gaming

For sentimental types—or just those needing a break from the corporate treadmill—Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Diwali are reason enough to cheer. But for gamers overwhelmed by the year-end tsunami of new titles, we’re declaring a new national holiday: December. Even 31 days isn’t enough to work your way through all the new releases. So to make the most of your month (or however much time you can get free) we recommend starting with these five games that blend the high tech with high adrenaline.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but they neglected to mention that it’s also a crushing chokehold on the windpipe of creativity. Nowhere is this fact of life more apparent than in this fall’s lineup of upcoming and recently released video games. Look a little closer and you’ll realize—with a few exceptions—that it’s not just this season’s selection of pixelly diversions that suffer from a general lack of originality; it’s a long-running ailment endemic to the entire video game industry.

Remember the original Tecmo Bowl? You could pick Walter Payton and be guaranteed that nobody else on the field would have a chance of catching him (except maybe Lawrence Taylor). It didn’t matter if Payton got hurt midseason, had a streak of fumbles or even retired the next year. In Tecmo Bowl, ‘Sweetness’ was forever. Ah, those were the days.

With the launch of DynamicDNA in NBA Live 09, EA Sports has completely shattered the static memory of Payton.

I am hunter, warrior, slayer of Jedi. I am Darth Vader’s secret apprentice in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which hits shelves for the first time today. ($60, PS3/Xbox 360).

Thanks to Euphoria artificial intelligence, which simulates every quaking adversary’s nervous and muscular systems (they convincingly dive and cower when the explosive crates and invisible energy waves start flying), the galaxy trembles before my wrath. Molecular Matter software emulates realistic material breakage, causing metal to warp and wood to splinter along the grain according to the point of impact. Unlike rival games’ predictable battles, each neon-tinted firefight and lightsaber duel promises singular mayhem every time you hoist the controller.

As a newly minted WoW-head (that's World of Warcraft for you noobs), I've always wondered just how all those "gold farmers" who try to sell virtual gold within in the game came by their vast, ill-gotten riches. I'd heard rumors of sweatshops in China where people are forced to drink Mountain Dew and kill Fel Orcs for 16 hours straight, but that sounded too strange to be true -- and, at the same time, not too different from the average college dormitory.

Here’s a radical idea: Put down that PSP for a while. Give your tired fingers a break from its complex configurations of buttons and action controls, and try a whole different kind of game machine, one that uses just a single button and can be built and modified at home. At the core of this simple yet elegant retro game platform is a device called a ScreenKey, a small LCD screen built on top of a pushbutton. Couple it with a tiny programmable microcontroller, and you have a complete portable DIY “GameKey” system.

Ben Heckendorn’s game-console creations, from a portable Atari 2600 to a pocket-sized Nintendo 64, are famous in the modder world. But he may have topped himself with his Xbox 360 Elite laptop.

To shoehorn a full 360 into the 2.25-by-16-by-12-inch case and keep it playable, Heckendorn had to install fans and speakers and redo the internal layout of the machine several times. He then rewired the console to output the video to the 17-inch LCD display, on which he mounted an Xbox Live Vision camera for online multiplayer games.

Tired of car chases, robberies, and general action-packed anarchy? Set aside Grand Theft Auto IV for a minute and enter a new kind of gaming adventure: the exciting world of protein folding! Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington have developed Foldit, a free, online game in which players compete to design proteins.

Soon youll be able to ditch your game pad and Wiimote. A new camera system for computers and consoles will track your movements in three dimensions—essentially turning your body into the game controller. For example, play Rock Band by waving your hands at imaginary drums, or dodge punches in a fighting game.

Rockstar Games producer Leslie Benzies says that Grand Theft Auto IV may have cost more than $100 million to develop, which would reportedly make it the most expensive game ever produced.

Apparently more than a thousand people worked on the job. There's a 1,000-plus page script. Photographers snapped 100,000 photos for background scenes. And yes, the developers worked long hours getting things ready.

If you spend your free time killing and maiming people and/or aliens in a virtual world, does this have any effect on what you do in the real one? Psychologists have been trying to answer that question, or some form of it at least, for a while, and Cognitive Daily has an interesting review of one of the latest papers on the subject.

Just because game developers have the technological cojones to create a perfectly accurate simulation of the real world doesn't mean it's a good idea. The more a simulated racing-game car handles like the real thing, the more likely I am to destroy it on the first turn. If The Sims were an accurate simulation, you'd uninstall the program after the first insufferable meeting at work or interminable family argument over original recipe versus extra-crispy.

Sometimes, though, the accuracy of the simulation is precisely where the fun lies.

A few enterprising gamers have managed to port the popular shooter game Quake 3 onto the iPhone and iPod Touch. A YouTube video recently put into circulation shows how they've taken advantage of the devices' built-in accelerometers and touch-screen capability. Basically, you move around by tilting the iPhone or iPod, and tap the screen to blast bad guys. They've set it up so that multi-player games are possible, too.

E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has rolled his last d20. He was 69.

I could go on and on about the impact D&D had on multiple generations of geeks, freaks and nerds, or its influence on modern computer gaming (World of Warcraft, LotROnline and Everquest), or even its rather checkered history with the civilian population. (Who remembers the anti-D&D hysteria in the 80s?)