Fine fall video games from Rage to Resistance 3

You can make geography your major this week with the latest video-game releases. Spend time in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, embark on a road trip across America, sail the streets of San Francisco, roll around environments inspired by the artwork of ancient history, and zoom through the outer reaches of space.

Rage
(Bethesda; PC, PS3, Xbox 360; rated mature)
An asteroid impacted Earth in 2029. Some 100 years later, you emerge from cryogenic stasis into a wasteland. Now you have to survive. The developers at id Software do a great postapocalyptic world. Rage is fully realized and wonderfully detailed, even if the music, especially during combat sequences, is mindless and repetitive. This is a first-person shooter that shifts to a third-person perspective when you’re driving vehicles. And racing around the wasteland is very much a part of this game. As you play through the story you take on missions for various factions, which makes it difficult not to compare Rage to 2009’s Borderlands. The games share many features, including finely tuned controls, but where Rage differs, and excels, is in the skill of the enemies. These bandits and mutants don’t just blindly charge; they careen at you, jumping, spinning, and cartwheeling in order to dodge your attacks. Rage will leave you breathless and twitching.

Driver: San Francisco
(Ubisoft; PC, PS3, Xbox 360; rated teen)
Inspired by cop shows of the ’70s, and with a suitably worthy funkadelic soundtrack, the latest entry in this driving franchise is the first to be published by Ubisoft. And the driving is excellent. To allow players to change vehicles, the developers at Reflections in the U.K. came up with a mechanic called Shift. With it, players can move into and out of the body of any driver of any car, navigating the area with an overhead map marked with different mission types. The concept works into the story with a plot device borrowed from the TV series Life on Mars: detective John Tanner wakes from a car crash with the ability to “Shift”. Using this power, Tanner goes about working the case—trying to find the escaped convict, gangster Charles Jericho. The script is largely clever, the driving fun and wide-ranging, and the Shift mechanic turns Driver: San Francisco into something special.

Rock of Ages
(Atlus; PC, Xbox 360; rated everyone 10+)
Fun and funny, this quirky game is a fantastic twist on the tower-defence genre. In Rock of Ages, you don’t only protect your fortress, you also attack your opponent. It all starts with Sisyphus, forever rolling the boulder uphill—until he realizes that if he rolls it downhill, he can break out of Hades. So you’ll roll boulders across a map, dodging some obstacles and crushing others, trying to break through your opponent’s gate. At the same time, you protect your gate by constructing buildings, equipping weapons, and using animals to attack your opponent’s rocks. The first to gain entry to the other’s fortress wins the game. You can play against computer opponents in a story mode, or against friends online. The entire experience is presented in a hilarious wrapper that plays on five notable epochs of art—Ancient Greek, Medieval, Renaissance, Rococo, and Goya—not only for the visuals but for the characters and situations.

Star Fox 64 3D
(Nintendo; 3DS; rated everyone 10+)
This remake of Star Fox 64, developed for the Nintendo 64 console in 1997, plays much the same as the original. There are a few differences, though, beyond the fact that this version is for a handheld system and is presented in 3-D. The polygonal graphics from the 1997 version have been tossed in favour of a more realistic art style, for example, and the visuals here are remarkable. The 3DS gyroscope can be used with the thumbstick to control your fighter, but it’s not nearly sensitive enough to be effective. And if you do use the motion control, you’ll have to move your 3DS around. Given the narrow sweet spot of the 3-D viewing, this is ill-advised. The crisp flying and shooting, though, are a testament to how well the original game was designed.

Resistance 3
(Sony; PS3; rated mature)
More understated than the overly plotted Resistance 2, this first-person shooter is a simple road-trip story. Sure, the survival of humanity is at stake, but isn’t it always? It’s been nearly 50 years since the appearance of the Chimeran virus that turns people into horrific creatures, and they have overrun the world. Massive machines are rapidly cooling the planet. A device in New York has opened a wormhole to another galaxy and it must be destroyed. Your journey from Haven, Oklahoma, to New York is interrupted, of course, giving you a chance to help others struggling to survive. The finely balanced combat requires you to carefully select weapons and to move into areas of conflict with caution; you face many firefights that you’ll lose if you try to run and gun. The addition of new enemies, including a chaotic strain of Chimera, changes the dynamic of play the most. And as you’ll discover, not all of the monsters are Chimeran. Radio broadcasts tell the story of a defiant humanity and are a chilling portrayal of wartime survivors. Well paced and with a nice variety of environments, Resistance 3 makes subtlety work to its advantage.