This season's hottest games are selling geopolitical nostalgia: all the bad guys are Russian. The military pandemonium simulator that is Call of Duty: Modern warfare 2 (Activision, Xbox360/PS3/PC) features one level, already notorious, in which you play a CIA mole in the team of a mad Russian mastermind, accompanying them as they stroll through an airport massacring civilians.
You don't have to kill the civilians yourself - as a protest against global consumerism, I decided to shoot up the duty-free shop instead - but the effect is unsettling. The rest is a Rolls-Royce-quality rehearsal of familiar shooter tropes, with some gorgeously built sets for the mayhem - a Brazilian favela stands out - but little thought is required beyond shooting the next guy in the face. The online options, which include dedicated cooperative missions, are state of the art.
A Russian ruffian also features in the other big action game, Uncharted 2: Among thieves (Sony, PS3), which resembles a movie starring Indiana Jones's psychopathic kid brother.
Your hero flirts, quips and smashes priceless artefacts through snack-sized cinematic clips and Tomb Raider-style locations, never forgetting the primary business of shooting a thousand hoodlums to death. It's just a glittering, linear string of set pieces, but some of them are spectacular. For a deliriously adrenalised ride, the designers have crammed in every great speeding train action-movie cliché in history, and then thought up some more of their own. 
More sedate diversions are offered by EyePet (Sony, PS3). With a webcam (supplied) pointed at your floor, you interact with a cute virtual animal, a kind of monkey-dog. Feed it, groom it, wash it, play with it and even show it drawings: they become objects in the game's intriguing space-between-two-worlds. A sure delight for young children, and an impressive experiment in augmented-reality technology.
You can also magic up a monkey, or a dog, but not a hybrid of the two, in Scribblenauts (Nintendo, Nintendo DS), a slightly messy but lovably surreal cartoon-style game in which you solve problems by typing in words for things, and watching those things appear in the game's world, complete with physically modelled behaviours.
There is a 20,000-word object repertoire: anvils, hot-air balloons or bridges glued to tyrannosaurs can all be yours - if you can figure out how to use them. Refreshingly, I couldn't create a Russian villain.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
