Games I'm Playing Now

As of this past week, I'm addicted to Burnout: Paradise. It's not perfect, but the speed is the essence. I'm flying around, sitting close to my flatscreen, trying to outperform the pixels themselves. It feels like an upper limit to my reflexes and visual cortex. Of course, the game cheats a little—corrects you on your path as you're flying around impossible bends—just a little, though. I drive around and around, trying to find something to do. I'm like a virtual version of myself back in Los Angeles, when I was jobless and meandering between the Valley and the hills of Mulholland Drive, the canyons. Just faster.

I played Lost Odyssey for several hours. A four-disc RPG epic for the 360, it's all Japanese styling to the nth. I got lost in the story. The controls are pathetic as far as being distanced from your character as he becomes a tiny figure in static, massive, gothic rooms after rooms, but the emotions are strange. I'm an immortal who is a mercenary now...a survivor of some strange battle on lava plains...? I have sentimental dreams that take the shape of ten-minute-long tone poems that play out on my TV, using only lines of text, font styles, fuzzy images, and sound effects. Kudos to the development team for being that artsy-aggressive, I'm stunned. I'm not sure I want to get deeper than one disc.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a cartoony DS game, all Miyazaki style and creepy anime throwback elegance. A top-hatted man meanders around a Japanese concept of a post-war French village seeking out the mystery of the Golden Apple, and along the way solves random puzzles and brainteasers that villagers throw at him. It's like a picture-puzzle book brought to life. It gets repetitive. I get bored sometimes. But I always come back.

I started God of War: Chains of Olympus on my PSP. It's gorgeous, plays just like the PS2 games, though a little small and pixelly. The PSP can't help it—those landscapes have to fit on that relatively tiny screen somehow. I like it. I am starting to switch over, perhaps, to the PSP for a while. There are too many great games. Too bad the system takes too long to load. I lose patience and long for my simple, quick-start, long-battery-life DS.

I still play Catan every day. But I've stopped Madden. Having an undefeated season as the Jets in 2012 was enough for me. I'm spent.