Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Many of you were only recently searching for the perfect gift, crushed amid a slavering horde of bargain-minded shoppers. Perhaps thoughts turned to clearing a path to the cash register with a few swings of the discounted Dyson vacuum cleaner. Video games can help you.

Few game enemies are as perennially popular as zombies. The undead offer a nearly guilt-free opportunity for indulging some violent retribution—after all, using a shotgun to create a bowling-ball-sized hole in a shambling corpse is only returning your once fellow citizen to his well-earned rest, right?

In any case, those seeking to purge the stress of the new year with the (virtual) perforation of non-breathing humanoids have two excellent choices. The first is “Left 4 Dead 2”, a new high-speed, high-intensity first-person shooter from Valve Software. The setting is a sketchily explained zombie holocaust, and the game pits you and three other survivors against a never-ending horde of monsters. This is something you can play alone, but it was created to be played as a co-operative experience with others, as you and your compatriots struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds, armed with assault rifles, Molotov cocktails and the occasional frying pan.  read more »

Do you have a heap of game controllers piling up around your television? Because Nintendo wants to sell you yet another one. If you’ve got a Nintendo Wii, you’ll have the wand-like controller and its plug-in “nunchuck”, used for some games. In fact, you’ll probably have two controllers, or possibly four, as the best Wii games are for more than one player. You may also have the “balance board” that comes with Wii Fit, which resembles giant bathroom scales and can be used for skiing and other balance games. Leaning up against that may be a plastic guitar-shaped controller for “Guitar Hero”. And perhaps the Wii Zapper, for shooting games. It looks like a gun, but Nintendo insists it’s a crossbow. Yeah, sure—a crossbow that can magically fire 6,000 rounds a minute.

This all adds up to quite a pile of white plastic. And now there’s more: the Wii MotionPlus, a small box that snaps on to the standard controller and dramatically improves its motion-sensing accuracy. This makes new things possible, such as sword-fighting games in which the on-screen action directly mimics the motion of the controller. (Many people, not all of them “Star Wars” fans, complained when the original controller couldn’t do this.) There’s a new set of games, “Wii Sports Resort”, to show what the Wii MotionPlus can do.  read more »

Before the heyday of the first-person shooter, gaming graphics typically involved two dimensions. Think of the original "Super Mario Brothers": Mario could move left, right or on top of an enemy, but he couldn't pass behind or in front of one.

Once three-dimensional gaming became all the rage, publishers and developers insisted that no one would shell out full retail price ($50-60) for a 2D game, and so entire genres languished. Now, however, as downloadable gaming becomes increasingly popular, developers can avoid the production and marketing expenses involved in producing and distributing game discs. This gives them the financial freedom to revisit older playing styles.  read more »

The year’s two big music games both came out recently. Their gameplay is similar, but everything else about them points to two very different ideas about the future of this popular genre.

To great fanfare, MTV Games released “The Beatles: Rock Band” on September 9th. High-profile reviewers greeted the game with breathless praise. Much of the coverage has concentrated on its unlikely creation. Ringo, Paul, Yoko and Olivia Harrison have jealously guarded the band’s legacy, and have chosen new opportunities very carefully. (The Beatles have yet to offer their music through iTunes, for example.)

Anyone who plays this game instantly understands why the band and their families trusted its developer, Harmonix, with the world’s most desirable music catalogue. The game is a love letter to the Beatles, offering both an exciting new way to experience their music and a sort of primer on their history.  read more »

Adventure video games, which prized exploration, conversation and problem-solving over combat, were among the most popular franchises of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. George Lucas-owned LucasArts published some of the best, including the "Monkey Island" series, "Loom" (Stephen Spielberg's gaming debut) and the "Maniac Mansion" games.

Lately some small development houses have been working to revive the moribund adventure genre. Telltale Games, a developer that boasts several former LucasArts employees, has gone about this in a very clever way: the company releases “episodic” gaming content, framing each game in “seasons”, like a television show, with new episodes released monthly. Each episode contains perhaps three to five hours of gameplay, and each is both self-contained and part of a larger narrative that extends through the entire series.  read more »