Having gone undefeated through 10 games, the Broncos (not a user-controlled team in this dynasty) reached the BCS Top 4, striking distance of Florida, Oklahoma (with an uninjured Sam Bradford) and Alabama. The week 12 standings were strongly analogous to present day standings, absent TCU and Cincinnati, both undefeated in the real world.

And then Boise fell at home to Nevada, tumbling far out of both voting polls' top 10, and to 12th in the BCS. The machine held the lesser-conference team to the same double-standard as the human voters, who have matched one-loss teams from the major conferences in the previous two title games. Further, Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore (sorry, "QB #11") who had led the Heisman voting to that point, bottomed out to third in the final tally. Finally, a two-loss Oregon (to Boise and to Utah) leapfrogged the Broncos, as many expect the real-life one-loss Ducks will do once pollsters realize their votes will affect on a national title and major bowl bids.

The plausibility of all this is not just dumb luck. Games in November always bring into sharp focus just how American college football's poll-driven, playoff-less season and postseason is the most meritless selection of a team champion in the entire world. And yet NCAA Football 10, unlike any other sports simulation, has the responsibility to simulate the same purely subjective conditions, which aren't just the subplots of a season, they are the season itself.

"With sports there is always going to be controversy," said Kendall Boyd, a senior product manager for NCAA Football 10. "We do our best to make sure we have a little drama, but also ensure the integrity of the current system."

As college football, with seven unbeaten teams, lurches toward another inevitable matchmaking controversy, this week I tugged on EA Sports' shirttail, asking how they build a game that, if it mirrors reality, should also screw some deserving team out of a title shot every year. Boyd didn't answer that question head on, and I really can't blame him - the hypercriticized Bowl Championship Series is one of the game's biggest licensors, after all, and it's not doing so to be held up to ridicule or split polls in virtual reality, too. But he did shed light on how NCAA Football incorporates reputation into its team and individual performances.

"The biggest factor of our ‘human element' is leveraged against your conference's prestige," Boyd said. "If you play in a BCS conference, you're going to move up the rankings a lot easier than a smaller conference school would."

Conference prestige - this is different from the six-star rating each program has in NCAA 10 - comes most into play in the game's simulated coaches' poll, the human factor most driving the game's BCS rating. The coaches' poll routinely favors programs from the major conferences, as 33 of 59 voters in this year's poll represent, and still others have previous experience with them.

Boyd said that once the season gets moving, "our media and coaches' poll are very similar." NCAA 10's media poll is, of course, analagous to the AP Top 25, which asked out of the BCS formula five years ago but remains an influential measure for judging the biggest matchups week to week.

"The previous week's rating is evaluated," Boyd said, "and then the following factors are brought in: score versus opponent that week; was it a game on the road? What was the ranking on our ‘Toughest Places to Play' poll versus the opponent you played, if it was road game? And then finally, the separation between the two is simple percentages, so we have a disparity between them."

The game's BCS computation comes into play in Week 8, the same as it does in real life, but it is not a strict replication of the actual matrix. For one thing, the Harris Interactive Poll, which serves as the second human poll in the BCS formula, isn't a factor all that distinct from the game's media poll. And the six indices - with names like Colley, Sagarin, Wolfe and Massey - that form the ranking's computer average are not used in NCAA 10, Boyd said, even though their formulae are public. "We do make it equally interesting," Boyd said. "Without giving too much away, we combine the media and coaches' poll and then add in other variables, such as strength of schedule."

Such as? "Quality wins and losses are a big factor. Losing to a bad team will definitely have a severe impact on the rankings in our game." Also, timing is a key factor, just like real life. "In our game, it's better to lose early than lose late," Boyd said. "If you were to lose in the first few weeks of the season to a strong opponent, you will naturally move up the rankings as long as you continue to win."

The biggest question I had is whether NCAA 10 internally gooses the polling to help out a user-controlled team, in the name of a more fun video game for the person who bought it. Because in more than six years of playing console sports sims, few experiences have been more gratifying than taking over a two-star doormat, storming the Top 10, and getting that "Where'd They Come From?!" headline in the next week's NCAA news.

Answer: No. "We want it to be an even playing field," Boyd said. If you manage to take Temple to the Orange Bowl, you came by it honest. "I believe most of the ways we evaluate the teams would be affected if we skewed it toward the human-controlled teams," he added.

Nor is the voting skewed toward user-controlled players in the game's Heisman Trophy simulation. However, "We do have a special circumstance for potential upsets in the voting to keep it dynamic, for a twist," Boyd said, "but we don't want to disclose the formula, to help keep the intrigue. But this is equal among human controlled and CPU teams."

NCAA 10's Heisman voting likewise reflects the values of its real-world counterpart. It typically goes to quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers, although I have seen offensive tackles and defensive backs get mentioned week-to-week, as they sometimes are in real life.

Significantly, Boyd said that the stats or results of a simulated game in a dynasty carry no additional weight, positive or negative, in the game's Heisman voting. And while it's easier to load up arcade numbers against creampuffs, he said a surer path is to take on tough teams on the road and log credible performances that contribute to a win there.

And no, Boyd said, there is no East Coast Media Bias helping players or teams from that region, in either the polls or the Heisman sims.

After our conversation, I went back into NCAA 10 to try to test out what Boyd had to say. I ran another simulation pitting Boise State versus a much tougher nonconference schedule this year. The Broncos went 8-3, losing to Oregon at home and Alabama and Texas in Tuscaloosa and Austin. Boise still ended the season at No. 11 - remarkably, the highest-rated three loss team in the nation, although all of the defeats came early. In fact, 11 is an uncommonly high rating for any three-loss team, let alone one from the WAC. Strength of schedule, with two Top-5 games on the road early in the season, clearly was in play here.

But it was impossible not to notice that a lesser team, North Carolina - whose football ranking I've long said is propped up by the school's basketball reputation and the votes of people who wish they went there - had hit No. 2 by the end of the regular season on a schedule as weak as the last swallow in a 2-liter of Cheerwine. And that literally raised up the old State alum anger in me, seeing the despised Tar Heels exalted by a system that would never ever give the Wolfpack the same benefit of the doubt, which is pretty much how we think about things in real life, too.

But then in the conference title game, Carolina suffered the kind of crushing loss that is so common to arriviste college football programs - 28-13 to Clemson, the ACC's original football power, booting UNC back to a lesser bowl, the Gator. And I threw a fist and roared with delight at, again, the true-to-life fidelity of NCAA 10.

Stick Jockey is Kotaku's column on sports video games. It appears Saturdays at 10 a.m. U.S. Mountain time.

Here's a quick look at how the service works on the console once you get the disc. For now, you'll have to pop the disc in to access the Netflix service from the Movie section of your PS3's cross media bar.

The Netflix service is relatively similar to the offering found on the Xbox 360. Although you can't watch a movie with friends online, everything else seems to be there for PS3 owners.

I actually like the interface a bit more on the PS3 than I do the Xbox 360. The PS3 version takes up most of your screen to show off the movies or shows available in a particular area. You can sort by a number of genres, including very specific ones keyed to your tastes, as well as look at your Instant View queue and browse through the selection of TV shows and movies just made available on the service.

Once streaming a video you can pause, rewind, fastforward just like with a disc or downloaded movie.

While this may seem like old hat to Xbox 360 owners, it's got to be a delight for Playstation 3 users, especially those that landed the disc before the weekend.

But in the eye of the contentious hurricane that swirls around the upcoming launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, developer Infinity Ward appears unfazed.

"It's very exciting," said Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling, who's title changed from community manager to "creative strategist" as the buzz began to swell for Modern Warfare 2. "I'm fully expecting it to do very well. I'm expecting good things."

And he should be. Set in modern times, the first-person shooter has already broken the record for most pre-orders, according to national retailer GameStop.

And industry analyst Anita Frazier says there's a very good chance it will break Halo 3's record for 3.3 million copies sold at launch.

"The previous best-selling Call of Duty games (across all platforms) in its launch month is a tie between (Modern Warfare) and COD World at War with 2.3 million units including those generated by PC sales at retail," said Frazier, who tracks sales numbers for the NPD Group. "For the title to exceed Halo 3 first month sales, COD: MW2 would have to best its previous best launches by 43%.

"That's a big number to increase, but is it possible? Yes, with what is being reported about pre-sells and the general level of buzz that this game is generating, it's possible. There are also a number of high-interest special edition SKU's launching for this game as well."

But all of that buzz, and those millions of pre-orders, means a lot of people are paying very close attention to what developer Infinity Ward is doing this time around with the game.

Fans have been carefully tracking every bit of information dropped about the game, from the night vision goggles that will be included with some special editions of the title, to plot twists and the way the game will be handled on different platforms.

"We have come to a realization with this game that anything that can leak will leak," Bowling said. "When our night vision glasses went into production, the guys making them figured out what they were for and put them on and took pictures of them."

The leaks have reached such a fevered pitch that Bowling recently advised gamers to avoid the internet altogether if they wanted to have a pristine experience playing through the game.

Soon after, word and video hit of a level in the game that seems to involve player-controlled terrorism. Despite the game being weeks from release, Australian politicians were up in arms about the notion and eventually publisher Activision released a statement defending the game and saying players will have the option to skip it.

But that short lived controversy was nothing compared to the ire raised by the developer's approach to the PC version of the game. When news hit that PC gamers would have less control over the way they play online it ignited a firestorm of seething disappointment, online petitions and, in at least one case, a cash donation to a competing video game.

Bowling and the company defend the decisions made to make the PC game more accessible.

"We have protected what our veteran gamers love about the game, but are also catering to different play styles and rewarding those different play styles," Bowling said. "Accessibility was a major focus for Modern Warfare 2."

And Bowling denies that Infinity Ward and Activision are more focused on making the console versions of the game than a solid PC version.

"We make a fantastic PC game," he said. "Modern Warfare 2 is our most feature-rich PC game yet."

When asked if the next Modern Warfare would be on the PC, Bowling said he doesn't even know yet what Infinity Ward's next game will be.

Bowling believes that the outcry against Infinity Ward's design decisions by some PC gamers is a case of a loud minority, and not the sentiments of the majority.

"We have 14 million players on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare," he said. "The hardcore gamers make up a smaller core of that, and PC gamers are the smallest group of that core.

"It is a very vocal community and they are all online."

The outcry is perhaps also the offshoot of a game developer being so engaged with their community.

"Our community gets so invested in our games," Bowling said. "Therefore they feel, and rightfully so, that we should justify every design decision to them. I think that it's very important to understand that you should be very involved in your community and work with them, but not to be held prisoner to their demands.

"We know our game very well. Some of the stuff you have to put in there and have faith in your design. Some things don't sound good out of context. You don't see the beauty of them until you experience them for yourselves."

"It's a very fine line."

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Josh Holmes has been in the industry for around 15 years. He was part of the EA Canada exodus that formed Propaganda Games in 2005, having previous worked on the first two Def Jam titles and the NBA Street series. At Propaganda he worked on the most recent Turok game. He came to Microsoft's 343 Industries and now holds the position of executive producer of the Halo franchise.

My first question for Josh following yesterday's release of the Xbox Live Halo hub was what's next for the Waypoint team? His answer? Sleep. Waypoint has been a labor of love for the development team from the get go, to the point where they stayed up well into the early morning on Wednesday night, watching the players download and explore the fruits of their labor. "The team here has been really grinding to complete this and launch it. We're all super excited to see it go live. None of us slept. We just stayed up and watched as people came in and tried it out."

And try it out they did. During the first few hours of availability, some users experienced problems downloading Waypoint due to the overwhelming response fans have to anything Halo related. "We've been blown away by the number of people we've seen coming in to check out Waypoint, and that number is bound to get larger."

So now the fans are watching Halo Waypoint. They're keeping track of their progression; replaying Halo 3 and Halo Wars in order to complete innovative achievements that span all the Halo 3 360 titles; and learning about the Halo Universe through an stylized information database.

And there's a lot more on the way. Starting Saturday night, four episodes from the Halo Legends anime series will be made available for a 24-hour period every other weekend, alternating with making-of videos. There'll be new fiction, interviews, and news. The aim is to have daily updates, with content that, if viewed on a regular basis, give players an idea of what's going to happen next in the Halo Universe.

While you can read all about the regularly scheduled content in Halo Waypoint in Stephen's excellent article on the future of the service, it's the amount of weight that player feedback will have on future content that's the most interesting aspect of Waypoint.

Josh first mentioned community feedback in response to my query about the possibility of eventually meeting friends and launching games from within Waypoint. "There's a ton of great ideas that the team has had brainstorming about the types of things we'd like to do in the future, but we're also going to be really taking the lead from a lot of feedback we get from the community."

The community focus came up time and time again throughout the interview, generally after I suggested potential upcoming content, such as excerpts from the upcoming Halo Evolutions anthology novel, or more avatar rewards. "Avatar awards are just one of the ways we can reward people for being a fan of the franchise and a good member of the Halo community."

The Career section of Waypoint is also ultimately in control of the fan base. "We may be looking at additional ways to compare data between friends in the future, and might be one of the things we evolve if we hear from fans that that will be something valuable to them."

You get the basic idea here. If there's something you'd like to see or a new feature you'd like implemented on the Halo Waypoint service, make some noise. Talk about it in the Halo forums. Twitter about it. Facebook it. Josh Holmes and the 343 Industries Halo Waypoint team are paying attention.

NBA Live Micro-Review: More than Pick-Up Hoops
In which Owen Good objects to Marv Albert.

WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 Review: A Game For Smart People
In which I invented the "What Is Your Favorite Color?" match and am amazed that WWE hasn't hired me away from Kotaku yet.

Fairytale Fights Review: The Tragic Kingdom
In which AJ Glasser deals with some big bugs.

Dragon Age: Origins Review: Tripping The Blight Fantastic
In which Michael Fahey also deals with bugs, but comes away happier.

Domo Games Micro-Review: No Thanks, Nintendo
In which, for once, I have nothing to love.

League of Legends Review: Free, Addictive, Worthy
In which Brian Crecente resists the urge to spend money.

Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter Review: Hero We Go Again
In which we learn how Michael McWhertor would arm his warrior ninja.

Rabbids Go Home Review: Strip-Platforming
In which I reveal what Santa Claus is secretly carrying.

You are not a plumber. You are not prince. You are not even Rayman in the Rabbids Go Home, the new single-player action game starring three bunnies (one of which lives in your Wii Remote) and a shopping cart. The raving Rabbids are making their fourth annual Wii outing since seemingly hijacking Ubisoft's Rayman platforming series, turning it into a party game series, and now making it a platformer again — sans Rayman.

Who would be clamoring for this? Welll, do you like Looney Tunes? Do you want to run a shopping cart over someone's dinner? And do you see many other platformers from which to choose?

Loved
Screaming Absurdity: From start to finish this is a game that tastefully borders on bad taste, making it perfect for 11-year-old boys and anyone who wants to feel like one. We've got a level-based action game that stars some maniac rabbits, who think that they can steal enough junk from human civilization to build a pile that will reach the moon. To do this, they (you) are wheeling two Rabbids and their shopping cart through shopping malls, airports and hospitals, among other locales, frequently pressing an attack button which emits a Rabbid yell that blows all but the underwear off any people in the Rabbids' way. This includes Santa Claus, who drops not just his red suit but cheeseburgers for the Rabbids to horde. Not just nurses, air traffic controllers and other people who lose not just their clothes but — from almost all of them! — a bottle of soda. Even old people get stripped to their underwear.

Yes, you are even yelling the clothes of old people who are slumped in their wheelchairs with an IV drip above their slouched heads. But you only do that after you yell the gowns off hospital patients in their sick bed, then you bounce off their bellies to vault the Rabbids and cart over walls. Do the patients mind? Actually, they pray out loud a thanks to the lord for giving them this "trial." The guys from whom you snatch their dogs whine for the ASPCA. The people on the plane that's taking off while your Rabbids remove an engine from its wing don't say anything — but hopefully they made it! I'd be troubled by some of this if it wasn't all portrayed as slapstick cartoon comedy where no one gets hurt. Remember when more games made joyfully this little sense?

The Good Kind Of Simple: This is indeed a platformer without a jump button. A Wii Remote and Nunchuck are used, but the inputs are simple. You steer and speed up as one Rabbid pushes and the other rides in the shopping cart. You drive them into all this human stuff so they can collect it into an ever-changing tower of junk in the cart. You've got a pair of attacks, and that's about it as a default. Though it is in vogue for the stat-upgrading influence of role-playing games to infiltrate other genres through the likes of Borderlands or Ratchet and Clank, Rabbids Go Home stands with the Marios in keeping the default characters little changed throughout the game.

The novelty in games like these is in how each level is shaped. In a rare return to quality 3D platforming (played from fixed camera perspectives), most levels present the evolving challenges of exploring and careening through halls of malls and hospital rooftops, trying to collect the most items, not fall off tilting platforms, bashing a few enemies and accelerate off many a jump ramp, before reaching a large item at the end to add to the pile. Like a good Mario game, Rabbids Go Home will offer a break. Maybe a level produces an item that temporarily allows the Rabbids to jump after all. Some levels turn out to be a fun mix of inner-tube slaloms and a sort of upside-down-Plinko. A few are simply chases along a roadway to catch a truck carrying a cow.

The Lunatic Fringes: There is much in the periphery of this game that's odd, but welcome. The soundtrack, for example, is decades' old, offering such non-modern hits as John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" or the relaxing Calyspo song "Jamaica Farewell," which can calm nerves during nervous narrow rooftop dashes. Other oddities include the ability to torture and deform the Rabbid living in your Remote (remember I mentioned borderline bad taste?). You can use this little guy as a projectile in levels. But he or his friends can be shaken in the Remote and then entered into online fashion contests administered by Ubisoft through the game's Rabbids Channel. That separate Channel can be installed to your Wiii dashboard and accessed without the game, allowing you to keep up on which mad entries people have made for, say, the most Halloween-appropriate Rabbid.

Hated
Hapless Hub: Continuing an often-irrelevant tradition, Rabbids Go Home has a hub world, a small city that includes doorways to five batches of stages. It's unclear why the designers thought the player should access a hub before getting to one of five lists of levels they might want to access and play. Let's say you lose interest in the levels in the current menu and want to try some earlier ones. You have to return to the city and head over to the doorway that will bring your Rabbid to another list of levels. Given the lack of original and interesting things to do in the city, it feels like a time-waster.

The Less Good Kind Of Simple: Rabbids Go Home is easy. Maybe that's for the 11-year-old boys. Your busy reviewer won't complain about a game he could casually dip into each night this week, laugh at a lot and proceed through with few lives lost. But if you grumble when games are easy and don't consider returning to levels to find every hidden item the way to get your money's worth, then this game might not be your thing.

Rabbids Go Home mixes the inanity of a good Saturday morning cartoon, the fluid movement of a Mario game (as good as you can get without the jumping), the collecting of ridiculous human stuff of Katamari Damacy and winds up serving a fun, easy comedy.

The game looks and sounds good, and, best of all, surprises with its warped sense of humor. It's another strong Wii game from a non-Nintendo company, adding to what's become an eclectic shelf of small 2009 Wii gems alongside Dead Space Extraction, House of the Dead: Overkill and Deadly Creatures. And this one doesn't even have "dead" in the title.

(Rabbids Go Home was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and published by Ubisoft for the Wii on November 1. Retails for $49.99 USD. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played to the end, helping the Rabbids approach the moon and liberating the clothes from hundreds of skinny, dopey cartoon humans.)

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

A few weeks ago in New York I had the opportunity to try a map of Bad Company 2, the PC and console military first-person shooter from EA's DICE studio. The sandy Chilean map, called Arica Harbour, is the one that will be available in the game's PlayStation 3-exclusive multiplayer beta later this month.

A preview event gives a casual first-person shooter player like myself little opportunity to assess the quality of the map. I fought in the almost desert-like environment in buildings, on a bridge, all under a seemingly hot sun. I drove tanks, stormed across the bridge and knocked down walls. But I can't say whether it's balanced or whether it will prove as addictive to play as the best arenas in the genre.

I can say, however, that the feature list for this game and the sensory impression it leaves make clear what this game's potential is. EA's Medal of Honor series might be missing in action, but with Bad Company they've got a game that can gun for Activision's Call of Duty.

Screenshots and even the animated stills from yesterday's beta announcement already show how good the game looks. Bad Company 2's engine, an enhanced version of its predecessort's, supports the chipping and collapsing destructibility of any building in the game. Rockets punch through walls, as they did in the first Bad Company. But now tanks can crumple support beams to level even the interior frame. And, more subtly, an engineer with a drill can poke a hole in a wall and then shoot through it.

Multiplayer combat in the game is class-based. Each class, be it soldier, medic, engineer or recon can be outfitted with several items and attributes. Before entering combat you might switch your soldier's rifle but also alter his radar to add motion detection. Perks are unlockable, secured as the player earns experience points in each battle and levels up. Upgrades are scheduled and unlocked per class. As we reported last month, the limited edition of the game will provide gamers with six upgrades, including some that enhance the arms and armor of vehicles, immediately.

Players can also earn pins during battle, which serve as more granular Achievements or Trophies, rewarding, say, good shotgun performance. You gain these for bragging rights.

The essence of Battlefield is the openness of its combat zone. Players can fight on foot, in helicopters or on tanks. They can command any vehicle or post in the battlefield, opening the scene to a variety of tactical encounters. The map I played was set for a Rush challenge, which involved one team trying to secure several locations by reaching them and holding off any attackers. I had my moments, gunning some of the rival team down on the sidelines. But I'm the kind of guy who rolls in on a tank and then gets blasted by the RPG trooper hiding around the corner who somehow knew I'd be there.

Bad Company's battlefield is an impressive site and one theoretically open to a wide variety of multiplayer strategy. The brand may not have the momentum of a Call of Duty yet, but the intent to compete is there. call of Duty is still the king. This one's the hungry hopeful.

Bad Company 2 will be released in early March 2010.

The Imperial Agent is all about high-tech gear, subterfuge, and subversion. They are the assassins of the Star Wars universe, prowling the seedy underbelly of the Empire as they go about their dirty deeds. They're probably the closest thing to a rogue you're likely to find in BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Looking at the screens posted over at IncGamers, the Imperial Agent reminds me of the Agent class in Anarchy Online, which also specialize in sniper rifles and have a flair for concealing their identities. Slap a balaclava on that guy's head and the resemblance is uncanny.

The class was revealed during a European press tour earlier this week. Expect more information to show up on the SWTOR website with next Friday's update.

The Imperial Agent Revealed! [Star Wars: The Old Republic Forums]

Princess Zelda has been getting herself kidnapped on a regular basis for 23 years now, and Nintendo is ready for a change. Today the company announces that for the first time ever, Zelda will be accompanying Link on his quest to save Hyrule - at least in spirit.

Seen in the GameTrailers exclusive trailer below, Princess Zelda's body still gets kidnapped, but her spirit is free to help Link out as he rides the rails on his customizable train and delves deep into the various dungeons littered about the countryside like gopher holes on a golf course. In said dungeons, Zelda's spirit will be able to possess Phantoms, hulking suits of armor, allowing the player to control both characters in order to win battles and solve puzzles. With Zelda having a constant presence in the game, fans can expect a closer look at the character than ever before.

"More than two decades into its rich history, The Legend of Zelda has introduced another historic first for players as Link and Zelda unite to save Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks," said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. "Combining these unprecedented new story and game-play elements with the series' innovative touch-screen interface on Nintendo DS and Nintendo DSi, the game is sure to surprise and delight new and longtime fans."

Leave it to Princess Zelda to figure out a way to bug Link constantly while being kidnapped for the umpteenth time. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks pulls into retail stores on December 7th.

"My relationship with Apple has been long standing, but it's a rollercoaster ride," he told Kotaku. "I'll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I'll say something they don't like and I can be blacklisted for six months."

Working with Apple on iPhone games has been no different, Carmack said, but he is happy to see that former collaborator Graeme Devine is now working at Apple in the iPhone Game Technologies division.

Devine worked at id Software from 1999 to 2003, producing and programming on a number of games including Quake III, Doom 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Devine went on to Ensemble Studios where he worked on Age of Empires 3 and Halo Wars before that studio was shut down.

Earlier this year he moved to Apple.

"Graeme Devine is in a significant position as a game developer at Apple," Carmack said. "I have a real man on the inside now. We knew each other from way back in the day.

"He's a real developer and I understand everything he is saying."

Devine's role at Apple doesn't mean that Carmack's dealings with the company has gotten any less bumpy though. Doom Classic was rejected twice before Apple allowed it to appear in the store with some minor changes.

Carmack thinks the run-ins with Apple are because the company, the highest people in the company, look down on games. But the popularity of gaming on the iPhone has forced Apple to try and come to grips with that, even if they're not happy about it.

"At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts," Carmack said, "they're not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else."

Lucky for you, Skate 3 developer Black Box is aware of this challenge and dealt with it once before in Skate 2.

What Is It?
Skate 3 is the follow up to last year's non-Tony Hawk skater sim, Skate 2. The setting is new, the modes are somewhat familiar and the emphasis is on team gameplay this time instead of the solo experience.

What We Saw
EA sat games journalists down in groups for a quick rundown of all the new features plus a multi-round multiplayer face off in several different gameplay modes. The modes (as I frantically wrote them down between loading screens) were: Race, Domination, One-Up, Contest and Own-the-Lot.

How Far Along Is It?
Very early days. Skate 3 is built on Skate 2's engine, so everything looks farther along than it is and probably will move along quickly — but it was still what you'd call "alpha."

What Needs Improvement?
Race: It is so hard to get back on the right track once you've hosed yourself in a race. I was doing damn fine at the beginning, but when I messed up a jump by trying to flick my trick stick (read: right stick), I wound up facing the wrong way and the game reset me on the race track right back where I'd failed the trick with zero momentum to get up the vertical wall from which I was trying to do a trick jump. It ruined the pace of the race and of course put me in last place. (And no, I didn't mean for that to rhyme, it just came out that way.)

Skate.School: Sadly, EA wasn't ready to show off Skate.School — their tutorial mode. I put it here because it's really, really important that the developer nail the tutorials in Skate 3. So much of the gameplay rides on a team experience and there doesn't seem to be a space that's really all about solo skating except for the tutorial. Without a solid tutorial experience to catch everyone up, newcomers are going to be left in the dust (and totally demoralized when they realize they're the weak link) by their teammates.

Not Fundamentally Different: Some people griped that Skate 2 was really Skate 1.5. Those same people might be tempted to say that Skate 3 is really Skate 2 because when you get down to it, new tricks and new modes doesn't necessarily make a new game. The might even call Skate 3 Skate 1.75, if they're being particularly harsh.

What Should Stay The Same?
One-Up: Easily the most nerve-wracking mode of them all, One-Up also turned out to be the most fun. You and your posse start out at the beginning of a track while a rival posse watches from nearby. When the timer goes off, you have something like 60 seconds to rack up as many points as you can by doing tricks. If any one of you falls of his or her board, your time automatically expires and the other team gets to try and one-up your score on the course. It was really fun — especially when I realized that on one track, it was the experienced developer who fell down and cost us the match, not me. I was being smart and just doing kickflips in a corner.

Hall of Meat Defaults to Off: I loved Hall of Meat because I'm a bad skater so it feels good to see some kind of rewards system for totally wiping out on even the easiest jumps. But the developer told me that people (particularly people who didn't realize you could turn Hall of Meat slow-mo displays off) weren't too fond of it. So Black Box has separated Hall of Meat from the main gameplay and given players the option to pursue it or ignore it completely. I didn't get to see this because the revamped Hall of Meat isn't ready yet, but more details forthcoming.

Not Fundamentally Different: The first two games were really good and mostly accessible games. Skate 3 seems to meet those same benchmarks, so what's not to like?

Final Thoughts
Customization from the community was a huge part of Skate 2, but it's the absolute life blood of Skate 3. From dedicated posses who take on the entire community online to niche artists who get off on designing team logos for other players to use and even on to would-be filmmakers who capture some of the craziest stunts or recreate true machinima, Skate 3 is all about a multiplayer, community-driven experience. So if you want solo skating, I have a feeling you're going to be disappointed. But if you're still thrilled with Skate 2 and ready for more multiplayer, this is your game right here.

Just three months before the January 2010 release of BioWare's second Mass Effect, there is an intriguing bit of, well, intrigue about what's going to be happening in BioWare's science fiction sequel to its hit Xbox 360 and PC role playing game Mass Effect. The more I've seen of Mass Effect 2 over three showings in June, September and then last month, the more mysterious its adventure seems.

The more I play it and talk to those involved in making it — including during a recent Xbox 360 demo of the game in New York of a new mission on the planet Omega — the more it appears that the flaws of the game's acclaimed predecessor have been addressed as the game assumes its identity as a shooter-role-playing-game hybrid.

Scrubbed, at least in the demo missions, are graphical imperfections: Slowed framerate, texture pop-in and bland backgrounds. All remedied, it seems.

The mission I saw brought Commander Shepard to the planet Omega and a nightclub called Afterlife where flames flashed in the background of the club and graphical textures didn't pop in a few seconds too late. Dancers and bartenders prowled a scene that bustled with more commotion than anything I'd seen in the first Mass Effect.

Graphical upgrades were desired and expected. Did you foresee that cut-scenes could benefit from some user involvement? After meeting some seedy folks at the bar, Shepard ran into an old friend from Mass Effect 1 — I'll only spoil his identity in the last sentence of this article. A cutscene started, but not the idle type of an older game. During a climactic moment, the player's of the trigger let off a rifle round, leaving fewer enemies to fight in the subsequent post-cutscene battle. This is similar to a moment during a cutscene in a level shown at E3 that let Shepard shove a man out a window, supposedly when prompted by a button cue.

Better graphics, interactive cut-scenes… how about an ammo upgrade?

This is the change I'm less sure all Mass Effect fans will like. As the Penny Arcade Expo demo of Mass Effect 2 led me and our readers to believe, the new game will arm the player with ammunition-based weapons that need to be manually reloaded.

Gone is the first game's system of infinite-ammo weapons that overheat if used to much too quickly. Reader feedback to that possibility was mixed during PAX. The EA representative who showed me the Omega mission couldn't tell me what the narrative justification was for abandoning the series' no-reload-needed ballistics technology. He could tell me, however, was that the game's developers felt that the old system for regulating player's use of guns — an overheating mechanic that enforced slower shooting and mandatory cooldown — disrupted the flow of a good firefight. Players would run for cover and wait until their weapon was ready to fire again. Not anymore. Hopefully.

After some tense conversation in the bar, the meeting with the old Mass Effect character and a bad sip of a dangerous drink, Shepard got into a firefight. He had a Krogan names Grunt and the human character Jacob from the recent Mass Effect iPod Touch game, Mass Effect Galaxy, at his side. I played this part, trying the refined combat system.

BioWare is clearly trying to improve and deepen the Mass Effect shooting experience. Gunplay is still third-person and real-time. The action can still be paused as the player activates a wheel of optional powers and weapons, which can be wielded by Shepard and whichever two partner characters are with him. Added to that is the ability to arm special ammunition types the freeze enemies or blow them up.

The demo level being shown ended with a mech battle, but I didn't get that far. I was off to play other games.

As combat heavy as the back part of the demo was, though, people curious about Mass Effect 2 shouldn't worry that story is being neglected. It is more obscured in these demonstrations of the game, partially, I'd wager, because there are more surprises there worth holding back. Even the nature of Shepard himself (or herself, if you've played as a female) is in question. As close to release as this game is, a mystery remains as to even the nature of its lead character's existence. Is he alive, dead, reborn? Why, in this demo, does another character not believe Shepard is Shepard and then snidely say, "That could be anyone wearing your face"?

This week's release of Dragon Age was BioWare's testament to not abandoning its classic role-playing game roots. Mass Effect 2 is the branch extending further away. These demos reveal the growth of a gameplay style that feels ever closer to a shooter, shaped, at least, by the player's strategic decision-making and ability-management. There's little hiding the active evolution of this gameplay style.

The gameplay may be more clear — and the graphics too — but it still also feels like Mass Effect 2 is hiding something: What are the dark secrets of its narrative? Why might someone else be wearing his face? And, hey, if they're going to explain that, why won't his weapons overheat?

Finally, as promised, here is your SPOILER ABOUT THE RETURNING CHARACTER…

It's Garrus who is back.

Activision's shooter includes mandatory installation of Valve's Steamworks, which the game uses for stuff like installation, DRM and save-game management. Something Direct2Drive (which is owned by website IGN) are having none of, telling us "We don't believe games should force the user to install a Trojan Horse". That "Trojan Horse" being the inclusion of Steam's commercial marketplace.

D2D also told Kotaku that, having evaluated some Steamworks titles earlier in the year (such as Empire: Total War and Dawn of War II) and finding the forced inclusion of Steam's storefront (offering automatic competition to D2D's own services) not to their liking, told publishers that they'd stop selling games bundled in such a manner until Valve "decoupled its retail marketplace" from Steam's other services.

To be clear, D2D's beef is not with Activision, it's with Steam, and to prove there's no bad blood between the retailer and mega-publisher, $5 coupons will soon be offered on select Activision titles to make up for it.

UPDATE - Seems Impulse have come out today and also confirmed they won't be stocking the game, for the same reasons.

UPDATE 2 - Digital store Gamersgate have told Kotaku that, like D2D and Impulse, they will also not be stocking Modern Warfare 2, and again, for the same reason.

As in the first Nintendo DS title, Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter asks the player to tap into their artistic touchscreen skills to draw platforms, vehicles, weapons and even the game's hero itself—my ninja Musashi, armed with a giant corndog, is just one of almost limitless possibilities—who must return color to the desaturated world and rescue a missing Raposa named Heather. In both the top-down adventure portions and side-scrolling platforming sections, players will flex their creativity to make this Drawn To Life adventure their own.

Should you apply your brush to Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter?

Loved
Presentation & Animation: Everything that I didn't contribute to Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter via touchscreen and stylus looks spectacular. Artist Paul Robertson's amazing sprites animate beautifully, adding charm and character to the game's non-playable Raposa and enemies. Beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds have lush, well-animated detail, ensuring a welcome level of visual variety across the game's five worlds. Save for the clumsy characters and items I drew—I often let the game's suggested template sprites take the place of my own creations—the game is a treat to look at.

Surprisingly Engrossing Story: It may not be wholly original, but the relatively simple tale of The Next Chapter has a few twists and a tender moment or two, made the better thanks to well directed, well scored cut scenes. The game's script is sharp and witty at times, dialogue I did my best not to miss.

Da Blob: The platforming portions start to wear thin quickly, but the addition of two additional forms—the amorphous Blob and wall-crawling Spider—help break up the monotony of playing as a sword or yo-yo wielding Humanoid. There are some clever level designs, some not-too-difficult puzzles that require dexterous use of all three forms.

Improved Creative Tools: Just about everything I crafted with Drawn To Life: The Chapter's graphics editor was an eyesore. But the tools have depth to them I've just begun to explore. A larger color palette and a wealth of interesting templates—plus the ability to add extra limbs!—offer the opportunity for a wide variety of cool or kooky creations. The "Action Draw" sections, which lets the player draw simple platforms using a limited supply, aren't particularly challenging, but they're fun.

Hated
Extended Downtime: Conversations in The Next Chapter can drag on, leading to long stretches of watching, not playing. For the most part, the game is careful not to throw unnecessary monologues and long-winded explanations, but there are a few moments where the narrative starts to wear out its welcome.

Mundane Platforming: The game's platforming sections are easy to blow through, offering little in the way of impressive level design or captivating challenge. There are, however, some well-hidden collectibles scattered throughout the game's 45 levels, but the drive to revisit some of these rather dull levels, especially with Drawn To Life's loose controls and sometimes spotty hit detection, is low.

Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter's biggest strength is its creative tool set. It's a wonderful little artistic outlet, a gorgeously crafted game that plays like it would appeal to a much younger, more patient and passionate player. It doesn't offer much in the way of depth for the more experienced action-adventure fan, but makes up for some of its shortcomings with its copious charm.

There's enough to do, see and collect over the course of the game's storyline to make the journey worth the while. It's just a shame that Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter's gameplay is its weakest link.

Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter was developed by 5th Cell and published by THQ for the Nintendo DS on October 27. (A Wii version developed by Planet Moon Studios is also available, but was not reviewed.) Retails for $29.99 USD on DS. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played game to completion.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Last year, Kotaku experimented with its own version of a Book Club and we will be bringing that back next week for Modern Warfare 2.

We are hoping to curate a community discussion about what has already been a provocative game. As Brian Crecente put it last year in his Kotaku Game Club announcement: "My hope is that it will get me and you and all gamers who participate to look beyond the graphics, the gameplay, the routine and perhaps think about games the way people think about a good book or a good movie."

There's an added element I want to emphasize: The idea of having a shared experience. Any fan of good weekly TV series knows the pleasure of knowing that millions of people are experiencing the same new hour of a show at the same time and then joining online or in person to talk with some of them about it. That experience is not easy to recreate with a video game, but I think we've got a shot with Modern Warfare 2.

So here's the plan, subject to change if you have a better idea or if Modern Warfare 2 proves to be structured differently than its predecessor:

-Wednesday, November 11: The Kotaku Game Club for Modern Warfare kicks off, with a post that will kick off a discussion about the game's first three levels. Those levels... and nothing else. So please try not to play past that, as hard as that will be. (Play multiplayer instead or something). I will start the conversation and then hang out in the comments for an hour so we can chat about those first three levels. I will post a reminder on Tuesday.

-Friday, November 13: The Game Club continues, with another post kicking off a discussion of the game's next three levels.

-We will pick back up on Monday, the 16th, then Wednesday, Friday, and Monday all over again. We'll keep this up until we finish the game.

The Game Club will be for people who want to discuss and debate shared experiences, who want to appreciate and examine a game in a close way, who want to think — and who can resist the urge to play ahead!

Join me on Wednesday.

Let's walk through what here:

Three copies of the rare Marvel Vs Capcom 2 vinyl mix tape.
A Brutal Legend statue.
A copy of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Fortune Hunter's Edition
A limited edition, hand-signed and numbered print by Scott Belcastro with letter from the founder an curator of i am 8-bit.
A collector's Edition of Tekken 6 for the Xbox 360.
A rare 3L colored and etched bottle of 8BitVintners wine.
A Tatsunoko vs. Capcom hoodie signed by producer Ryota Niitsuma.

I'll be posting the silent auction details next week, but all of this along with a ton of schwag, free play on stage for DJ Hero and Rock Band and an arcade console will be available to everyone who comes to the 16 and older Kotaku Child's Play Fundraiser on Nov. 19 in Denver.

Check out the details, location and time here.

"Wolfenstein Classic was my original experiment on whether a first-person shooter would be any fun on the iPhone," he said. "It did surprisingly well for all of us."

So well, in fact, that Carmack finds himself spending a disproportionate amount of his time working on future iPhone games. Already id Software has released Wolfenstein Classic, Wolfenstein RPG, Doom Resurrection and this week Doom Classic.

Carmack said that there was a lot of "hand wringing" initially over the idea of spending the company's own money (there was no publisher to help fund development) on making games for the iPhone. Doom Resurrection, when it hit, was probably the most expensive game to develop for the iPhone, Carmack says.

But that internal concern quickly disappeared when Wolfenstein Classic hit the App Store.

"It did really well for us," he said. "It was Wolfenstein Classic that made the argument for iPhone development for me. We made quite a bit of money off of that."

After its success Carmack and id Software decided to launch a three-prong approach to iPhone development, working on classic remakes, role-playing titles and original games.

With only a few games out for the platform so far, each game gives Carmack a chance to experiment with development and the technology, he said.

While Doom Classic's touch controls may seem very similar to those found in Wolfenstein Classic, Carmack says there's quite a big difference.

" There were some important changes, like the virtual stick autocentering, changes to precise ramping of movement," he said.

The game also introduces a new control option that allows gamers to turn around in the game by spinning a virtual wheel. But only six months into iPhone game development, Carmack says he already finds himself "hamstrung" by people's expectations of controls set by his previous games.

"We're still feeling out what will play well and what people will like," he said.

Next up for Carmack is Quake Classic, it will be the first shooter that id Software releases for the iPhone that will include the ability to look up and down, not just side to side.

I pointed out that some in the gaming and development community have suggested that both Doom and Wolfenstein Classic control so well because they don't need to worry about up and down controls.

Carmack said that while adding another axis of control is tricky, it would be wrong to dismiss what the current games have accomplished.

"There is an excellent experiment that can be done here," he said. "Play the jail broken Doom and the one I worked on. There is obviously a large difference here. You can be dismissive of the game, that there is a limited control input set, but there is a lot of work that goes into that.

"Everything that has a 32-bit processor has had Doom ported to it, you can run it on a toaster, but it takes a lot of work and care to turn it into something you would choose to play. I had people showing me FPS apps while I was working on Wolfenstein, and they were all atrocious."

Carmack says that it is possible that a fully controlled first-person shooter just isn't in the cards for the iPhone, but he won't really know until he's developed Quake Classic. After that he plans to work on Quake 2 for the iPhone.

"I'm not sure if after Quake 2 I want to do Quake Arena or Quake Live for the iPhone," he said.

The problem is that while Quake Live has better levels it would require WiFi to play online. That's because 3G just won't cut it for Carmack.

"I was originally excited about 3G," he said. "I was told it could have 180 pings, but when I tested it, it was twice that. It was not usable."

While the Classics' line seems fairly mapped out, Carmack isn't as sure about the RPG and original games coming from the developer. He says that the next RPG game will be Doom 2 RPG and if that does well they will move on to the Orcs and Elves RPG games.

The only other original game announced by id Software is one that will be based on their upcoming PC title Rage, but that doesn't mean there aren't others in the works. In particular Carmack is interesting in getting parent company Bethesda interested in bringing some of their games over to the iPhone.

"I spent a bit of time talking to Todd Howard about the iPhone," he said. "We want to make something happen for those products as well."

An obvious choice would be Fallout, something that Carmack says has already had internal proof of concepts made. But nothing has yet officially happened with the game.

Carmack says that Howard, a big fan of the iPhone, is very supportive of the idea and that anything made based on Bethesda's games would likely be created as a joint project between id and Bethesda.

He added that he would be involved in making the game most likely, but that his time is "overloaded badly right now".

"At the very least I'm going to be providing code," he said.

While more people are being brought on to help with iPhone development at id Software, it's clear that Carmack wants to stay involved with the growing business.

"I've had tons of fun working on it as a platform,"he said. "I carry an iPhone around with me as my regular phone all of the time. It's like carrying around a dev kit in my pocket."

The deals listed, which hit the day after Thanksgiving, include DSi bundles for $170 that come with five free games and a $25 Nintendo gaming coupon, Left 4 Dead 2 for $40, an Xbox 360 Elite bundle featuring Pure, Lego Batman and Halo ODST for $299, and tons more.

Check them out in the gallery.

And I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time.

Looking back, the timing of founding Meat Bun, our video game-themed t-shirt line, makes sense. It started in Tokyo, following an afternoon pounding the pavement in Harajuku, a fashionable slice of Tokyo nestled between Shinjuku and Shibuya. The area attracts the fashion conscious, from outlandish cosplayers to street fashion freaks.

Harajuku is also home to one of our biggest influences, Beams T, a Japanese label that somehow manages to make the stereotypically uncool—including video games, anime and manga—cool. It was after shopping at Beams T, where I purchased an Every Extend Extra t-shirt, lamenting that we'd missed out the label's Dragon Quest anniversary line of tees and bemoaning the fact that shirts from The King of Games were hard to get in the U.S. that the idea of making our own clothes, video game-themed ones, started to gel.

It was just days before the Tokyo Game Show. Wedged between the t-shirt shopping and the promise of playing dozens of unreleased video games, the whole thing seemed like a good idea.

Our goal? To tap into the hard to define culture of video games, a medium which we had been passionate about for decades, and create something that was better than what we were being offered. And we weren't the only ones with that idea. Similarly passionate video game fans, those raised on 8- and 16-bit games were doing the same thing, like the people behind Panic, J!NX, Attract Mode, Starmen.net and its spin-off Fangamer and many others.

So, after foolishly deciding on the name Meat Bun—inspired by a life-giving pick up from Capcom's unpopular side-scrolling arcade beat 'em up Warriors of Fate—we set off to clothe gamers.

My partner in clothing is Scott Spatola, a lifelong gamer who originally introduced himself to me after learning that I'd brought a SNES and a copy of Street Fighter II to college, against my parents wishes. The aforementioned arm-twister, Scott has always been the motivator, a rabid fan of Spy Hunter, Ninja Warriors and Darkstalkers, and the other half of this full-time-feeling side project dubbed Meat Bun.

It always helps to have a friend like Scott, one who's organized enough to undertake the business side of the business—setting up the bank accounts, applying for federal tax IDs, legally incorporating the company. There are just shy of a million little things that crop up in the process of starting to run one's own business, from the minor—like running out of envelopes with 200 orders waiting to be fulfilled—to scary legal threats. What seems like a fun little lark isn't often as easy as originally planned.

"I always said that if anyone ever asked, I'd tell them that starting your own business is F-ing hard, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise," says Sean "Jinx" Gailey, the creative overlord at clothier and accessory maker J!NX. "Real blood, sweat and tears (also real) have gone into this business."

But J!NX has turned those hard-lost fluids into a successful brand and, perhaps more importantly, a full-time gig for its founders.

"Frankly, the biggest challenge was getting over the 'hump,' making that transition from working your day job to solely working on your own business," Gailey says. "Anyone who's working on their own business can relate to that. We didn't take a paycheck from J!NX for 5 years of business, during the 'this is our side business' days. That was rough."

J!NX has been in business since 1999, when Gailey started the company "as a three page website with six designs" running the label from his bedroom. We met Gailey at last year's Spike TV Video Game Awards, bending his ear about the J!NX empire, which, while different from what we had set out to do with Meat Bun, reflected a similar passion for video games and general nerdiness, coated with a cooler shell.

"I wanted to make clothing inspired by our lifestyle, one of video games, pen and paper gaming, geek culture, giant robots, comics and dragons," Gailey says of the origins of J!NX. The clothing company has grown from a bedroom doubling as headquarters to an operation employing 21 people, occupying 18,000 square feet of office and warehouse space and making merchandise for hugely popular games like World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, StarCraft, Aion and EVE Online.

And while not quite understated, for the most part, what J!NX does is offer something to the fan of, say, World of Warcraft that's designed with more of a wink and a nod.

From the barely referential designs from Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy t-shirt maker Panic to the Earthbound obsessed crew at Fangamer—borne of Starmen.net—the subtle approach appears to be a common tactic. For our own part, ultra vague references to The House of the Dead, Ikaruga and Spy Hunter, seemed sometimes lost on the Meat Bun customer.

Reid Young of Fangamer says his company draws much of its inspiration from the Super Nintendo's role-playing game heyday for its similarly obscure designs.

"EarthBound and other SNES RPG's have definitely been our main inspiration," Young says, a fact reflected in the clothing label's EarthBound-heavy catalog. "1996 was pretty much the best summer ever — Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Super Mario RPG from morning to midnight. It's fun to relive those days and, hopefully, inspire new and old fans to do the same."

While the Fangamer store—"Something we hoped would bring in enough money to keep the lights on" over at Fangamer's community-driven side—is now the "main business focus," according to Young, employing three full-time Starmen.net veterans, running a clothing and merchandise label exceeded the EarthBound fan's expectations.

"I never anticipated the amount of work which goes into a single piece of merchandise," says Young. "It sounds easy to slap a design on a shirt, but the amount of time, money, and care that goes into the process is staggering."

Fan response, Young says, makes the grind of shipping thousands of Mother 3-inspired handbooks and t-shirts all worth it.

"Releasing a product, going to sleep, and waking up to find that everybody is as pumped about it as I am. It brings a little tear to my eye," he says.

That may be the most exhilarating part of trying to appeal to a gamer's fashion sense, finding something that people will buy and wear in public, unafraid to wear their love of video games on their sleeve, sometimes literally.

One person who's taking a different approach to the sometimes hazy cloud of "culture" that surrounds video games is Adam Robezzoli, founder of "video game culture shop" Attract Mode. It's an endeavor four years in the planning, one that includes fashion, art, print magazines and more.

Attract Mode's online store opened earlier this year, an effort that allows Robezzoli to "curate and produce unique art/goods related to video games, but also a way to fund pet projects like the artxgame collabs and the DATA BEEZ chip music concert." It also sells t-shirts, giving gamers more wearable options.

The online store offers a broader set of merchandise, however, from video game inspired t-shirts to zines from writer Matt "Fort90" Hawkins to Pac-Man oven mitts to CDs from chiptunes superstars YMCK, Anamanaguchi, Covox, et al.

Personally, when we started doing our own thing with Meat Bun, it was simply an extension of our gaming-related lives, much like what the founders of J!NX, Fangamer, Attract Mode and others have done—turned their passions into something tangible. And, yes, it's sometimes F-ing hard. But you have to wear something, right?

Seriously, there are video snippets of just about every major event in the game here, if not every level, including stuff that's potentially spoiler-filled. On the other hand, the rhyming styles of Nate Dogg and Marshall Mathers set to footage of missiles decimating castles and frosty snowmobile chases may override one's desire to go into Modern Warfare 2 fresh.

I'll leave it up to you to decide.

Oh, and keep in mind, this level of violence is for the mature crowd. No clicking if you're under 17, OK? Thanks.

I'm sure comic-book-author-turned-game-designer Joe Madureira is pretty sick of hearing that for the last eight years or so. But here's hoping his game will make you forget all about war-torn worlds, burly swordsmen and huge gauntlets.

Oh, wait...

Darksiders, for those of you who don't know, is about one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War. Turns out, there was a false Apocalypse and somebody set War up to take the blame. War's bosses glue a creature called The Watcher (voiced by Mark Hamil) to his fist and kick him back down to Earth sans most of his powers to figure out what went wrong.

Gameplay follows War through a series of environments on the ruined Earth. The map itself is huge once you open it all up, necessitating both a warp function you unlock later in the game and a badass horse called Ruin that serves as your ride. You also have to do a lot of backtracking to areas as you learn new abilities that open up places you either couldn't reach or see initially. Not only are you getting mystical powers like the ability to see into the Realm of Shadow with a button press, but also weapons and items that might remind you of a certain green-clad Nintendo icon.

It was about halfway through my tour of Darksiders with Hayden Dalton that the Zelda connection clicked. We'd just entered a room with several giant spiders and a puzzle element to it that was more complex than the usual go-here-kill-this kind I'm used to in action/adventure games. There was a grappling hook involved and something that looked like a spikier version of Link's boomerang.

"The puzzles are akin to Zelda," he explained after successfully dodging a huge spider dropping from the ceiling a la the Great Deku Tree dungeon in Ocarina of Time (only yuckier because Darksiders is big on blood and pus).

Dalton went on to say that Darksiders is about 40% puzzles to 60% combat/level exploration — and even the combat itself is something of a puzzle. In addition to planning for what weapon upgrades to buy (because you can't afford everything in the game on the currency you earn in one playthrough), you've also got kill types to consider and a Wrath gauge to fill. Killing enemies in the old fashioned way nets you souls — which are the game's form of currency. However, there are three different types of soul and only one of them can be used to buy weapon upgrades, while another fulls your Wrath gauge and the third restores your health.

The best way to go for soul-gathering is probably the special kill button. This happens when you beat an enemy within an inch of its life and then the B button icon pops up, prompting you to pull off a fancy special kill. You can ignore this button and just keep thrashing said enemy how you were thrashing it — but going for the special kill nets you more than one kind of soul currency. Also, that button prompt might give you the chance to ride on an enemy's shoulders to trample other enemies for more souls. And once your Wrath gauge goes up all the way, you can activate your Chaos Form overdrive which makes War more super-awesome-kill-guy than he usually is for a short amount of time.

Having cleared the gross spider mini-boss, Dalton continued on our tour of Darksiders. We encountered a sexy angel (voiced by Moon Bloodgood) who was bitter about being left behind on the post-apocalypse planet to clean up after War's mess; a flying griffin creature that we totally stole from said angel's buddy; and the ominous Black Tower that looms in the background of most levels 'til War finally finds a way to reach it.

The Black Tower level Dalton demoed for me looked the most like a Zelda dungeon of anything else I'd seen that day — but it also reminded me of another game. Apparently, it takes something like two hours to complete and you get a nifty portal-making gun that turns the whole thing into a giant puzzle, like, well — Portal. The cool thing about Darksiders' portal gun, though, is that you can shoot portals through portals to solve puzzles and you can change the velocity at which things pop out of the second portal hole once they go through the first. This means you can make crazy super-jumps to get enemies' heads during fights from across the room where said enemies can't even reach you.

All in all, I walked away from Darksiders with a pretty good feeling that I'd seen a tasteful pastiche of action/adventure games with a solid coat of Joe Mad's storytelling — instead of a hollow rip-off of other action/adventure games that hides behind a comic book author's big name. Also, Mark Hamil was there and that makes everything better.

A couple of fast facts for the road:
1) There won't be a demo.
2) The basic game is 15-20 hours, but completionists will take something like 30 hours and still not be able to afford every single weapon upgrade in the game.
3) There are no quick time events.
4) War doesn't level up, but his weapons, abilities and equipment do if you're spending souls on them. So if ever the game seems too hard, grind a bit and buy some upgrades.

Darksiders ships January 5th. If it sells well enough to warrant a sequel, let's all start begging Joe Mad to include random pages of Battle Chasers #10 on the loading screens in Darksiders 2. That would awesome.

I have a relatively modest gaming computer, all things considered. It's got one of the first AMD Phenom processors in it from a few years back, 2GB of RAM, and a ATI Radeon 3850HD card in it. Not too powerful by today's standards, but still a ways out from obsolescence. While installing Dragon Age: Origins yesterday I envisioned a game that was slightly less stuttery than the PlayStation 3 version I had spent several days playing previously. I figured I would start it up, create a character, wander about a bit, and then maybe go to bed. Four hours later I was exhausted, but still reluctant to part from the much sharper, much prettier game I discovered.

Even once I maxed out the graphic settings in the game, the frame rate was still extremely smooth compared to the PlayStation 3 version, and large battles came to life in a whole new way, with a clarity the console version definitely lacked.

So the PC definitely has a leg up on the console version aesthetically. How about functionally?

The PC interface is a world apart from the console version, and if you've playing any massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game, it will be instantly familiar. The pair of three swappable shortcuts in the bottom right corner of the console version is replaced with a standard hot bar, where powers, stances, and skills can be slotted just as they are in countless MMO titles. The select button menu is nowhere to be seen, with the PC version instead featuring a row of buttons at the top of the screen, allowing quick access to inventory, your journal, character stats, and the like.

I wouldn't say the interface differences are better or worse. It all depends on how you are used to playing. As an avid MMO player, I found the PC version easier to navigate, though your results may vary.

As Totilo mentioned previously, the PC version of Dragon Age allows players to scroll backwards into an overhead, Baldur's Gate-like camera, presenting a much more tactical view of the map you are on, as well as adding a bit of extra familiarity for the PC gamer crowd. I haven't used it much, but I do appreciate the option. BioWare has also included the option for mouse-click movement, but I despise clicking to move with a passion that glows hotter than a thousand suns, so it isn't really a plus.

The PC version is also superior in the way it connects to the BioWare Community Website. As detailed by Totilo in his article on the social features of the game, the PC version automatically takes screenshots at key moments in the game, uploading some automatically while letting the player choose from addition shots to share with the community.

Dragon Age: Origins on the PC isn't without its faults though. There is no auto-level option for PC players, so you are going to have to manually update each of your characters as you progress. The inventory has also been streamlined a little, with potions, gifts, and miscellaneous items all lumped under one heading. It's slightly more confusing, but since you should be relatively close to your computer screen as opposed to your couch, it's workable.

Update: We have found the PC auto-level. Thanks guys!

After spending time with both versions of the game, I don't necessarily regret playing through the PS3 version first. I still had a damn good time playing. It's just now that I've seen how the game runs on the PC, I long to see the events of my first character unfolding with the clarity of that one.

Given a choice, definitely go for the PC. It looks better, runs smoother, and it's generally $10 cheaper as well.

No Doubt says in a statement that the band "agreed to place avatars containing their name and likeness performing three No Doubt songs" but that Band Hero allows their use in more than 60 other songs, all without the group's knowledge or approval. (No Doubt's "Don't Speak" and "I'm Just A Girl" appear in the console versions of Band Hero, with "Excuse Me Mr." featured in the Nintendo DS version.)

Furthermore, individual band members can be "isolated into solo performances of these cover songs and placed randomly in countless variations."

According to No Doubt's claim, that goes against the contract it signed with Activision granting its likeness in Band Hero. It also contends that Activision refused to change the band's appearance beyond the agreed songs, saying that catering to No Doubt's request would be "too expensive."

The publisher of Band Hero raised the ire of Kurt Cobain's widow Courtney Love—as well as former Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic—for the singer's inclusion in Guitar Hero 5. In that game, the late Cobain could be used in non-Nirvana songs, performing any instrument, resulting in hastily Twittered fury from Love and requests from her attorneys to limit the musician's appearance in the game.

No Doubt is seeking an injunction and damages in the suit. We've contacted Activision to get its side of the story and will update with comment, should it provide any.

Update: Activision has responded with the following statement: "Some of the world's most popular and iconic artists have been featured in Guitar Hero as playable characters, and we are proud to count No Doubt among them. Activision has a written agreement to use No Doubt in Band Hero – an agreement signed by No Doubt after extensive negotiations with its representatives, who collectively have decades of experience in the entertainment industry. Pursuant to that agreement, Activision worked with No Doubt and the band's management in developing Band Hero. As a result, Activision believes it is within its legal rights with respect to the use and portrayal of the band members in the game and that this lawsuit is without merit. Activision is exploring its own legal options with respect to No Doubt's obligations under the agreement."

The following data was pulled from the Wii's Nintendo Channel, which has collected the playing history from more than two million gamers. Kotaku tracks these numbers monthly — with a new top 10 posted yesterday. I strive to extract at least one interesting slice as a bonus. For a full explanation of where the data comes from check yesterday's post.

EA's Wii Games*
Average total playing time per Nintendo Channel user, since the game's launch
Rock Band 2 - 45 hours, 30 minutes
FIFA Soccer 09 All-Play - 34 hours, 21 minutes
Rock Band - 31 hours, 47 minutes
The Godfather: Blackhand Edition - 28 hours, 52 minutes
Madden NFL 08 - 28 hours, 39 minutes
MySims - 25 hours, 46 minutes
Madden NFL 09 All-Play - 24 hours, 18 minutes
MySims Kingdom - 22 hours, 9 minutes
Need for Speed: Uncover - 22 hours, 1 minute
Tiger Wood PGA Tour 08 - 21 hours, 26 minutes
Need for Speed Carbon - 20 hours, 17 minutes
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 All-Play - 19 hours, 10 minutes
NBA Live 09 All-Play - 18 hours, 28 minutes
The Sims 2: Pets - 18 hours, 15 minutes
Need for Speed: Pro Street - 18 hours, 1 minute
NCAA Football 09 All-Play - 17 hours, 50 minutes
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 - 16 hours, 47 minutes
Skate It - 16 hours, 22 minutes
The Sims 2: Castaway - 14 hours, 41 minutes
Boom Blox - 14 hours, 21 minutes
Boom Blox Bash Party - 13 hours, 45 minutes
Madden NFL 10 - 12 hours, 38 minutes
The Beatles: Rock Band - 12 hours, 1 minute
Boogie Superstar - 11 hours, 21 minutes
EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis - 11 hours, 50 minutes
Littlest Pet Shop - 11 hours, 25 minutes
Monopoly - 11 hours, 1 minute
SimCity Creator - 10 hours, 11 minutes
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - 9 hours, 10 minutes
MySims Racing - 8 hours, 32 minutes
Boogie - 7 hours, 43 minutes
SimAnimals - 7 hours, 17 minutes
EA Sports Active - 7 hours, 15 minutes
MySims Party - 6 hours, 57 minutes
NASCAR Kart Racing - 6 hours, 34 minutes
AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack - 6 hours, 21 minutes
Nerf N-Strike - 6 hours, 2 minutes
Rock Band Track Pack, Volume 2 - 5 hours, 43 minutes

Activision's Wii Games
Average total playing time per Nintendo Channel user, since the game's launch
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock - 57 hours, 51 minutes
Call of Duty: World at War - 49 hours, 28 minutes
Guitar Hero: World Tour - 35 hours, 18 minutes
Guitar Hero: Metallica - 17 hours, 57 minutes
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows - 17 hours, 13 minutes
Quantum of Solace - 16 hours, 20 minutes
Little League World Series 2008 - 13 hours, 21 minutes
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith - 13 hours, 14 minutes
Call of Duty 3 - 12 hours, 28 minutes
Spider-Man 3 - 12 hours, 28 minutes
Guitar Hero: Smash Hits - 12 hours, 15 minutes
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - 11 hours, 29 minutes
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground - 10 hours, 45 minutes
Cabela's Big Game Hunter - 8 hours, 45 minutes
Shrek The Third - 8 hours, 27 minutes
Monsters Vs. Aliens - 8 hours, 22 minutes
Cabela's Legendary Adventures - 8 hours, 15 minutes
Kung Fu Panda - 7 hours, 35 minutes
Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2009 - 7 hours, 26 minutes
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - 7 hours, 17 minutes
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - 6 hours, 19 minutes
NPPL Championship Paintball 2009 - 4 hours, 56 minutes
Cabela's Trophy Bucks - 4 hours 50 minutes
Rapala's Fishing Frenzy - 4 hours, 29 minutes

*Games that are either too new or too unpopular to be played muchdon't appear in the Nintendo Channel data.

Any surprises here?

In League of Legends you take on the role of a summoner, calling forth a champion that you control in Warcraft-esque skirmishes as you work to tear down defensive positions and destroy the enemy nexus. Working with other player-controlled champions, the game is based on cooperation and collaboration, with all of the micro-managing thrown out the window.

As with its mod-inspiration Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends won't cost you a dime to play, but is it good enough to convince you to shell out cash to upgrade and excel?

Loved
Simplified Strategy: Built on the core of Warcraft III, League of Legends strips away the need to micro-manage, or manage at all. Defense towers exist when a match starts, minions spawn automatically and course through a map's paths on pre-determined routes, stopping to attack the first foes they encounter or to try and level enemy defense towers. You have no control over any of that. What you do have control over is your single champion, his or her ability to impact the lines of minions, and the champion's growing power, which can be used in battles to shift the tide of war. Of course you also have to look out for the other champions on the map looking to take you out or clear a path to your nexus home base.

Cornucopia of Champions: In many ways, League of Legends plays like a straight-up action role-playing title. The character you level up over the course of a match is selected from a growing number of champions, each with their own abilities, spells, attack styles and look. As you play through a match your champion earns experience and levels up, unlocking skills and spells that only last until the match ends. The game launches with 40 of these characters with a steady stream promised from the developers. Mastering the game is one challenge, but learning the ins and outs of each champion is the sort of enjoyable task that could takes months to complete.

Mastering Masteries: While the champion you summon and control is drawn from the same ever-expanding pool all of the other players draw from, the summoner (that's you) levels up over time, earning mastery points which can be applied to three different fields: Offense, defense and utility. The way you spend these points impacts whatever champion you decide to use in a match giving them stronger attacks, better defense, improving their magic or even tweaking the spells they can cast. This summoner leveling adds another level of complexity to the already cleverly constructed game.

Items and Spells: Champions all start out as level one at the beginning of a map, but as you gain experience they level up, letting you assign points to their abilities and spells. The fact that you have some choice means that even if two of the same champions meet in battle, there's a good chance they won't play the same. On top of that, you can spend the gold your champion earns in battle to buy magical items that augment attack and defense abilities, spells and give your character new skills.

Stealth: While the maps can get a little old over time, the fact that there are creatures stalking the marsh and woods between paths can make things interesting. Better still, certain areas of the map allow you to hide from other characters, making it possible for you to slip behind them during battle and pull off a stealth attack.

Anime Warcraft: The selection of champions include a wide variety of art styles, from large-eyed, big-headed anime-ish characters, to characters that would fit in as heroes in Warcraft III. The look, as much as the abilities, of these champions are the biggest reason you may want to take the time to master one.

Free Forever: While it's probably worth dropping $30 to pick up the collector's pack, and score special runes, items and a champion, you can actually play this game for absolutely nothing. The better you are at it, the more points you earn to use in the online store to purchase new champions and other power-up items. And the game always gives you access to 10 of the 40 champions. If you're not good, or you're impatient, you can also spend cash to buy items, champions or new skins. It's a serious win-win.

Hated
Need More Maps: With the game already out for more than a week, there's really only one map to play on and earn experience. A snow version of the map is said to exist, but I could never find a match with one. A third, smaller map, is in beta right now. As much as I love the game, and I borderline can't stop playing love it, the lack of maps is a serious issue. Riot Games' biggest push right now should be on rolling out more maps so the current one doesn't go so stale no one will ever want to play it again.

Slow Matchmaking: Matchmaking in League of Legends is a surprisingly long affair. I've waited as long as 15 minutes to find a match, though waits of closer to a few minutes is closer to the norm. While it's hard to directly control, I also found a high percentage of whiney, insular gamers in the matches I played. They complained about tactics, about losing, about experience points. Maybe creating different rooms or leagues could help cut down on the player in-fighting because it's a real turnoff.

As a long-time fan of real-time strategy games, I approached League of Legends with more than a little doubt that it could provide the sort of engagement and intellectual stimulation I'm used to from my RTS gaming sessions. But it only took a couple of matches to prove me wrong.

My biggest concern with League of Legends is not whether it's worth playing, but whether it can survive under the creative micro-transaction pricing system that Riot Games has established to financially support the title.

League of Legends was developed by and published by Riot Games for the PC on Oct. 27. The game is free to play, though you can spend cash on upgrades. The collector's edition sells for $29.99. A copy of the collector's edition and a $10 gift card for in-game item purchases were given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through training mode and dozens of matches with 20 of the 40 champions.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

1) Take five mini-games from what must have been an underwhelming 2002 Game Boy Advance game.
2) Bank on the fact that Americans will be delighted that these mini-games star a Japanese pop culture icon.
3) Charge two bucks a pop.

That's the seeming strategy behind Crash-Course Domo, Rock-N-Roll Domo, Hard-Hat Domo, Pro-Putt Domo and White-Water Domo, five downloadable games starring NHK TV mascot Domo which were all recently released for American Nintendo DS owners.

This is the dark side of DSiWare, from the company you might forget brought you Super Mario 64, WarioWare and Wii Sports but that you might remember used to churn out the Mario Partys and sold NES games on the Game Boy Advance for $20.

Hated
Shallow Gameplay: In the deep end of DSiWare, we've got games such as Art-Style Pictobits and Mario Vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again, which layer complex gameplay atop the simple, offering variations on the essentials of Tetris and Lemmings pioneered years ago. In the Domo end, we've got a side-scrolling bicycling game that lets you change lanes, tap a button to speed boost, go up and down a few hills, with barely a touch of innovation beyond what was done in Excitebike. White-Water Domo is a downstream slalom. Pro-Putt is rudimentary one-button mini-golf. Rock-N-Roll Domo, which at least has an option of touch-control, is the simplest of music games — tap one of three circles in time with music note streaming through them. The only game demanding the player do something they haven't done more interestingly elsewhere is Hard-Hat Domo. That game has the lead character painting floors of a half-constructed building as he tries to erect color-coded ladders that match the floor he's standing on and the one to which he'd like to climb.

Lowest Of Values: Nintendo's frequent release of new cameras and clocks through DSiWare may bother some folks, but the company has provided numerous substantial games for those looking for something to play and enjoy. Even in the 200-points ($2) range, where the company has been releasing chopped-off pieces of larger retail games, there has been gameplay value. Take Bird & Beans, which was ripped from an old WarioWare and consists of nothing more than a single-screen Missile Command riff involving a bird sticking his tongue out to catch air-dropped beans. Its tight design rewards return play and harkens back to an era of single-screen arcade ingenuity. The Domo games, however, lacking in depth or more than a handful of levels of content, feel like clumsy side-attractions. The games make little use of the DS' second screen other than for maps, minimal use of the touch-screen, and sport graphics barely better-animated than what was on the GBA. The DSiWare store doesn't even offer a budget option for people who buy the full-set. What a strange way to sell such strange goods.

Barely a half year old in North America, the DSiWare downloadable service may still be in its experimental phase. If so, these Domo games may be just another test tube shaken up and stared at. What's the better concoction: The $5 and $8 DSiWare games that sparkle with creativity and nostalgia? Or the repurposed portions of a game that betrays no design breakthroughs conceived in the past decade?

The ratio of quality to filler on DSiWare may still be superior to that of iTunes, but the Domo games hurt the credibility Nintendo was gaining as a curator of an online games store that emphasized quality and value.

Crash-Course Domo, Rock-N-Roll Domo, Hard-Hat Domo, Pro-Putt Domoand White-Water Domo were developed by Suzak and published by NIntendo for the Nintendo DSi's DSiWare service on October 19. Each retails for 200 points ($2.00 USD). Played them all. Only planning on playing Hard-Hat Domo again.

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We'll also be chatting about Halloween, Warren Spector and fundraisers. Of course don't forget to listen to our week's taste of music too. Most importantly, we'll be taking calls from you. Now's your chance! Call now! Ask away.

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Because of its unique plug, to do this you'll have to buy a special set of component AV cables for your portable. Sony sent a set to me yesterday to check out, so I plugged it into our 42-inch high definition LCD in the living room to give it a spin.

The first thing I noticed is that the image typically takes up a relatively small portion of my screen, but thanks to the settings on my television I was able to zoom and stretch the picture to pretty much fill the TV without much resolution loss.

Keep in mind, the resolution isn't going to be so great on fast moving games like Gran Turismo and MotorStorm, but for games like PixelJunk Monsters and Patapon it looks great.

The best part is that you can sync a Playstation 3 controller to the PSPgo so after attaching your portable to the TV you can sit back on a couch and play games on it as if it were a console. All of the games we tested had zero lag for controls. The only real issue is that the games are created to be used with the PSPgo's control layout, so some of the buttons don't work on the PS3 controller.

It would be great if developers threw in a way to tweak controls for PS3 controller use or added some sort of auto detection for when you use a PS3 controller.

Check out the video to see what a collection of different games look like on the system. And, despite what I say on the video, they really are Component AV cables.

You can see from the trailer just how much of that "action/adventure" thrust comes from what look like platforming puzzles writ large with Jake Gyllenhaal. Those of you that played the Sands of Time games, though, will be expecting a lot more than just jumping around. You want to see time-rewinding and sand monsters, don't you?

Well, too bad, says Mechner. To get the whole time-rewinding mechanic into the movie, some things had to be changed or cut completely.

"In the movie, the [Dagger of Time]'s powers are much more limited," he said. If they'd left it the same, after all, the Prince would be omnipotent and the plot would get mighty boring.

So instead, there will be "consequences" for using the Dagger and there won't be sand monsters Jake Gyllenhaal fights to recharge it.

Sadly, Mechner wouldn't say what kind of, with whom there would be, or how many "boss fights" we could expect to see in the film. But he did say that producer Jerry Bruckheimer — that master of big, big action/adventure movies — knows what he's doing when it comes to creating an experience that everybody including non-gamers will be into. And because it's set in a sort of sub-genre of "1001 Arabian Nights" action/adventure, Prince of Persia the movie will probably go a long way toward appealing to the Pirates of the Caribbean-starved masses.

If only we could count on it to unseat Twilight. Alas, I'm not seeing much chemistry between Gemma Arterton and Jake Gyllenhaal in the trailer's banter snippets.

What do you make of the trailer?

P.S. No, Mechner didn't say anything about film sequels. However, he did say Ubisoft has something big planned to announce in conjunction with the film's marketing as the release date draws nearer. Dare we hope for a video game sequel?

The meal comes in four configurations, offers four "collector's cups" featuring NFLers rendered, interestingly, in their cartoony Madden-for-the-Wii forms. McWhertor, still nauseous from last year's unboxing of the Guitar Hero meal, assigned this to me on the pretense that as the sports writer, it was my responsibility.

I selected the five hot wings version over the two-piece grilled chicken (white or dark meat), the three chicken strips or the Twister (a wrap with lettuce). I went with the hot wings because I figured five pieces would allow me to burn 66 percent more calories reaching into the box than I would with three crispy strips, and that would be healthier than whatever I got from the Twister's vegetable matter.

The KFC Madden Box also comes in a standard $5 version and a $7 special edition that, while it doesn't include night vision goggles, is packed with enough pupil-dilating sodium you'll see in the dark on your own. I went with the $7 configuration, which is supposed to deliver an extra side item and a dessert.

But as you can see in the above unboxing, this product shipped in such an incomplete state I'm not sure any patch or update can fix it. Opening the box reveals just the five wings and the mashed potatoes and gravy - which I had declared as my extra side item. No crumbly biscuit doused in butter pheromones. No chitinous coleslaw in mayonnaise the color and consistency of watery ejaculate. In fact, since the hockey-puck brownie bites come in plastic and I poured the Diet Pepsi (oh hell yeah, I went with the diet), there are a grand total of two items here actually prepared by KFC employees, even though the loading time for this was an unacceptably slow seven minutes.

KFC #D705027, Springfield, Ore., you fail. Well, maybe you were thinking of my health by subtracting 360 needless calories. Either way, my review of this meal's components follows:

Hated (Secretly Loved):
Hot wings: These babies start slow, not really hitting you with the spice until midway through the third piece. Then it was like Cayenne Frankenstein farted in my face. Even after the meal my mouth had this residue on it that reminded me of the time I drunkenly kissed this chick who had that bee-sting toxin lip gloss to give her the Angelina Jolie pouty look. Both encounters were degrading, but this one diminished my self-esteem. Also, these are not boneless wings; I thought "wings" was an allegorical reference in lieu of "nuggets," a competitor's term, because these things were fried up to the point they no longer resembled the limbs of any known terrestrial animal. So I took a big mouthful of bone on the first attempt, and believe me, that's not a sentence I ever wanted to write. I didn't expect the amount of meat in this item to be nourishing; I did expect it to at least be filling. Rating: Anorexy.

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy: The pudding-like body of potato flour and pureed notebook was at least free of lumps or standing water. It was thoroughly mixed with the viscous tailings of cooked chicken, whose bouquet hit artful notes of obesity, unemployment, and parole. If the chicken didn't fill me, this sure did, as not soon after polishing off the MP&G it felt like my large intestine was mixing up Redi-Crete, certain to turn my commode into a birdbath. Rating: Lunchlady.

Brownie Bites: These pucklike treats came packaged in a cellophane sleeve upside down on a piece of waxed cardboard, evocative of the conveyor belt that shat them out. In March. But ultimately, they were chocolatey and thus the highlight, comparatively speaking, of this dining experience. Rating: Hockey.

Despite the grandiose packaging and $7 pricetag, even if this order had been completely filled it would still be engineered for a 15 minute experience, tops. I expected that this calorie bomb would have left me doing the old Dad thing of unbuttoning my pants and laying on the couch to watch Jeopardy and blame my farts on the dog. But all it took was one tuberculose belch-cough and I was back to full strength.

If there was $1.95 worth of actual food in this meal I'd be astonished. That, coupled with the EA Sports sponsorship, must make this cross promotion an insanely profitable no-brainer for Yum! Brands, and all but guarantees a sequel in the coming year.

KFC Madden NFL Box was developed in a conference room by marketing geniuses and produced by KFC, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. Retails for $5, $7 if you want the extra side-item and brownie bites, assuming they remember to pack all the base items. Eaten until regretted.

(Click the chart to enlarge)

The Nintendo Channel is properly calculating and reporting player data again and so I can provide this month's look at Wii gaming usage without last month's asterisks. The stats on the chart are up to date as of the first of November.

Smash continues to reign, but look at that graph. Animal Crossing seems bound to catch it.

Guitar Hero III has been flat for a while, which either means no one new has bought it and those who have it have stopped playing it (doubtful) or that new users' lack of time with the game is balancing out veteran users' continued use. Whatever the case may be, the game dipped slightly this month for the first time in a while. GHIII is a 2008 game. It's successor Guitar Hero World Tour is at 35:18 and rising. The 2009 edition, Guitar Hero 5, just charted for the first time this month. But it's still low. Down at 13 hours flat.

Two games rose in the top 10 this month. Call of Duty, fueled likely by its online play, passed the single-player Fire Emblem. Harvest Moon passed Zelda.

No new games have entered the top 10. Tales of Symphonia is well outside at the number 11 spot with 38 hours, 43 minutes. Wii Sports follows at 37:33. Down a bit lower in the mid-teens are some games that are rising and may someday crack the top 10: Mario Kart Wii (35:06), FIFA 09 (34:21) and WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2009 (32:15).

Tomorrow, as usual, I'll have a closer look at a slice of some of the October numbers.

Where's all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only): In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good, though it is obviously biased toward users who hook up a Wii to the Internet. We calculate that sample size by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that more than 82 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users as of November 1 (up 4 million in the last month), for an average of 29.9 sessions per player. That divides to more than 2.7 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners in North America would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 2.7 million people are contributing stats. That is up from the 2.6 million people when these numbers were run for October 1.

Last year our annual fundraiser drew in a crowd of about 300 people before hitting capacity, this year we have room for more than 500.

The event is open to anyone 16 or older and kicks off at 6 p.m., running until midnight. If you are 21 or older, don't forget your ID so you can get a wristband to purchase drinks.

We're asking for a minimum donation of $10 to get in and get a door prize ticket. We will be giving away a huge amount of swag including more than 70 T-Shirts, a custom straight jacket, a Guitar Hero drum seat, a popcorn machine and Divinity Dragon knives.

There will also be a silent auction for a number of items including a copy of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Fortune Hunter's Edition, which comes with a CD of the game's soundtrack and a copy of the Brady Games guide; a 3L etched bottle of 8BitVintners wine, rare Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 mixtape vinyls, a collector's edition Chun-Li statue, a Capcom hoodie signed by Niitsuma and limited edition Brutal Legend Statue.

Once again Gabe of Death of the Arcade will be running the free Rock Band and DJ Hero gameplay up on Cervantes' mammoth stage. Since we have two set-ups, we'll be able to cycle through people much faster.

On the second floor, Greg of Colorado Cutthroat will be running a free console arcade which will include a chance to play Tekken 6, Street Fighter IV, BlazBlu, Smash Bros. Brawl, Soul Calibur 4, Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2 on a number of set-ups.

It sounds like this year is going to be quite a blast, so mark your calendars now! Did I mention that Cervantes has a gi-normous disco ball? Because it totally does!!

In a nutshell: The event will be at Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom in downtown Denver on Nov. 19. Doors open at 6 p.m. and close at midnight. Sixteen and older to get in and a minimum $10 donation. Be there and have fun... for a good cause.

If you can't make it you can always donate directly to Child's Play.

The retailer will also be selling a Sony BluRay player for $148, according to our source, who included an image from the retailer's computer system showing the deals.

Sounds like a great deal or two, though as with all rumors, make sure to take this with a grain of salt until we can get verification or the official news hits on Wednesday.

The country of Ferelden is on the verge of being overwhelmed by the demonic Blight, and only the heroic Grey Wardens can save the land from total destruction. It sounds simple, but the struggle between good and evil is merely the backdrop to a much more twisted tale of intrigue, political maneuvering, and betrayal. Once you play through one of six unique origin stories based on your character's race and caste you're plunged into the thick of it, gathering a party of heroic and not-so-heroic adventurers as you struggle to ensure that Ferelden is ready to take on the Blight once they rise.

BioWare has proven time and time again that it can produce high-caliber fantasy roleplaying games based on existing properties, but can they pull off an original fantasy setting? The Dragon Age is dawning.

Loved
In A World...: As comfortable creating their own worlds as they are dabbling into established fictions, BioWare brings the country of Ferelden to life in Dragon Age: Origins. Rather than a simple game setting, Ferelden feels like a real place with a rich history lurking just outside the corner of the player's vision. The look and feel of the world is almost as impressive as the fiction, with several areas - particularly those in the underground realm of The Deep Road - looking as if they were traditional fantasy artwork come to life.

Tangled Webs: The origins in Dragon Age: Origins are more than just little stories created to move your character into the main story arc. Each gives insight into the major political and societal issues that plague the country of Ferelden, all of which crop up on a larger, more important scale later on in the game. The struggle between good and evil merely serves as a backdrop for a much more complicated tale of political intrigue, racial tension, and moral versus popular choices.

You Gotta Have Friends: Expanding on the excellent character work established in titles like Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate, BioWare once again provides an amazing cast of characters to fight by your side as you travel the twisted paths of Dragon Age: Origins. Each of your NPC companions has a distinct personality, and while they may seem rather cookie-cutter at first glance, exploring their origins and motivations reveals a truly complex collection of individuals. You'll Travel with them on their own personal quests as you progress through the game, establishing bonds and perhaps even falling in love with one of them. You'll grow attached, and should any of them part ways with you, you'll feel it acutely.

It isn't just your party members, either. Each NPC is handled with great care and attention to detail - even the ones who only have one line of text, spoken over and over again. Enchantment?

So Many Choices: I've played every major BioWare RPG released so far, and while they all deal with making tough decisions, none have seemed to have nearly as profound an impact as those in Dragon Age: Origins do. I regularly found myself making the sort of decisions that had me realizing that I had just completely altered a major portion of the game. Kingdoms rose and fell and important people lived or died based solely on my whims. This is definitely the kind of game you'll want to play through multiple times, just to see how your actions affect the world.

Just Talkin' Bout Dragon Age: An extremely well-written, deviously witty script is only as good as the actors who voice it, and BioWare has pulled together a winning team for Dragon Age. Claudia Black does a fine job of voicing the sardonic witch Morrigan, and Steve Blue does one of the best dwarves I've ever heard in his portrayal of Oghren. All in all, everyone does a spectacular job, but by far my favorite is Steve Valentine as Alistair. Alistair has some of the most amusing lines in the game, most of which would have fallen completely flat if not for Valentine's expert timing. Just remember, "There's nothing like a brush with death to make you...not like death very much."

Swords and Sorcery: Combat in Dragon Age can be as shallow or as deep as the player desires. You can spend the entire game simply controlling your own character and letting your party members go about their business, triggering special moves using the double 3-slot quick bar on the bottom right of the screen, and you'll do just fine. For more depth, you can customize your party's AI behavior by assigning situational tactics for individual characters based on a wide variety of conditions and roles. As satisfying as it is to simply plow right through the enemy, constructing elaborate plans and placing your party in just the right positions to completely decimate your opponents is even more satisfying still.

Hot Micromanagement: I really enjoy micromanaging my role-playing characters, from fine-tuning their equipment to placing each skill point to maximize combat efficiency. Throughout the game you unlock specializations which allow you to tweak your characters even further, focusing on particular aspects of the warrior, mage, and rogue classes. Enchanting weapons, applying poisons, constructing traps; these are the elements of a good RPG that get me all aflutter, and Dragon Age: Origins allows me to indulge myself while still allowing the player who'd rather just wing it to go their own way.

Outside Of The Game: BioWare goes above and beyond with the Dragon Age: Origins community site, where players can communicate, share stories, or browse each other's character profiles to see how far along they've gotten in the game. Once you have an account at the BioWare Social Network website, you can see everything I've done in Dragon Age. Skills, plot points, talent, equipment; it's all there for the world to see. It makes the game feel like more than a game, if that makes any sense, adding a new layer to the experience that keeps it alive long after you've finished playing.

Hated
Bugs Aplenty: My time with the PlayStation 3 version of Dragon Age was not without troubles. In fact, my 40 or so hours in the game were plagued with annoying little glitches that, while not breaking the game completely, did hamper the experience. Some special combat animations were way off, with my character performing finishing blows in the air next to the boss I had just downed. Sound glitched frequently, leaving me watching a character's lips move while no words came. On a few occasions the screen would glitch when a character was speaking, showing broken geometry instead of the person talking. I also had issues with monsters dying and taking up to 30 seconds to register as dead, making me have to wait to loot bodies and in some cases delaying the completion of certain quests.

Perhaps the biggest bug I encountered was during the final battle, when I simply could not progress. BioWare suggested it was due to a monster I needed to kill falling through the world. I wound up having to load a previous save in order to complete the game. Luckily the game had autosaved just before the battle started, but it was definitely more frustration than I needed.

Chugga Chugga Frame Rate: Dragon Age is a pretty game, but when it really starts moving, things get ugly. With only a couple of characters on the screen things aren't too bad, leaning towards the high 20's frame rate-wise, but when you're in a big battle or a crowd scene, things dip into the middle to high teens. Mind you I am guestimating here...it's not like I have some magical PS3 FPS tool, but the dip is definitely noticeable.

BioWare's Ray Muzyka once said that "Dragon Age is the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate." I'd take that a step further and say that Dragon Age is the evolution of Baldur's Gate, taking the concepts and mechanics established in that classic PC RPG and updating them using today's more powerful technology. While that alone is a recipe for success, the lack of an established license has allowed the developers to craft a unique fantasy setting from the ground up, populating it with fascinating characters and instilling upon it a depth that goes far beyond the simple tale of good versus evil the game initially presents. Much like CD Projekt's The Witcher, Dragon Age overlays modern day politics and social issues onto its fantasy world, creating a richer, more mature atmosphere in the process.

Perhaps the biggest testament to Dragon Age: Origins is the fact that after more than 40 hours of play time, I found myself contemplating my next character as the credits rolled, working out in my head what I would do differently the next time around. During the busy fall video game release season, when my response to completing even the most enjoyable games is "next," it takes an extremely compelling title for me to want to go again. Dragon Age: Origins is exactly that sort of title.

Dragon Age: Origins was developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on November 3. Retails for $59.99 USD ($49.99 PC). A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Reviewed the PlayStation 3 version. Played through the main game on standard difficulty, choosing the City Elf origin and rogue as my character class. Completed main quest, multiple side quests, and The Stone Prisoner downloadable content, which should definitely not be missed.

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Kotaku reader Wayne T. received a form letter, two 1960s/70s era comic covers ("Saxton Hale's Jungle Brawl" and "Saxton Hale's Barbershop Action") and the most badass piece of mail the United States Postal Service ever sorted.

"I guess I'll forgive them for not having my spy crab kit in stock," Wayne told us. "P.S. - The woman probably wasn't impressed because I didn't send enough money. I'll fix that next time ..."

Not much, it turns out. The fairy story-themed action title is only adult in that it wants players to be as violent as possible. Players take the role of Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, the Naked Emperor (from "The Emperor's New Clothes") or Jack (from "Jack and the Beanstalk") and battle their way through a world peopled with characters from other fairytales like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and "Sleeping Beauty." Nearly everybody in the world except gingerbread men bleeds copious amounts of blood when you slap, beat, slice or hex them and for some reason, nearly everything in the world looks so cute it's almost psychotic.

But there's no sex or sexuality in the game whatsoever. So either the marketing team behind this whimsical gore-fest is made up of inspired geniuses with close connections to the adult film industry – or there's something wrong with this game that they need to hide behind the glamor of porn.

Loved
The Concept: Pairing cutesy stuff with violence is a proven concept. Just look at Happy Tree Friends, Fat Princess or Castle Crashers. Fairytale Fights follows along in lockstep with these examples as far as the setting and back story. Four major characters from four very familiar fairytales have their fame and notoriety stolen from them by a fifth fairytale character and they have to brawl their way through all of storybook land up to the Giants' house to find both the culprit and their missing storybooks. The combat keeps it simple, the setting is loaded with colorful props and characters that evoke a sense of nostalgia, which in turn creates a perverse sense of satisfaction when you bash a gnome or a bunny open to reveal buckets of blood.

The Graphics: The world of storybook land spans forests, cottages, castles, palaces made of candy and beanstalks. Everything is rendered lovingly with big, rounded and blocky art design via the Unreal engine. It's colorful and vibrant with a real sense of depth to the background.

The Music: Despite the raging violence that carries on throughout most of the gameplay, the music is consistently soothing and sweet. Like the cutesy setting, it does a lot to create the sense of juxtaposition and it totally mellows you out when the game aggravates you.

Hated
It's Broken: Fairytale Fights has its share of tiny flaws like graphics hiccups or poor collision detection when enemies go into ragdoll animations after death. However, it's also peppered with some pretty big bugs – like freezing during loading screens, corrupted audio playback and total failure of gameplay mechanics. For example, there's something called a Glory Kill in the game that you can activate by mashing a shoulder button after filling up a kill gauge – it makes enemies freeze in place and gives the player the ability to go nuts with the attack stick in a cool slow-mo animation. An unfortunate bug robs you of your Glory Kill by freezing not only the enemies in place, but you as well while the gauge runs out.

Fake 2D Platforming: Fairytale Fights is one of those games where everything is 3D, but the game adjusts the camera to make the world look 2D and then asks you to complete jumping puzzles in different planes of depth. I cannot stand this – it leads to a lot of pointless deaths from falling off of things while jumping in the wrong plane of depth, and it can get confusing in environments where you don't know where to go to access the next part of the 3D level.

Needs A Treasure Magnet The world is filled with treasure chests that contain either weapons or money. Unfortunately, some of them are placed poorly so that stuff falls off of cliffs as soon as you open said chests. But the real rub comes from the fact that money vanishes within seconds (while weapons stay on screen eternally) and there's no safe way to collect it when it happens to be near a ledge or a pool of acid. Granted, there's no economy in the game that requires you to have money – but it's so annoying to see a puddle of gems and know that it's not worth going after them because they're just going to vanish right when you get there and you might fall off a platform en route.

Camera+Controls = DEATH: Fairytale Fights is cursed with both a lousy camera that pulls way too far back most of the time and with controls that make it difficult to move your character away from dangerous ledges and out-of-shot positions beneath platforms. I think the Unreal engine is partially to blame – its physics make your character top heavy because their heads are too big for their bodies (so it's hard to slow down during jumping puzzles or make hard turns while running). But the fact that the camera can just lose you behind the 3D environment or pull so far back that you can't tell your character apart from the enemies makes it ten times worse.

Fairytale Fights is one of those sad games that suffer from good ideas and lousy execution. I wouldn't be half so upset if the concept was lame or the graphics were terrible. But the truth is that there are some really good things about this game that would be welcome in a normal, not-broken title. Heck, they might even be welcome in a broken title if it didn't cost a player $60. But these good parts don't make up for Fairytale Fights' numerous flaws. They're just made all the more tragic for being surrounded by them.

And Ron Jeremy. That's the most tragic part of all.

P.S. No, that "Kill 1000 Children" Achievement didn't make it into the game, but you can still off the kids you encounter in the candy palace.

Fairytale Fights was developed and published by Playlogic for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It came out on October 27 for $60. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed the main Quest using both two-player cooperative mode and singleplayer on Xbox 360. Played several rounds of Arena.

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Today Microsoft told Kotaku that they've refunded the money Greg's dog spent on Xbox Live and have granted the dog his own Gamertag.

Here's the statement sent to Kotaku:

"I saw you wrote a story on the guy whose dog bought Xbox LIVE points. People spend tens of billions of dollars on their pets every year, but it's pretty unusual for your pet to return the favor (except in love and tail wagging of course ). One lucky pet owner in Richmond, Virginia, though has a pet who really cares. Greg Strope's dog purchased 5,000 Xbox LIVE points while the guy slept. Luckily for Greg, Microsoft is refunding his LIVE points and providing extra for good measure. Plus he will get an extra controller and a LIVE subscription for his dog, Oscar. We also created a gamertag for Oscar so that he doesn't feel left out anymore!"

For those of you who missed it, Greg told Kotaku that he awoke a couple of weeks back to discover that his dog, Oscar, had managed to spend $60 on Xbox Live while chewing up his Xbox 360 controller. At the time Greg said he was annoyed but hadn't bothered asking for a refund.

The story went on to make national news.

Oh, if you want to be Oscar the dog's only friend on Live his Gamertag is Oscar The K9. Go figure.

It was my reputation among team Kotaku that got me assigned to reviewing what has proven to be the best wrestling game I've played in a decade — Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010, which is also the only wrestling game I've played in a decade. I guess everyone thought I'd be perfect for it. Maybe they know that the only website that I pay to read daily is a pro-wrestling site, a site that allows me to read about the often-mediocre happenings on modern wrestling shows without having to watch them. Perhaps they know I imported Bret Hart's autobiography from Canada and Ohio Valley Wrestling DVDs (when Paul Heyman was booking OVW shows) from Ohio Kentucky. Or perhaps it's that Hulk Hogan thing I did.

Regardless, you'd think that someone who has loved video games and, I guess, loved pro wrestling, for much of his life, would love the melding of the two. But I started this new game, the latest in the annual releases of THQ-published, Yukes-developed modern wrestling games, with almost complete alienation from the genre. (I have some professional embarrassment about this, since I've been to Yukes' studio in Yokohama and met the wrestling-obsessed people there. I even got a great tour that included a look at the back rooms that reek of body odor every summer as the team sleeps in the office while cramming to finish their game by fall). This new game brings to the series a revised Royal Rumble, an enhanced Create a Finisher option, a new training arena, revised rosters, new storylines and — the big feature — the ability for fans to create and share their own storylines. But it was all new to me. And, wouldn't you know it, the game is fun and… intellectually stimulating? Yes.

Loved
The Basic Flow: WWE pro wrestling games, as fans would know, are 3D fighting games played from a quasi-overhead perspective and battled on the surfaces of wrestling ring and floor, with the walls of a steel cage or the top of a destructible announcers' table sometimes also in play. You win not by eliminating an opponents' health bar but by executing enough minor and major strikes, throws, dives, taunts and more, all of which either damage to the opponents' body or build the momentum of your own wrestlers' adrenaline, which enables a successful pinning (or submission or count-out) victory. In other words, the game treats wrestling as if it's a hybrid of combat and performance, with the player driven by more competitive intent to maim than in the real thing. It's a good system that demands the player learn how to smoothly chain their moves to build momentum. And it is a a rewarding one, as Yukes has managed to capture and animate hundreds of moves that transition from one to the next with, of all the rare qualities in games, grace. Winning a match in this game is a performing pleasure.

The WWE Recreated: Even a lapsed fan of WWE such as myself stumbles across Smackdown on Friday nights or remembers older episodes of Raw well enough to see that Edge's shoulder-twitch during his ring entrance is true to life, that Shawn Michaels' super-kick should look as perfect as it does and that selecting Shelton Benjamin will grant the player access to a cool set of moves. The game's venues, from the pay-per-view-specific entrance ramps to the backstage announce areas, look perfect. The tone of violence and sex — an endless parade of T&A and at least one storyline involving a female wrestler sleeping her way to the top — matches squarely with even today's toned-down WWE. The announcing sounds right, issued by (mostly) the right people. This game is very WWE.

The Thesis-Worthy Story-Editor: Of all the new features this year, conveniently marked "NEW" in the game's menu for people like me, the best and most interesting is the storyline editor. In the past, wrestling game fans could create their own wrestlers, customize move-sets and even, more recently, chain pieces of animation to create new match-ending finishing moves. In the new game, players can craft a storyline, mixing matches that include player-defined outcomes with story-advancing sequences. The latter scenes are comprised of WWE-related locales (rings, locker rooms, offices) with wrestlers, a variety of conversational and confrontational emotions, adjustable camera angles, selectable music and crowd-noise background sounds and, most importantly, player-written dialogue. The system's interface has some rough edges that players can work around but is nonetheless fascinating.

This is what you'd write your thesis about: Pro wrestling is already an odd blend of fake sport and acted drama, something fans appreciate as real and unreal at the same time (We know that John Cena is a man really named John Cena, but we also know that the Undertaker is not really a man who has risen from the dead. We buy into the idea that the Stone Cold Stunner hurts, because it looks like it does; we laugh with The Rock that the People's Elbow does not hurt, because we know that he knows that we know that his big elbow move is a love tap at worst). In a wrestling game, that reality/unreality gets twisted some more, as the action in the ring is made to seem both more real than it is in real life (The depicted action in a WWE game involves hurting an opponent thoroughly enough to win, not simply entertaining the crowd through fake-fighting) and less real (The moves in the game, animated without fear of causing bodily harm, are made to look more impactful, thereby exposing how deadly and illegal they ought to really be). The new game's story editor knots these strands of truth and untruth even more. Maybe gamers have been able to re-arrange games through mods for years. Maybe they've been able to puppeteer fake lives through The Sims for over a decade. But now we can mangle and morph the pseudo-reality of real celebrities through the WWE. We could craft a storyline in which CM Punk demands to know John Cena's favorite color and then wrestles the answer out of him (I did this. Search for it on Xbox Live using the keyword phrase "Favorite Color"). We could make a storyline in which WWE Diva "A" falls in love with WWE Wrestler "Z" but is seduced away by the Create-A-Wrestler character who you designed to look just like a muscular Bill O'Reilly. (I did not do this.) You're playing with sort-of real lives. You're creating officially-sanctioned slash-fiction. You're kind of writing the next Indiana Jones adventure at the same time that you're kind of writing the next thing for Harrison Ford to do. The layers of reality and unreality are dense.

The Unintended Consequences: Maybe a simpler way to praise the interesting aspects of the Create A Storyline editor is to mention that I downloaded a storyline called something like "One Night After Raw," and after meeting a condition to have Shawn Michaels win a match, and after sitting through a series of backstage vignette's written with not the best user-generated spelling, my Shawn Michaels was then ambushed in the ring by three definitely-not-licensed wrestlers from rival company TNA. For years wrestling fans have wanted to book Raw themselves. Now they can do it virtually, for me to play through. Too bad the game's canned announcers were still plugging the WWE website instead of reacting to what this one user created.

The Royal Rumble: The game has a revised button-mashing mini-game for eliminating people in its Royal Rumble. The 30-man elimination match is often the most fun pro wrestling match of the year, so any improvements that more authentically let me, as Vince McMahon, team up with The Great Khali to flip some-user's Street Fighter Sagat over the top rope is ok by me.

The Sense Of Pain: WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 is one of those eye-catching games that other people in the room, who may be tired of the Bret Hart and Mankind books on the bookshelf, can't help but be drawn into. Why? I believe it's because the animations are so good that they look like they connect and that the moves hurt, which, given the combat that is supposed to be depicted here, is a victory.

Hated
Poor Counter-Attack Training: The game's menu-screen training arena allows players to swiftly try and learn many of the basic single or double-input commands needed to execute the extraordinary variety of maneuvers available in the game. Consider, for example, that you may want to make your wrester who is standing next to the ropes in the ring either jump over the ropes, crawl under them, wind up on the apron of the ring or on the floor or not do any of that and climb the turnbuckle… or take the padding off the turnbuckle. And there's a button combo for each of those. Offense is easily learned and joyfully executed. But the trick to mastering the game seems to be the execution of a single-input counter-move. The same button counters anything. Animated prompts appear during training and in the game's matches to alert the player that a window to counter has opened. But those windows close so quickly that that game does a poor job teaching the player how to execute this key move well.

The Online Limitations:The WWE game's online competitive wrestling worked fine and minus the lag I saw some complaining about on message boards. But I found the skill-level-matching inadequate. I can breeze through normal difficulty but can't find a player online who I can beat? I also can't easily re-find my uploaded wrestling storyline to find out how people have rated it, nor can I select which ones to download with any filters other than most recent and most-highly-rated. Overall, the options for the game's online modes are just not specific enough for the needs a player might have. The content and gameplay available through online, though, is solid.

Immediately Outdated: I played a developer-scripted storyline that involved a rivalry between Edge and Mr. Kennedy. But Mr. Kennedy doesn't work for WWE anymore. Many of our matches were announced by Jim Ross and Tazz. But Tazz doesn't work for WWE anymore, either. Both men left the company in 2009, and I understand the challenges of adapting to such changes. But this is one of those things that, as a potential consumer, I just want to have work right. This is an online-connected game. So let's see it adapt to the present.

Buried Info:What are my character's finishing moves and what position does his opponent have to be in so I can execute them? How am I doing in career mode in terms of raising my wrestlers' ability to connect with the crowd and raise his charisma stat? There are many pieces of information that are relevant to the gameplay of Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 that seem to have been omitted from menu screens and the instruction manual, possibly being reserved for the official game guide. That leaves the player to stumble across or guess many important details. This is not a bad thing for those who don't like a lot of tutorials and explanations, but gamer beware that you'll have to figure a lot of this game out for yourself.

I used to avoid pro wrestling games because of my disinterest in fighting games and my belief that the games treated pro wrestling as something different than what I enjoyed. I liked the acrobatics and the melodrama of real WWE. The games, I guessed, treated the whole affair as if it was straight-up sport. WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 still does treat pro wrestling a little more as sport than I'd want. Things like winning streaks are almost required in the game, even though they are rare in the real wrestling leagues.

But the addition of configurable storylines provides that element of unpredictable, scripted entertainment that has made WWE programming, in some years, among the best and most enjoyably wild material on TV. Finally, I'm interested. The fact that the configurable narratives — the post-Sims, post-mods playing we can do with sort-of real lives — is a spectacular and mind-bending bonus.

(WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 was developed by Yukes and published by THQ for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and Wii on October 20. Retails for $59.99 USD on the home consoles. An copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the 360 version. Won the Royal Rumble as Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Made it on the Road To Wrestlemania as Edge. Progressed Shelton Benjamin up a career ladder to ECW and Intercontinental title glory. Created, uploaded and downloaded storylines. Invented a new top-rope finishing move. Got pinned a lot online, including by a female version of MVP.)

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I don't use that word lightly. Maybe that's why I have all this money and no one to use to make it happy. I'm not going to lie: I had to close my eyes in order for the words to come out. It was that creepy. Eyes closed, lips pressed close to the microphone so as to minimize the already-minimal chance that the girl sleeping in the other bedroom sixty feet away wouldn't hear me and think I was talking to her, I said "I love you" to my Nintendo DS. (In Japanese: "a-i-shi-te-ru".) My god; I shuddered. That was the first god damn time I ever said those words to anyone, real or not. The sickening implications of this — the causes, the effects, the explanations — made me suddenly dizzy.

The girl in the DS then said, "Now say it 999,999 more times". The microphone icon displayed again. Was this a bad dream? Well, certainly, in the game I was playing — Konami Digital Entertainment's Love Plus — it was being presented as a bizarre nightmare of the main character's. I had been living out the simulated life of a high school student for 81 days — ten hours or so in the real world — and the game was just starting to recognize that I had preferred this one girl from the start. The thing is, she was finally starting to like me. The main character realized this, in much grimmer terms, minutes after I saw the figures and crunched the numbers from the comfort of my giant oak bed, here on a beautiful, crisp October morning. Hence the nightmare. The master bedroom in my current palace-like apartment doesn't have a lock. If it did, I would have done like the time the "Eyes on Me" scene came up in Final Fantasy VIII. Back then, I was a college student living in a dormitory, and there was a football game on TV. I could have been decapitated.

I told the game "I love you" one more time, finally feeling like I was doing the second worst and terriblest thing I have ever done in my life. The worst was way too terrible. I have occasion to remember it, maybe, once a week. It took maybe three years after doing the worst thing I ever did in my life to even realize how terrible it was to say such a thing to someone, so unthinkingly. With Love Plus, the guilt came immediately. We can get into that part later, if you'd like.

Thankfully, it let me off the hook at the second "I love you".

2009! More than a decade after I experienced the "Eyes On Me" scene in Final Fantasy VIII and eight years after I did the worst thing I ever did to another person, I live soft and work hard in Tokyo, Japan (not to be confused with Tokyo, Nebraska), and I have developed something of a reputation for being a guy who writes things every once in a while. After eight years of doing pretty much exactly the same thing in pretty much exactly the same way, people have started offering me money for it. Hell if I know why! I will say, however, that life feels something like a vintage arcade game. You know, like how in Altered Beast, all you have to do is keep putting money in the machine and you're basically guaranteed to see the ending sooner or later. In the past, the proposed writing assignments were utterly inane. To paraphrase one (which Gmail search makes it so easy to just quote): "We hear there's this popular comedian on TV who sometimes dresses up in a schoolgirl outfit and acts like a girl. Can you interview him? It'd make a great 'WHOA JAPAN IS WACKY' story." When did I become the "whoa, Japan is wacky" guy? I've even been asked to write about "Ninja and samurai in modern Japanese pop culture". When Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball was released, I got asked to interview Tomonobu Itagaki in a no-nonsense just-the-facts fashion, refraining from putting "any cynical spin" on the proceedings. A couple years ago, this game called Gakuen Heaven: Boy's Love Scramble! was released, and someone asked me to write a "lifestyle piece" about that. Gakuen Heaven is a game where you play the part of a young boy who receives a golden ticket in the mail in the form of an acceptance letter from the most esteemed all-boys boarding school in Japan. Of course you accept the invitation. Unlike, say, Harry Potter, where all the boys would be wizards, in Gakuen Heaven, all the boys happen to be really, really gay. So yeah, I played that game, interviewed the director, the whole shebang. Eventually, the magazine didn't use my article because the director — a woman — used the word "gay" too much, too suggestively, and flat-out admitted that the game is intended mainly for girls who think gay guys and the things they do in the name of being gay are "funny". They figured it would probably offend some people. They figured it wouldn't really offend anybody, however, if, you know, the game was by gay people and intended for gay people. I think they were thinking too deeply about a couple of things. Of course, there are plenty of gay dating simulations in Japan — they didn't want me to write about them, though, because they weren't being released on the PlayStation 2. Anyway, after that — what was there? Oh, there was that Doki Doki Majo Shinpan game, where you're supposed to use the stylus to touch little girls on all kinds of parts of their bodies, to find their most ticklish spots, forcing them to reveal that they are, in fact, witches. Someone asked me to write about that, and at that time I was so inundated in riches that I didn't bother. Then there was this game called Duel Love, where you play the part of a girl who develops deepening relationships with Hot Guys during the precious seconds it takes you to (using the stylus) towel them off between rounds of bare-fisted combat. Both Duel Love and Majo Shinpan are rooted in fetishes so specific that you'd never expect to see them so cutely presented, grinning up at you from a game shop shelf. Neither of them set the world on fire. Well, here I am, in the future, told to write about whatever I want to write about, and I've chosen to write about "wacky Japanese dating games".

I have started and stopped and deleted this question maybe ten times, now. Let's revert to the first phrasing: What the fuck is wrong with Japan?

I won't dare say that they're morally bankrupt or sick or perverted or whatever. In fact, I find it refreshing that they're so open about things like pornography. I am thirty for-god's-sake years old, over here. I carry a Louis Vuitton wallet and wear Dolce and Gabbana jeans. My glasses contain studs made of actual solid gold. I pay $200 for my haircuts. If I want to pick up a men's lifestyle magazine from a convenience store newsstand and flip it open to the Boobies Page, I'll go right the hell ahead, and I will do so completely unconcerned about the stares of the people standing to my right or left, whether they be angry old males or attractive young females. Being comfortable about one's sexuality is part of being an adult. Being comfortable about one's fetishes (I'm genuinely attracted to girls who look like guys who look like girls, for example) is part of being a successful adult.

The thing is, the majority of "dating simulation" games are positioned as the same kind of escapism as, say, Gears of War. Gears of War is a game that satisfies the typical fourteen-year-old's impossible fantasy of being the size of a yeti and shooting mini-mountain-like alien freakbastards with a machine gun that has a chainsaw attached to the end of it. Gakuen Heaven is a game about being a straight boy forced to choose which of a myriad of very gay (and very tall) young men from whom he least minds a super-platonic molestation. The Gakuen Heaven Boy's Love Scramble series is escapism, into the world of straight boys being harrassed by gay boys, for straight girls who can't even muster up the wherewithall to be harassed by straight boys. Majo Shinpan is a game for men who would maybe very much not mind touching a four-year-old girl's bikini area and are merely afraid (or simply wary) of the legal consequences.

The trend in modern video game development has seemed to be that every genre decides, every once in a while, that they have to widen the entrance and invite a few new fans in. Konami (arguably) created the dating sim genre with 1994's Tokimeki Memorial (written and programmed by none other than later Castlevania director Koji Igarashi). Tokimeki Memorial was a breakthrough for many reasons. It combined the absorbing atmosphere of a graphic adventure game without the pesky spector of death, murder, or whatever Immediacy McGuffin the writer had chosen to slop in there. Adventure games of the "Japanese, Graphical" variety had always tended to be mysteries of some sort or another. There's a dead body at the beginning of the game, there's a gun on the mantle in act two; by act five, the killer is unmasked, and the gun has been fired. The only "mystery" of a game like Tokimeki Memorial is "Which of these girls do I, personally, like most, and how do I get her to like me?" At their cores, early dating sims required you to solve the mystery either by growing some common sense or exercising your existing common sense by jumping through hoops of varying heights and sizes. In short, thanks to the "solution" being rendered a "goal", the games played more like . . . games than "interactive fiction". Your own choices drove the action forward.

Remember "Seinfeld"? In season four of "Seinfeld", the main characters — Jerry and George, based on the real-life series creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David — begin writing a television series that is nearly as different from their fictional lives as their fictional lives are as different from the lives of the real-life creators. Have you seen "The Sopranos"? (If not, see it. It's the greatest work of Western art of the 21st century, so far.) Near the end of "The Sopranos", a character dies in a car accident while listening to the song "Comfortably Numb", which figured into a poignant scene of the film "The Departed", which had just won best picture. The car accident occurs near-immediately after the character says, "Man, this 'Departed' soundtrack is fucking killer".

The thing is, anything explosively successful enough to change or impact the real world on any meaningful level simply can't continue to present a version of the real world without some representation of their pop culture event. It's dishonest. I had half-expected some television drama series representative of "The Sopranos" — a television show starring characters as informed of mafia stereotypes in pop culture as the characters within "The Sopranos" itself — to show up at some point in the last season of "The Sopranos". That didn't happen, though the awareness was certainly there. (Aside: for some fun, try looking up "Wikipedia" on Wikipedia.)

As far as I have ever been able to tell, Japanese culture seems blissfully, deliberately unaware of itself in the places where Western pop culture would enjoy such awareness. It's not the case that Japanese would-be art-pieces don't copy one another; it's that they pretend they're not copying anything else. If one Japanese comic featuring a character who dresses like a maid finds popularity of any measure greater than mediocre, you can bet that fifteen hundred other comics are going to appear within a year's time that also feature maids. I've touched on this before, in previous columns — The Everything Disease: those tasked with assessing why something is popular will merely write down a list of adjectives that describe the thing and then dash off a conclusion that all of these are reasons why the thing is popular. Maybe I didn't enunciate clearly enough in my previous description of The Everything Disease. Here's a metaphor. Say you have found a way to make a drug that produces the same euphoric feeling of invincibility that cocaine produces, only with none of the side effects. It's not addictive and it poses no threat of killing the user instantly if he snorts too much. If every marketing person in the world thought like a Japanese entertainment executive, you'd possibly have top brass telling you to make sure that your drug can also kill the user, because cocaine can too. Somewhere in another company, someone would produce a drug with none of the good effects of cocaine — it would just come in a powder and kill every user instantly. This is the kind of thing you have to deal with if you exit your house, seeking entertainment, on a Saturday night in Tokyo, Japan!

With videogames and Japanese animation, the self-awareness exists near-entirely in winks, nods, and elbow-nudges that only true fans will pick up. Like, maids are popular, so the game has to have a maid in it. And girls who are meanest to the guys that they like are also popular with some guys. And also, girls with glasses are popular with some other group of guys. Maybe the game doesn't have enough budget to make these three separate characters, and none of these three groups of guys are exactly the core target audience, so they combine the three traits into one character: a mean maid girl with glasses. This character, thanks to maybe one signature line of dialogue, becomes popular with people who like her because no one else likes her. Be honest: Have you ever liked and / or mastered a character in a fighting game because none of your friends ever plays as that character?

Meanwhile, in the real world, some girl who finds she doesn't have much luck with guys suddenly finds that a certain selection of not-unattractive males (of maybe questionable hobbies) will devote to her their undivided attention should she start wearing glasses and a maid outfit. This is how a fetish becomes a fashion. This kind of thing — not just this specific thing — happens all over the place in pop culture.

Escalation is another key principle. In the West, for a while, female pop stars' breasts were getting bigger and bigger, prompting many water-cooler comedians to ask "How much bigger are they going to get?" In Japan, it went kind of the other way. Pop stars getting younger and more juvenile-looking. The more-than-ten tweens of Morning Musume gave way to the, uhh, forty-eight girls of "AKB48". "AKB" stands for "Akihabara". By all indications, none of the girls involved in this pop music corporation are involved begrudgingly. They all seem to be having a good time. Being popular among and ogled by the types of men who ogle them was a hobby of theirs before they became pop stars. This is (maybe) a key point.

On the other side of another coin, we have hostess clubs. What is a hostess club? A lot of you guys out there carrying Kotaku Readerland passports hear "hostess club" and you think "Oh, they have those in the Yakuza games." That's one way of putting it. A lot of people only know hostess clubs from modern videogames, and relatively few of those people have actually played the game, or — even worse — when they do play the game, they assume that the representation of hostess clubs is a somehow quite toned-down version of a real-life hostess club. You might presume that real hostess clubs invariably involve prostitution. They don't! In fact, your chances of getting laid at a hostess club are significantly lower than your chance of scoring a girl at, say, any given bar for Normal People.

A hostess club is a place to go to pay a lot of money by the hour to talk to girls. There's a vicious cultural cycle involved: The girls in hostess clubs look like girls who would work in hostess clubs. They have magazines devoted to hostess girl fashion — like Koakuma Ageha, which recently had a "Have Toshihiro 'Yakuza' Nagoshi be your customer for the day" contest. The weirdest thing is that, unlike the wider-scope world fashion trendsphere, hostess fashion seems to thrive by incorporating every "successful" trend simultaneously. Though some variation is of course allowed, and though of course clubs can be excused for wanting to look a certain way, it's curious how similar the girls look: They must all have the same ash-blonde hair, teased up into hundreds of finely ironed ribbons, they must all have the same white eye-shadow, the same gaudy glittery nail implant-baubles. Whether it's the industry or the community that imposes such requirements is irrelevant: Iit's obvious that no one tries to be "completely" original. What happens is more like this: Until one day, no hostesses wore white eye shadow. Then one girl decided she was going to. She didn't get fired, and none of her customers threw up for any reason other than extensive inebriation. Two days later, "white eye shadow" was a requirement for all girls at that particular hostess club. Three weeks later, after that hostess club fails to go bankrupt, every hostess club on the street has assimilated the New Trend.

Why are there so many hostess clubs on one street? Well, it goes like this. Here's Japan Urban Folk Wisdom Lesson #1: In many major towns, you will find a "ramen shop street". How did one street come to have so many ramen shops? It goes like this: A man who happens to be a pure culinary genius builds a ramen shop in the cheapest place his starting budget will allow. His ramen is delicious. The people have never had such a delicious ramen. He puts lots of extra garlic in his soup. Maybe he throws more steamed bamboo whatevers on top of the finished soup than any of the other ramen shops in the city. Anyway, word travels fast in an urban atmosphere: The people genuinely love this ramen. They start to line up. Luckily for some skeazy jerky ramen-cooking loser, the real estate in the area surrounding this little ramen miracle spot is exceptionally cheap. Within weeks, another ramen shop has opened up. Maybe some people lined up for the ramen genius decide to just give up and eat at this other ramen shop. Or maybe all they've heard is "there's this ramen shop on this street in this town; check it out". Accidental sales are enough for some businesses to keep their heads over the water. So now we have two ramen shops on one street. Maybe a ramen chef with great confidence in his ability decides to challenge the market microcosm on this little street by putting up a shop close to the genius. Maybe he does pretty well. Maybe people see this third ramen shop on their way to the first ramen shop and after eating the first shop's ramen, they say "that was great", and then they say, "maybe that other shop is good, too". In general, some people just aren't pitch-perfect judges of quality. They might try the other ramen shop a week after trying the genius ramen, and a week removed, they might not be able to tell the difference. Eventually, as the reputation of these two ramen shops grow, so does the number of customers lining up outside them. Then another shop opens. Maybe the second shop goes under. Another hack ramen shop pops up to take its place. Maybe, one day, a ramen shop comes that everyone genuinely agrees is better than the first ramen shop. By this point, this particular corner of the city has already earned a reputation as a "place for ramen shops". You'd have to be a real connoisseur to tell the difference between two bowls of miso ramen beyond just listing the toppings. More often than not, a "genius" bowl of ramen is declared when someone takes the chance to add a different topping, or add a standard topping in a different way. If it looks immediately different and yet produces familiar sensations, it must be brilliant.

What we see in the hostess club example is a "medium" that, unlike "Seinfeld" or "The Sopranos" is entirely wrapped up in itself without a scrap of irony. As far as I can tell, the majority of Japanese pop culture evolves in the same way as hostess club fashion. Trend-aeons transpire until, eventually, "fashionable" human beings / bowls of noodles in soup are so loaded down with clicking plastic cell-phone trinkets or chopped onions that they have essentially become indecipherable katamaris. At this point, consumers start to back away. The industry recognizes decreased revenues and everyone unanimously agrees, hey, it's time for a reset.

This happened to videogames — pretty recently, even. It's just that this concept of going back to square one is so foreign in a culture like Japan, where everyone creating any kind of entertainment is considered part of some all-encompassing "team", basically working toward the noble goal of finding a way to fit everything in the world into every single twenty-minute slot of television. So when a reset comes, and the resetter finds great success — the way Nintendo did with the DS and the Wii — everyone is bizarrely surprised. On another hand, did you know that Square-Enix apparently thought that Kingdom Hearts was a terrible idea? Combining and then cutely fetishizing two things that two maybe-different groups of people love with terrifying intensity seemed like a bad idea. How can that be a bad idea? I mean, if you like money.

Love Plus is a reset of the genre of video dating sim game. The fascinating part is how. Here in this modern world, "love" is complicated for an adult. We have cellular phones, text messages, voice mail, email, Skype, et cetera. The birth rate is declining in Japan for a variety of reasons. If it's declining in the rest of the world, maybe it's not as apparent as it is in Japan. In Japan, many of the reasons are visible to people willing to give in to a little conspiracy-theorizing. The ramen shop street phenomenon has led to more than enough installations of particular need-satisfying instutions centered around geographic locations. The "love hotel" industry has been simplifying infidelity for decades. The "health" industry has familiarized prostitution the way "Gokiburi Hoihoi" ("Come On In, Cockroaches") cockroach traps have familiarized cockroaches (by displaying the courtesy to make them into cartoon characters). Rent a hotel, call a Health Girl, go home to your wife, tell her you have a headache, go to bed. If you need to genuinely satisfy the need to interface intellectually with a female, you can go to a hostess club, and sit and talk to a plastic-looking princess. In the name of keeping the content ratings low enough to prevent sales droppage, the makers of dating sims have to pay mind to the hostess clubs and ignore the prostitution. However, more than enough men grow up playing dating sims — it wasn't very hard to find a hostess club with the word "Memorial" in its name, written in the same font as "Tokimeki Memorial" — to be genuinely ignorant of the finer points. Dating sims have created a group of fans, who now allow themselves to be defined as people who play dating sims.

Surely the idea of a hostess club wasn't inspired by dating sim games. Ever since the twelfth century Japanese men have been paying money merely to drink alongside women. In the modern age, it's easy to see how the two have evolved in parallel. Just as there are entire niche dating sims centered around a certain painfully specific type of girl, so there are hostess clubs that do the same. If you want to talk to a girl who looks like a "stereotypical college student" because she is a stereotypical college student, you can, for the right price. Next thing you know, there'll be a sub-genre of girl-get games about girls with broken front teeth, and a hostess club to match.

People in the West talk a lot about girls being oppressed or whatever here in Japan. No one really talks about it over here. Maybe it's the Western, puritan views of sexual relations. As far as I can see, many Japanese women are doing pretty well for themselves, flaunting their sexuality whenever they stand to gain from it. It genuinely doesn't bother them when they do this, either. The stereotypical view of a woman is that she doesn't know much about "man stuff". The stereotypical view of "man stuff" is that it's boring, it's complicated, and it makes the man enough money to support his family. Girls at hostess clubs sit with boring older men who try their hardest to act like they're having fun. Part of the employee's job description is to make the customers have fun. This involves pretty much zero effort: A boring Japanese man will try very hard to at least pretend to be having fun around what he perceives to be a pretty girl. Girls are expected to be reserved and calm. All a girl has to do is smile and say she's having fun, and the typical hostess club customer can and will "fall in love" with her. Love doesn't mean he's going to marry her — maybe he'll just bring her chihuahuas. The typical hard-working hostess club girl earns maybe double what your typical section manager earns every month, and she doesn't even have to wake up early in the morning.

I used to "date" a girl who worked in a hostess club. She said that, lots of times, conversations with guys would go like this:

"Wow! I'm so tired!"
"You must have worked hard today."
"I did! Wow, I worked so hard!"
"What did you do?"
"You know, guy stuff. You wouldn't understand!"
"Of course I wouldn't."
"Hey, let's drink some alcohol!"
"Yay, alcohol!"

Of course, the girls' drinks are pre-watered down. How can a man enjoy this? I don't know. Then again, I don't smoke. When I was working in a Large Japanese Corporation many years ago, there was a twenty-two-year-old man, just out of Tokyo University, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life. The section chief got up to smoke, and all the guys got up to smoke with him. They invited the new kid. He shivered. He went into the smoking room — a veritable hot-box packed to window-buckling pressure with smoke — and emerged thirty seconds later, vomiting water onto the carpet. My impression of Big Business in Japan has built up slowly out of that particular experience.

Where was I? Oh, Love Plus. I view Love Plus's particular method of resetting its genre as noble. It hearkens back to the earliest days of the genre — and the earliest days of its players' existence as sexual beings: High school. Sure, most of these games are about high school. Though few of them are nearly as un-weird as Love Plus. It's breaking the genre down into its essence.

In Love Plus, you assume the role of a mostly-blank slate, a high school boy whose methods of courtship you mostly choose by your own tact. When the game needs to make a girl mad at you for whatever reason, of course, the control slips out of your hands, your guy says something that makes him look like an asshole, and it gets kind of depressing. You actually have your choice of three girls — one, your age, is a boring princess; one, a year older than you, is somehow mature enough to resign herself to the lifestyle of a workaholic waitress; the other is a year younger, cute, with short boyish hair, big fan of rock and roll music and fighting games. Of course I chose the third girl.

Works in the dating sim genre are typically referred to as "Girl Get" games. The emphasis is on the "get". Once you "get" the girl, typically, the game is pretty much over. "Girl Get" is a much better genre distinction than "dating sim". Love Plus is a dating sim. Once you "get" the girl via ten or so hours of grueling menu-mashing, you earn the option to flip the game into "real-time mode". The game gives you "action points" to use to perform actions of your choosing — you have a wide variety of options, from calling your girl to sending her a "what's up" email to scheduling a date. You can even choose the location of the date: zoo, movie, park, shopping mall. Then you have to make sure to turn the game on at the right time to attend your date. Turn the game on before bed and give the girl a phone call to tell her goodnight, et cetera.

This raises so many interesting points that one man, even one such as myself, is hardly enough to summarize them.

For one, this game is billed as a "sensational new type" of dating sim. As such, it's actually attempting to widen the entrance of the genre by inviting in new fans. This makes it, by default, a "casual game".

However, why should a dating sim have ever been anything other than a casual game? This point really interests me. What are some historically successful "casual" games? Super Mario Bros. and Gran Turismo are amazingly successful, and were loved by millions of newcomers, despite their not being precisely easy. Most players, it's not a stretch to say, really loved Super Mario Bros. without even nearly completing it. Effectively, this means that Super Mario Bros. doesn't "end". So it's possible to say that people like games that don't end.

These days, we have a split between "casual" and "hardcore" games. How did this happen? "Casual" gamers are "newcomers" to the idea of gaming, or people who didn't play games very much before finding their own personal gateway drug.

I am pretty sure that the "casual" distinction only exists in the heads of the "hardcore" gamers, the people devoted to completing and bragging about the bigger, louder, faster, more cinematic experiences pumped out on the next-gen consoles. Anything that doesn't feature better graphics and the same general game mechanics is "casual". To "hardcore" gamers, casual games are weak and small and technologically inferior.

Upon hearing that "casual" games are finding a whole new audience, many software developers began flapping the "casual games" banner. They produced a lot of pretty bad pieces of software under that distinction.

Still, maybe the "hardcore" don't have all their priorities straight when it comes time to bash the casuals. Casual is a good thing. More gamers means more games, means more money being spent on making the big games. Many hardcore gamers were casual gamers, once.

Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that longtime hardcore favorites such as Dragon Quest are, in fact, casual games. When Dragon Quest IX was announced as both a "major installment" in the series and a game for a portable system (the Nintendo DS), many a series fan felt something like a kid whose parents are getting divorced. The game had appealed to both casuals and hardcores for the longest time, and now that it came time to choose between one or the other, the fans felt like the developers had chosen the casuals. Dragon Quest IX's release for the Nintendo DS seems to be part of an industry-wide acceptance that more people don't play videogames than do, so let's try to appeal to those people.

This brings us back to Love Plus. It's a "casual dating sim". It's "casual" because it appeals to people who don't play dating sims for various reasons, like: it's not creepy. It's not weird. It has clean presentation and somewhat tasteful marketing visibility.

Why should a game genre that seeks to educate young men on the moods and behaviors of young women be something only for freaks and closet pedophiles? Why can't this genre be a kind of mainstream entertainment? Did you realize that there are entire films where not one person dies, where the only thing to happen by the end is two people fall in love, break up, and remember each other fondly? "Annie Hall" won best picture over "Star Wars", you know. People like this sort of thing. "Well, gamers don't like this sort of thing". Who said so? You?

The modern "casual game" is a very vague idea. We've got human-productivity software like all those brain-training games, which aren't really games so much as they're series of challenges that do have incorrect solutions. These "games" probably shouldn't be counted in the software sales charts. They're something else altogether. For a while, it was seriously creeping me out when people on the internet would celebrate Nintendo's "dominance" over all other consoles because Brain Training was selling more copies in Japan than Halo was selling in the US. These are two completely separate audiences. Well, that's not to say that some of the people who played Halo might also be enjoying Brain Age. It's just that the games serve two completely different functions. I propose that we stop calling things like Brain Age "casual games" or even "non-games". Just call them "software", maybe prefixed with the name of the console they're published for.

Actually, let's stop calling games "casual" or "hardcore". I'm pretty sure that the best games in the world are those that can be enjoyed by both "casual" and "hardcore" game-players alike. When PR people, like that one Nintendo woman (not going to look her name up on Wikipedia because that would be pretentious of me), declare in press conferences that they're going to make an effort to release "more hardcore" games in any given financial quarter, all you're doing is pissing people off. The devoted fans will immediately speak up: "See, they're acknowledging that they've been ignoring us".

You know what's a game that appeals to both casual and hardcore players? Tetris. People can enjoy it deeply without even being good at it. I see them playing it on their cellular phones every time I ride the train. Most of the time, they don't know what the hell they're doing. And then there are the virtuosos. Seriously, there are some people who have built up lifestyles around that game. Have you ever watched a Tetris virtuoso play?

Similarly, I've run into a lot of people over the years who talk about how much they loved Super Mario Bros. as a kid, and then I get them sitting around my living room and we fire it up on the Virtual Console, and man, they suck. I ask them, did you always suck this much as a kid? Usually, they go, "Yeah!" Sucking at a game is fun. Why do we assume that because a game is "fun to play" the player will invariably want to win? I think that somewhere early in the evolution of the post-Super Mario gaming medium, too many introverted people were jumping in and making games. Like, do you remember the old Ridge Racer games? You could be in fourth place and still be allowed to continue to the next race. Now, in the PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 generation, we have Ridge Racer 7, where you start every race in last place and you must finish first to continue to the next race. The base assumption among game makers seems to be that people want to win, or they're not having fun. Somewhere along the line they stopped considering the possibility that people generally felt that it doesn't matter who wins or loses, it's how much fun you have when playing the game.

I've always thought that Tetris doesn't get really, deeply studied enough as a game design. This game, post-Super Mario, turned housewives, of all people, onto the idea of slaving over a computer screen. The game is never about winning. In fact, you can't win Tetris. Tetris is entirely about how long you can survive before you die. The only action you can perform to prevent your collapse in a game of Tetris is rotating blocks. If the blocks fall in the right shape, they complete a line. Here's the intriguing part: all that happens when you close up a complete line is: The line disappears. Your reward for success is that your accomplishment immediately vanishes. All that's left to stare you in the face is your failure. Eventually, the failures stack up until you can't breathe, and you fail. That's kind of sick! That's kind of grim!

And then you mention Tetris in front of a Normal Person — a "non-gamer", if you must — and they say, oh, I used to love that game so much. You ask them what they liked about it and they say, "I don't know, really". Sometimes they say the music of the NES version was "mysterious". Or they'll hum the music from the Gameboy version. Many times, they'll suggest that it made them feel a certain way that they can't put their finger on.

The thing about something like Tetris is, everyone has a time in their life when it resonates deeply with them. The best part is that the time for Tetris to resonate with you is probably created the moment you first start to experience Tetris. It's lighting up new parts of your brain, and making new parts of your "soul" feel this new, weird feeling. There's something half-terrifying and half-lovely about that.

Tetris is near-untouchably abstractly perfect. Future puzzle games attempted to add characters. You've got Puzzle Bobble with the little dinosaurs from Bubble-Bobble, with in-game graphically represented contextual explanations for how your line-clearing tools are able to reach and deal with the crushing death. You've got the death descending from above instead of rising from below because, hey, we don't want to make it too much like Tetris. Puyo Puyo gives all the blocks faces, effectively anthropromorphizing them. Also, Puyo Puyo has a story, explaining that the blocks you are making vanish by connecting them to other blocks are tools of some kind of magic duelling practice, and that you aren't just clearing blocks to keep yourself alive, you are clearing blocks to defeat someone else who is trying to clear blocks and also trying to defeat you as you try to clear blocks. How much explanation do we need in a game like this? In Tetris, all we had was a cold background, music evocative of Soviet Russia, and this immediate, direct reaching out of the game straight to our brains. If you're like me, it might be hard to imagine your childhood without all the hours you grinded against the void in Tetris. It changed all of us in ways we can't understand, because we've never been anything else.

Where are games like this, these days? Why can't atmosphere be everything? Why are we obsessed with narrative? Why do games have to tell stories, to talk my ear off? I'd rather be dropped in a world with no explanation of where I was or why I'm there. Like, one of my pet peeves is when I'm listening to a record and a friend comes in and says, after hearing less than ten seconds of a song, "Hey, this is pretty great. Who is this?" Why don't you try listening to the song some more before you worry about the name of the band? Mainstream entertainment seems to do this a lot — neither a "casual" nor a "hardcore" thing — and it bugs the hell out of me. I want to listen to the song, and then be told afterward, by a smooth radio announcer voice, if possible "You just listened to . . ." Put the experience before the exposition. This isn't the newspaper, this is entertainment; these aren't earthquake death statistics, this is a story about a world that isn't real: Let me form my own opinions before you tell me the facts. Please.

In short, there is a narrative in Tetris — it just doesn't have any characters in it, and it isn't "about" anything. The atmosphere is the narrative. The playing of the game is the narrative. Somehow, in the time spent playing this abstract little software program, you grow . . . weirdly intimate with some kind of emerging pseudo-consciousness.

The original Super Mario Bros. is totally the same way — for that game, too, the atmosphere was the narrative. The little pop-song-miracle of the theme music (which I will argue heatedly is yet the "Best Thing Ever To Emerge From The Video Game Industry") and the iconic graphics, together with the personable physics with which Mario skids to a stop after running, all meld together in this beautifully chemical way. No matter of scientific assessment and fetishistic adulation could produce a better game. The only better game than Super Mario Bros., as far as I'm concerned, is Super Mario Bros. 3. Super Mario World added more . . . shit to the game. Well, to be fair, it took some shit out, and then put some other shit in. If you ask me, the game got too friendly. It's weirdly apparent to me that Nintendo suddenly got concerned with people liking their games. I guess it had something to do with wanting them to shell out money for a new console.

I don't know. Can they? Can robots love humans? The robot in the film "A.I." didn't really love humans. Or is that kind of dumb persistence the same thing as love? Whoa, I've grown all woozy with wondering. Let's Investigation:

Love Plus. The director of Love Plus says that the game was designed to make the players feel, and subsequently develop a deep appreciation of "Real Love". When the game forced me to say "I love you", I must say, I did feel something. To be perfectly honest, it was something I have never felt in my entire life. Was that "real love"? I'd feel terrible if it was. For me, the feeling was very ugly, muddy and weird.

Here's how you play Love Plus: Your character is a teenage boy, a nearly blank slate. You are a student at a high school. You live alone for reasons unexplained. Or maybe we just never see your parents. It is definitely not a boarding school, because two of the girls talk about their family lives a great deal. At your school, none of the students have faces or names except for three girls to whom your character is immediately attracted the first time you meet.

Your character has four statistical attributes you are free to grind at your leisure. They are "fitness", "smarts", "sense", and "charm". You grind these by carefully choosing your activities every day. You can only choose four activities a day. You can go running to build your fitness, or study to build your smarts. You can work to gain "sense", or you can "fashion" (trying on clothes at home, maybe?) to gain "charm". Some activities serve as means to talk with the girls in your life. Work at the local family restaurant to talk to the older girl, play tennis in the tennis club to meet the girl your age, or go to the library to talk to the younger girl.

Each girl has different criteria for her future boyfriend. The tennis girl would like a guy to be physically fit. Of course. The library girl would like a guy to be smart. The girl who works in the family restaurant is boring, so how the hell should I know what she wants? The more you grind your physical attributes, the more dangerously close you get to a girl confessing her love for you. When it happens, it happens.

Maybe this highlights a problem I've had in real life: I kind of liked both the tennis girl and the library girl. I liked the library girl more, and if someone would have put a gun to my head, I'd have chosen her in a heartbeat, before telling them to kindly put the gun away. However, I kept seeing those numbers crunching on the left screen (you hold the DS vertical for this game, by the way), and my gamer's instinct kept telling me to just keep grinding, to get the numbers as high as I could get them. When you highlight a daily activity during the schedule-planning phase (scary hint: the default activity choice is always "study") you can see its effects on your stats on the left screen. I was trying to get each of my stats to increase every day. How sick is that? The girl I wanted only cared if I had "sense" (built by practicing music and/or going to the convenience store at night, of course) and a reasonable amount of smarts. Why didn't I just polish those, meet her at the library every afternoon without fail, text her "goodnight" every night and "good morning" every morning? When tennis girl started waiting on the road near my home, asking if I wanted to walk with her to school, the dialogue box stared me right in the soul: "Sure, let's go, yay" or "Sorry. In a hurry." How could I choose option B? Why should I blow someone off in a video game?

This has happened to me every time I play one of these modern games with a "morality" system or whatever. Like, in Fable II, a man is dying by the side of the road, and it's the same number of button presses to save the guy's life as it is to kill him and then make your on-screen avatar laugh about it. Why should I bother to, you know, be a jerk in a video game, given the choice? Why was Peter Molyneux actually surprised that people more often than not play the part of the good guy? As Matt Damon said in "The Talented Mr. Ripley", no one ever considers himself a bad person. You have to actually try to be "bad" in a game. You have to try pretty hard, sometimes. You have to willingly detach yourself from the game. In a way, maybe this makes you and the game best buddies. Or maybe it makes you worst enemies. It's a coin toss.

I didn't want to say no to the tennis girl. I let her keep being my friend. I kept talking to her. I hoped that the game would gradually realize I liked library girl more, because I was choosing to spend my afternoons in the library instead of on the tennis court. Tennis girl kept waiting for me after school. Eventually, one day, library girl was waiting for me after school. I walked her home and that was pretty much it. She asked if I wanted to go out on the next pseudo-real-time Sunday. I said why not. Two in-game weeks later, my character had a dream about her. The game forced me to say "I love you". Twice.

This was the first (and second) time I'd ever told anyone I loved them in any language, and I did it to get to the next level in a fucking video game. Fucking thirty years old, over here.

Minutes later, one in-game afternoon, library girl met me in the library, asked if I would come up to the roof, and then asked me formally to be her boyfriend. Wondering for a half-second if the game would try to wrap up things with tennis girl, I sighed clicked "Yes", finally thinking, "about time I beat this stupid game". The "final boss" was the mere act of saying "Yes". And then I realized: Doesn't that just say it all?

The guilt came immediately. After trying very hard to polish my guy's stats to perfection on all fronts, to make him a real Renaissance Man, I gave up and started stacking the activities purely in favor of "sense" and studies. I told tennis girl — precisely once — that I was too busy to walk to school. Me and library girl were sliding into a relationship soon after that. It felt ridiculous. In real life, my strategy for sex usually involves much self-effacing, to the point where, after weeks or possibly months of listening to me talk, the girl is finally psychologically worn down to the point where she basically tears my pants off. It's not that I don't want her to tear my pants off. I'd love it if she did it immediately after I said "Hello; you're pretty hot". I'd love it if life worked that way. It doesn't, though. We're not all yeti-sized chainsaw-gun-wielding marines a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. There comes a point in every terribly failed sexual relationship I've ever known where I start to exercise what I believe is a psychic power. Maybe I'm just laying the hints on thicker. Maybe I'm making jokes about my penis more often, talking about how I can't jerk off because I can't raise my hand far enough above my head, or whatever. It felt like that with library girl. Only, in this game there would be no getting laid. I have gotten laid — oh my god — so many times in real life, just because I can play at least three musical-sounding notes on most instruments (most recently learned a couple notes on the cello (thanks for the lesson, American McGee)). I've done this all without a single "I love you". And now here's a game, telling me to tell it I'm in love, and it won't even show me any virtual fornication because Nintendo doesn't allow that on their consoles. How weird.

"Real love" is the feeling of settling for something because it's there. Well, that's how it felt to me. I felt like a dunce. Maybe there's something wrong with me. I've seen too many charismatic Jewish guys (Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld) find flaws in any relationship, and I always figure I can do better. What weird courage it takes to say those words that centuries of literature have built up as so holy! It felt like attempting to practice profanity as a six-year-old in front of a mirror Sunday afternoon after church. The top teeth close down on the bottom lip, the "Ffffff" escapes the mouth, the rest sticks in the throat. It felt that kind of weird, futile, introverted, religion-like event.

What is this game, to me? Are we friends? Are we in love? I don't know if we're either. What is love? Who the shit knows? Love Plus's designers seem adamant that Love is 95% showing up, 4% choosing the right date spot to match your remaining number of activity points and your girlfriend's mood, and 1% knowing which six parts of your girlfriend's body she likes you to touch. (Hands, hair, shoulder, arm, forehead — oh, shit, what was the other one? Oh. Ears. (She hates it when I touch her breastlets. Or her, uhh, inguinal area. (The swimsuit region unfortunately falls just beneath the bottom of the screen (can't delete "The Hot Folder" from my hard drive just yet))))

You know what, though? Here's where I close my eyes and remember that Tokyo University Kid, who threw up water right onto the carpet after barrel-rolling out of the smoking lounge on his first day, his first cigarette, at that Huge Japanese Corporation all those years back. The moment that happened, I wasn't even thinking that years later I would consider the event some kind of cosmic revelation. No, in the moment, I was remembering and in-head-quoting "The Matrix": "He's gonna pop!" Years later, the revelation is this: Maybe love really is just persistence. Maybe there's really no damned difference. You just keep throwing yourself at that wall of ocean, ice, fire, wind, whatever color of Pokemon you bought on puberty day.

I was watching an episode of "Dexter" — a show about a serial killer who lives by a code (he only kills other killers) and tries to blend into society. He thinks, when about to comfort his step-daughter re: some bullshit thing that happened earlier in the episode, "I wish I was like everyone else; I wish I knew what to say". How can't you? Can't the knack for rote memorization that allows you to be a virtuoso at concealing murder evidence also provide you with a plethora of pre-prepared responses to everyday situations such as these? I've already tooted this particular horn of mine once in this particular piece; let's toot it again: I am a not-completely-normal, game-playing kind of dude, and even I have had sex before. Not only that, I'm pretty good at it!

Apparently, Love Plus is the source of a controversy in Japan. Or maybe this is something the viral marketers made up. You never know anymore, man. Like, apparently there are some girls complaining that men are acting creepily close to their Love Plus girlfriends. They're putting their DSes under their pillows, they're doing the little free-conversation "mini-game" mode in the bathtub, they're interrupting real-life Sunday dates with their real-life girlfriends to switch on the DS and give their fake girlfriend the gift that they bought for them earlier in the week.

There's an urban legend that still spins today on the hot pavement of Tokyo like a shell casing just discharged from a machine gun: a woman was driving a car when her Tamagotchi beeped. "Tamagotchi" is a mash-together of the Japanese words for "Egg" and "wristwatch". It was the first "virtual pet" released in Japan. It caused a huge fad. Tamagotchi was like a Chia Pet with a button to reset it if you screwed up. If you were attentive, and fed and played with the Tamagotchi enough times a day, it would eventually evolve and grow into something bigger, neater-looking, and even tougher to care for. Anyway, this woman's Tamagotchi was beeping while she was driving her car. She got tired of the fucking thing beeping and reached over to take a good look at it. Anyway she got hit by a truck and killed.

It turns out, actually, that this isn't just an urban legend, like that thing about Jamie Lee Curtis being born a hermaphrodite (no, Zak, that is not true). It actually happened.

I got the idea to play Love Plus and maybe write something about it when I saw it reported in various publications that women in Japan were jealous of "virtual cheating". Might this be a viral PR stunt? Or might it be something else even more sinister? If it's a PR stunt, then doesn't it fly in the face of everything the game's director says it stands for — this is a game about teaching men about "real love". And if it's not a PR stunt — if these reports are true — then I guess the game wasn't very successful at teaching men who to love for "real". Or does the "A.I." question go both ways? Is it easier for a human to love a robot than it is for a robot to love a human? (Getting a head rush over here. Should probably sleep. Soon.) That said, if a man already has a girlfriend, and Love Plus is meant to teach him to appreciate her more, in this scenario, it's doing a terrible job. (Alternately: maybe the girlfriends of Japan should try becoming schoolgirls that fit into one of three clearly defined stereotypes.)

A Tamagotchi is addictive and interesting, again, partly (mostly) because it's so enigmatic, alien, weird. The instruction manual that comes with an old-school Tamagotchi literally spells it out: The little plastic egg in your hand is a vessel containing a creature. The creature comes from a planet where all beings literally exist only as computer data, however, he feels real pain, real hunger, and real love. Please care for him. A Tamagotchi immediately engages us because we cannot, and never will be able to, prove that he does not feel pain when he dies, hunger when he's hungry, or love when we appreciate him. Though we look at a Tamagotchi and initially wonder "What is this thing?" eventually, we answer that question with "something that relies on me to survive". We have defined a creature's existence based on the sole fact that it relies on us.

What is Love Plus? Well, here's the sad part: Love Plus is a video game for the Nintendo DS. It has a goal: Don't make the girl mad. Nothing you can do will make her die, or make her hate you so completely that you never talk to her again. The girl inside the game is very clearly a slightly abstracted artistic rendition of a female human being.

Rather than explore the possibilties and implications of "virtual cheating", which I suddenly find about as exciting as the idea of skipping breakfast, I'm going to instead pass judgment on the guys who would rather give presents to and/or punctually honor date times with their virtual girlfriend than say one kind word to their real-life significant others or family members: Fuck you.

However, the lady who died caring for her Tamagotchi: That's sad. That's a real modern-day tragedy, is what that is. I'm not even being sarcastic. Maybe she didn't have a husband or a child. Maybe all her friends were girls who decided that with the equivalent of three hundred dollars and six hours they could look just like the girls in the magazines, and they could get paid enough money to purchase their own lonely shimmering condo and enough chihuahuas to fill it by age 27, enticing and exciting the dreams and shallow hopes of every commitment fearing man who rang the little chime over the door, never procreating by choice, their goal — like that of so many females in this post-birth-rate nation — merely to be left alone. Here was Chieko — yes, we've just named the woman who died with the Tamagotchi in her car — desperately wanting someone or something to hold onto. Maybe she was unattractive, and probably she was beautiful. Who the hell knows.

Here I am, thirty years old. You want to know something? I have sixty-six female Miis, all of them tall, thin, with beauty marks just beneath their right eyes and big round glasses on their faces. They all have the same name. That name is "Chieko". Where did they go? Why did they come back? When did I make all of them? What was I thinking? What am I, really, at this stage in my life?

Maybe I'm not afraid of commitment. Maybe I just find other people's idea of commitment shallow. Maybe I'm waiting for some cosmic, huge thing. Love Plus sure as fuck isn't it.

This is the second time I've asked this question, unless you count the title of this article. The answer is: I don't see why they can't be. I just don't think they should pretend to be our friends.

Tetris is our friend. Love Plus is not. (Though only because it pretends to be.)

We've got Fable II, right? I might have mentioned before how I'm that guy who's really good at making a game look stupid within seconds of picking it up. In Stranglehold I ignored the on-screen navigation and slid back and forth over a tabletop for maybe two straight minutes. It was hilarious. In Fable II, I stood in town square immediately after they let you go to the town the first time, and I just started spamming the "thumbs-up" gesture for, like, a minute. I had a crowd of people gathered around. Curious, I kept spamming the gesture. I knew there was a computer program trained to recognize "thumbs-up" with a positive reaction. However, what I didn't realize was precisely how bone-headed the game was about to be. It turns out that "favorable reaction" stacks up over time, giving no priority to the size or impact of events. After thirty minutes of thumbs-upping in town square, I had no less than half a dozen girls repeating "I bet you'll be giving me a ring, then?" Is that all it takes to get a girl to want to marry you — just prove to her that you are capable of repeating the same tiny task over and over again for a half an hour at a time? (I wonder if one of those shops that airbrushes a photograph of your kitten onto a sweatshirt would do a sweatshirt with a picture of my Dragon Quest IX party on it.)

Now, I'm all for a thumbs-up button in games. I've said before that Grand Theft Auto games are all about violence because there isn't a "hug button". Can you make a whole game where there's only a hug button? What about this Milo thing that Fable II developers Lionhead are working on? It's a whole game built around the idea of interacting with a little boy. That better be really clever.

Maybe playing Love Plus and thinking about Fable II again has allowed me time to think about the nature of violence as an interaction in a game: When you get a girlfriend in Love Plus, you begin a complicated relationship — which is even more complicated for the game designers than it is for you. In Grand Theft Auto, when you shoot a pedestrian, you end a shallow relationship which began only milliseconds earlier, when you pulled out your gun.

Recently, Toshihiro Nagoshi, the director of the Yakuza games, stated that the Grand Theft Auto games were morally difficult to classify in Japan, because they allow the player to do whatever he wants. Also recently, Hifumi Kouno of Nudemaker — developers of intricate mecha-piloting simulation Steel Battalion and a few adult graphic adventures for the PC — commenting on the recent debacle surrounding RapeLay (an amateur-made graphic adventure game about rape), said that it would be possible for a game that concerns a specific situation of violent crime to take an artistic and valid viewpoint, however, giving the player total freedom to murder innocents as in Grand Theft Auto is morally wrong.

What no one wants to talk about is that murdering innocent civilians in Grand Theft Auto is merely "something you can do". It's not a "feature" of the game. It's never something the game tells you to do. Killing civilians in no way deepens your relationship with the game. It does, however, make you feel something. And, more importantly, it says something about you. Did you feel bad the first time you killed a civilian in Grand Theft Auto? I would say, if put on the spot, that I felt "about as bad as I felt when I got a girlfriend in Love Plus". What does that even mean?

How bad did you feel the second time?

There are many types of friends. There are reliable friends, friends who you can always count on. Like Treasure's Sin and Punishment or Super Mario Bros. 3. There are friends who were with you through tough times, like Braid, or friends with whom you share larger-than-life experiences, like Earthbound or Dragon Quest V.

There's a game series that is always your friend, whether you're a casual or a hardcore: Dragon Quest. Yuji Horii once described the ultimate goal of a Dragon Quest as being to create a world that the player "can feel". I feel like I've mentioned this a hundred times: Every NPC in every town serves a small purpose. You might meet an old woman alone in a house. She says (never minding that you just stepped into her house uninvited) that she's worried about her son. He's recently joined the castle guard. Ever since his father died ten years ago, he's insisted on growing up to be a military hero. Later, you find yourself in the castle. All of the guards look the same. They all say the same things. One of them, sleeping on a bed in the barracks, says that he's sick, and he really wishes he had some of his mother's home-cooked soup. Between two tiny NPCs (one of whom looks like a hundred others) and five short sentences of dialogue, Dragon Quest has just presented you an entire world, a world made of people. We need more stuff like that, less stuff like thumbs-upping a girl straight into future-wife status in thirty minutes in Fable II.

Listen, I have been to a lot of modern art museums, and I would reckon the curators of those places make enough money, so they must know what art is. I have seen some stupid shit in some modern art museums. So for the first and last time, of of course they can. Out of this World is art.

Canabalt is art. Try and tell me that's not art. It's Super Mario Tetris. It's got atmosphere.

In conclusion, the Japanese still haven't gotten over Final Fantasy VII. Final Fantasy VII was a game that was about something. It had a "main theme". It was successful. All RPGs now try to look just like it, to build their ramen shops right next door. Tetsuya Nomura's character designs have poisoned more than a decade of haircut catalogs. Ugly men whose most memorable human relationships probably occurred between their self and Aeris and Sephiroth in a dark room now enjoy employment at many game companies, sometimes consulting the spreadsheet in their head that lists all of the things Final Fantasy VII did. The thing is, Final Fantasy VII didn't come out of nowhere. It was, itself, calculated. Why is everyone in business trained to consider any success a fluke? No, wait, don't answer that. Final Fantasy VII is not a fluke. They pour love and stuff int the game. Not all of the stuff worked, though the love sure did. People responded to the love. The stuff, maybe they liked some of, maybe they disliked some of.

Why do they just keep making shells built around character designs and loud battle systems? What the hell was Final Fantasy VIII "about", really, aside from characters who looked at least as cool as the characters in Final Fantasy VII? Aside from the fact that the hero had a fur collar, a scar on his face, and a gun trigger on his sword? Where were the actual feelings? Do they think players are that shallow? Do they think we care only for the flash and bang, just because we once cared for something that had flash and bang in — in addition to many other things? Why not just look at the things Final Fantasy VII did, and try to do them again? Establish a character that players will like. You sleep in that character's mother's house at one point, for god's sake. Let the player experience solitude and confinement. Give them a world. Then show them something that happens in it.

They're afraid of satisfying the players "too much". They're afraid of "cannibalizing" other genres of games. A friend of mine was telling me today that the first phone he ever had in Japan contained a flawless voice-recorder feature that let him record up to fifty minutes of voice. When it came time to finally get a new phone, he couldn't find one with such a robust function. No, his new phone only has "room" for three ten-second memos. How lame is that? It's like, maybe NEC had a voice recorder on their phone, and maybe Toshiba, who also sells phones under the DoCoMo umbrella, came up to DoCoMo and was like, "Hey, we sell standalone voice-recorders and we feel like that NEC phone with a voice-recorder is kind of cannibalizing the sales of our voice recorders". This isn't even conspiracy-theory talk: They do have guys at big companies whose only job is to think of shit like this. As the Japanese games industry grew, thanks to Final Fantasy VII, so did its potential for teasing its fans.

And then: I used to know a guy whose job was creating fake, "female" profiles for a Japanese website that advertised to men looking for a quick hook-up. They'd charge guys money if they sent messages to girls. Well, if you signed up, you'd get 30 free "conversation points". It would cost maybe 11 conversation points to open a message from a girl, and 11 points to reply. So this guy would make fake female profiles and then immediately message guys when the server showed that a new guy had signed up and filled out a profile. The guys would reply, and then he would reply back. The guys would reply one more time, which would put them two points into the red. The website sold points at a rate of something like 10,000 yen for 100 points. The "server" would "automatically" mail the guy's cellular phone address a request for money, bank account information, and a please-transfer-by date.

This is the kind of psychotic bullshit from which I suppose games could serve as an escape. Some men on Japanese internet messageboards talk about how they "only love 2D girls", or how games are all the "social interaction" they need. Today, I almost find myself sympathizing with these people. Loudspeakers right outside my bedroom window blare terrible commercials for bicycle shops or pachinko parlors or cat food wholesale stores, I've just told a game "I love you" so I could get to the next level, I have 66 identical female Miis living inside my Wii, the man across the street at the tiny bakery is standing outside screaming into a megaphone at a dead-empty early-Sunday-morning street because it's a "proven sales tactic". All over the world, people are pretending to be things or people they are not for money. Maybe it's even someone you know. Sitting here, typing this, half-asleep, in what should be dead, spartan silence, I keep hitting the num lock key on my Macbook Pro keyboard. When did I develop this accident? These days, every day is one of those days when I keep hitting the num lock key on the keyboard. I start to sympathize with Hikkoshi Lady, who became so fed up with the world and her festering place in it that she took to screaming out her window literally 24 hours a day for nearly a decade. At near-inexplicably weird times like this, I feel entertainment, of all things, is failing us.

I wanted to use this story in here somewhere; I can't remember where. I wanted to mention how Hideo Kojima once told me in an interview that his "ultimate game" would be not for any console — it would be a robot, maybe of a little girl, who you had to care for, who would maybe tell you a very long and affecting story. Then I wanted to mention Love Plus, where your guy asks the girl, during a routine walk home from school, "What kind of music do you like?" and she says, "You know, the usual stuff", and your guy says, "You don't seem like you like the usual stuff", and she says, "What's that supposed to mean?" and I'm home, in my boxers, in my bed, blue LED christmas lights taped in the shape of a psychotic constellation on my ceiling, thinking, I know what that's supposed to mean. I'd ask her, hey, show me your iPod right now! Or if she didn't have an iPod (protip: some people don't!) I'd say, what's the last CD you bought? Then I'd realize I'm not on the Holodeck on "Star Trek: The Next Generation", that in ths imagined world I can only timidly go where game designers have already gone before.

Then I wanted to mention Final Fantasy VII, then I wanted to mention the Final Fantasy XIII trailer, full of action figures posing and spouting impenetrable, indecipherable catch-phrases in scenes so vague that you can tell the makers hadn't jigsaw-puzzled even a quarter of the game's "plot" together before they commissioned the cut-scene. Then I would paraphrase this joke. It's the kind of joke you can only paraphrase, really. Every culture used to have another culture they didn't like, or considered intellectually inferior, so the main character of this joke was usually a member of that culture, depending on your culture.

It goes like this: A man, who is an idiot, has a superhuman ability to paint straight lines. He gets a job painting a line down a long, straight highway. His first day, he does wonderfully. He paints miles of straight line. The next day, he paints significantly less. By the end of the week, his productivity has fallen through the floor. He's getting no work done at all. His superior asks him: "Are you having trouble?" To which the idiot replies: "Nah. It just takes longer and longer to walk back to the bucket. It takes so long, I don't have time to paint anymore."

It's like that.

—-

Once again, thank you for reading this! Your patience knows no bounds.

I will be back next month with, hopefully, something even more fatuous and impenetrable.

In the meantime, if you are a 2D artist or programmer and would like to help me make an independent game and are willing to work temporarily for (probably) no money at all, please contact me at 108 (at) actionbutton (dot net).

If you have any questions or concerns or suggestions for future columns, please mail me! Getting email is fun!

Also, if you are a game developer and would like me to play your product so as to further my broken encylcopedic knowledge of game design, please send me an email. Disclaimer: Giving me your product for free in no way guarantees a favorable opinion. I am even enjoying iPhone games, these days.

tim rogers is the editor-in-chief of Action Button Dot Net (stay tuned this month for a big-time Action Button revival! lots of cool stuff coming; bookmark it asap, etc); he lives in tokyo; friend his band on myspace!

Illustration by Harvey James. Vote for his shirt, 2012 The Ape~Ocalypse' at Design By Humans!

You have the option to click play on the video below and completely spoil your sexual experience in Dragon Age: Origins, or you can simply turn away and go about your business. The scene below came after hours of my City Elf rogue wooing and coddling the human rogue Leliana.

Considering the amount of crap BioWare caught for Mass Effect's sex scene, one can't blame them for leaving the tops on. Besides, once the PC version hits tomorrow I'm sure some enterprising modder will figure out how to get their tops off, as it's probably easier than removing a real bra. That's why I keep scissors on my bedside table.

Again, spoiler! Don't blame us if you click the shiny, candy-flavored button. And if you want more Dragon Age: Origins, be sure to stop by tomorrow for our full review of the PlayStation 3 version.