I love science fiction and fantasy. I love that genre stuff in just about any format. There are deeper, more profound ways of expressing this, and I spend a fair amount of time defending such items critically and with big words, but at the root it's essentially a love affair. I often find myself hankering for a good SF or fantasy read of the lowbrow kind—some exploding spaceships or a besieged castle—so there's an element of can't-go-too-long-without-it, an addictive undertow. I'm a sucker for spectacle, but I'm most smitten with those works that can back up the big show with story and depth.

I also love videogames, which falls more into the category of an addiction than a simple love affair. I get antsy if I haven't played a good game in a while (although some of that has been absorbed by boardgames). Fortunately for me, there's a strong overlap between SF/F and videogames, since a high ratio of the most successful videogames have a science fiction or fantasy connection (just like the list of movie blockbusters). Whether those videogames tell a good story, or if they even should try to tell a story, is another matter or two altogether.

On that note, I wrote about indie videogames last year, titles that were either online or easy to load up on ancient computers. Now, indie games are often focused on purity of gameplay by necessity, leaving a story aside in favor of, say, a refined puzzle or shooting game mechanic. It takes big bucks to make a videogame that has it all, especially the flashy graphics, and if someone is interested in going that route, they can spend decades in the industry and gain enough credibility to become the creative lead on a multi-million dollar project. (Ken Levine is a good example; see thoughts on his Bioshock below.) Or they could load up some Flash files and make their own damn game, mostly sans satisfying narrative. It also won't have shiny bells and fancy whistles, but it can be addictive enough and fun enough to make a few bucks and get a person's name out there. My prime example is still Fizzball, a game made by a creative staff of under five. Fizzball refined a mix of Breakout and Katamari Damacy on the gameplay side, with the faintest hint of a storyline: on each level, you have to rescue some animals. Why? Who are you? Why do you care? No need to know.

(I'm still trying to keep up with indie/casual games, but nothing has had the same impact as the one-two punch of Peggle and Fizzball last year. I've been playing Fairway Solitaire, and keeping up with the various casual/Flash games mentioned on JayIsGames. Two recent titles worth mentioning are Floribular and Gemcraft.)

Ironically, I didn't have a computer to play the recent games that outshone small indie gems, so it was a bit of a forced virtue to be so caught up in the "indie" thing. Late last fall I made the huge mistake (well, not really; it's not one of those mistakes I truly regret) of buying a high-definition camcorder. It's a beautiful piece of machinery, and the video quality is tremendous. Unfortunately, I didn't have a screen to watch the resulting footage on, and I had nowhere near the computer to do any of the editing on. In a cycle familiar to anyone with gadgetitis, one upgrade led to another. And since I don't have much use for bigscreen TVs, that meant that I soon had a computer with a nice monitor, huge hard-drive, fast videocard, etc. Alert gadgeteers will notice that this style of computer will serve fairly well as a gaming rig—perhaps not so coincidentally, I already had a list of titles I wanted to try. So over the next eight months or so I plugged away at my list. Four of the games turned out to be highly interesting, one of those a masterpiece, which is a better result than I was expecting. All of the games have at least a mild genre interest, and the best, Bioshock, is filled to the brim with sci-fi goodies. Onwards!

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty is the one game that's not heavy on the science fiction. You play either an American or British soldier, using all your special killing skills to take out terrorist thugs in various gritty real world settings. Or something like that: the plot is generally a mess, and while the individual missions are generally clear, the overall storyline is a jumbled Clancy ripoff. Two missions related to the nuclear age made me think of genre items from Stalker to On the Beach, but otherwise, it's pure shooter adrenaline of the modern-day sort, with nary a magic spell or plasma rifle in sight.

Gameplay-wise, Call of Duty 4 is very smooth. In fact, I played this as one of the first titles on my new computer, and it ruined a lot of the following games for me; the others simply didn't have the same well-balanced, heavily scripted gameplay. Call of Duty 4 is one of those rare blockbusters that's actually a good game on a basic, minute-by-minute level.

So you've got some guns and you're blowing up some terrorists, but that's not what I remember about the game. As much as it's a jumbled narrative, two story-related moments made it memorable for me. The superior officer of the British character gets his own flashback to a time when he had to infiltrate the ruins of Chernobyl. This whole level is a chilling one. And remember how I said there was an American soldier? Spoiler alert: there's a mission in the middle of the game when the marines go in gung-ho to rescue a shot-down pilot, even though some of the enemy apparently have their hands on a nuke and are getting ready to set it off. Then they do so! Our kick-ass marine doesn't survive—his viewpoint comes back after the blast, but you can only stagger about before a few minutes, breathing raggedly and gazing at the irradiated city around you, before dropping dead. Crazy! That hasn't happened in another shooter game, as far as I know. Of course, after that moment, you switch to the British character and it's the same old run and gun gameplay, but that's still a stellar moment.

Also: there's apparently a pretty good multiplayer component to Call of Duty 4, if that's your thing.

The Witcher

The Witcher is a popular fantasy series from Poland by author Andrzej Sapkowski. It follows the adventures of Geralt, the witcher of the title, who is a professional monster hunter. With five novels (not yet translated into English) and a collection of short stories (The Last Wish), Sapkowski has written a rich universe. Interestingly, the widest exposure for The Witcher has been through the videogame of the same title, released late in 2007 in most languages by a Polish game developer, CD Projekt. (Translations of the novels are apparently in the works.)

In the game, Geralt starts out as an amnesiac who is trying to find some other dude who has stolen some magic thingie from the other witchers. Sure, sure, we've seen this before, and the details escape my mind with great celerity. More interestingly, of the people that Geralt runs into along the way, the majority have a much different concern on their mind: the elves and dwarves of the land are being chased out by a concerted campaign of racist humans; there are non-human rebels trying to fight back; and at some point, you are forced into picking a side. The rebels do some pretty despicable things in their struggle, but the humans are racist, arrogant jerks who probably had it coming. I chose to side with the underdogs. I'm not sure how much that actually changed about the game, but I felt like it was a nifty twist on the same old fantasy world.

The North American version of The Witcher was censored; intrigued, I got a hold of the European uncensored version of the game (the UK version, actually). As far as I can tell, both versions have lots of swearing and lots of violence. The difference is in "adult situations." Geralt can use various options in the dialogue tree to convince girls around town to have sex with him; the scene fades out and you get a little card depicting the particular woman in a state of undress. In the North American version, the woman usually has a black bar across her chest area. The censored version seems ludicrous to me, but the material in its full uncensored glory is ludicrous in a different way, even absurd considering how many encounters there are in the game. Geralt can sex it up with about three or four women per town, so he's a busy guy; I dunno, it never seemed particularly sexy or grown-up to me. As Rock Paper Shotgun says about the collectible nudie cards: "Point being, the bigger problem isn't the fact it's a sexist-pokemon-mechanic (which it is)—it's that it makes the game very hard to take as seriously as it wants you [to]."

In its original release, The Witcher had a number of technical glitches, some translation problems, and awkward issues with the interface. The game sold well enough that the developer (an independent company, coincidentally enough) is planning to fix all of the above items: the updated edition comes out in September. If a fantasy game with a deep, unorthodox plot, a dodgy view of gender relations, and a decent set of graphics sounds at all good to you, I would recommend waiting for the update and then picking it up.

The Orange Box

The Orange Box is a compilation of five game titles released by Valve Software in 2007. One game, Half-Life 2, was a full game released in 2004, and another game, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, was a previously released episodic follow-up to Half-Life 2. The Orange Box has three new items in it: the second episodic follow-up in the Half-Life 2 series, a standalone game called Portal, and an online shooter called Team Fortress 2. In terms of value for money, it's an incredible deal, especially if you haven't played the two earlier games.

Half-Life is a sci-fi shooter series following the adventures of Gordon Freeman, a physicist who can seriously kick ass when Earth gets invaded by aliens, as seems to happen with dismaying regularity. In Half-Life 2, he's trapped in a vaguely Soviet city called City 17 that has aliens, quisling human soldiers, zombies, and lots of other perils. In the two episodic follow-ups, Gordon has escaped the city with his sidekick Alyx, and they try to find their way to their human allies. These Half-Life 2 episodes are like a just-as-polished version of Call of Duty 4, but with a proper storyline and some decent characterization thrown in for good measure. Highly recommended, especially since you can finish each episode in an evening's play.

I already knew what to expect from Half-Life 2, and I'm not a multiplayer fan, so that left Portal. I fired it up knowing only that it had received a fair amount of hype and that it was a short game, on the lines of 10 hours or less. Frankly, this game blew my mind! It starts off as an interesting but fairly tame 3D puzzle environment of sorts; about two-thirds of the way through, the lid gets ripped off and the game accelerates into the first rank of gaming experiences.

You play as Chell, a woman who is essentially trapped inside of a giant testing facility, with only the voice of a deeply deranged computer to guide you through the portal-testing levels. The environment is incredibly sterile and white, but the portal technology is intriguing, since you can jump from one area to another with a well-placed shot of the portal gun. Also, you constantly hear the computer saying things like "Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an 'unsatisfactory' mark on your official testing record followed by death. Good luck!"

Why are you here? No answers are given. What is this place and how can you get out? I won't reveal the answers to those questions, but that's the brilliance of the last part of the game. What could have been a dull, repetitious puzzle game is given a huge boost by some quality writing and characterization.

Unusually, I had heard a great deal of buzz about the song that plays during the closing credits of Portal. You owe it to yourself to hear this one in context; after about five or six hours of amazing gameplay, it's a perfect capper for the game.

Valve has been busy creating a commercial empire for themselves on the side with Steam, where you can buy games like Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, and Bioshock directly and start playing them as soon as they've downloaded. Steam is watching you, though; they generally know a little bit too much about what players are doing.

Bioshock

As it turns out, I saved the best for last! I just finished this game last week, nearly a year after it came out, and since this game received tons of media notice, this might be old news: Bioshock is really good. It's a gorgeous, compelling game that delivers on the associated hype.

The setting for the game is Rapture, a vast underwater city that was built in the 1940s to exacting art deco standards, complete with beautiful architecture, wavery neon, old-timey songs in the background, and so on. Andrew Ryan, the most Ayn Rand-like villain in videogame history, was rich and ambitious and built Rapture to suit his ideology, inviting all of his rich and multitalented friends along to live there. The game starts not long after something seriously wrong has happened in the city (there's at least one wrecked "Happy New Year 1959" sign). You survive a plane crash over the ocean, only to find a tower poking out of the water. Swimming for rescue, you find Rapture, filled with scary creatures and grandeur of the ruined variety.

My overwhelming impression of the game is how complete it is, in every way. If you're into a deep storyline, it's here (more details in a moment). If you like poking around in unusual settings and gawking at beautiful graphics, Rapture provides plenty; every vista, every detail is breath-taking and consistent with the other bits of world-building. At one point, a whale glides majestically underneath you as you walk in a passageway from one building to another. If you like amazing firefights, you can crank up the difficulty level and challenge your trigger finger. All kinds of guns, all kinds of upgrades, all kinds of player powers. Like messing around with stats and player upgrades? You have every option imaginable. At one point, you even get a research camera and if you get enough clear shots of your enemies (you get the best results if the subject is jumping right at you), you receive bonuses like increased damage.

And the most impressive part of the complete package that is Bioshock: the storyline. You can slow down and savor the details or speed up and burn through the levels, as you wish, but if you stop and take the time to listen to various recordings left behind by the deceased residents of Rapture, you'll get swept up into a fascinating narrative. Why did Rapture, a place of such promise and wealth, fall so quickly and thoroughly into violence and wild genetic alteration? Who is Atlas, a voice that is guiding you through the early levels, and why does he hate Andrew Ryan so much? And most basically: who are you, the player? The twists and turns of the story form a nice balance between moments that are personal to your character's development and moments that are driven by the ideas of the game and its inhabitants.

Much of the ink expended on Bioshock in the mainstream press concerns the Big Daddy/Little Sister pairing. Those two particular character types are on the front of the game box; many such pairs roam about Rapture, the Little Sisters harvesting genetic material from the dead and the Big Daddies protecting the weird little girls. If you defeat the Big Daddy, you can either rescue or "harvest" that Little Sister, either turning her back into a little girl or killing her. I was so immersed in the rest of the world that I didn't pay much attention to this so-called dilemma (and I generally play as a "nice" character anyway).

Bioshock was created and written by Ken Levine and put together by the team at Irrational, now renamed 2K Boston. Irrational's earlier games were favourites of mine; for example, they collaborated with Looking Glass, in the dying days of that game studio, on System Shock 2, a gem from about ten years ago. Bioshock has often been called the spiritual successor to the two System Shock games, so there's a deep heritage. In many ways, Bioshock is even better than the old Looking Glass titles, as much as I liked them, since this particular game found a way to deliver on all the goods and not confine itself to a niche. Making a game this idiosyncratic and deep and keeping it accessible to a wide audience is probably Irrational's highest achievement.

Briefly now: a few of the other titles I played. I've become much less interested over the years in spending my time writing up negative reviews; that's partly due to my professional training as a librarian, where you have plenty of practice stepping outside your own tastes, and partly due to my realization that the sheer amount of crap out there defies any one person to ridicule it all. I'd prefer to praise the items that moved me, artistically, emotionally, in some way, as I've just done. I know that it's necessary to experience the lower quality items, since that's how you can judge the magnitude of the achievement of something like Bioshock, but I'm not motivated to diss the mediocre stuff at length anymore. Fortunately for my purposes, the Internet is a rich source of cranky people! I'll make a few notes on the following games, and then point the way to a longer, crankier review by someone else.

Unreal Tournament 3

I quite enjoyed the original Unreal Tournament back in 1999—a multiplayer shooter with the barest wisp of a plot and non-stop action. You used to be a player in a galaxy-wide competitive bloodsport, which made sense for the various showdowns and matches of capture the flag. In UT3, you are fighting for revenge against those who destroyed your world, with the exact same gameplay. Ridiculous! I had high hopes, but I ended up only playing it for a few hours. It simply didn't have any hold on me. Check out this review at Twenty-Sided.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

It's a fantasy quest, complete with dark lord, orcs and dragons, magic items, et cetera, et cetera, right down the list of clichés. The storyline is lame, but I loved the little gameplay items like rope arrows (a neat callback to Thief: The Dark Project) and a dedicated keystroke for kicking opponents off of all the high ledges and castle walls. I admit that I edited my character to max out all my fireball spells and such. You can call it either ludicrous, as does Tom Chick, when he calls the game "The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot Deathboot in the Land of the Conspicuously Placed Spike Racks," or you can enjoy the fact that "[w]hile there are a lot of serious gaming mechanics in Dark Messiah, [its] primary devotion is fun, and lots of it." I fall into the latter category, but won't defend the game past that.

Oblivion (The Elder Scrolls IV)

Oblivion is a popular fantasy title from 2006 from Bethesda Software. I was quite caught up in the hype when it came out but my computer couldn't run it (see comments above). Now that I have something that can, I discovered that Oblivion is like yesterday's jam—these kind of games get caught up in the graphics/eye candy treadmill, where coming back to it after only two years is a disappointment. Oddly enough, not long after I had uninstalled it, I came across the Popehat Oblivion Omod Project, the acronym for which is memorable but probably not intended as commentary since it aims to spruce up the game's graphics, fix gameplay issues, add fan-created content, and so forth. Bethesda made it easy to make your own changes to Oblivion, and the response has been tremendous. In one sense, it's offloading the work of balancing a game and polishing the graphics to the fan base. On the other hand, the game is improving long after commercial interests have moved on. I will probably try the game again if I have a dull moment.

Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

This sci-fi strategy game was a hoot! I remember playing the original Command and Conquer quite a few years ago, so this has been a durable series; it's been around just about as long as The Elder Scrolls. C&C has always been known for its ultra-cheesy full-motion video segments, something that was impressive when games started coming out on CD-ROMs and then quickly fell out of favor. Well, those cutscenes are back! There's a game that goes with it too, but it's more an experience than an actual game. See this Eurogamer review for a good encapsulation of my thoughts. Not very deep stuff in other words.

There is one classic line that I would like to mention. Late in the game, aliens have invaded, breaking up the war between human factions. At one point, a grunt unit in the middle of a war takes a break to say, "We thought we were alone in the universe. Oh, the hubris!" That's not even in one of those cheesy cutscenes!

Supreme Commander

I haven't been able to find a suitably cutting review of it anywhere online, since the title seems to have bowed to universal praise. I tried to like it, but I just couldn't do it. Supreme Commander is a science-fiction strategy game, where three races, some quite alien, are fighting each other across the galaxy. The main innovation of the game is that you can zoom all in the way on the individual units or zoom all the way out to a satellite-like view of a gigantic battle-field. Unfortunately, the graphics don't look so hot at the zoomed-in or zoomed-out level—C&C 3, for all its faults, made the battlefield look pretty impressive at its default view. And while the promise of controlling giant armies in Supreme Commander might appeal to a core audience of strategy gamers, I only saw visions of micromanagement and clicking through hundreds of not-so-bright units and telling them what to do. Not for me; your mileage may vary.

Crysis

Crysis, a free-roaming shooter where you're fighting North Korean soldiers on a secret island in the Pacific, was supposed to be the game that brought even the most impressive computer to its knees. It duly did so: my fancy rig couldn't keep up to the even fancier graphics. I played a bit, suffered through the slow frame-rate, and found that I didn't care for it anyway. By all accounts, there's an alien invasion or a crashed alien ship too, so that's been a fairly common theme throughout this list of games. Most reviewers seemed to like Crysis, but 1Up claims it got a lot worse, story and gameplay-wise, later on; I didn't make it that far.

Hitman: Blood Money

Ah, Hitman. In this game, you are a clone, so that's the sci-fi angle. And you are on missions to go out and assassinate people, so that's the videogame hook. On the highest difficulty level, you have to sneak around, disguise yourself, leave no trail, hit your target, and make it safely back out, sometimes without even firing your weapon (lots of poisoned syringes and other stealthy items available). That's the pure way to play. I played on the easiest setting, which fundamentally broke almost everything about the gameplay. Namely, the stealthy approach was a thing of the past. The only mission where I had to sneak was when I was supposed to break up a redneck wedding. Stereotypically, just about every guest carried a shotgun, so the civilians were not so friendly when you broke cover. Otherwise, you were not supposed to go in with guns blazing, but that's what I did, and it was SO unfair. Oh well! Another game that was a hoot to play but not particularly noteworthy beyond that.

Gears of War

Another game from Epic, after Unreal Tournament 3, and the plot is just as nonsensical—Earth has been invaded by the Locust, and you're a squad of hyper-muscled badasses who want revenge—but at least it fits in with the gameplay, kinda sorta. The main innovation of the game is that, despite your big-ass guns and macho banter, you can't run around and fire your weapon manically and expect to survive. You have to use every bit of cover to fire back at enemies who are doing the same. Fine in so far as it goes. Very strangely, I played this on a PC, not the XBox. Yes, weird, just about as weird as playing Guitar Hero on PC. I liked the way the cover-system was implemented, but I didn't make it very far in this game either, since I had to sign up for some online account to save my game. Save my game?! It's Games for Windows Live, which I avoided like the plague. Xbox Live has always sounded like a solid service, but the Windows version gives me the willies. In the absence of saved games, I didn't make it very far, needless to say.

What's next? I'm a little leery of jumping back into a lot of different videogames—I'd like to savor the experience of Bioshock for a while. I'm looking forward to Fallout 3 and The Force Unleashed, both coming out this fall. Other than that, I'm taking a break for a bit!