When the Wii was about to be released, I could not have been a more jazzed little Nintendo fanboy. My bros and I were in high school and had loved Nintendo for all our lives, as many of us of course have. With well-produced videos and coy press releases, Nintendo slowly revealed info about the console and made wild and lofty promises about the mystery codenamed “Revolution”. It totally worked on me. For two nights and one day, I stayed in front of the Best Buy in my town in a tent. I was second in line and the employees leaving work Friday night told us we were crazy and to go home. They opened the store the next day to a line around the building. READ MORE
Every gamer has their reasons for enjoying the medium of video games. We’ve always been drawn to games as a narrative experience. Sometimes you get so enraptured in a game that you won’t even notice what’s wrong with it mechanically. Then, when you’re halfway through a game and enjoying the heck out of it, someone says something like, “Doesn’t the combat get a little repetitive?” Then the glass shatters in your head and you realize that yeah, it does get a little repetitive. And that climbing the terrain was annoying. And that the gunplay is a little off. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception could have been one of those games, but it isn’t at all. READ MORE
As I’ve mentioned many times in the several venues on this site through which you can hear me pontificate and whine about video games, I manage a video game store. From behind that counter, I see every type of gamer go by. There is the dude who wears a long black coat, fake fangs and a ponytail, and only buys Square Enix games. There’s the young asian girl who would be pretty attractive if she didn’t wear a foxtail out in public. And there’s a disturbingly large subset of people who come into my store, buy Madden or Call of Duty and leave, only to return when the next entry in one of these series is released. They terrify me. READ MORE
If you listened to this week’s podcast, you’ll know that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Batman: Arkham City. Don’t get me wrong, the game is entirely competent and I had a good time with it. It’s a great action game, but to me it wasn’t a great Batman game.Then I realized it’s actually a great adaptation of a Batman. Just not my Batman. Whose Batman is it? Keep reading. READ MORE
Batman: Arkham City came out this week, and gamers everywhere have retreated into their own caves to finish the game before Kotaku can spoil anything else about its plot. I was running the midnight launch at GamePorium, so I couldn’t help but give in to the hype and bring it home that night to put in a couple hours before passing out. So far it’s about what I expected, but I haven’t been blown away by it. If you’ve played the first game, you know exactly what you’re in for. What I want to see is some game companies shaking things up with comic games. READ MORE
