August 31–September 7, 2000

naked city

Arcadia

Ecco location: Can our little dolphin save the Earth from killer aliens without leaving his sunny coral reef?

Ah, violence. Ask any pontificating child psychologist or scapegoating parent and they’ll undoubtedly tell you the problem with the kids in America is all the damn violence they’re exposed to. It’s "rampant," they’ll say, in movies and TV shows and music and, of course, video games.

It’s true, some of the best, most popular bits of home entertainment have made digital bloodshed their selling point. Doom’s an easy example — those Columbine killers apparently played it all the time. Of course tons of non-killers play that game too and often nobody gets hurt off-screen. Still, it might be best to see what bloodless alternatives there are.

Excusing an occasional fastball to the forehead and the ensuing bench-clearing brawl, baseball is one American pastime that doesn’t sell violence. Of course, TV ratings and tickets sales are down these days, but we’ll overlook that for the purposes of this flimsy premise.

World Series Baseball 2K1 (Sega Dreamast, $49.99) is squeaky-clean fun that prides itself on non-gritty realism. As with the NHL, NFL and NBA entries in the 2K series, the pro players and their nuances — from David Wells’ gutty wind-up to Randy Johnson’s rat’s ass coif to Tony Batista’s ridiculous batting stance — are all accurately portrayed here. The 2000 lineups are available, but with 1999’s stats (even though this was released after the All Star break). Also, since this is a Players Union-endorsed game, any player who played during the 1994 strike, like Mets’ starter Rick Reed, is mysteriously absent. The stadiums are given realistic 3D treatment, too — except for the virtual Vet, which is shown packed to the upper decks with a cheering crowd. Must be dollar dog day.

This is a pretty easy game to pick up. After a quick reading of the instructions, you can sit yourself down for that choppy, gradual process called baseball. A few simple taps of the buttons let you switch from a devastating slider to a pointless pickoff move. Serve a Paul Byrd meatball down the middle and you’ll pay for it when it sails over the Green Monster in Fenway. Yes, interleague play is not a problem.

If you’re looking for healthy, non-aggressive one- or two-player competition without all the eye gouging and sidesplitting the rest of the Doom generation craves, Baseball 2K1 is for you. It’s a easily a 9 on the jumbo-tron realism scale for looks and is fun in the same slow, silly way that baseball is.

If you prefer a Doom-type adventure trek, but would like to forego all the splatter, Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future (Dreamcast, Sega, $39.95) could be the cold fish you’re looking for. The only violence in the second installment of the Ecco series is of the dolphin-on-shark variety, which, as we learned from Flipper and Jaws 3, is good because sharks are kill-crazy chomping instruments of messy death.

The game is set in the 30th century when humans and dolphins have made the universe super-friendly and happy. But an unnamed intergalactic foe, jealous of human-dolphin prosperity, attacks, disabling the earth’s dolphin-crafted defense system. As Ecco, a young, sleek, vaguely sexual dolphin, you must "defend the future," which amounts to a lot of fish snatching, shark head-butting and yapping with your dolphin, whale and turtle pals. Tales of "how far you got with Ecco" will not go over well at the corner bar.

Ecco’s crazy swimming motions can be tricky to master. You may also find yourself feeling a bit woozy, as this is a truly three-dimensional playing field in which you can get hopelessly turned upside down and ridiculously disoriented in myriad positions.

The moves here are not all spelled out, as you must perform nebulous tasks such as teaching a school of bio-luminescent fish to swim along with you in a dark cave, sing to sharks to confuse them, or do dolphin tricks just for the halibut. It’s the kind of game parents get for their gifted kids cuz it’s just the kind of think-outside-the-tank, feel-good (except when poor Ecco drowns in an underwater tunnel) thing they think will turn them on to careers as marine biologists. Ecco gets a 10 on the swim-simulator scale but a 7 on the enjoy-o-meter cuz figuring out the next step can be excruciatingly frustrating, just like trying to find all the secret doors in Doom by pushing every damn wall. It can make you want to kill stuff.