The Top Video Games that Push the Envelope

It's easy when you walk past your teen's room with gunfire from an alien- shoot-'em-up video game resonating down the hallway, to feel like nothing can go right in a world where small children insist on entertaining bloodshed. Certainly you would be right there about almost every video game title on the shelves, mass-produced generic gratuitous blood and gore; the games have really evolved in the last two decades. What used to be strictly tween play is now a truly evolved area of entertainment that like the movies or music, can legitimately be thought of as art. If you could be gently encouraged to take a look at what is on the screen, perhaps once in a while, you could see a truly groundbreaking attempt in videogame art that not only makes for a shattering gaming experience, but also for a moving esthetic one. Let us just look at a few of the top video games that are widely recognized to truly be among the evolved electronic arts.

Traditional mythology and religion have always been rich ground for the fantasy movie and gaming genres. The Japanese game Okami, featured on the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii draws on Japanese folklore for its setting. The entire set for this game is made to look like a hand-drawn watercolor, with delicate brush strokes and leaders of shades. It is still an adventure game, but it is an artistic one. On the Wii, when you use your controller, you end up making delicate brush strokes to alter the scene before you. When delicate Japanese music moving you on, it is hard to ever get jaded on this, one of the top video games out there.

Great art is also the theme of Shadow of the Colossus. This fighting game doesn't merely follow one of the traditional plot lines seen in video games. To begin with, the setting of the game occurs in a place filled with structures that are colossal in a way that the game's programmers somehow imbued with a feeling of vertigo. Through this humbling scenery do you go fighting your foes in tightly choreographed Bruce Lee type motions. The game doesn't try to overdo it, and keeps the length down to where it is just right. Not only is this a wonderful artistic game, it is also a blockbuster on the sales charts of top video games.

The Japanese don't have great internationally known movie makers like James Cameron or Peter Jackson; videogames are their art form instead. The PlayStation 3 game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, is Japan's answer into videogame arena to, say, the Terminator movies over here. The game has excellent visuals of course, but nothing is lost in the storytelling department either. The cinematic effect is humbling, and the brilliantly directed fight scenes are quite epic. Of course this plot depends on Japanese mythology that may take a little time for gamers to get around; they say that the director of this videogame Hideo Kojima always wanted to make his mark on Hollywood. This looks like a brilliant start.

The Japanese always have to carve out something that was all their own; and how brilliantly have they done it with this adopted art form of theirs. And as they have to do always, they had to make a great business of it too. And who can dispute that these top video games have registered a major blip on Japan's business charts?