Dust is actually two different games. The "Premium Rules" allow each player to control an established superpower in world that has been divided by the battle to acquire and use alien technology. The "Epic Rules" start each player with a meager power base that gradually expands as the game goes on. The epic version can take up to six hours, compared to the three or four hours for the shorter version.

Each game plays out on a large map of Earth, and has some similarities to Axis & Allies - you produce units, move existing units and then fight your battles. The turn order is determined by an innovative mechanic in which each player secretly chooses a card. The cards set the order of battle along with production and combat limits. On any given turn, you're forced to compromise with yourself and hope your cards fit in with your plans for conquest. The coolest part of Dust is the mix of WWII flavor with alien tech. The mechs look like walking Sherman tanks, and the air units are strange, boxy machines. You can read both versions of the rules online. Images by: Fantasy Flight Games.

Condon told me that he's directing something called SonsbeekLive: The Twentyfivefold Manifestation. It's an art project/live action role playing game happening right now, in a Netherlands forest, with 200 participants. The event coincides with an annual outdoor art display in Sonsbeek forest, and the art is incorporated into the LARP. Set in a distant future where industrial civilization has fallen, the LARP unfolds as the characters come to the forest to worship the art and go through a series of ritualistic rites-of-passage. The haunting, beautiful art in the forest really does look like futuristic monuments.

Influenced by playing a lot of computer games as a kid, and participating in what he calls "an experimental LARP group" in the 1990s, Condon focuses on how games create small moments of abstract beauty — sort of like modern ballet.

What I find intriguing about Condon's work is the way it suggests that participatory, amateur performances like LARPs are nearly indistinguishable from art. Games have always verged on being art, and have certainly been part of art for thousands of years. But gamers have not usually been granted the status of artist. I love Condon's work for showing how LARPers and other kinds of gamers can be artists in their own right, creating public fantasy narratives that are just as worthy of attention as a piece of theater performed at your local rep house.

So does Condon see SonsbeekLive as art, or is it gaming? He says it's ambiguous:

Tis both i suppose. I dont really ask those questions. Art isn't a thing, it's a place/context/discussion. The base of my work is modifying existing games, so - I made a LARP, then I'm modifying it (usually I'm modifying existing games- in this case my own) to create random motion performances in the park around the sculptures. It's like making a live game engine that spits out random performances.

Want to learn more about SonsbeekLive, or participate? Find out more on the website.

SonsbeekLive [official site]

The creator creator allows you to design a unique look for your critter, and to pack it with attributes that will aid it in its quest for survival. A social animal will have to make friends and influence creatures. A herbivore can only eat fruit it can reach, and a predator can only feed on prey it can outrun or outfox and outfight. You can guess which path my Chlororaptor is designed to take.

Your critter's biology - the choices that you made while creating and upgrading your creature - will influence the culture that develops as your creature moves into the civilization phase of the game. Twitchy many-eyed herbivores built by nature to constantly search for and flee from trouble do not easily develop into Klingons. The game is likely to be more forgiving than evolution, but one can imagine a player sighing, "The appendix...what was I thinking?" You can also add my creatures to your games. Spore is kind enough to keep track of the statistics, giving me a chance to see how successful my voracious sack of algae tends to be.

Environment, change, and consequence aren't the whole story, but they are a pretty good introduction. As a teacher I've always been interested in entertainment that manages to educate without being obnoxious. If science is done entirely without a sense of play it ends up being wearisome and fruitless. And Spore isn't the only game to figure that out.

Programs like Folding@home use your home computer or Playstation 3 to process the dynamics of protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that are wadded together in specific ways. Fold them into the wrong shape, and at best you'll have a nonfunctional protein. At worst, you could be looking at the beginning of Alzheimer's. The math to describe protein folding is typically too much for a single computer to handle, but thousands of idle PS3s between games of Call of Duty 4 can do a lot of sums.

With apologies to the King of All Cosmos, this is how I imagine Folding@home on a PS3.

Foldit takes this approach a step further. Instead of taking advantage of computers, Foldit takes advantage of users. Teams of folders compete to produce the best 3D shape for a given protein. Human beings are good at manipulating 3D shapes and solving puzzles - computers aren't, or, at least, aren't yet. Given the rules of how different pieces of a protein will interact with one another, what likely shapes will it assume? Give a computer this problem and it will laboriously and ponderously churn its way to an answer that might be obvious to you or I (for a simple protein). Give the same computer the wrong algorithm or starting conditions, and you'll get nowhere fast.

Dr. Leeroy Jenkins prematurely rearranges a protein, much to the chagrin of his Foldit guild.

Games like this take advantage of what NYU digital studies professor Clay Shirky has called the cognitive surplus - the spare time to ponder and participate that technology and culture have been steadily generating ever since the human race moved past subsistence. Though some of the surplus ends up devoted to projects like Wikipedia, much of it is naturally expended creating and consuming art and entertainment. The amount of work required to appreciate entertainment varies, but many would argue that the complexity of popular television narratives has increased significantly. A good narrative is a puzzle with people in it, and requires a bit of that cognitive surplus to enjoy.

The alternate reality game I Love Bees tapped into that surplus with a vengeance. A beekeeper's website begins to display disjointed and enigmatic fragments of text. What follows is a complex narrative involving the Halo universe and an damaged artificial intelligence. Players were rewarded for solving puzzles given to them by the game team with a new clue or an advancement of the plot towards. In Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming, Dr. Jane McGonigal discusses how players - without prompting from the game team - naturally developed strategies for distributing workload and solving puzzles efficiently. Given a list of numbers that could be GPS coordinates, the mathematically inclined began working out alternate theories while the more physically adventurous (and geographically fortunate) began visiting locations and looking for commonalities. A relay puzzle required the communication of facts given to the players via payphone increasingly quickly to the next player at a distant payphone - one break in the chain, and that part of the narrative ends. Despite a scant 15-second pause from one call to the next during the most challenging part of the puzzle, the players never wavered. Another part of the game involved an artificial computer language, which the players were so successful at deciphering that, by the end of the game, the game team was using the player documentation to write hints.

Expert analysis of data, peer review, and the effective coordination of large groups in an emergency emerged in-game. These are talents that are useful for more than finding out what happened to a fictional bee fancier's web page. The energy, brilliance, and sheer bloody-mindedness of your gamers is a largely untapped resource. I imagine Final Fantasy minigames where players fold magical widgets into protein shapes for bonuses, or an alternate reality game where FEMA takes notes. Hybridize real problems with compelling narratives, and you may find that you and your guild inadvertently cured cancer.

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• Battlezone was developed in 1979 by Atari and released in 1980. Morgan Hoff at Atari was the lead designer, and Ed Rotberg served as the principal programmer. Both had worked on many of Atari's other classic games.
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• Battlezone was a tank simulator that gave you two joysticks, one for the left tread and one for the right, and a single button that fired your gun. You would drive all over an alien landscape, complete with an erupting volcano, and blast enemy tanks and spaceships while dodging simple geometric shapes.
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• In addition, the screen would "crack" when you were killed by an enemy, and would also play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture when you would enter your initials for the high score.
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• Battlezone incorporated many new design elements that hadn't been seen in coin-operated games before, like a persicope-like viewer and realistic (for the time) simulated tank driving. The game also featured a built-in step to allow shorter gamers to reach the periscope.
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• The game featured wire-frame vector graphics in black and white, but they overlaid red and green cellophane onto the monitor to make it look like the game actually had different colors. The radar and warning messages were in red, while the main graphics were in green.
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• Once the game was released, it was an instant hit. In fact, it became so popular that the United States Army approached Atari and had them design a version of the game that would train gunners on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Only two prototypes were produced that featured realistically modeled enemy helicopters, tanks, and other vehicles.
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• Ed Rotberg was so incensed that Atari was getting involved with the military, that he had several shouting matches with his bosses. He agreed only to stay on at Atari as long as he never had to work on another military project again.
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• Because players covered up most of the game with their face and body, other editions were designed like one without the periscope (because of concerns over hygiene as well, with everyone pressing their faces up against the viewer) and a cocktail table prototype.
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• Rumors persisted that you could drive up to the volcano, enter a secret passage, and then find and explore a castle. Also, people thought that if you continued driving straight for over an hour (!) you could eventually reach the mountains and find a tank factory that was building the enemy tanks. Sadly, neither were true.
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• Red Baron was a game released almost a year after Battlezone, featuring similar wire-frame graphics and gameplay except sit in a World War I biplane instead of a futuristic tank on an alien world. In fact, many Red Baron cabinets were just conversions of Battlezone units, and you could peel off the Red Baron stickers revealing the Battlezone artwork underneath.
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• Battlezone remained popular much longer than most games that came out at the same time, and several different versions of been produced over the years. The game was ported to just about every home and portable video game system, and there were multiplayer versions and sequels produced for PCs.
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• In Battlezone, the 1998 remake for PCs, they included an actual story. Meteors fall on the Earth in 1957, and the Americans and Soviets find a rare element inside them called bio-metal, which lets them build vehicles with special abilities. Of course, the Soviets and Americans use this ability to wage war across the solar system rather than better mankind.
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• Peter Hirschberg is an amazing computer animator and arcade owner who frequent makes 3D models of old arcade cabinets in his spare time. He contributed models to the retro-gaming documentary Chasing Ghosts, and you can check out his Battlezone and Tron models here. Keep in mind there are completely rendered in the computer, and are not photographs or filmed images.
  
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Wall-E: The Video Game will be out on June 27th, for just about every gaming platform you can imagine. Probably even on your car's computer navigation screen, or your internet-ready can opener.

New Wall-E Screens [Worth Playing]

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• Rocket Ship (Gottlieb, 1958): One of the first true science fiction themed pinball machines was this beauty where you had to spell out R-O-C-K-E-T-S-H-I-P during gameplay and blast off into outer space.
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• Egg Head (Gottlieb, 1961): A wacky mad scientist and his robotic pal use their wiles to play tic-tac-toe with a bevy of buxom beauties. The actual playfield had a tic-tac-toe setup made up of bumpers, and you had to try and light them up in a row based on the random bouncings of your ball.
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• Pinball Pool (Gottlieb, 1978): Dark-haired pool sharks with ample bosoms spar against a gleaming chrome robot. Just check out the closeup of the lower half of the playfield that shows them glaring at each other.
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• Apollo, Blast Off, and Lunar Shot (Williams, 1967): Hoping to cash in on the race for the moon, Williams released not one but three pinball machines, all with identical artwork and slightly modified playfields, that played on America's race for the moon.
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• Star-Jet (Bally, 1963): Bally's outer space fantasy game was one of the first to feature extra balls in play, which was called the "Blast Off Extra Balls" feature. The term multiball hadn't come into play yet. Pretty amazing back art showed a group of attractive young men and women heading for space.
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• Time Tunnel (Bally, 1971): Time Tunnel was a simple pinball game featuring mod-style artwork of teenagers who were probably supposed to be traveling through time. However, CBS sued Bally over the copyright to the name due to their Time Tunnel television show and Bally stopped producing this game.
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• Space Mission (Williams, 1976): Inspired by the space exploration of 1970s-era NASA, Space Mission featured artwork that looked like Spacelab above a playfield filled with outer-space docking targets. They also released a two-player version that was virtually identical called Space Odyssey.
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• Tri Zone (Williams, 1979): Tri Zone looked a bit like Logan's Run meets THX-1138, with vapid people standing around in some sort of a utopian future where they're forced to compete in the Tri Zone competition. Don't ask me to explain it.
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• Alien Poker (Williams, 1980): Yes, you've seen dogs playing poker on countless oil paintings, now it's aliens playing poker. You know, when interstellar travel and exploration get boring, it's time to bust out a deck and play a little five card stud. Check out the playfield, where it looks like ROM the Space Knight also plays poker.
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• Fireball (Bally, 1971): A giant space vampire hurling fireballs at you? Sign us up. The actual game was about releasing Odin and Wotan (the German version of Odin), and having them square off against each other, but we're holding onto our fantasy of a space vampire who wants to kick some ass. He even came back for vengeance in Fireball II in 1980.
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• Laser Ball (Williams, 1979): This game featured a buxom redhead (who looks a lot like Jean Grey) firing... er, laser balls at you. She sure was hell-bent on keeping you beat down for some reason.
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• Vector (Bally, 1982): This was a science fiction sports fantasy game, where it looked like players were combining jai alai with some sort of bizarre Discs of Tron hockey mashup. Still, they got to don cool Mighty Morphin Power Rangers-esque costumes and hurl things around, sounds like fun.
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• Embryon (Bally, 1981): This game featured some of the most graphic pinball art we've ever seen, featuring a half-naked bald alien woman writhing around in some sort of a birth-chamber-sac. There's a human figure who looks a lot like Adam Strange watching over everything... did he somehow impregnate her? Maybe that was the goal of the game.
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• World Defender (Nuova Bell Games, 1985): Boy, does the guy on the backart for this game look familiar or what? Plus, we can't recall a time when the Terminator went toe-to-toe with fighter jets. Holy ripoff, Batman.
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• Pin-Bot (Williams, 1986): The first in a series of three robot pinball-themed games from Williams featured a Pinball robot in outer space, forcing you to do his interstellar bidding and attempting to score points.
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• Strange Science (Bally, 1986): A truly bizarre pinball game that featured a mad scientist trying to swap a monkey's brain with that of a hot girl's. You had to facilitate the transfer by lighting up bonuses and making things happen. Much like Igor.
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• The Machine: Bride of Pinbot (Williams, 1991): Probably one of the coolest and most bizarre pinball machines was this early 90s model Pin-Bot sequel from Williams, which featured a robotic woman with light-up nipples, and an extreme bonus field right where her vagina would be. Overt sexuality in games? Shocking.
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• Jack-Bot (Williams, 1995): Jack-Bot was the third in a series of games featuring "bots" in pinball, and of course used the Pin-Bot babe yet again. The game features a jackpot robot (the Jack-Bot), and a jackpot-style playfield.
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• In 1978 Taito was a Japanese company that was struggling to make a profit on Pachinko machines. With the rise of electronic arcade games, Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders and created history.

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• The game was inspired by Atari's Breakout, by the descriptions of the aliens in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and by a freaky dream that Nishikado had about aliens appearing in the sky instead of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Which means you get lines and lines of relentlessly invading creatures, who all happen to look like an octopoids.
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• Arcades opened in Japan featuring nothing but rows and rows of Space Invaders games, so if you thought your corner convenience store with Galaga and Pole Position hardly had any choices, think again.
  
• The game was so popular in Japan that it caused a major shortage of coins, and they had to quadruple yen production to keep up with the demand.
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• Space Invaders was one of the first games to feature endless gameplay, as previous games had all worked on a timer. If you were good, you could go on blasting aliens forever... or until the game ran out of memory.
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• The upright cabinet version of the game in arcades actually had the monitor below the eyeline of the player, and the gamefield was reflected onto a piece of plastic on the back of the cabinet, which had cool artwork painted on it. The resulting combination had the gamefield on top of a lunar landscape.
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• The original Taito version of the game used joysticks, but the American version from Midway used buttons to control the laser cannon.
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• The game ran on an Intel 8080 as its processor, running at 2 MHz.
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• It was estimated that the game pulled in $500 million in its first year of release in the arcades alone, which still makes it one of the most profitable games ever developed.
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• In 1980 a version of Space Invaders was released for the Atari 2600, and it quickly became one of the "must have" games for the system.
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• Versions came out for other home gaming consoles, but due to copyright infringement they would have to be retitled. Like Space Armada for the Intellivision.
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• Coca-Cola even asked Atari to create a version for the 2600 called Pepsi Invaders, featuring invading letters spelling out Pepsi, so you could blast them out of the sky. Coke gave the 125 cartridges out to its employees.
  
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• Numerous sequels have appeared in arcades over the years, including Space Invaders Part II (or Space Invaders Deluxe), Return of the Invaders, Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV (or Super Space Invaders '91), Space Invaders DX, and Akkan-vaders (or Space Invaders '95: The Attack Of The Lunar Loonies).
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• Guillaume Reymond created a human version of the game in 2006, which you can watch in all of its glory right here:
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• Shigeru Miyamoto, who created Donkey Kong and a slew of other games for Nintendo, has said that Space Invaders was what inspired him to get into game development.
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• The cover for Boston's "Don't Look Back" album was inspired by Space Invaders.
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• In an episode of Futurama, Fry fights off invading aliens because he's a master of Space Invaders. All he needs to rock the game are a two-liter bottle of Shasta, and a Rush mix tape.

You'll control a squad of four Colonial Marines in the game, issuing commands and dealing with their different personalities as you investigate the disappearance of Ellen Ripley and the team of Colonial Marines she left with aboard the U.S.S. Sulaco. Key areas in the game include the derelict spacewreck from the first Alien movie, and the LV-426 colony from Aliens. You'll use weapons like the pulse rifle, the M240 flamethrower, and the M56 Smart Gun that Vasquez kicked much ass with.

The thing sure looks a bit like Doom meets Quake, but we loved the world of the Colonial Marines so much that we'd watch a television show or movie about them even if it didn't have a single Alien in it. Oh wait, we did... and it was called Starship Troopers. Actually, there were a lot of aliens in that, except they looked like bugs instead of creepy H.R. Giger nightmares. Still, we loved it and have high hopes for Part 3, especially if it includes shower scenes.

Colonial Marines was originally being developed for the PS2, but was cancelled by Fox back in 2001. Then SEGA announced in 2006 that they were working on a game set in the Aliens world, and it'll be out for the PC, the PS3, and the Xbox 360 in late 2008. Which of course means we're going to have to wait on it, a lot more than 17 days. As Hicks would say. "17 days?!?! We're not gonna last 17 hours!"

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• Gygax spent his formative years reading science fiction authors Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber as well as the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian via Robert E. Howard's books.
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• In 1953 Gygax first played Gettysburg by Avalon Hill, and later ended up ordering blank hexagonal mapping paper from the same company.
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• In 1966 he founded the International Federation of Wargamers with friends, and in 1967 he organized a 20 person gaming get-together in his basement that was later billed as Gen Con 0. Gen Con is now the world's largest hobby-gaming convention.
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• He founded the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, which was a military miniatures society. This guy sure loved his Associations, Federations, and groups.
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• In 1971, he and Jeff Perren wrote Chainmail, a medieval miniatures game, which later featured a supplementary set of rules featuring magic spells and other fantasy elements.
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• After playing Gettysburg, he became obsessed with finding ways to generate random numbers rather than using traditional six-sided dice. He found a set of the five platonic solids in the back of a school supply catalog and ordered several sets, and later introduced them into gaming in D&D. In fact, owning your own dice and keeping them in a little velvet bag was a sign of geek coolness, back then.
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• In 1974 he formed Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye and released the first set of Dungeons and Dragons rules, and their first run of 1,000 hand-printed editions sold out in nine months, and were later passed around college and high school campuses across the nation.
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• In 1976, TSR introduced the game Metamorphosis Alpha, which later became Gamma World. The game was inspired by Brian Aldiss' novel Starship, and later crossed over into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world with the "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" module. Gygax said the module was meant to show what would happen if a ship like one in Metamorphosis Alpha crashed into a D&D world.
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• In 1982 TSR followed the scifi vein with Star Frontiers, which featured swashbuckling space adventure through the unexplored worlds of the Frontier. This was actually my first introduction to role-playing games, and I have to admit that I loved this game a lot more than D&D. In fact, I'm tempted to dig through trunks to see if I still have the rulebook.
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• Gygax left TSR in 1984 during changes to management, and began working on the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon show.
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• In 1987 Gygax developed Cyborg Commando, a science fiction roleplaying game "set in 2035 at a time when the earth is invaded by aliens called Xenoborgs intent on subduing humanity and taking control of the planet. Luckily humanity has developed a new kind of solider: the Cyborg Commando, a mechanical/electronical man-like structure that can be implanted with a willing human's brain." Unfortunately it was later criticized as "the worst role-playing game ever written."
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• In 1999 he introduced Lejendary Adventure, which was meant to be a return to less-complicated gameplay with an emphasis on fun, although it explored the familiar gaming territory already well-covered by D&D. One of the last projects he had been working on was an expansion module for Lejendary called "Lejendary AsteRogues", as sort of "fantastical science RPG." According to Gygax, "The Lejendary AsteRogues game is actually in the "Fantastical Science" area, not true SF. It is a sort of mix of steampunk and super science with a leavening of Napoleonic Era military material." Sounds pretty scifi to us.
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• He wrote two science fiction short stories, "Pay Tribute" and "The Battle Off Deadstar," which were published in the scifi anthology The Fleet and Breakthrough (The Fleet, Book 3).
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• He has a strain of bacteria named after him: "Arthronema gygaxiana sp nov UTCC393." We hope it's not flesh-eating.
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• In 2000 he appeared as himself on an episode ofFuturama along with Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, and Stephen Hawking. He rolls the dice to determine which greeting to give to Fry.
  

Karl Kopinski did a lot of illustration work for Warhammer 40,000, and he brings the same attention to detail to AT 43, obsessing over details and geeking out with new alien races. The final miniatures (including this set that we want to live on our desk) are actually very close to the concept art, and don't look like your traditional stamped-out plastic gamepieces. They come fully assembled and painted, so you don't have to spend hours trying to make them look pretty before you game.

There's scant information on their website about the game (although the rulebook that you can purchase promises a full history), but you can download excerpts from the rules, as well as a bunch of concept art wallpapers. When you don't hear from us on the weekends, it's not because we're taking a break, it's because we're getting our game on all weekend and trying to conquer the world with miniatures.

AT 43 [AT 43 stuff]

• Half-Life: The original Half-Life came out in 1998, and it's sequel Half-Life 2 came out in 2004. The extremely popular game has spawned numerous "mini-sequels," including Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Episode 2, and the spinoff title Portal.

  In the game, you play Dr. Gordon Freeman, a scientist who unwittingly tears open a dimensional portal during a routine experiment at a facility in the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico. Aliens begin pouring through the newly opened portal, and you find yourself both the target of these creatures, and of government forces who are trying to hush up the incident. You end up surviving (the sequels wouldn't make much sense otherwise) and things get continually worse. By the time Half-Life 2 begins, the Earth has been changed into a dystopian world that is slowly being de-terraformed into a wasteland. Oceans are being drained, buildings taken apart, and the place is full of both alien and humanoid forces who want to have your liver for dinner.

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• Halo: Halo 3 came out in September, to massively sales and fanboys complaining that it just "wasn't enough," but developer Bungie has created a fully realized universe within in the game.

  Halo takes place in the distant future where the human race is in the middle of a bitter war with an alien race called The Covenant. You play "Master Chief," a genetically engineered supersoldier (called a Spartan) who dons battle armor and serves as humanity's last hope. As the game progresses, you discover that the Covenant have found a giant ring-like object (a Halo) left behind by an ancient alien race called The Forerunners. If activated, the Halo will act as a deadly weapon, able to destroy entire planets. Much like Luke destroying the Death Star, you have to destroy the Halo and make sure the Covenant don't win. The Earth in Halo is brutally invaded by the Covenant, where they lay waste to entire continents with massive weapons, turning all of the land into glass. Cities have become battlefields, and most of the citizens have been wiped out, or are in deep hiding. It's not a pretty site when you see nukes going off all over the planet, and it's even less pretty when you have to go down there. Even if you manage to save the world, it's going to look like a wasteland when you're done.

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• BioShock: One of the most imaginative games to come along in years isn't set in the future at all, but in a bizarre undersea city that re-imagines the future of the past, and combines a steampunk science fiction approach with genetic modification technology.

  In BioShock the game controls Jack, a passenger aboard a plane in 1960. Disaster strikes and the plane plummets into the ocean, killing everyone aboard except you. You swim to a nearby tower poking out of the dark waters, and inside find a bathysphere that takes into Rapture, a full-sized city built secretly on the ocean floor in 1946. Through a series of audio recordings and newsreel style videos, you're shown how meglomaniacal millionaire Andrew Ryan built the city to get away from what he saw as the oppressive rules of government and religion. He envisioned Rapture as an undersea utopia, but it didn't take long for things to unravel. By the time Jack arrives in the city, it's clear that the place is falling apart, and most of the popular are dead. The only remaining inhabitants are "Splicers," genetically mutated humans who are murderous and insane, and a few human holdouts who have barricaded themselves into the few remaining safe places in the city. You become trapped in a battle between the leader of the black market, Atlas, and the insane Ryan himself. As the game progresses, you acquire raw genetic material that you can use at upgrade stations to modify your genetic template, meaning you can give yourself telekinesis, the ability to turn invisible, or the power to shoot flames from your hands. It's sort of like having Heroes on tap. You come to appreciate the beautiful disaster that Rapture has become, with the sea attempting to overtake the city that has become trapped in time.

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• Portal: Strictly speaking, Portal was meant to be a small one-note spinoff set in the Half-Life universe featuring a small game called Narbacular Drop that Half-Life developer Valve had acquired. It was included in The Orange Box, a game set Valve released last month that included Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2 and Portal. Portal has overwhelmingly been the smash hit of that set.

  In Portal you play Chell, a female test subject for Aperture Science, Inc. (a company in the Half-Life universe) who wakes up inside a gigantic maze and coached (or tortured, depending on your views) by an artificial intelligence called GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System). GLaDOS puts you through a series of testing chambers designed to help you learn how to use the "Portal" gun, which can create entrace and exit wormhole portals on walls, ceilings, and floors. Each chamber challenges you further with increasingly hard puzzles that you have to solve using the Portal gun in order to escape. As the game goes on, you notice that GLaDOS is a bit off her rocker, and all of the human observation posts are empty. In fact, she starts promising that cake will be waiting for you if you can complete the test course. Later you're able to slip behind the scenes and find some graffiti from a previous test subject telling you that the cake is a lie. Although if you finish the game, you find out that she might not have been lying all along. It's all immortalized in a song that GLaDOS sings you over the closing credits, which you can watch below.

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