A Cross Between Courtney Love and Peter Pan

There is a certain creepy, meticulous, lurid quality to the Spider art of Louise Bourgeois. Like, when you go to the cavernous Dia:Beacon and see "Spider," all enclosed and adorned, you feel the hairy arachnid creeping inside you. You get that same feeling from SOUL CALIBUR III, probably the best fighting game ever made. After you play it, it lives inside you. Now, what distinguishes the SOUL CALIBUR series is its artful attention to story and its careful consideration of the most minute detail. There are some games, just a few of them, that can be called art—not just tech art like some Ipod-like gizmo from Wired, not just popular art like a cartoon from Spain Rodriquez. In SOUL CALIBUR III, the art is so rich on alls levels from gameplay to graphics, it could be displayed in the Gug.

In the latest version, the character rendering is more lurid than in past iterations. Even the darkest characters seem brighter. The newest, the pixie-ish Tira with her circular fighting sword and vivid green outfit, is a cross between the delicacy of Peter Pan combined with the hard-edged spirit of Courtney Love.

And (oh, joy) you have to be a reader to really sponge up the story in SCIII. Take time to read the odd grammar within the text that appears on the screen when each character fights through the single player mode. Here, the character's personality unfolds. Whether it's the sad immortality of Zasalamel, which recalls the most passionate yearning of Anne Rice's vampires, or the almost religious purity of Sophitia, you get to know the compelling, complex nature as though they were real people.

Buy this and you'll find it's like a drug and literature rolled into one. As you sleep, you'll dream about SCIII. During the day, you'll analyze it, deconstruct it, even wonder about influence of myth upon the creators. And you'll kick some real A when you play.

The Complete New Yorker puts 8,220 jpeg thumbnails of covers in a file on your computer. It took such a long time to install its "New Yorker Viewer" files on my new Toshiba, that I wondered if every word of every issue were going onto my hard drive, or if my Pentium IV chip had reverted to an old Intel 386. When it finished taking my laptop on a one hundred yard dash, the first thing I looked up, of course, was video games.

The New Yorker is the closest thing to literature in magazines: that's not news. But would the writers over the years treat video games as they treat any other popular art? Though the search engine took some getting used to, I finally found Elizabeth Kolbert's piece on "Ultima Online" from 2001. It was beautifully and meticulously written, but it just did not seem to take any joy in the beauty of the game or the gaming experience itself. Is this a pattern? In December, I will continue this search through The New Yorker archives for words about video games—to let you know if they're written with condescension or with the same adulation and appreciation that you get from a New Yorker writer, when, say, you're reading a pop music piece about Keren Ann.

Shadow of the Colossus
Publisher: Sony
Developer: SCEI

Forget the Tom Wolfe crap about Masters of the Universe. They weren't walking here in Manhattan. In fact, forget the old toys and the old TV show. SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS reveals the real MOTUs. They're big; they're ugly, and one even looks like Dick Cheney if he were made of stone (his heart actually may be). You're the puny braveheart trying to get the gods to revive your young maiden friend. You ride a stallion through some of the most beautiful environs ever to be seen on the PS2 and you beat up on 16 monolithic behemoths with a sword, a bow . . . and a prayer. Everything here is tastefully and carefully rendered, and there's not a lot of bad writing to bog down the story (which is told well by the graphics alone). Overall, SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS is sheer panorama; it's adventure; it's exotic music; it's the zen of gaming mixed with the art of war.

Spartan Total Warrior
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Creative Assembly

While Colossus is cinematic in a Days of Heaven meets Kurosawa, SPARTAN TOTAL WARRIOR is the "Lord of the Rings" battle scenes meets HBO's "Rome" (without, unfortunately, the rampant sex). As the ultimate Spartan, you war against everything from the Hydra to the Minotaur as you move from hero to legend. (And haven't you always wanted to be a legend? Me, I'm happy to be a hermit.) What's really staggering here are the battles. You'll see 160 fighters onscreen at once, which is as awesome as games get these days. Still, there are problems, the primary one being the targeting of enemies. It's too often not exact enough. However, if you're waiting for that crosstown bus that comes 45 minutes late, don't take it out the driver, the 311 operator or even with a note Bloomberg (who won't answer you). Take it out on the gladiators and barbarians. It's very satisfying.