CYBER CITY.(The Talk of the Town)(True Crime: New York City video game)

Typically, video games are set in places with names like Myst, Zanarkand, and, slightly less fantastically, Vice City. True Crime: New York City, which was released last month by Activision and is being advertised on billboards around town, is set in Manhattan. While it is not the first game to take place in a real-world location (or even in New York), True Crime: New York City's attempt to accurately re-create an existing place is unprecedented in scope and ambition. (It is more complex, by several orders of magnitude, than its predecessor, True Crime: Streets of L.A.) To design True Crime's virtual city, six location scouts walked the borough of Manhattan with maps and digital cameras, taking photographs of practically every intersection and major landmark. Through the use of proprietary 3-D imaging software, the resulting eleven thousand images were transformed into a coherent representation of the entire island. "We tried to make it a real living, breathing city," Simon Ebejer, an Activision producer, said.

The question of whether the game's designers succeeded was put, one recent afternoon, to two professional tour guides: Paul Rush, who leads independent sightseeing groups, and Seth Kamil, the founder of Big Onion Walking Tours. Both have extensive knowledge of the history and culture of New York City; neither had any experience with video games. Within minutes of taking command of True Crime's protagonist, an undercover detective named Marcus, Kamil had wrapped his vehicle around a lamppost ("one of the fancy ones Giuliani put in to beautify the city," he noted), and then, after venturing forth on foot, he inadvertently got into a fatal gun battle with a uniformed officer. It was decided that the game's controls would be turned over to an observer, who would follow Kamil and Rush's directions.

The initial response of both licensed tour guides was pleasant surprise. "That's not terrible," Kamil said when he got his first glimpse of digitalized Stuyvesant Town. "The scaffolding is perfect. That's as right as it gets." Zipping from neighborhood to neighborhood (the absence of traffic is the most unrealistic aspect of the landscape), the guides were impressed by the attention paid to small details: the hexagonal paving stones in Central Park; the counterfeit-Rolex dealers along Broadway; the yellow sidewalk boxes of the Gotham Writers' Workshop, and the way they all seemed to be stuffed with trash.

Soon enough, however, they began to nitpick. "There is a church on this site, but it looks absolutely nothing like the building that they're showing here," Kamil said, clucking at the transformation of humble St. Mark's In-the-Bowery, on Tenth Street, into what he called a "Batmanesque" Gothic cathedral. "The thing that strikes me ...