FOR video game players the summer begins after Labor Day. The preceding months have the prestige titles and the intriguing independent projects. In that category 2012 has served up Dear Esther, Fez, Journey and Papo & Yo, to name a few. The fall is the time for blockbusters, many of them sequels with big explosions.
The biggest sequel coming soon is the Wii U, Nintendo's follow-up to the original Wii. The Wii U's main selling point is a new touch screen controller that is something like an iPad with thumbsticks and buttons. In demonstrations for the news media Nintendo has shown off games that permit what it calls “asymmetrical†competition, in which the player using the Wii U game pad sees something different on the touch screen than the rest of the players, using traditional Wii controllers, see on the television.
In one such game, Luigi's Ghost Mansion (part of the coming anthology Nintendo Land), the touch screen player controls a ghost that is invisible to the remaining players. In another title slated for a 2012 release, New Super Mario Bros. U, the player using the touch-screen controller can add new platforms into the game world, either to assist inexperienced players or to frustrate less-well-liked opponents. Nintendo has also been showing off games, like ZombieU, that are designed to appeal to people who dismiss the Wii as a family-friendly device for casual players. (And yes, that is exactly what so many other people liked about the Wii in the first place.)
If the Wii U delivers as advertised, Nintendo will have once again expanded the universe of the possible for video game players. So far there's no release date, other than a pledge that the Wii U will arrive sometime this year.
Here are some other titles worth watching out for. Not every last one of them has a number at the end of the title.
BORDERLANDS 2 The sequel to an unexpected hit that some critics regarded as the best game of 2009 lands this month. Shooting, looting and customized skill trees combine for a genre-bending shoot 'em up that the developer calls a “role-playing shooter.†(Gearbox, Sept. 18; Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC.)
RESIDENT EVIL 6 Video game nomenclature is a tricky thing. This is actually the eighth Resident Evil game. The actual sixth one (Resident Evil 4, naturally) is often cited as one of the finest video games ever created. That's a lot to live up to. (Capcom, Oct. 2; Xbox, PS3, PC.)
DISHONORED Not a sequel! A supernatural assassin can possess fish and rats (and people) to sneak into places and find his targets. A nonlethal solution is supposed to be available for every contract too. The most intriguing original fiction of the next four months. (Arkane Studios, Oct. 9; Xbox, PS3, PC.)
FABLE: THE JOURNEY The fourth full-size Fable game will require people to use the Kinect, Microsoft's your-body-is-the-controller technology, to play: hurling lightning bolts and fireballs with the right hand, blocking melee attacks with the left hand. Hard-core gamers are skeptical that Kinect is useful for anything other than family-friendly party games, pretty much the same thing they think of the Wii. The new Fable is Microsoft's chance to prove them wrong. (Lionhead Studios, Oct. 9; Xbox.)
ASSASSIN'S CREED III Really the fifth title in the Assassin's Creed series, which features an incomprehensible science fiction plot involving conspiracies and secret societies, set against astonishing re-creations of historical settings (past examples include 12th-century Jerusalem, Renaissance Italy and 16th-century Constantinople). The new game introduces a half-Mohawk, half-European figure who will roam the colonial American frontier and visit models of 18th-century Boston and New York. (Ubisoft, Oct. 30; Xbox, PS3, Wii U, PC.)
NEED FOR SPEED: MOST WANTED The 19th - yes, 19th - release in the long-running car-racing franchise is part social network, part game, in a city with Boston-inspired architecture. (What is it about Boston this year?) One example of how it works: Do the longest jump through billboards plastered through the game, and you can plaster your face inside your friends' game worlds - until they do better, when they can return the favor. (Criterion Games, Oct. 30; Xbox, PS3, PlayStation Vita, PC.)
HALO 4 Master Chief, the character who launched a million Xboxes, is in the hands of a developer other than Bungie, the studio that created him, for the first time. Is 343 Industries - owned by Microsoft, like Bungie before it - up to the task? And no, this isn't the fourth Halo game. It's the seventh. (343 Industries, Nov. 6; Xbox.)
CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 2 The ninth Call of Duty game - but legitimately the second Black Ops game - moves the franchise into the near future, with a plot that moves from the 1980s to 2025 in cold war hot spots like Panama and Afghanistan. For the first time Call of Duty will have a branching story line with multiple endings, and there will be multiple paths to the objectives within the game. The multiplayer suite is typically ambitious: a new “e-sports†mode will attempt to bring competitive league gaming to home consoles, and another mode allows people to broadcast their play-by-play of other people's multiplayer matches. Who will emerge as the Vin Scully of Call of Duty? (Treyarch, Nov. 13; Xbox, PS3, Wii U, PC.)
FAR CRY 3 Genuinely the third title in the Far Cry series, this game doesn't have the political ambition of its predecessor. But it looks as if it has a vibrant island setting, teeming with tigers and bears and water buffaloes that can be turned against you, or your enemies. (Ubisoft, Dec. 4; Xbox, PS3, PC.)
