is games are “interactive” or geared toward kids. “As long as violence and sex are put in context, they should be fine,” he said. At the same time, he is shocked by games that try to one-up each other with increasing levels of violence. “We should stop doing this, because this is a matter of being responsible to ourselves and society,” he said. “If we don’t want to be accused of being responsible every time something terrible happens, we should be responsible.”

8. The role of the press should evolve from reviewers to critics. “Press are very clever people who analyze the industry,” he said. “On the other side of the spectrum, people give just scores. You have a camera bug and so you get a 5-out-of-10 [review score]. This is not press. Where is the analysis or thinking? Being a critic is a very serious job.”

9. The importance of gamers. When you buy games, he said, “You place a vote on where the future of games should go.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Games don’t have to be based on movies or sports teams to feature real humans. As 3D rendering technology advances, more and more developers turn to flesh-and-bone actors, and models to give life to their protagonists and antagonists.

In the case of Far Cry 3′s Vaas Montenegro (top image), Ubisoft hired Canadian actor Michael Mando to portray, voice, and provide motion capture for the sadistic madman as well as star in promotional material. Vaas’s appearance (combined with Mando’s performance) give the title an extra layer of realism.

I made a list of 20 celebrity sightings in modern video games with side-to-side images of their in-game models next to their real faces. Hover the cursor over the image below to launch the gallery.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Last week we exposed some of the most rampant cover art clichés in gaming. Well, it only seems fair that we celebrate the most beautiful and original images that have ever graced the boxes of interactive entertainment.

The gallery below contains games across multiple eras of the industry’s history, but they all feature covers that beg for a second glance. Also, if there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s that Japan is far better at this sort of thing than we Americans are.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Over the course of four hours across three Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press conferences, hardcore gamers submitted over 16,000 real-time impressions — a valuable set of data for anyone curious as to how fans felt about the most important announcements during the gaming industry’s biggest event of the year. Now that E3 is over, we can take the time to really dig into what they liked and didn’t like, learning some interesting lessons in the process.

For this study, we counted the positive and negative comments in the hugely popular NeoGAF gaming forums, charting the reactions minute-by-minute in the graph below. The basic rule of thumb: the more positive responses, the higher the reaction score and vice versa. In short, Sony received the most positive responses, well ahead of Microsoft and Nintendo…but the publisher didn’t exactly impress everyone.

Click for a full-size version. For a more detailed explanation of how we analyzed this data, please see the explanation at the end of this article.

What NeoGAF liked about the Sony press conference

NeoGAF reacted strongly to the following games: Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Assassin’s Creed III, and The Last of Us (for more on these or any products mentioned here, click the tags below). While they responded positively at first to Beyond: Two Souls, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Far Cry 3, and God of War: Ascension, opinion soured soon after their first mentions.

The community also reacted positively to Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and Kaz Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Corporation. Both have become heroes to the video game community. David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls), also received good feedback, if not as strong as the two Sony personalities.

The most positive reaction of the show came at the end of the The Last of Us demonstration. The presentation concluded with the game’s protagonist killing his enemy with a brutal shotgun blast to the face, at which point the community exploded with shock and amazement. In fact, this single moment would prove to be the most popular across all three press conferences. One could say that The Last of Us “won” E3 — an expression gamers are very fond of using.

What they didn’t like

As noted, NeoGAF responded poorly to long demonstrations, and goodwill for games quickly evaporated as they continued. The group gave mixed responses when Sony discussed PlayStation Plus and PlayStation 1 games coming to the handheld Vita.

The most negative reaction of Sony’s press conference occurred during the Book of Spells demonstration. The community complained throughout this Wonderbook presentation, and comments hit a low point during the eighth minute of the Book of Spells segment. They cited a variety of factors for their displeasure: that the game is for kids, it was motion controlled, it was augmented reality, it was boring, and the demo was too long. In fact, the segment was so unpopular that members posted 943 negative comments during the 11 minutes Sony featured Book of Spells, compared to 103 positive comments. It didn’t help that the live demo had technical hiccups, and the game didn’t work for a brief moment.

For more on how NeoGAF reacted to the E3 press conferences, check out the Microsoft and Nintendo studies.

How the scoring works

NeoGAF hosts a single message board thread for each press conference, where dozens of members comment throughout each show. I graded each comment as positive or negative, giving them scores of 1 or -1 respectively. Then I totaled the sum of these reactions for each discrete minute and plotted in the above chart. A high score means that the NeoGAF community liked what they saw; a score close to zero represents mixed reactions; and a low score means that they were not enjoying the show at that moment.

Some notes on how I scored each response:

• I made no distinction between really positive or somewhat positive comments — likewise for negative comments. Each was given either a score of 1 or -1.
• While I made every effort to understand the various memes and inside jokes that make up a large part of the responses, if I could not understand a response, I would not score it.
• In the event that a comment employed obvious sarcasm, I scored it to reflect the original intent of the commentator. If the sarcasm was not clear, I relied on the literal meaning of the comment. Fortunately, the very expressive NeoGAF community rarely employed subtle sarcasm.
• When comments included positive and negative observations, I accounted for the more immediate reaction to preserve a more real-time response. An example: “I liked the game that was shown at the beginning of the show, but this game now is bad” would have a negative score.
• Many comments weren’t scored as they offered no opinion. These included clarifications, questions, discussions between members unrelated to the press conference, and inquiries into whether one game or another would be shown at a later time.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“Death is the biggest mystery of mankind,” said David Cage, founder of the game studio Quantic Dream as he announced the company’s upcoming project, Beyond. “We have our hopes, fears, and doubts, but what lies beyond?”

Beyond is the 15 year story of Jody Holmes, a girl plagued by spirits. The decisions players make will impact how her life unfolds, much like Quantic Dream’s previous game, Heavy Rain.

Quantic Dream is known for using motion capture to enhance the emotional realism in its projects, and Beyond continues this trend. Actress Ellen Page plays Jody, and from the screen shot above, she looks amazing.

The demo during Sony’s press conference began with Jody sitting in an interrogation room as a police officer tries to get her to talk.

“I found you by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.  Was there an accident?” Jody remains silent until he leaves the room to check the missing persons list. As he goes, a coffee cup on the table in front of Jody, which had previously been shaking, flies against the wall and shatters.

When he leaves, Jody utters “They’re coming” before a SWAT team bursts in looking for her.

Jody is on the run when we meet her, and something dangerous and clearly supernatural is keeping her going. The demo ends with a series of scenes showing her escape. “Tell them to leave me the f*** alone,” she tells a downed SWAT agent. “Because next time, I’ll kill everyone.”

Something dark, and definitely outside the realm of the living, is haunting Jody.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Dead Island: trailer of the year?

Few game trailers have elicited as emotional a response as this one, for Dead Island. Moody, subtle and emotionally rich, it turned out to be everything the game was not. Luckily, beating zombies around the head with an oar still proved a lot of fun. As a means of grabbing the attention of the gaming public, this trailer certainly proved its worth, helping Dead Island achieve healthy sales this year, with a possible sequel on the way. Don’t even look at this one if you’re under age.

Mario Kart hits Paris

French comedian Remi Gaillard decided to give the real world another taste of Mario Kart this year, following up his previous turn as everyone’s favourite Italian plumber, back in 2008. Taking to the streets (and shops) of Paris, with bananas in tow, Gaillard somehow survives his madcap race intact. Kids: don’t try this at home.

LongLivePlay

Sony rolled out all its stars, and then some, for this great advert, which manages to perfectly communicate the visceral thrill of becoming immersed in a gaming world. Not all the characters on show are exclusive to the Playstation brand, and there are plenty of cheeky cameos to look out for. A reward from Sony, for ‘Michaels’ everywhere.

Reworking the Angry Birds theme

Pamplamoose is a California based indie duo centered around musicians Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn. Here the duo present their unique take on the Angry Birds theme tune, which has over 3 million views on YouTube. That means only 497 million more Angry Birds players are yet to hear this gloriously chaotic version of the contemporary classic gaming theme.

Stunning Portal live action short – No Escape

Surely a contender for best ever fan made film, Portal No Escape is a wondeful sideways look at the Portal universe, by filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg. If Valve ever think of getting into the movie business, they should seriously think of signing this guy up. Breathtaking stuff.

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The relatively nascent social network and smartphone platforms have begun to challenge the consoles and the PC. But rather than siphon away players, these platforms are helping games reach new players. With the list below of the year’s top game releases, you can begin to see how these new forces are reshaping the industry. Nintendo had some decent hits but failed to produce a game that resonated with everybody. By contrast, Angry Birds was a phenomenal success, with more than 50 million downloads. Never before has an iPhone game climbed so high on everyone’s favorite list. The progression is clear: iPhone gaming has hit a major milestone with its first blockbuster hit. And the games are getting better and better.

The common thread between the traditional console games and the emerging titles on the iPhone is that the best games keep players engaged, but also leave them the option of playing for a short time. These games give you the option of playing for 10 minutes or three hours. They can hold your attention because the quality is outstanding. The duality of quality and time efficiency makes games more accessible and more likely to draw in the millions of people who profess not to have the time to play. Even the longer games — such as the 30-hour Red Dead Redemption — can be broken down into shorter missions. As long as games focus on quality, engagement and accessibility, they will keep gaining a larger share of our entertainment time.

Check out the list and vote for your favorites in the poll at the bottom. Also, please leave comments explaining your vote. I’ve also included in the poll other titles that were popular this year.

1. Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar Games.
Publisher Take-Two Interactive
Available on: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Average Metacritic rating: 95 out of 100
Our score: 97 out of 100

This could have been a spaghetti Western, but instead it turned out to be an epic. Red Dead Redemption is a great example of cinematic storytelling in a genre of video games that hasn’t been done to death. It stands out as a Wild West game the way that Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven stood out as a movie. And it shows that the “open world” style of Grand Theft Auto works wonderfully well in the Wild West. You play John Marston, a farmer-turned gunslinger who has to hunt down an outlaw in order to save his family. You can wander through a vast fictional turn-of-the-century Western world full of towns, hideouts, grave robbers, swindlers, lawmen, and everything else you need to make a Wild West setting come to life. The graphics are beautiful, the characters are memorable, and the Dead Eye slow-motion gunslinging makes you feel like a quick-draw artist.

The variety of activities — from horse racing to animal hunting — keeps you from getting bored. You can take on a hundred bad guys with a Gatling gun or just sit back in the evening and watch the wild critters roam across a moon-blanched prairie. There is so much ambient life out on the prairie that just looking at the landscape is relaxing — until a cougar attacks you. The whole time, you feel you’re making choices with consequences. You can wind up being a feared gunslinger, or a respected do-gooder.

What worked in this game’s favor was that there weren’t dozens of Western games on the market. Game developer Rockstar spent an estimated $100 million over six years to make this game, which many called a masterpiece. I felt that it delivered on every front –right up to its ending — and that’s why it’s the best game of the year.

2. Call of Duty: Black Ops
Developer: Treyarch
Publisher: Activision Blizzard
Available on: PS 3, Xbox 360, and PC
Average Metacritic rating: 88 out of 100.
Our score: 95 out of 100.

This game was just a hair away from being No. 1. It had a great and fresh setting in the Cold War, but it was just a tad too familiar to win the top spot. If you played last year’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, you could very well come away feeling that this game is an incremental improvement, which explains its relatively low Metacritic score. I didn’t mind the familiarity because I can never get enough of Call of Duty. Neither can anyone else. The title sold more than $650 million worth in its first five days of sales, breaking all records. It had an unfair advantage since its predecessor, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, was the previous bestselling video game of all time. But last year’s lousy story in Modern Warfare 2 sorely tested me as a fan of every installment of this series. And I was quite worried when the mainstay Call of Duty development studio, Infinity Ward, melted down amid a dispute between founders and executives. But Call of Duty Black Ops had a strong movie-like story at its core.

The single-player campaign focuses on a brainwashed covert agent and his CIA handler who embark on a series of clandestine missions behind enemy lines to stop a rogue Soviet conspiracy to use nerve gas against America. The agents have access to all sorts of experimental weapons such as Dragon’s Breath, or shotgun ammo that sets its targets on fire, and a crossbow with explosive bolts. Put that together with the Cold War environments such as Vietnam and the music of the 1960s and you have the makings of a great combat game. The story unfolds a bit at a time, and you eventually get to a revelation, much as you do with a good blockbuster movie. The online multiplayer combat is especially addictive. You can play it for weeks after you finish the single-player game. (I’m a brigadier general at multiplayer level 42). I expect to play the multiplayer version for weeks, at least until the next major game forces me to quit. That means a lot of games launching in the wake of Black Ops will find that their potential audience is still a bit tied up.

3. Angry Birds
Developer: Rovio
Publisher: Chillingo and Rovio
Available on: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, Symbian, Palm Pre, Maemo
Our score: 94 out of 100

Everybody loves Angry Birds. During my Thanksgiving holiday, all of the kids were playing the iPhone game. I let my college-age nephew play it on an iPad and he was still playing it three hours later. The game has become the killer app of the iPhone, dominating the App Store for much of the year and launching phenomenally well on Android as well. The title comes at a special moment in time for the iPhone, since the smartphone is struggling to be recognized as a legitimate platform for real games. After Angry Birds, there can be no doubt that a mobile game can be as fun as the more traditional console and PC games. It stands out among 44,000-plus games on the App Store as uniquely fun. With Angry Birds plush toys on the market and talk of an animated movie, this title has become a cultural phenomenon. For the iPhone, this moment is a lot like when YouTube took off after kids started creating silly eruptions by combining Diet Coke and Mentos. The videos became viral and YouTube cemented itself in the culture as a site for quirky user-generated videos.

As a game, Angry Birds couldn’t be simpler. The evil green pigs steal the eggs of the birds, who become very angry. Seeking to retrieve their eggs, they slingshot themselves into the fortresses of the pigs. The touchscreen of the iPhone was a perfect interface for the slingshot mechanic, which was made all the better with accurate physics. Other games used the slingshots before, but Angry Birds was polished. When you fail to destroy the pigs, they smile and snicker. That’s enough to make you want to play it over and over again until you wipe out the pigs. Rovio had made 50 other games before Angry Birds. They finally created one that resonated universally. All I can say is, watch out, Nintendo, there’s a new player in town that understands how to make games that appeal to everyone from three-year-olds up to octogenarians.

4. Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment/Activision Blizzard
Available on: PC
Average Metacritic rating: 93 out of 100.
Our score: 93 out of 100.

Blizzard’s greatest asset is patience. The first StarCraft debuted in 1998. It was a real-time strategy game where you played one of three races fighting for control of the galaxy. You create units to collect resources, then spend those resources building up your base and your armed forces. Then you let them loose against the enemy and fight on multiple fronts until one side gives up out of exhaustion. The first game sold 11 million units and essentially became the national sport of South Korea, where professional gamers still play it today.

Blizzard waited 12 years before launching the sequel. It was worth the wait. The game play was refined and the enemies were perfectly balanced through years of playtesting. And Blizzard connected the tissues of the story together much better, thanks to the heavy use of animated cut scenes that were movie-like. The cinematic scenes immerse you in the story and make you care about the characters and what happens to them. With superb multiplayer combat, I have no doubt that people will be playing this game for years, and not just in South Korea.

5. Mass Effect 2
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Available on: Xbox 360, PC, PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 96 out of 100
My score: 90 out of 100

The story behind this sci-fi game is a lot like the classic film The Seven Samurai, except there are 11 tales about the team members that you, as Commander Jon Shepard, have to recruit for a suicide mission to save the galaxy. It is a blend of BioWare’s traditional role-playing game with a lot of action blended in. You wander around the galaxy in what seems to be an open-ended universe, but the story pulls you into certain planets and scenes, where you encounter ethical dilemmas that force you to choose between doing what’s right, loyalty to your comrades, and fulfilling the ultimate mission of saving the galaxy. The game is at its best when it makes you feel like you’re in complete control of the direction of the story and that your choices will lead to the salvation of humankind in the galaxy.

The stories along the way are emotionally engaging, like the tale of the super-caffeinated scientist Mordin Solus, who turns out to have a conscience behind his dedication to science. The execution on this game was much better than the first, as I noted in my full review. The action sequences and battles are much more spellbinding than they were in the first title. If there’s a fault, it gets a little repetitive as you go through each character’s own tale and it is easy to predict that every character has some kind of deep dark secret. I’m glad to see EA’s shift to focus on high-quality games paying off in both critic scores and market sales.

6. Halo: Reach

Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 91 out of 100.
Our rating: 95 out of 100.

Bungie’s swan song for the Halo franchise wasn’t a disappointment. The latest game in the sci-fi series that began nearly a decade ago lived up to its promise. This prequel takes us back to the beginning of the Covenant war against humanity. It has an overarching sense of fatalism about it, since you know how the story turns out if you played the earlier games. But you still want to follow the journey that is full of individual acts of heroism within the larger tragedy of a losing war. You play a member of Noble Team, a group of Spartan III super-soldiers who have to defend the planet Reach. The action in this game is first-rate and full of variety. You get to shoot all sorts of weapons, drive different vehicles, take to the air and even to outer space. The combat scenes in zero gravity are cool. And the multiplayer game is first-rate, making the game last a lot longer. This series has seen more than 35 million units sold, mainly because it has become a part of the fabric of youth culture. Microsoft will try to pump out more Halo games with its internal studio, 343 Industries. We’ll see if it can keep the quality up as original developer Bungie moves on to a new fictional game universe.

7. Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Developer Firaxis Games
Publisher:2K Games label of Take-Two Interactive
Metacritic rating: 90 out of 100.
Our rating: 95 out of 100.

I never met a Civ game I didn’t like. When new versions of Civilization hit the market, productivity goes down around the world. The games are so addictive that you always want to take just one more turn and then find yourself looking up at the clock in the wee hours of the morning. Civilization V is a lot like playing Risk on your computer, but with many more sophisticated nuances and strategic considerations. It’s a thinker’s game, for those who want to savor each move without the pressure of a ticking clock. You can develop a good strategy in the game, but you can never completely prepare for the secret deals and treachery of your seven neighboring empires. Those rivals play their cards strategically, sometimes surprising you with their cunning. The game is graphically beautiful and gives you the option of being a micro-manager or running an automated empire. This version made the enemies more like characters. Perhaps the best thing about this game is that the user interface is simpler than it used to be, even though the range of options and strategies you can pursue is mind-boggling. This is the kind of game that’s going to save the PC as a video game system.

8. Alan Wake
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 83 out of 100
My score: 95 out of 100

Alan Wake had the great misfortune of debuting on the same day as Red Dead Redemption. It was also panned by critics for some performance glitches. But I felt it was under-rated. This game’s strong psychological thriller story will hold your attention like a well-done thriller movie. You play Alan Wake, a bestselling horror writer who has writer’s block. His wife takes him to the idyllic Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls, and then Wake’s life becomes a nightmare. Wake’s wife disappears, and he begins finding the pages of a horror novel that he doesn’t remember writing. The novel’s scenes start coming true, and a Darkness inhabits beings known as The Taken, who seek to murder Wake. Wake has to use light — flashlights, flares, and flashbang grenades — to hold off the Taken and then dispatch them with weapons such as shotguns. Wake has to solve a mystery and seek out havens of light in the darkness as he deciphers what is real and what is nightmare. The story and game play are entirely original. This game also took six years to develop as an exclusive for the Xbox 360 (see our interview with storyteller Sam Lake on why it took so long). Hopefully, the weak sales of this game won’t discourage further innovation in storytelling. Alan Wake is a much-needed breath of fresh air for video games. I consider it to be a work of art, as I said in my full review.

9. BioShock 2
Developer: 2K Marin, Digital Extremes and 2K Australia
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive
Available on: PS 3, Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 88 out of 100.
My score: 90 out 100

This was another game that, despite an initial burst of enthusiasm, didn’t sell as well as expected. But I love its combination of imaginative setting and hardcore combat. The game is a sequel to the 2007 game BioShock. That title introduced us to the underwater utopia-gone-bad of Andrew Ryan, the megalomaniac who built the city of Rapture as a haven for intellectuals (much like in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged). That utopia was so unique, with its art deco architecture, 1930s music, and 1940s-style characters in cool period fashions. When it all went bad, it became a terrifying place and was the perfect setting for a combat game where you had a dizzying array of weapons to choose from.

In BioShock 2, you return to Rapture in its earlier history and find yourself immersed in a fight for survival again. This time, you are playing a Big Daddy character (like the one pictured) where you are built like a tank and have to find and protect (or exploit — it’s your choice) the cute little girls known as Little Sisters. The enemies are terrifying and smart, closing in on you from multiple directions as you fire and switch weapons. The Little Sisters are so swift and deadly that you would swear there was a real person controlling them. Fortunately, you are well armed. In this game, you can wield two weapons, using one weapon to freeze, incinerate, or electrocute enemies and then another weapon in your other hand to finish the enemy. BioShock 2 has the same great combination of horror, nostalgic art style, addictive game play and engrossing story. If there is a flaw, it’s that some of the weapons are just too powerful.

10. Heavy Rain
Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony
Available on: PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 87 out of 100
My score: 89 out of 100

Some games are complimented for being “movie-like.” This one was criticized for being more like a movie than a game. But it had a very unique interactive storytelling style, where you had to mash buttons quickly in the right sequence in order to move on to the next scene and the next cinematic story clip. Heavy Rain conveys great emotion, like the panic a father feels as he searches for his lost son in a crowded shopping mall. This game has lots of layers to it. You start out doing extremely mundane things, using your PS 3 game controller to take a shower, brush your teeth, and turn on your TV; and eventually you move up to more important things, like changing your baby’s diaper. That is your basic training to get you ready for the interactive story of the game. In the story, a serial killer is loose, and the only clue is an origami creation left on the body. The main character’s son is kidnapped and you play multiple characters who all have a role in trying to rescue the missing child. As the story unfolds, the question arises: How far will you go to save your son? It is a psychological thriller like Alan Wake, but the game play is far different. It’s a cool story, and the interaction is interesting, but the action could be better. Still, this game gets kudos for its originality and drama.

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One of the things that several of these games share in common is that they were in development for ungodly amounts of time, running up big bills and creating big risks for the publishers backing them. The budgets for development and marketing of these titles is starting to approach that of Hollywood blockbuster movies. Let’s hope publishers get big returns on these games so we’ll see more like them. The other thing these games share is that some of them aren’t necessarily games in the traditional sense, but are nonetheless truly unforgettable experiences.

1. Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar Games.
Publisher Take-Two Interactive
Available on: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Average Metacritic rating: 95 out of 100
My score: 97 out of 100

This game shows that the “open world” style of Grand Theft Auto works wonderfully well in the Wild West. You play John Marston, a farmer-turned gunslinger who has to hunt down an outlaw in order to save his family. You can wander through a vast fictional turn-of-the-century Western world full of towns, hideouts, grave robbers, swindlers, lawmen, and everything else you need to make a Wild West setting come to life. The graphics are beautiful, the characters are intriguing, and the Dead Eye slow-motion gunshooting makes you feel like a quick-draw artist.

The variety of activities — from horse racing to animal hunting — keeps you from getting bored. You can take on a hundred bad guys with a Gatling gun or just sit back in the evening and watch the wild critters roam across a moon-blanched prairie. There is so much ambient life out on the prairie that just looking at the landscape is relaxing — until a cougar attacks you. The whole time, you feel you’re making choices with consequences. You can wind up being a feared gunslinger, or a respected do-gooder.

Game developer Rockstar spent an estimated $100 million over six years to make this game, which surprised many industry watchers with its high quality. With dozens of hours of game play, it is clearly one of the best games of the year so far, and that’s why I’ve put it at No. 1 on my list. I suspect Rockstar will make its money back on this one.

2. Alan Wake
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 83 out of 100
My score: 95 out of 100

This game’s strong psychological thriller story will hold your attention like a well-done thriller movie. You play Alan Wake, a bestselling horror writer who has writer’s block. His wife takes him to the idyllic Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls, and then Wake’s life becomes a nightmare. Wake’s wife disappears, and he begins finding the pages of a horror novel that he doesn’t remember writing. The novel’s scenes start coming true, and a Darkness inhabits beings known as The Taken, who seek to murder Wake in the darkness. Wake has to use light — flashlights, flares, and flashbang grenades — to hold off the Taken and then dispatch them with weapons such as shotguns. Wake has to solve a mystery and seek out havens of light in the darkness as he deciphers what is real and what is nightmare. The story and game play are entirely original. This game also took six years to develop as an exclusive for the Xbox 360 (see our interview with storyteller Sam Lake on why it took so long). The reviews weren’t as strong because there are a few flaws in the game graphics. But Alan Wake is a much-needed breath of fresh air for video games, and I consider it to be a work of art, as I said in my full review.

3. Mass Effect 2
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Available on: Xbox 360, PC, PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 96 out of 100
My score: 90 out of 100

The story behind this sci-fi game is a lot like the classic film The Seven Samurai, except there are 11 tales about the team members that you, as Commander Jon Shepard, have to recruit for a suicide mission to save the galaxy. It is a blend of BioWare’s traditional role-playing game with a lot of action blended in. You wander around the galaxy in what seems to be an open-ended universe, but the story pulls you into certain planets and scenes, where you encounter ethical dilemmas that force you to choose between doing what’s right, loyalty to your comrades, and fulfilling the ultimate mission of saving the galaxy. The stories along the way are emotionally engaging, like the tale of the super-caffeinated scientist Mordin Solus, who turns out to have a conscience behind his dedication to science. The execution on this game was much better than the first, as I noted in my full review. I’m glad to see EA’s shift to focus on high-quality games paying off in both critic scores and market sales.

4. God of War III
Developer: Sony Santa Monica
Publisher: Sony
Available on: PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 93 out of 100
My score: 90 out of 100

Any movie that is the third in a series is usually a dud. But video games can keep getting better with each sequel, since the developers learn to master the technology they are using and can build games with better and better graphics. That’s the case with God of War III. The graphics have a huge scale. You start with Kratos, the god of war, fighting in the woods on his climb up to Mount Olympus for his final battle with Zeus. Then the visual focus pulls out, and you realize that Kratos is fighting on top of the back of the Titan, Gaia. Kratos carries his Blades of Exile into the fray, and the button-mashing never stops. You’re constantly killing everything that gets in your way, from smallish skeletons to gargantuan gods such as Poseidon, Hades, Helios and Hermes. The game was more than three years in the making, and it may or may not have hit its breakeven point. This game suffered along with the rest of the game industry, when video game sales dropped 26 percent in April compared to a year ago.

5. BioShock 2
Developer: 2K Marin, Digital Extremes and 2K Australia
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive
Available on: PS 3, Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 88 out of 100.
My score: 90 out 100

I loved the originality of BioShock, the 2007 game that took us to the underwater utopia-gone-bad of Andrew Ryan, the megalomaniac who built the city of Rapture as a haven for intellectuals. That place was so unique, with its art deco architecture, 1930s music, and 1940s-style characters in cool period fashions. When it all went bad, it became a terrifying place. Add to that the unique game play that equipped the player with the ability to freeze, incinerate, or electrocute enemies. There was nothing like BioShock, and the BioShock 2 game certainly does it justice. It has the same great combination of horror, nostalgic art style, addictive game play and engrossing story. This is the first game from a brand-new studio. While there were some BioShock veterans on the team, this game proves the wisdom of putting fresh eyes on a game property and turning it into something wonderful. It’s too bad that, like God of War III, this one suffered from the April doldrums and didn’t have staying power. Take-Two had great ambitions for this game, but it didn’t sell spectacularly.

6. Heavy Rain
Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony
Available on: PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 87 out of 100
My score: 89 out of 100

This game has lots of layers to it. You start out doing extremely mundane things, using your PS 3 game controller to take a shower, brush your teeth, and turn on your TV; and eventually you move up to more important things, like changing your baby’s diaper. That is your basic training to get you ready for the interactive story of the game. In the story, a serial killer is loose, and the only clue is an origami creation left on the body. Another person is missing, and the player has to solve this mystery before more bodies show up. The question arises: How far will you go to save someone you love? It is a psychological thriller like Alan Wake, but the game play is far different. It’s a cool story, and the interaction is interesting, but the action could be better. Still, this game gets kudos for its originality as well as its movie-like dramatic pacing. This game wasn’t a huge seller, but it is worth a look for anybody who has finished playing some of the other blockbusters.

7. Super Mario Galaxy 2
Developer/publisher: Nintendo
Available on: Wii
Average Metacritic rating: 97 out of 100
My score: 88 out of 100

The danger of making more Super Mario games is that players may get bored with the little plumber. That’s the way I felt before I played the latest edition of Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii. But Nintendo has managed to keep this franchise fresh with lots of little puzzles that you have to solve as you bounce around from planet to planet. There are cool new features like using  a drill to get through the middle of a planet so you can access something you need to solve a puzzle. Nintendo has a devotion to getting the game play right so that it either makes you grit your teeth or smile. I suspect this game is going to single-handedly turn around the video game business in May. That’s because there are more than 70 million Wiis in the market, and a lot of those players have been waiting for this sequel since 2007. The only thing I truly wish Nintendo did with this game was make it multiplayer, much like the New Super Mario Bros. from last fall.

8. Battlefield Bad Company 2
Developer: EA Dice
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Average Metacritic rating: 88 out of 100
My score: 85 out of 100

EA wisely waited until the  popularity of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 subsided before launching Battlefield Bad Company 2. In contrast to the deadly serious Modern Warfare 2, I enjoyed Bad Company’s mixture of modern combat and comic relief in the single player campaign, where you fight it out alongside some funny squad mates. The cool thing about the game is that you can destroy almost anything. Some things fall apart too easily under machine gun fire, but you can use the physical environment to your advantage. The game is also fun because you can pilot various vehicles such as tanks, jeeps and helicopters. The game covers so much ground that it feels like a full tour of the modern combat experience. The online game play is addictive, and if I didn’t have to look at so many games I would have played far more than I did. I loved the multiplayer team play where you take an objective, move forward to the next goal, and eventually win the whole map. Again, the lesson here is that doubling down on a good franchise and making it stronger in the sequel will pay off; Bad Company 2 has sold more than 5 million units, more than enough to make EA a good return, even if it isn’t near Modern Warfare 2′s 17 million-plus sales. EA keeps coming out with new maps for this game, but they are free; by contrast, Activision Blizzard is milking Modern Warfare 2, charging $15 for each new map pack.

I’ll end the list with a couple of honorable mentions. I enjoyed the beginning of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction. It could have been executed better, since I found it far too easy to get killed while lurking around in the shadows. I liked the direction the story took, bringing more emotion out of the cold fish covert operative Sam Fisher, who hunts down the killer of his daughter. But I just didn’t have time to play this one fully.

The other honorable mention is America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking for the Nintendo DS. This game has kept me well fed. I shared it with my eldest daughter, and she’s been using it to make home-cooked meals that turn out really well, including a Caprese-stye spaghetti dish. I laughed when I heard about this game, which is really not a game. It’s a collection of 300 recipes. It reads the instructions to my daughter, step by step on the DS, with pictures to show what your dish should look like. The results are delicious. I truly did not anticipate a “game” like this one. It just goes to show that games can truly change your family’s quality of life. Or at least my waistline.

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Moments before, I faced a unique problem—unique to video games that is. A baby was crying. She had a dirty diaper. And her mother was unable to car for her. In order to advance the game, I had to mash a few buttons in proper sequence to change her diaper. Call it The Diaper Combo.

“There you go, fresh new baby,” our hero triumphantly said, after I quickly mastered the challenge. It was then implied that I would need to feed the underdeveloped mammal. Having never done this before (in a game), I smiled at the prospect. But I wonder: Is this even a video game?

No, says designer David Cage, attempting to distance his work from more popular alternatives. “This is not a video game,” he answers bluntly. “For 20 years, the video game industry has defined interacting as shooting. When I told some publishers that my heroes would not have weapons, they were puzzled. ‘What type of video game could it be if you cannot shoot?’ they asked.”

There is a story here. In the plot, a serial killer is loose. People go missing and four days later, their bodies are found. An origami creation on the body is the only clue. Another person goes missing, and the player has to solve the mystery before the next body appears.

In a traditional sense, Cage is right about how this is not a game. I have no weapon. I don’t drive cars. I can’t jump onto platforms, and there are no magical mushrooms. If I die, there isn’t a game over screen—I simply take control the next living character.

But I’m playing this whatchamacallit on a machine called a “PlayStation,” with a joypad even, so surely it’s a video game.

It most certainly is, says game consultant Adrian Crook. An adventure game to be exact. “‘Heavy Rain’ is an innovative throwback to adventure games like ‘Countdown,’ ‘Full Throttle,’ and ‘Myst,’” he says. Like “Heavy Rain,” some of the best adventure games “were primarily cinematic experiences that were visually stunning for their time and easy to enjoy because they lacked complex control schemes.”

In other words, it’s a familiar genre in new clothing. “It pushes the envelope of its craft visually and narratively, while allowing gamers who can’t handle the intensity of  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to experience the best their console has to offer,” Crook adds.

Unlike previous adventure games, though, “Heavy Rain” resonates more with mature audiences, thanks to situations that are close to home. In addition to babysitting, players are asked to help their kids do homework, set the dinner table, and care for a suicidal mother.

“Gameplay is no longer a challenge for the player; it becomes an element of the immersion,” explains Cage. And the effect works. Seemingly mundane tasks pulls the player in.

But the novelty of feeding, cleaning, and managing day-to-day task would quickly grow boring. So to spice things up, “Heavy Rain” asks the player a hypothetical and dramatic question shortly into the game: How far would you go to save someone you love?

“‘I would do anything for you,’ is something we have all said before,” says Cage. “Heavy Rain questions the player on what exactly this sentence means. Are you really prepared to do anything for love?”

Later in the game, you’re asked by villains to cut off your thumb in exchange for information on the whereabouts of a loved one. “Should I do this?” I thought to myself, upon encountering the dilemma. “I like my thumb. Will I need it later?” Although it’s a game, it’s not an easy choice.

And that’s the point, says Cage. “The game is a safe environment in which you can answer serious questions without taking risks,” he says. As Austin Powers might say, it’s “consequence-free—yeah, baby!”

Admittedly, “Heavy Rain” effectively evokes strong emotions. But veteran players might balk at its heavy reliance on story and easy controls, something Crook recognizes. “The crux of the core game industry’s issues with ‘Heavy Rain’ appear to be that [Quantic Dream, the developer] somehow ‘cheated’ with a big story or a series of quick-time [controller] events, and because of that, it’s less of a game,” he says.

“I don’t buy this at all,” he adds. “If a game elicits emotion from players—whether that game is ‘Farmville,’ ‘Bejewelled,’ ‘World of Warcraft,’ ‘Modern Warfare’ or ‘Heavy Rain’—I don’t think it’s worth quibbling about whether the methods it used to achieve that emotional response were worthy enough.”

In short, video games are about feeling, not control. Which brings us back to what a video game can or can’t be, and why Cage is so adverse to calling his game “game.” Specifically, he doesn’t want non-gamers to overlook his work due to generalizations, because if they do, “games will be about swords, guns, and zombies for many years to come.”

Having played “Heavy Rain,” I think it’s best described as a “murder mystery adventure game.” Cage responds with “not exactly,” favoring instead the self-described “interactive thriller.” In any case, the mature themed experience is novel in its approach, and it’s obvious Cage and his team are hopeful the game can entice new players.

Will it work? As a fun game, yes, says Crook. As the next big thing? Not really. “I wouldn’t place any of my own money on the bet that ‘interactive movies’ will open up the gaming market to those not already interested.”

Whatever the case, The Diaper Combo has made it’s mark.

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