Like Smash Brothers Brawl is a tribute to Nintendo icons young and old, Call of Duty 4 is a love letter to the FPS genre. We’ve come a long way since the days of Marathon: Durandal; health bars have given way to temporary damage, waypoints are status quo, and it’s hard to imagine a modern FPS that fails to lead you from objective to objective. Call of Duty takes modern FPS design and, without really adding anything new to the formula, delivers a lean and polished game experience.

There’s been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over at Gamasutra about the role of writers and narratives in game development.

The upshot is that some developers think that a writer is too specialized to contribute beyond the skills of a designer who can also write. One opinion goes so far as to say that games tell a nonlinear story that, by simple virtue of player agency, is antithetical to traditional narrative structure, and writers therefore can’t contribute.

A more conciliatory and dualist viewpoint is nestled in an interview with portal developers Kim Swift And Erik Wolpaw:

We had this theory that games tell two stories. There’s the “story story” which is the cutscenes and the dialogue, and the “gameplay story” which is the story that’s described by the actions you take in the game world. The theory was that the closer you could bring those two stories together, the more satisfying the game would be.

It doesn’t really speak to the role of writers in game design, but nevertheless clearly articulates that traditional narrative and flow of agency are separate constructs that can be brought together. If Portal is any indicator, maybe writers and designers should pay attention.

Marathon 2: Durandal is (understandably) an evolutionary throwback to a simpler time in FPS design where everything looked blandly similar and the only thing to hold player attention was merciless difficulty. Both design and graphics have moved on since then and the only people who will likely enjoy the game are the truly hardcore and series fans looking to revive gaming memories.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl takes the super-accessible multiplayer fighting of previous Smash games and piles on even more content without shaking up the core formula too much. The end result is hundreds of hours of fun fan service that should keep your Wii busy for the foreseeable future.

Elite Beat Agents, eat your hearts out.

Edit: May contain NSFW language. Your office environment may vary.

If you’re out there gaming right now, you should be aware that Gary Gygax has died.

Even if you’ve never played a tabletop roleplaying game, RPG fans owe a great debt to this man and his co-creators. Squaresoft borrowed heavily from the core Dungeons and Dragons formula to produce Final Fantasy, the game that saved the company, and later Final Fantasy VII, the game that mainstreamed RPGs in american gaming. These design tropes have rippled throughout gaming as genre lines have blurred and his impact on the medium is probably now inestimable.

Well done, Mr. Gygax. Rest in Peace.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is both the oldest and newest puzzle game you’ll play all year. Beneath the lovely retro aesthetic and slick DS interface beat the merciless hearts of 130 puzzles. If you can work your way past the abject humiliation of getting everything wrong, the game is a fresh take on classic mindbenders and is absolutely worth the 10 hours you’ll sink into it.