The New York Times has posed a slide show featuring gamers in the real world, as well as their in-game avatars. It is pretty amazing, and also very moving. One photograph in particular depicts clearly what gaming can do for some people — how it really does enable some to live life in a way that their real world cirumcstances would never allow.

Have a look here.

“Don’t worry, he’s not that desperate …”

I have to say, something this funny and postmodern would never have existed before YouTube. There’s so much irony and stupidity in re-subtitling and re-conceptualizing the great German film “DOWNFALL,” which chronicles Hitler’s last days into a tale of Hitler being banned from XBOX Live.

I have to warn you, if you’re not a gamer you probably won’t get most of the jokes, or the subtext that the cheaters, smactalkers, homophobes, racists and sociopaths on XBOX Live have much in common with Hitler.

If you are, you’ll probably think this his hilariously inappropriate.

The trailer looks like a Philip Glass video, and you have to blink a few times before you realize you’re looking at in-game footage and not live video of New York City. Yes kids, this is the first trailer for the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV. And I have to say, I’ve never seen an video game city look this impressive. From what I can tell this is a scale rendering of NYC.

I’ve always been a fan of the series, albeit an unenthusiastic one. I understand that it’s a bunch of Brits and their American thralls at Rockstar Games having a laugh at the expense of American prudes. GTA has always been a pretty sophisticated social satire mixed with lowbrow humor and gratuitous sex and violence. The first few hours are amusing in a “I can’t believe they did that” kind of way, but eventually the GTA games lose their fun factor. I’ve never finished one, always getting bored by around the 15 hour mark. Maybe this one will be different?

Have a look at the trailer:

Well, I’m now on my third XBOX 360. Two weeks ago my original system — which I bought at launch — failed after only a year of use. And then my replacement, purchased out of pocket because the original was out of warranty, started acting up shortly after I got it. Apparently the DVD-ROM drive was bad.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the XBOX 360 has the games I want to play and a superior online service in XBOX Live, I’d probably switch to the PS3 or the Wii. Two faulty systems is pretty inexcusable in my book. I can’t help but wonder if the desperate need to keep costs low has caused them to cut conerns with the design.

A $300 game console should last a good deal longer than a year. There are working Atari 2600 systems that will outlive us all. I know that the 360 is a fair deal more complicated, but you’d think that Microsoft could maintain the generally high quality standards of the original XBOX. I guess not.

5. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recond Advanced Warfighter
4. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent
3. Gears of War
2. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas
1. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

There was a lot of talk last summer about whether or not video games (and I include computer games in this, since there is still a distinction, though it is beginning to blur) can be considered “art.” The convention wisdom both in and outside of the gaming media seems to be “no,” and I think this is arguably still the case, although games are starting to creep across the line.

Although I tend not to see as much a distinction between entertainment and art as others, not all creative endeavors can be considered art. Art to me transcends its medium — it evokes emotion or ideas, stirs controversy, has some quality that makes it greater than what it is on the surface.

Many of the games I play are pretty far from “art.” Most first person shooters or action games are little more than action figure sets for adults, allowing us to play army like we did when we were kids, but without the stigma of grown men running around in the back yard with plastic machine guns. Alas, most of my gaming experiences fall into that category.

Some games, like World of Warcraft, offer more of a theme-park environment, allowing players to band together and go on virtual rides within each other. Yes, it has a vast and attractive world to explore, but that world has all of the authenticity of a sword and sorcery Busch Gardens.

But there have been games that border on art. Final Fantasy VII, Halo:CE, Halo 2 and Planescape: Torment all evoked a strong emotional reaction and had some interesting things to say about the human condition. Splinter Cell was never a game I thought I’d add to the list, but the latest installment in the long-running stealth series, Splinter Cell Double Agent, is coming close.

There’s a scene just following the first level in the game where Sam Fisher, the series protagonist, learns that his daughter has died. In his grief, he tosses his visor — often used as an iconic symbol for the series — out the window of the Osprey vehicle that has just evacuated him from his latest mission. We watch as it sinks beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, disappearing into the deep. Not only does it symbolize that the character, Sam Fisher, has lost some part of himself, it’s also a metaphor for the game itself, which abandons many of its past conventions in favor of a new approach.

Granted, most of Splinter Cell Double Agent is spent lurking around on stealth missions, but this is a strong character moment heretofore unheard of in the series. And with the game’s emphasis on moral compromise, there’s a good case to be made that Splinter Cell does more than entice the player to break a few spines — it addresses the choices and their effect on the character. It’s a step forward in terms of game design, and it also furthers the argument that some games at least can be more than mere entertainment.

I first played Medal of Honor for the original Playstation back in 1999 — at the time, shooting Nazis was a refreshing change of pace from the usual alien hordes that dominated first person shooters. But nearly seven years later, I’m sorry to say the WWII genre has gotten a little stale, as evidenced from this gameplay video from Call of Duty 3:

Hey look, we’re in a bombed out French village again! Oh no, better take cover in that building! Luckily there’s a big hole in the wall from which I can conveniently shoot Nazis that have dug into that building across the street! Isn’t it swell how American artillery opens up holes in just the right places? Wow, isn’t the HDR lighting cool and innovative — why it’s like a whole new Normandy campaign here — let’s just milk a few more million bucks out of this franchise …

The “Mac versus PC” commercials are pretty entertaining, but I find the guy playing the Mac to be a bit too swarmy. Like “Look how cool and hip I am.” The PC guy always has the best lines.

This parody is even funnier than the original commercials. And they even get a great dig on Linux.

The XBOX 360 has a cool new feature called “XBOX Live Arcade” that let’s you download “small” games for about $5 each. My two favorites are Geometry Wars — a game where you play as a geometric shape dedicated to destroying other geometric shapes before they destroy you — and Bejeweled, which is everyone’s mothers favorite game.

Geometry Wars looks like one of those music player visualizations, or more accurately, like what it must be like to be trapped up in the sky as part of an amazing fireworks display. The game is insanely simple, but more fun in a lot of ways than the glossy, big budget “next-gen” titles you have to pay $60 for.

Bejeweled, as you probably already know, is addicting in the Tetris sense of the world. Two days ago, one of my old Halo 2 friends sent me a message asking me why I was playing such an old game.

Seeing that he was still playing Halo 2, I had to reply with the same question.

(Huhm, anyone notice how this has sort of become a gaming blog? Never thought that would happen — remember back when I just wrote about politics?)

I have to say it — the reviewers and fans must all be insane. Almost everything I’ve heard about Perfect Dark Zero has been refuted by the experience of actually playing it.

• The storyline, often lambasted, is a fun, campy scifi spy story that has been influenced more than a little bit by the television show, “Alias” — look at how Joanna’s dressed, how she has an HQ operative giving her instructions over an ear piece, or how similar her relationship with her father Jack Dark is to Sydney Bristow’s relationship with her father, Jack Bristow. It’s a camp send-up of “Alias.”
• The graphics, which fans have been bashing since day one, look phenomenal on my HDTV set — maybe they don’t translate to standard definition, but I think they look amazing.
• The AI, said to be dumb, seems pretty smart on medium difficulty — it frequently flanks, takes cover, and does all the things Halo’s AI is often praised for.
• The weapons feel great (the assault rifles feel a lot better and are more fun to shoot than Halo 2′s sluggish assault rifle), the impact of the shotgun in particular is very satisfying — even the pistols are fun to shoot.
• The music is exactly what one would expect from a British-developed spy story — and I like the mix of dance music on some levels.
• The online play definitely offers the best multiplayer FPS experience on the 360 currently (although I found the demo of Quake 4 to be slightly better and the matchmaking setup more to my liking, there’s hardly anyone playing that game).

Now, there are some issues with the game:

• You can’t jump — although you can roll, the fact that your feet are glued to the ground is a serious problem; I feel like Joanna is physically handicapped and jumping is standard in all but the most sim-oriented shooters.
• The stealth elements aren’t implemented very well — on the first mission you’re asked to sneak, but unlike Splinter Cell, you’re always spotted, even in shadow.
• The in-game physics find that the death animations for your enemy are a little slow — people taken out by a shotgun blast, for instance, fly backwards, albeit in extremely slow motion.

The only reason I can think of for the incredible amount of negativity directed at a game which is, I think, the XBOX 360′s current HD killer app, is that the lead character is female. The legions of young men who have the XBOX 360 are uncomfortable playing a first person shooter whose protagonist is a woman — they’d much prefer a man’s man like Master Chief or Sam Fisher. But, being that they’re at least partially acclimated to modern times, they don’t want to admit it, so they make up superfluous criticisms of the game’s mechanics. No, this isn’t Halo 2, but it’s still a damn good game.