Videogames

With 2009 drawing to a close, we thought it was important to put down our PS3 controller -- and stop playing Modern Warfare 2's brilliant online multi-player mode -- just long enough to reflect on the best games we played over the year. Though it's probably physically impossible to play every game that came out, of the titles we tried, here are our top 10: No. 10: Assassin's Creed II Renaissance Italy is the star of Assassin's Creed II, complete with ornate structures full of ledges, railings, windowsills and protruding bricks.

No doubt thousands of college kids in California play video games when they are not in school, and now one state lawmaker is proposing to bring the expertise they are gaining into the classroom. Assemblywoman Marie Waldron (R-Escondido) has introduced legislation that  could someday have California universities offer a degree in creating and designing video games. "Video game design is a growing industry that is in need of a highly skilled workforce," Waldron said Monday. "These are well-paid jobs for a young generation that is struggling for economic opportunities.

If you're a hard-core fan of the God of War series but just can't wait until the next installment is released in March, then you're in luck, my friend. Rush out today and buy Dante's Inferno . God of War rip-offs don't get any more blatant than this one. Everything about it is like GOW, in a nearly comical way: the red and white accents on the god-like main character, the giant shiny weapons he swings around, the epic boss battles, the blatant nudity, the third-person view with woeful lack of camera control, even the button tapping cut-screen final-kill moves.

The launch of the biggest video games of the year was only enough to lessen the long-running slump in retail video game sales. U.S. game industry receipts were down 11% in November, the month that saw the debut of such hot titles as “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” “Halo 4” and “Assassin's Creed III” -- the top three titles of the month, in that order. Searching for a silver lining, NPD Group analyst Liam Callahan noted that “November had the smallest year-over-year decrease we have seen for dollar and unit sales so far this year.” Microsoft's Xbox 360 was the No. 1 console for the 16th month straight, selling 1.26 million units.

Boilerplate looks like an old stove with legs. He was built by Chicagoan Archibald Campion as the model for a new kind of soldier -- for "preventing the deaths of men in the conflicts of nations." After many exotic adventures around the globe, he disappeared in 1918, during World War I, in the Argonne Forest in northeast France: No piece of wreckage was ever found. Subsequent rumors, though, suggested that the robot had been recovered by the Germans and later rechristened as "Panzermann."

Activision Blizzard Inc. came out with guns blazing Friday in its legal battle with two former lead developers of Call of Duty, the video game publisher's multibillion-dollar franchise. In a lawsuit that read like a dramatic Hollywood script, Activision claimed it fired Jason West and Vincent Zampella in March because the two "morphed from valued, responsible executives into insubordinate and self-serving schemers who attempted to hijack Activision's assets for their own personal gain."

Gabrielle Burton was a fledgling poet at the 1972 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference when she was stopped by the writer William Lederer. He told her he had dreamed she would write a book about people surviving without eating each other. When Burton asked him what he meant, he cryptically replied: "Most people survive by eating each other. You're going to write a book that shows a better way." That set the stage for what would become Burton's obsession with Tamsen Donner, the matriarch of the Donner family, in whose name one of the darkest chapters in American history is written.

'Po Boy Tango' Where: David Henry Hwang Theater, Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 6. Price: $25 to $35 Contact: (213) 625-7000 or www.eastwestplayers.org Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Shadow Tag A Novel Louise Erdrich Harper: 258 pp., $25.99

The World War II-era action-adventure game The Saboteur may feature plenty of curvy burlesque dancers, but it doesn't quite measure up. Its open-world gameplay and "go anywhere on a nice big map" features aren't as well done as in Grand Theft Auto. The wall climbing and "free-running" across rooftops aren't nearly as good as in the Assassin's Creed series (see the review below). Even the plot, cut screens and controls aren't as good as in most games. But despite its lack of originality, The Saboteur includes a couple of key elements that make an effort to set it apart from its predecessors.

It's game on for the battle of the next-generation consoles. Nintendo Co. kicked off the high-stakes competition by announcing Thursday that its highly anticipated Wii U video game console will hit stores Nov. 18 with a price tag starting at $299.99 for a basic package that includes a console with 8 gigabytes of internal storage and a touch screen game controller. A deluxe package, which will also include the "Nintendo Land" game and 32 gigabytes of internal memory, will be sold for $349.99.

There's no shortage of big-name stars who have tried to make movies out of hit video games. Mark Wahlberg and “Max Payne.” Dwayne Johnson   and “Doom.” Jake Gyllenhaal  and “Prince of Persia.” There is, however, a shortage of such movies that have succeeded on any level (pretty much  “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and, if you count Milla Jovovich as a big-name star, the “Resident Evil” franchise.) Which makes today's news, first reported by Variety, that Michael Fassbender is throwing his  weight behind an “Assassin's Creed” movie just a little bit noteworthy.

With 125 million viewers watching more than 1 billion of its videos a month, Machinima may be the most-watched channel that's not on TV. The specialty channel devoted to video-game aficionados — which offers game walk-throughs, gaming news, exclusive trailers and original series — is the channel with the fourth most subscribers on YouTube, itself the world's third most popular website, according to online measurement firm ComScore Inc. ...

At Next-Gen Video Games in the Mid-Wilshire district, it has been two months since a customer bought a Nintendo Wii, the console that became a sensation for letting players swing a virtual tennis racket or steer a virtual car with a flick of the wrist. Owner Jeff Bryson has three on hand for the holiday season, significantly fewer than last year, and he's not even sure he'll find buyers for those. "The Wii has really slowed down," Bryson said on a recent evening in his store.

"Prince of Persia" didn't exactly get a royal reception overseas this weekend. Walt Disney Studios' big-budget video game adaptation starring Jake Gyllenhaal opened in 19 foreign markets, including every major European country except France, one week ahead of its Memorial Day weekend debut in the U.S. and the rest of the world. The film sold a studio-estimated $18 million worth of tickets. That's 5% more than the opening of "National Treasure" in the same countries in 2004, but 13% less than the original "Iron Man" in 2008 and 24% less than 2005's historical epic "Kingdom of Heaven."

Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. is starting a new act. The video game publisher best known for the bestselling Grand Theft Auto series is poised for a high-level shake-up Thursday when shareholders are expected to elect representatives of activist investor Carl Icahn to three of its eight board seats. It was only three years ago that a team led by Chairman Strauss Zelnick, the former president of record label BMG Entertainment and movie studio 20th Century Fox, took over a company that was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the New York district attorney's office.

When a video game captures an award, does anybody really notice? The answer was made painfully obvious last month at the game industry's equivalent of the Oscars. "A lot of big names," the show host Jay Mohr said as he scanned the room, "are not here tonight." The line, thrown out at the opening of the Interactive Achievement Awards, got a chuckle from a crowd of several hundred of the industry's top game developers, who were used to toiling in relative obscurity. Game sales, at more than $45 billion a year globally, have far eclipsed movie box office receipts, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Activision Blizzard Inc. came out with guns blazing Friday in its legal battle with two former lead developers of Call of Duty, the video game publisher's multibillion-dollar franchise. In a lawsuit that read like a dramatic Hollywood script, Activision claimed it fired Jason West and Vincent Zampella in March because the two "morphed from valued, responsible executives into insubordinate and self-serving schemers who attempted to hijack Activision's assets for their own personal gain."

Impatient With Desire A Novel Gabrielle Burton Voice: 248 pp., $22.99