Sandler is Count Dracula, a doting if overprotective vampire father who builds the hotel as a refuge so he and daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) can be safe from scary people with their pitchforks and torches. Dracula croons a tender lullaby: “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s going to bite the head off a bird.”

Next to the changing table is a coffin-shaped diaper pail.

Mavis gets a little older, with cute little baby tooth fangs; her caped father makes sure she’s wearing a helmet before he teaches her how to transform into a bat and fly. The hotel is a castle surrounded by a haunted forest and a graveyard populated by the undead. “Human-free since 1898,” the hotel proudly proclaims. And so things stay for over a century.

This Dracula has no need for human blood (“it’s so fatty, and you don’t know where it’s been”). He relies on synthetic. All he wants is to take care of his guests, give his daughter a wonderful 118th birthday party, make sure she never leaves home, and never, ever see a human. But then, just as all of the monsters have arrived for the party, an easygoing bro with an enormous backpack walks in. His name is Jonathan (Samberg), he thinks the monsters are cool, and he likes Mavis’ goth-girl vibe. This is worse than torches and pitchforks. A human who wants to get rid of monsters is one thing but a daughter who might fall in love with one is even scarier. And yes, there’s a wink at “Twilight.”

Of the three animated horror 3-D comedies this summer/fall, “Hotel Transylvania” is the least aesthetically ambitious, the most accessible for younger children, and the closest to the comfortingly silly scares of “Scooby-Doo.” As in this film, “ParaNorman” (in theaters) and “Frankenweenie” (out next week), the focus is on showing us that what we think is scary isn’t very frightening after all.

Of the three, “Hotel” has more all-out comedy, much of it coming from the monster-fied setting and the ghoul-ification of ordinary life. At this hotel, the Do Not Disturb signs hanging from the doorknobs are shrunken heads — very outspoken ones. Mavis likes to eat “scream” cheese, which amusingly rises up from the cracker to let out a squeal as she takes a bite. Guests are greeted by zombie bellman, a Jack Pumpkinhead doorman, and a skeleton mariachi band with sombreros and sarapes. When the Invisible Man (David Spade) attempts to play charades, it’s a hoot.

First-time director Genndy Tartakovsky was a storyboard artist on films like “Iron Man 2,” so he has an exceptional understanding of the mechanics and timing of the action sequences. The 3-D adds a vertiginous thrill to a chase on flying tables and a touch of claustrophobia to a maze of underground corridors. It is telling that both of those highlights involve the most vivid vampire/human relationship, Dracula and Jonathan. Despite a lot of talk about romantic “zing,” the bromance is much more real than the love story. When they leave the castle for that most overused of climax cliches, the race to the airport, the story sags.

Top voice talent includes Kevin James as a sweet-natured Frankenstein and Fran Drescher as his bride, Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon as the wolf couple with innumerable cubs, and Cee Lo Green as the outgoing Mummy. But the real stars are character designers Carter Goodrich (“Despicable Me”), Greg Kellman (“Madagascar”) and Carlos Grangel (“King Fu Panda”), whose monsters pay affectionate homage to their origins but are so endearing that families may want to pay a visit to have room service deliver an order of scream cheese.

Like almost everything else about American politics and culture, this goes back to the Cold War. Indeed, when Dick Cheney urged us, in the days after 9/11, to join him on the Dark Side of the Force – okay, he didn’t say “the Force,” but he didn’t have to — he was only reasserting a postwar order that had been temporarily thrown into chaos after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A Manichaean and roughly symmetrical worldview, in which your opponent is seen as infinitely evil and infinitely devious, is extremely useful if your goal is subverting constitutional governance and replacing it with a permanent, hidden shadow-state that stands outside electoral politics. Is that overly paranoid? Well, I don’t know. But if I’d told you a few years ago that we would one day see a Democratic president claim the right to sentence any civilian to death, anywhere in the world, on secret evidence and with no pretense of judicial process, that might have sounded pretty crazy too.

Art and culture, including popular entertainment, is often where a society’s doubts about itself can be most freely expressed, and from its very beginnings the spy thriller has often presented espionage as, at best, a morally dubious affair. Even in a prewar classic like Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” while the main character’s decency is never in question, the sense that the spy bureaucracy is a semi-competent, half-sinister organism eager to blame its mistakes on others is a main plot driver. Pretty much every movie about a real or de facto agent on the run, who’s been framed for some murder or treachery he didn’t commit, is descended from that one, right up to and including “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” “Salt” and the Bourne series.

Indeed, outside of the Bond franchise and its various imitators, it’s not all that easy to come up with spy movies, even from the height of the Cold War, that present the world of espionage and counterespionage in straightforward or idealistic terms. Certainly John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” from 1962, is the most effective piece of Red Scare propaganda ever applied to celluloid. But along with its ultra-conspiratorial view of the dastardly Commies – who have not merely brainwashed and trained an assassin, but implanted a Joe McCarthy-type anti-Communist politician as a triple-secret agent — that film paints a scabrous, misanthropic and satirical portrait of American society as a zone of nutbars and sheeple, barely worth saving from the incoming red tide.

A year after that movie was released, of course, John F. Kennedy was killed, and the official explanation involves a weird guy with ties both to the loony left and the loony right, whose shadowy history included a visit to the Soviet Union. I’ve never felt personally persuaded by the theories that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, or by Soviet and/or Cuban intelligence – for one thing, they can’t both be true, unless you’re going nuclear with your paranoia – but they’ve never gone away. All the unanswered questions surrounding the JFK assassination only strengthened our sense that there was an entire world that lay below the surface of the one we could see, and that nothing about it was salutary.

All the social division of the 1960s around the Vietnam War and America’s role in the world made the spy thriller seem increasingly problematic, and except for the Bond series – which simply ignored all real-life current events – they often sought refuge in the reassuring past of World War II. A virus of existential doubt began to spread through the genre, perhaps beginning with Martin Ritt’s outstanding 1965 adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” Starring Richard Burton in one of his least showboaty screen performances, as a burned-out British agent sent into East Germany as a fake defector, the film (and the book) are arguably closer in tone to Albert Camus than to Ian Fleming. Even more mundane British spy fare of those years, like the trio of Len Deighton adaptations starring Michael Caine (“The Ipcress File,” “Funeral in Berlin” and “Billion Dollar Brain”), drank deep from the same well of exhaustion and cynicism.

But the year I really want to talk about is 1975, in the PTSD American aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when spies and spying were very much in the news. Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, held a series of committee hearings that year that laid bare the extent of questionable or outright illegal conduct by the FBI and CIA, ranging from widespread surveillance of both prominent and ordinary citizens to covert attempts to assassinate foreign leaders and overthrow hostile governments. The Church committee was widely demonized by conservatives at the time, especially after a CIA station chief was killed in Greece, and its work remains controversial in the 21st century. After 9/11, some commentators claiming that these revelations crippled U.S. intelligence gathering over the long term and enabled the creation of al-Qaida. (Funding and arming a bunch of loony-tunes jihadis to kill Russians in Afghanistan had nothing to do with it, I guess.)

That year also saw two major spy movies featuring two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, which established a dichotomy within the genre that endures to this day. On one side we have “Three Days of the Condor,” with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, a fast-paced adaptation of a pulpy bestseller directed with style by Sydney Pollack. If the fashions and mannerisms of the movie – those sideburns! – seem positively antique, it holds up pretty well overall. Clearly an heir to “The 39 Steps” and a direct ancestor of both the Bourne films and Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” series, “Condor” tells a classic man-on-the-run story, as Redford’s bookworm character is forced to unpack a world of double-dealing, insider warfare and government corruption. When confronted with the argument that the CIA plays dirty because it has to, Redford’s character turns New York Times whistle-blower.

But the antidote, for viewers who found “Condor” unbearable liberal pantywaist propaganda, came in the virile mountaineering-espionage adventure “The Eiger Sanction,” starring Clint Eastwood and his impressive mid-’70s hairdo as a retired CIA assassin turned art professor (yes, really) turned frequently shirtless freelance patriot. There are a lot of superficial similarities between the two films, including the general atmosphere of government coverup and post-Vietnam blowback, but the preening machismo of “Eiger” is pretty hard to take, as is the obvious pandering to Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” fan base. It was Clint’s first big Hollywood production as an actor-director, and seemed aimed at building a franchise around his character, a lady-killing, wisecracking Yank cognate to James Bond. But while “Condor” was a pretty big hit, “Eiger” was middling at best, and Eastwood dropped not just the franchise idea but the spy genre, period.

I would be the first to agree that audiences go see spy movies for the thrills and the action scenes, not the politics, and on that level too “Taken 2” (which was directed by Luc Besson flunky Olivier Megaton, and no, that’s not his original last name) is incoherent, relying on a boom-boom-chaka-boom musical score and repeated shots of random structures in Istanbul being destroyed by men in fast cars. A crucial plot element in “Taken 2” involves an American teenage girl roaming around the city chucking out live grenades to mark her progress, rather like Hansel and Gretel with exploding breadcrumbs. As Neeson’s defrocked CIA assassin, Bryan Mills, might say in his overly flat Amurkin accent, it’s Istanbul, Kim — stuff gets blown up every goddamn day. Indeed, the city’s only inhabitants appear to be scary Albanian sex traffickers and their henchmen, ominous-looking Muslim women in full-face hijab and weird old blind guys playing the oud. Everybody’s too busy being threatening to go work in a bank, or buy eggs at the supermarket.

Context matters, and the context for “Taken 2” (a sequel to the 2008 hit in which the same Albanians kidnapped the same teenager, that time in Paris) is a xenophobic, ugly-American worldview inherited from “The Eiger Sanction” and, still more, from James Cameron’s “True Lies,” pretty much the balls-out gold standard for this kind of dumbed-down, pseudo-flag-waving thriller. I say “pseudo” because producer Besson and director Megaton (who also made the ludicrous drug-war thriller “Colombiana,” a movie even stupider than this one but 20 times more enjoyable) are a couple of French dudes, for Christ’s sake, and exactly the kind of French dudes whose exaggerated love for the very worst kinds of American movies has caused them to stick their heads deeply up their own butts.

Stand aside, now, because I’m droppin’ the bomb on Mr. Megaton! Luc Besson is officially being “Taken 2” the woodshed! If these guys believe in anything about this movie, they believe in it entirely as gesture, mannerism and style. They may or may not be smart enough that they’re cackling up their sleeves the whole time; it’s not impossible that “Taken 2” is a meta-American movie, a Godardian spoof of the whole genre, an attempt to see how stupid and insulting a motion picture can be and still be a big hit. (See also: “True Lies.”) They believe that removing the guilt from the spectacle of an implacable American with high-end hardware killing every funny-accent, facial-hair-wearing foreign mofo in sight will pay off. And, yeah, they’re probably right.

You are undead, struggling to fight your way through the realms of Lordran on a quest whose final purpose is anything but clear. Where many games burden you with plot and background lore, Dark Souls lets the places you go tell their own kind of story, one lost in time and shrouded in mystery. The stone ruins at Firelink Shrine, the overrun town known as the Undead Burg, the vast marble halls of Anor Londo–these all speak of a once-prosperous realm rich with history, and rather than spelling it out in detail, Dark Souls lets you wonder about what has dragged this land into its current state of miserable disrepair. Item descriptions and brief conversations with non-player characters occasionally illuminate the smallest aspects of Lordran’s past, and over time, you may piece together a reasonably fleshed-out picture of the crisis that has befallen the land. But you needn’t concern yourself with these details if they don’t interest you. The wondrous realms of Lordran are sure to seduce you whether you care to know their history or not.

Darkroot Garden is so oppressively green that you can almost feel the air get warm and muggy around you. Running along the surreal shores of Ash Lake is like stepping into a dream. Locations like Anor Londo and the duke’s archives fuse faded opulence with grand machinery in a way that’s reminiscent of locations in the classic adventure game Myst, and like the realms of that game, these places have a way of staying in your head even when you’re not playing. Terrific sound design is a huge factor in Dark Souls’ ability to pull you in. Your steps echo convincingly in vast chambers. A heavy suit of armor clangs with every step you take. The strange noises a feared creature makes may send shivers up your spine before you even lay eyes on it.

Dude, what happened to your face?

From almost your earliest steps in this dangerous world, you’re beset by enemies, and you quickly learn to never let your guard down. Even the most common and clumsy enemies you encounter have attacks that can make short work of you if you’re not careful. Melee combat is straightforward; there are no elaborate combos to learn, and Dark Souls certainly doesn’t need them. With the small assortment of attacks, blocks, parries, and evasive maneuvers at your disposal, the combat in Dark Souls becomes a deadly dance in which each of your strikes that hits its target is a small victory and each potentially devastating attack from an enemy that you narrowly evade offers a new lease on life. Just be aware that poorly implemented mouse and keyboard support makes playing the game that way much too unwieldy; the game demands a controller.

Each new area brings with it challenging new enemies, as varied and memorable in their designs as they are in their techniques. Huge knights slumber in a forest, slowly and menacingly getting to their feet when you draw near. In the painted world of Ariamis, foul abominations with repulsive toxic sacs around their heads threaten to poison you when you deliver the killing blow. And you won’t soon forget the first time you’re cursed by the big-eyed basilisks of the depths, as your body becomes covered in a crystalline growth and you freeze in a pained gesture as death takes you.

There’s a wide variety of weapons to acquire and use, with each type offering a different fighting style. (Some swords are for swinging, and others are for thrusting, for example.) There’s also a good assortment of weapon enhancement options. As you progress and collect crafting items, you find that you can have a blacksmith make your weapons more powerful, and eventually imbue them with effects like lightning or fire. Finding a better weapon or making your existing weapon more powerful isn’t just a matter of added convenience; it can be the difference between survival and failure. And if you prefer to keep your distance from foes, bows and a diverse assortment of magic spells can be very effective, though you still need to frequently tangle with enemies in intense, close-quarters battles.

There’s a wonderful sense of history to Dark Souls’ varied, frequently beautiful realms.

The stakes can be high as you venture through Dark Souls, making your determination to survive and persevere that much greater. As you vanquish enemies, you collect souls, which can be spent to level up your character, or to purchase items and services from the few blacksmiths and merchants eking out an existence in certain corners of the world. These souls are a precious commodity indeed, and should you fall in battle (and you will), your souls fall with you. However, all is not immediately lost. If, in your next life, you can make it back to the spot of your previous demise and touch your bloodstain, you regain the souls you had acquired. Perish again without recovering them, however, and they disappear forever. It’s a crushing feeling to die, knowing that it means the permanent loss of a significant number of hard-earned souls, but it’s precisely that danger that makes the struggle to stay alive so exciting.

In each realm of Dark Souls, there are bonfires that offer your only real sanctuary from the constant dangers you face. It’s only at these locations that you can spend souls to level up, and when you perish, you restart from the last bonfire at which you rested. Because they serve as checkpoints on your journey, happening upon one can bring with it a tremendous sense of relief, since you know you won’t need to overcome the dangers you faced to get here again. That feeling of relief is short-lived though, because you must soon press on into the unknown dangers that lie ahead.

The sense of trepidation that comes with forging on into unknown realms of Dark Souls doesn’t subside after you’ve played the game for an hour or 10 or 20. It is a sustained feeling that arises out of the fact that you rarely know what lies around the next corner, or if you do, you haven’t yet managed to overcome the challenges that await you there. That feeling of dread finds tremendous release in those moments when you finally conquer the boss of an area, and in the discoveries of the many shortcuts that link Lordran’s realms in often surprising ways and give you the liberty to bypass long stretches you’ve conquered at least once.

In fact, few games offer a sense of exploration and discovery as rich and rewarding as that of Dark Souls . There is no hand-holding here, no NPC companion or helpful sign telling you which way to go next. Your discoveries are yours alone, and that makes them all the more gratifying. That’s not to say that there is no assistance available for the wandering warrior, though. Players can scrawl messages on the ground that serve as clues or warnings to other players. It’s a wonderful system that serves to remind you, as do the fleeting, ghostly glimpses you occasionally catch of other adventurers fighting their own battles, that although you are solitary, you aren’t alone in your struggles.

Dark Souls is a shared experience in which each player must mostly fight his or her own battles. However, you can call on assistance in moments of need. Players can leave summon signs, and you can summon one or two of these players to your world to help you take on the boss of an area. (You can also leave your own summon sign, offering your assistance to other players.) These connections are fleeting–win or lose against the boss, players are promptly returned to their own worlds–but the impact they have on your journey can be tremendous. Not all connections with other players are benevolent, though. Under certain circumstances, other players can invade your world with the intention of seeking you out and defeating you. It’s terrifying to be deep into a dangerous realm and get the notification that your world has been invaded. It’s just another example of the ways in which Dark Souls keeps you constantly alert and a little afraid.

The battle with Artorias is one of the best and most challenging in the game.

Unfortunately, summoning and invading are somewhat spottier on the PC than they were on consoles. When attempting to summon other players to your world, you may more often than not get a “Summoning Failed” message. Additionally, the PC version is locked by default at a resolution of 1024×720, though a user-created mod is available that resolves this issue. However, the PC version improves on its console counterparts in terms of performance; where the console versions suffer from severe frame rate drops in the area known as Blighttown, the PC version does not.

Most noteworthy in the Prepare to Die Edition is the added content, called Artorias of the Abyss. This content adds new areas that take you back into Lordran’s past and find you going toe-to-toe with figures who loom large in Dark Souls’ lore. Like many things about Dark Souls, the way in which you access Artorias of the Abyss is shrouded in mystery, and unless you investigate the world thoroughly and pay close attention to item descriptions (or just look up the instructions online), you might miss it.

That would be a shame, as the content thoroughly holds its own when added to the existing game. The bright forests of the Royal Wood offer an intriguing glimpse at the Lordran that once was, and the enemies who populate this land are as memorable as the rest of Dark Souls’ fantastic stable of adversaries. Particularly excellent is a battle with the knight Artorias, a fearsome foe even by the standards of Dark Souls’ challenging bosses. His appearance tells its own story; his armor drips with a purple substance that suggests the corruption that has befallen the once-noble knight, while his left arm hangs from him uselessly, a dead thing. He is frighteningly agile and powerful, and vanquishing him is one of the sweetest victories to be had in a game full of rewarding challenges.

Dark Souls is a game of tremendous beauty and unfettered imagination.

Also in this new realm is the Battle of Stoicism, an arena for player-vs.-player battles. Here, you can partake in one-on-one, two-on-two, or four-player deathmatch battles with nothing at stake but leaderboard glory. Sadly, a number of issues make the arena a frustrating place. It’s not unusual to have to wait several minutes or more to be matched with an opponent. (This is assuming you’re playing the one-on-one battles, which are much more heavily populated than the other types.) Once you are paired up with a foe and dropped into the arena to see which of you can defeat the other the most times in a three-minute period, you can expect lag to plague your battle, as your opponent hops around the screen without animating properly and you sometimes take damage despite the fact that your opponent didn’t appear to hit you. The arena’s presence doesn’t harm the overall game since it’s entirely optional, but it doesn’t bring much to it, either.

Despite this minor disappointment, Dark Souls remains one of the greatest games of recent years. There’s so much to do and to discover in its beautiful and frightening world. You might encounter and join one of nine covenants, each with its own benefits and agendas. You might find that one NPC has murdered another and that you can invade the killer’s world as a spirit of vengeance. The genius of Dark Souls isn’t just in its environments, or its monsters, its thrilling combat, or the unusual and exciting ways in which players are connected. It’s in the uncompromising way it throws conventional wisdom to the wind, dropping you into its dangerous world without guidance, making you fend for yourself, and teaching you to shrug off defeat time and time again to finally earn victory. That this vast and unforgettable masterpiece is now only $40 makes the decision to play it even easier.

You play as Corvo Attano, former bodyguard to the empress and current death row inmate. The prologue chronicling Corvo’s crime not only inflames your desire for revenge, but also sparks your affection for a vulnerable character. These dual fires foreshadow the choice you have to make each time you encounter an enemy: do you walk the bloody path of brutal vengeance, or take the nonlethal high road and rise above the violence that suffuses the city? Your actions have small, yet tangible consequences throughout your quest, and it’s up to you to decide what kind of retribution you want.

A cadre of conspirators helps you escape imprisonment, and you find out that they are plotting to bring down the very men who wronged you. These characters embody familiar archetypes–the dutiful admiral, the egotistical nobleman, the cheeky servant–but Dishonored is not content with one-dimensional portrayals. An excellent voice cast (which includes a number of notable actors) and stylish character design help bring these people to life. As you listen to them talk (you remain mute throughout), read their journals, eavesdrop on conversations, and learn whispered secrets from an arcane, psychic item you acquire, you come to know the characters and the world they live in. This kind of knowledge is engaging, so even when the main plot follows some well-trodden paths, you’re always interested and eager to press on.

Exploring Dunwall is another one of Dishonored’s great pleasures. The city prospered from the whaling trade in the recent past, but has fallen on hard times since the influx of a deadly plague. Brick walls and wooden beams loom over alleys crawling with rats, while granite facades and metal barricades block off the cobblestoned plazas of the wealthier neighborhoods. Dunwall evokes a British city in the grip of the industrial revolution, but painterly coloring and slightly exaggerated proportions give the place a unique feel. The lovely artistic design shines on the PC, bursting with detail and making Dunwall an immensely appealing place to inhabit.

Of course, there are tangible benefits to exploration as well. Sewers, alleys, apartments, and estates all hide items that restore your health, reinforce your arsenal, teach you secrets, or allow you to gain new supernatural powers. The large areas you must traverse to get to your targets are riddled with out-of-the-way places to explore, and finding them reveals not only hidden goodies, but alternate routes as well.

Figuring out how to move through the environments is an enjoyable pursuit, and one of the first powers you get allows you to teleport a short distance. The quick pop and blurry whoosh of this power provides a nice audiovisual accompaniment to the thrill of defying natural law, and if you choose to supernaturally augment your jumping ability, your range of locomotion is drastically increased. Though you’ll likely have some awkward moments as you try to go places that the game won’t let you, Dishonored’s level design is consistent enough to make such moments easy to avoid once you get the hang of things.

In addition to these superhuman movement abilities, you can choose the power of possession. Slipping into the skin of a rat or the scales of a fish allows you to navigate small tunnels and reach new areas, and when leveled up, you can even possess other humans for a short while. Acquiring and improving your supernatural powers requires runes, though, and there aren’t enough for you to max out every power. There are no bad choices, thankfully, though some clearly favor lethal or nonlethal approaches. Pacifists will appreciate the ability to stop time, for example, while assassins might favor the power that instantly turns corpses to ash.

Powers are equipped in your left hand and are accessed with a radial menu. This menu also contains your pistol and your crossbow, each of which has a few different ammo types. Sleep darts are the only nonlethal munition in the bunch, and they are invaluable to players who try to play the entire game without killing anyone (yes, it’s possible). The rest of your options are decidedly deadly, including grenades and razor-flinging proximity mines.

With such nasty weaponry and formidable powers at your disposal, you have a startling array of ways to deal with hostiles. Simply sneaking by them is often effective, as is creeping up from behind, applying a sleeper hold, and dragging the bodies to a dark corner. Killing can be quiet too. A deadly drop from above makes no noise, and a properly timed windblast can blow an enemy off a high ledge, never to be seen again. If you prefer to see the whites of their eyes, your sword is always in your right hand, ever ready to duel. You are a formidable swordsman, able to block and counterattack against most blows, but clanging swords bring more guards or thugs, and they won’t wait until their allies are out of the way to take a shot at you.

Enemies are prone to fatal dips in intelligence from time to time, but they are generally tenacious and alert enough to put up a decent fight. Once you start experimenting with powers, weapons, and environmental elements, Dishonored’s amazing flexibility shows its stuff. Summon a swarm of rats to devour an enemy, and then possess one of the rats to sneak up behind those foes who come running. Blow enemy projectiles back in their faces, killing them instantly. Freeze time, enter a room with hostiles, drop a live grenade, exit and close the door, and then watch the explosion through the keyhole.

And that’s the end of that.

Sure, you didn’t really have to watch, but taking a playful approach can result in even more supernatural fun. Blow bottles off a shelf from a hidden perch to terrify the maids. Snatch a painting while a guard is looking at it instead of waiting for him to walk away. Throw a corpse off a balcony onto a guard, but freeze time before it hits, so you can watch his reaction when you appear in front of him as he gets clobbered from above. Dishonored has multiple save slots available, and taking advantage of the ability to tear things up and then reload a fresh start encourages you to engage in some absolutely delightful mayhem.

Yet even though it allows you to wipe the recent slate clean, Dishonored still begs to be replayed from the beginning. Unlocking different powers, finishing missions in different ways, striving to be more or less murderous, and seeing a different endgame all offer appealing incentives to give it another go. It’s a rare game that feels so compulsively replayable, but Dishonored is such a game. The compelling abilities, the bold artistic design, the colorful characters, and above all, the freedom of choice–these are the things that mark Dishonored as one of the truly remarkable games of this year.

Samsung’s behemoth Series 7 Gamer is one of a new line of laptops for the Korean electronics giant, clearly an answer to products from the likes of Origin, Alienware, and Asus.

Big-boned and full of high-end components, the Series 7 Gamer comes in only one, $1,899 configuration. The good news is that there’s a lot of meat in this laptop: a quad-core Core i7-3610QM processor, 16GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M graphics, a 750GB hard drive, and a 1,920×1,080-pixel-resolution 17-inch display that’s flat-out gorgeous.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

Yes, it’s heavy (9 pounds). Yes, it’s expensive (nearly $2,000). Yes, it’s a little ugly. However, it’s one of the best-performing laptops we’ve ever seen, at a price that’s not that unreasonable. Samsung’s entry into PC gaming laptops is a success, although it’s a surprisingly bulky and flashy product for a company that’s been making sleek and minimal laptops otherwise.

With its lid closed, the big, black, shiny presence of the Samsung Series 7 Gamer blends in with the “gamer gear” look of so many other competing products. There’s nothing on the surface that screams anything unique.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

The back lid, with its nearly mirrored coating and tapered lines, recalls the midrange R series of Samsung’s laptops more than the recent Apple-like looks of the Series 7 Chronos, Series 5 Ultra, or Series 9. Incidentally, while this laptop is also technically a “Series 7″ by name, it bears no family resemblance whatsoever to any Series 7 we’ve ever seen before. This might as well have been called a Series 8.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

The differences extend to the interior: glossy plastic around the bar above the keyboard showcases the speaker grille and several LED-enhanced circles. The left circle provides volume control, the right is a power button, and the middle “Turbo” circle lights up when the Series 7 Gamer is set to Game Mode (Intel Turbo Boost is applied to the quad-core Core i7 processor in this mode). There are also several LED-lit touch controls for toggling audio mute, the Wi-Fi antenna, and keyboard backlighting.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

To the right of these lit circles is a physical dial knob that emerges from the side, reminiscent of the volume dial on an HP Envy or an old-school home audio system. The knob controls the Series 7 Gamer’s energy/screen modes: a “Green Mode,” “Library Mode” (which seems to automatically mute audio, but not much else), “Balanced Mode,” and “Game Mode,” which optimizes the display’s brightness and contrast and triggers a pretty silly and overdramatic animation and “cyber-effect” that, presumably, is meant to make you feel like your laptop just transformed into a Serious Gaming Machine. It’s one step short of sprouting fake gun turrets from the speakers, but maybe there are some hard-core gamers out there that will enjoy it.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

The Series 7 Gamer has a huge, spacious keyboard with adjacent number pad, backlit, and — lo and behold — it’s an old-fashioned tapered-key affair. Nearly no one makes keyboards like this anymore; even Lenovo did away with its old-fashioned ThinkPad keyboards. It looks odd on this Samsung, but the truth is…it’s a great keyboard. Keys have plenty of travel, concave surfaces cup your fingertips perfectly, and a row of function buttons above the number keys doesn’t get in the way. I wonder if this laptop could have been made any slimmer by giving it a shallower keyboard, but the bottom line here is you’ll be comfortable. Even better, the commonly used WASD keys are lit in mellow orange instead of pale blue.

The touch pad beneath has a smooth, matte surface and a flat button-bar below it. A blue LED strip demarcates the button strip from the pad and provides your eye with a focus zone when attending to the screen, as you can see the bar in your peripheral vision. I wish I could say the touch pad’s responsiveness was as good as the keyboard’s, but that’s a standard problem with Windows laptops. Most gamers will use a mouse, anyway.

Game Mode has a little animated icon that launches a dedicated settings panel: background services and antivirus programs can automatically be set to Limited/Silent, and a few other minimal adjustments like touch pad on/off can be toggled. A few preset animations can be selected for the Game Mode transformation. It all pales next to the customizations on an Alienware or the Razer Blade, but the easy-access launcher is somewhat helpful.

What makes a gaming laptop a gaming laptop? A phenomenal screen can’t hurt. The 17.3-inch glossy display on the Series 7 Gamer has 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution and looks positively fantastic, big and bright, with rich colors and excellent wide viewing angles. Blacks are blacker than on most laptops. It all makes for a great viewing experience, whether watching Blu-rays or playing games. The screen’s so good and big that streamed media like Netflix videos are bound to look like pixelated disappointments by comparison.

Stereo speakers and a subwoofer underneath offer up loud, powerful sound for gaming, and even for movie-watching. The audio experience isn’t head and shoulders above the competition, but it earns points for sheer volume. To listen to 5.1- and 7.1-channel audio, you’ll need to plug in surround-sound headphones or connect to an external speaker set or receiver.

Even the 2.0-megapixel Webcam is top-notch. Samsung preinstalls CyberLink YouCam software, but the 1,920×1,080-pixel-resolution camera had more saturated colors and better light sensitivity in my office-based casual testing than I’m used to seeing in a laptop.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

If you’re paying $1,899 for a laptop, you expect lots of features. This Samsung Series 7 doesn’t disappoint, although it doesn’t deliver anything unexpected. The requisite USB 3.0 ports (2) and video ports (HDMI, VGA and even DisplayPort) are present. There’s onboard Blu-ray. The only thing I wish this laptop had that it doesn’t was a Thunderbolt port, but I don’t know what I would do with it.

The Series 7 Gamer comes in only one configuration, just like Ford’s first Model T. For $1,899, you get two 750GB, 7,200rpm hard drives with 8GB of ExpressCache SSD for frequently used core functions, a generous 16GB of RAM, a quad-core third-gen Core i7-3610QM processor, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M graphics. That compares favorably with a system like the recently reviewed Maingear EX-L 15, which included a slightly faster Core i7-3820QM CPU and the same graphics, but less RAM and hard-drive space, for $2,349. The also-recently-reviewed but less expensive Asus G75VW had the same CPU, slightly less powerful Nvidia graphics, and less RAM.

This laptop’s 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU, a quad-core processor, is part of Intel’s newest, third generation of Ivy Bridge processors. It’s the same processor we’ve already seen in the Lenovo IdeaPad Y480 and Asus G75VW, and, not surprisingly, it performed nearly the same in our tests. Multitasking is blazing fast, and nearly any task you can think of, from video encoding to large software installations, can be handled lightning-quick. This is more computer than anyone really needs, but if you want something even faster, the Origin EON17-S and Maingear EX-L 15 do best it in performance speed.

The graphics, from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M, are even better. They match what was included in the Maingear EX-L 15, and performed nearly identically. Street Fighter IV screamed at 161.5 frames per second at native 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution. Metro 2033, a demanding game, ran at 19.3fps at full 1080p with DX 11 and graphics settings at High. Batman: Arkham City ran at 51fps at 1080p with graphics settings at High, and DX11 off. The recently releasedDiablo III flew, at about 80fps based on my time playing. Battlefield 3 played very well at 1080p with graphics settings ramped up, too. In fact, the performance was extremely close to the Origin EON17-S, a far more expensive machine that’s the current top end of 2012 gaming systems.

By the way: keep this laptop plugged in when playing games. Even in Gamer Mode, unplugging the Series 7 Gamer from its power brick resulted in big dips in framerate for most games. To get the most out of this system’s performance (as well as hot air blasting through the back vents that feels like a space heater), stay on AC.

Don’t expect great battery life from a gaming laptop this large. The Samsung Series 7 Gamer eked by with 2 hours and 33 minutes of video playback, but expect that number to shrink way down when playing any type of game. You’ll want to keep that charge brick plugged in, which, incidentally, is gigantic.

(Credit: Sarah Tew)

Samsung includes a standard one-year warranty with the Series 7 Gamer. Samsung’s Website has an easy-to-find phone number (1-800-726-7864) and a variety of live chat support options, plus manual and driver downloads. You can gain an extra three months of warranty support by registering with Samsung.

Gaming laptops often feel like an extinct breed, and are frequently priced and sized to match. The Samsung Series 7 Gamer does nothing to subvert the stereotypes, but delivers an excellently performing, sharp-screened, fully geared-up example of the form at a price that’s exorbitant but not unearned. Simply put: Samsung’s made a big-boned gaming beast, and it’s yours for the taking if you can afford it and fit it on your desk.

Street Fighter IV (in fps)(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Native resolution, 2X AA, V sync off

Origin EON17-S (Ivy Bridge – Intel Core i7-3920XM)

216.6

Maingear EX-L 15

162.4

Samsung NP700G7C-S01US

161.5

Asus G75V

99.5

Lenovo IdeaPad Y480

59.8

Design and Features
Like most enthusiast-grade gaming laptops, the GT70 sports an eye-catching, over-the-top design. Its chassis weighs 8.37 pounds and measures 2.17 by 11.34 by 16.85 inches (HWD), so it’s not exactly the easiest system to tote around. If you do carry it around, however, you’ll likely receive a bevy of complements on the handsome system tucked under your arm, as the GT70′ sports an intricate design, which consists of a plastic body sporting a brushed aluminum lid and palm rest,.

Designed by SteelSeries, the GT70′s tiled keyboard offers a superlative typing experience, with keys that are springier than those of most laptops. The keyboard features full-colored backlighting that, via preloaded software, can be customized in a few different ways, from a dual-color arrangement to a “breathing” light effect wherein the user-selected colors gently pulsate. Touch-sensitive LEDs above the keyboard include a Cooler Boost button to increase the fan speed, toggles for the keyboard backlighting and display, and a Turbo Drive Engine button that purportedly optimizes performance by maxing out the power settings in a vein similar to the “Turbo” setting on the Samsung Series 7 Gamer‘s $1,899.00 at Walmart.comMode Dial. Though most of your attention will undoubtedly be directed towards the lovely keyboard, the touchpad and its accompanying mouse buttons, meanwhile, work smoothly and provide excellent tactile feedback.

Gaming is obviously a visually intensive experience, and the GT70′s matte-finished 17.3-inch 1,920-by-1,080 display delivers with aplomb. During use, it’s hard not to admire the crisp colors and deep, inky blacks. Likewise, video playback looks fantastic, especially when you toss a Blu-ray disc into the GT70′s Blu-ray burner. Yes, you read that correctl—the GT70′s built-in optical drive can also write Blu-ray discs, a singular feature that sets it apart from other systems in its class, like the Alienware M17x R4$2,224.00 at Dell, for instance, which can play Blu-rays but only burn DVDs. Through dual speakers housed in metallic grilles directly beneath the display and a built-in subwoofer, audio is pumped out at fairly loud volumes thanks to an added boost by THX TruStudio Pro software. Though not exactly ground-shaking, the built-in speakers are good for a laptop. That said, though, the GT70 is clearly designed to be hooked up to a surround sound system, as suggested by the multiple gold-plated audio jack ports and built-in amplifier.

The GT70 is loaded with ports. Alongside the Blu-ray burner, the right side houses two USB 2.0 ports. Meanwhile, the left side features the aforementioned gold-plated audio jacks, three USB 3.0 ports, and a 7-in-1 card reader (with SD and Memory Stick compatibility). At the rear of the GT70, you’ll find an eSATA port in between VGA and HDMI-out ports.

As far as storage goes, the GT70 manages to be both capacious and quick, coming equipped with a pair of 128GB solid-state drives (SSD) arranged in a RAID 0 (striped) array alongside a 7,200 RPM 750GB spinning hard drive. Unlike the Alienware M17x, though, there’s a good amount of preloaded software included on the GT70, some of which can be classified as bloatware, and that gamers would immediately uninstall, like 30-day trial versions of Norton Online Backup and the 2012 edition of Trend’s Micro Internet Security suite, as well as 7-day trials of Magix Music Maker and Magix Video Easy SE.

Performance
The combination of a 2.30GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM processor and 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX, along with 16GB RAM, made the laptop a solid performer in our benchmark tests. While its PCMark 7 score of 4,875 points fell short of the class-leading Origin EON17-S (5,461 points), it nonetheless topped the rest of its class, including the M17x (4,598 points). Despite performing admirably, however, the GT70 didn’t fare as well in our multimedia tests. It completed our Handbrake video encoding test in 1 minute 17 seconds, falling markedly short of the Origin EON17 (1:01) and, to a lesser extent, the Alienware M17x (1:12). Its Cinebench R11.5 score of 6.19, meanwhile, ranked at the bottom of the class and was even outflanked by the substantially cheaper Series 7 Gamer (6.23). Meanwhile, the 3 minutes and 23 seconds it took for the GT70 to complete our Photoshop CS5 test was on par with the Series 7 Gamer (3:23) but was a second slower than the MSI GT70 0NC-011US (3:22) and was significantly outpaced by the Origin EON17 (2:27).

As far as gaming goes, the GT70 unsurprisingly crossed the 30 frames per second (fps) playability barrier without breaking a sweat, but its frame rates were lower than the rest of its class. In our Crysis benchmark tests, its performance (93fps in medium quality at 1,024-by-768 resolution; 36fps in high quality at native resolution) were eclipsed by both the Alienware M17x (98fps and 38fps, respectively) and the Origin EON17 (120fps and 41fps, respectively). On the other hand, though, the GT70′s performance on our Lost Planet 2 benchmark tests (148ps in medium quality at 1,024-by-768 resolution; 63fps in high quality at native resolution) dominated the rest of the pack, save for the Alienware M17x (159fps and 77fps, respectively). Likewise, its entry-level 3DMark11 score of 8,726 points came in second place behind the Alienware M17x (9,023).

Given their emphasis on unbridled performance, gaming laptops aren’t renowned for stellar battery life. Even with lowered expectations, the GT70s’ removable battery yielded underwhelming results. In MobileMark, it lasted 2 hours 16 minutes, falling slightly short of both the Origin EON17 (2:33) and Alienware M17x (2:36) and significantly behind the MSI70 0NC (5:29).

There is plenty to like about the MSI GT70 0NE-276US, like its inspired design, built-in Blu-ray burner, and beautiful display. At the end of the day, however, performance is the only thing that matters about gaming laptops, and the Alienware M17x R4 outguns the GT70 almost entirely across the board while sporting the same price tag, and it remains the system to beat.