The first foe I faced in Alpha Protocol was a soldier who burst through a door. I was unarmed, so I ran to the far side of a table that was in the middle of the room. The soldier chased me halfway around the table and then reversed, trying to catch me on the other side. I switched directions and the soldier did too. I switched again. The soldier switched. Back and forth we do-si-do’d. For five minutes I outsmarted this trained militiaman with toddler tactics. "All around the cobbler's bench," I thought, "The monkey chased the weasel…"

Alpha Protocol, as it declares boldly on its game box, is "The Espionage RPG," so I thought maybe the brain-dead soldier was a fluke—an uninformed flunky who was merely teasing me during my training. After all, espionage is about stealth and subterfuge. Surely things would be better as I moved from combat training into actual spy activities. But when I finally found my way to the covert heart of Alpha Protocol, I discovered that the espionage elements of the game are merely mini-games about picking locks and bypassing security systems.

I’m not Mario. I need to make my shots seriously stronger if I want to send the ball sailing over the sand dunes and water ponds that look like they were salvaged from an overhaul of Everquest. In order to strengthen my swings, improve my putt and increase all of those other golf statistics, I need to spend experience points. But those same experience points also unlock the clothes that I wear. I must chose between spending experience points on better golf skills or a new pair of shoes. In the world of Tiger Woods, it’s not easy to be both well dressed and a good golfer.

Mario, that little tricky marionette, always has kid-friendly button pushing and timing games to rely on in his easy-access sports franchises. (He hasn’t yet proven that he’s mastered motion-sensitive golf for the Wii.) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 makes every swing a tense moment of immobile precision. The left thumbstick controls the golf club’s swing backwards and forwards, and in that meager half inch of motion every deviation to the left or right is deducted from the overall power and accuracy of the swing.

Every year, some trend in videogaming comes from behind and delivers an outstanding streak of games. In 2009 there was an abundance of beautiful fighting games: Street Fighter IV for arcade fans, Fight Night Round 4 for sports lovers, DISSIDIA Final Fantasy for franchise fighting, and the decent Tekken 6 at the end of the year. The year before that was all about outstanding PSP games. Now 2010 is turning out to be the year of outstanding racing games.

Every system has its own solid racing title. The Wii has the venerable Mario Kart Wii, but the PS3 is catching up with this year’s excellent kart fantasia ModNation Racers. 2010 has also given the PS3 and 360 MotoGP 09/10 for serious bike racing simulation. Split/Second joins the group as an arcade-paced racing game with an abundance of combat and explosions. Crashing airplanes, capsizing ships—the stuff of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay movies as seen from the inside of a racecar in less than five minutes.

“My kids are hooked on ModNation Racers,” a friend recently e-mailed me. “They love anything where you get to create your own character.”

ModNation Racers is a go-kart racing game similar to the ones that have made the Mario Kart series a success. Because everyone is pretty much zooming around the tracks in custom-designed milk crates, the intricacies of tire surfaces and engine idle are less important than lobbing bombs at opponents and knowing where the racetrack’s shortcuts are located.

Lost Planet was a straight-ahead shooter that distinguished itself with its large, harsh landscape. Set on the snow-covered planet of E.D.N. III, the game made survival precarious. It was only by battling the native life forms and dominant government that I was able to scrape together the energy required to keep myself from freezing.

The sequel, however, has migrated to warmer climates. E.D.N. III has accumulated deserts and sprouted jungles, making it much more like a generic videogame planet instead of, well, Lost Planet. It also makes it possible for me to walk through water and sand with as little effect as when I passed through snow.