The two-dimensional world of classic Mario is the perfect place for 3-D. The ground stretches out flat and even. Hills climb upward like staircases. Cliffs and ledges are square, tidy drops that descend forever into nowhere. Overhead, the flat blue sky is interrupted by clouds so solid that Mario can run across them like fluffy white tabletops. The colors are primary and flat, as though they had been filled in by someone using a small box of crayons, and the sunlight shines brightly from overhead.

Super Mario 3D Land looks like a storybook, and the 3-D effect provided by the Nintendo 3DS turns it into a pop-up book. Mario has been moving around in three dimensions since the advent of 3-D modeling. But I haven’t been able to see him and his world in 3-D until now. Instead of the free-flowing landscapes of Super Mario 64 or Mario Sunshine, however, Nintendo has elected for Mario to make his 3D-display debut in game that resembles the classic Super Mario Bros. The simple landscape, with its flat contours and staggered layers, is an ideal match for the 3DS’s diorama-like display, where things don’t reach out as much as they recede into the distance.

This looks fake.

We are advancing down a road alongside a river. The air is chocolate-milky with dust from gunfire and from the bombing of bridges further downstream. The riverbanks and roads look prefabricated, as though they had been poured from plastic. The soundtrack layers gunfire on top of gunfire, some sounding slow and explosive, some whiney and long-lasting, stopping suddenly when one of my comrades' bullets finds its intended head.

My squad and I move with a lifelike fluidity, except that we often seem to be doing those movements a fraction of an inch above the ground. As we run beneath light poles, I see my comrades cast shadows onto the ground. But as I pass the same place, no trace of me blocks the light. As I run across the cracked asphalt of the road, my view floats along evenly, as though I were already dead, stalking across the battlefield like a ghost, untroubled by footsteps and uneven terrain.

I'll give the Kinect credit: It's improving. Microsoft's motion-sensitive, hands-free videogame controller for the Xbox 360 arrived last year to the usual gimmicky fanfare. Yes it was amazing to be able to control games simply by moving my body.

But at the same time, the Kinect was sloppy. A thumbstick was something I could touch, so I was never in any doubt about how I was steering through a game. But the Kinect forced me to slowly wave my hand in the air in front of me, trying to find out how far I had to reach before the system realized that I was moving. And it was almost useless at detecting whether I was moving fast or slow.

Fortunately, after a year, that broad-range motion sensitivity has been fine-tuned, and Kinect Sports: Season Two provides a number of games such as darts and baseball that demonstrate the system's improved programming. Now, the act of aiming feels intuitive. Once the Kinect starts to track my moving hand, every subtle shift I make translates onto the screen as I try to keep my aim steady while I pull back my arm and throw the dart or pitch the baseball.

With great power comes great responsibility. I learned that from Spider-Man, but it's been driven home by the current generation of videogames. Since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 arrived under my TV, and Nvidia's graphics cards arrived in my PC, I've been playing videogames that have the power to replicate reality.

But as games have become more detailed and lifelike, they have also started to show their seams. Every fake-looking eyeball and each unnatural movement spoils the game's illusion. Whenever I see the landscape ripple and tear as the graphics engine attempts to draw it into existence, I'm thrown out of the world that I've been pulled into.

Rage immediately impressed me with its visual intricacy. Gone were the endless straight lines that always reveal that I'm walking in a world created by computer. Even the floor of the simplest room in Rage undulates and fragments. Rage is set on Earth after a meteor has plowed into the planet, and the haphazard, uneven appearance is perfect for the aftereffects of an apocalypse.