Apart from having a criminally underutilized (not to mentioned creepily sexualized) female cast, Sleeping Dogs was a delightful if not exactly original GTA clone. What exactly it is that people are finding so damn enjoyable about the lazy micro-DLC Squeenix has flooded every imaginable platform with is anybody's guess, though...
I actually liked Resident Evil 6 a lot, and I doubt the generous 25+ hour adventure with its many cinematic excesses (most of them qualifying as the good kind of bad stuff) would have been possible without significant outsourcing. Then again, if all that money was spent on playtesting the QTE sections then I'm sure health care expenditures as a result of thousands of broken thumbs made the costs skyrocket...
"It's clear to me that Grand Theft Auto and BioShock have more in common with a tea party for teddy bears than they do with the plays of Shakespeare." I respect Denis Dutton's views on a lot of things, but this is needlessly condescending to writers and developers working with video games today. One crucial distinction which might clear things up a bit is between conventional narrative structures and devices used in games and video game narratives as some kind of new and revolutionary way of telling stories which can only be done in the context of a game. We haven't seen much of the latter yet - a fact which I interpret as the basis for Dutton's rather derogatory remarks - and whether we will at some point remains to be seen. However, when it comes to effective and nuanced use of conventional narratives inside games, things are steadily improving. Sure, GTA4's story of a tortured war veteran searching for revenge or redemption in the midst of urban decay may not be up to Shakespeare's better plays (arguably better than his worst ones, though...), but it's infinitely more compelling material than most of the stuff we see in the movies these days, and there's no reason to believe that the fairly conventional and non-interactive storyline elements in games isn't on an upward trajectory as far as quality is concerned.
The whole "are games art?" is premised on the idea that the concept of art has a clear, precise definition which we can then use to determine whether games are art or not. But why bother? Why not just accept that "art" is anything that anyone says it is. If you want to call Mona Lisa art, fine. If you want to call a pile of poop art, then go ahead. The only important issue here is whether Mona Lisa and the pile of poop is GOOD art or not. People's ideas about what constitutes good art will also differ, but that at the very least seems to be a more interesting discussion than what qualifies as "art" according to some abstract definition.
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