But to everyone who might be kicking back, lighting up and/or grilling out this weekend - Francophones, we realize you're waiting on Bastille Day - we start with a roundup of our reporting highlights, led by the Summer of Gaming package. McMike also got a look inside Blizzard and Starcraft.

Hey, wasn't Frank O'Phone a reliever for the New York Mets? I digress. The week in original coverage.

Summer of Gaming
Sink Or Swim? The Game Designer's Conundrum
Kotaku's 2009 Summer Reading List
Kotaku's Summer of Gaming

Blizzard/Starcraft
No LAN Play For Starcraft II
Three Things We Weren't Allowed To Photograph At Blizzard HQ
Ogle Blizzard HQ's Epically Mounted Orc
StarCraft II Beta Planned To Last 4 To 6 Months
What's Inside Blizzard's Library?
StarCraft II Hands-On: Round Three

Features
How To Name A Video Game Studio - And Hopefully Get It Right
In Defense Of The Classic Controller

Previews, Reviews, Hands-On and Impressions
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen Review: Clench The Difference
Battlefield Heroes Review: The Great (Cartoon) War
Frankenreview: The Conduit
Mecho Wars Micro-Review: Landians Versus Wingians... Really?
Sony Expands "Official Licensing Program"
Let's Take A PlayStation Home Survey!
Captain Blood Preview: Errol Flynn He Ain't - But He'll Do
Dreamkiller Impressions: "Emotional Painkiller" Doesn't Sound As Cool
The Conduit Review: A Bland, But Enjoyable Shooter
Death To Spies 2: Moment of Truth Preview: SMERSH is a fun word to say
Bit.Trip: Core Preview: Thumb-Aching Good Fun
Gunstar Heroes Micro-Review: The Perfect Shot
MySims Agents Preview: Spy vs. Sims
Fight Night Round 4 Review: Boxing Beautiful

Rumor
Foot Controlled Silver Surfer Game?

News
PS3 Bundle Includes MGS4, Killzone 2

Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma Premium Box Pack Premium Price
How Many Hours People Play Nintendo's Wii Games (Sorry, Donkey Kong)
Square Enix Brings Hammer Down On French Retailer
Midway Sale To WB Clears Court, Staff At Two Studios Given Notice
Grand Theft IV Auto Goes Discount In Japan
Xbox 360 Game Creation Tool Kodu Now Live - Got Any Ideas?
Dave Perry: How Gaikai Goes Beyond OnLive, Could Spread Gaming Everywhere
Square Enix Mystery Solved - The Four Warriors Of Light
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Dated And Detailed For Japan
Damnation Developers Laid Off
Nintendo Patents WarioWare Take On Othello
Carmack: Just About Everything id Makes Coming To iPhone
Doom Resurrection: The iPhone Game That Nearly Wasn't
Would Natal Enable User-Generated Mo-Cap?

Kotaku Reader
K6

Swag and Toys
Wish I Had A Record Player
Kotaku Kard Man
Check Out This Awesome Akuma Statue

At the Half
2009 Is Half-Done: What's Been Great So Far?

Facts and Figures
How Many Hours People Play Each Wii Sonic Game, Music Games Too
The Ten Most Avidly-Played Wii Games In America (As Of July 1)

Sent in by a Best Buy employee, and confirmed by other BB employees, it's an 80GB PS3 bundled with copies of two of the biggest games on the system: Metal Gear Solid 4 and Killzone 2. All that for the asking price of a standard PS3, $400.

It's one hell of a bundle. It's like getting a Wii with Twilight Princess and Mario Galaxy, or a 360 with Gears 2 and Halo 3. But perhaps more importantly, it's also one hell of a saving; perhaps Best Buy need to clear out their stock of 80GB PS3s for oh, I don't know, a new PS3?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an action adventure game based on the movie of the same name, telling the story of the return of Megatron and the rise of an even more diabolical enemy from the dawn of time. After a sub-par product from Traveller's Tales for the first film, Activision handed over development duties for the sequel to California-based Luxoflux, the team behind the video game adaptation of Kung Fu Panda. While the new developer brings much to the table, including robust multiplayer on top of the required single player mode, certain aspects of the game are a real pain in the ass.

Let's tense up and roll out!

Loved
Big, Beautiful Bots: No matter what my opinion might be on the Michael Bay-bots versus the more traditional designs, I have to admit that Luxoflux has done an admirable job of recreating the movie machines for the video game adaptation. The developer knows this, kicking off every mission with a crane shot of your character so you can appreciate all the work that went into creating him before the firefight begins.

Heavy Metal Combat: Revenge of the Fallen does an admirable job of depicting giant-robot-on-giant-robot combat. Bullets, missiles, and fists all pack a seriously satisfying punch, and each robot has a different set of ranged weapons and special abilities than makes going back through missions with different characters to try and top your score a worthwhile endeavor. The combat may not be perfect, but it works for me.

Pimping Your Rides: An upgrade system allows you to convert Energon based on how well you complete your mission objectives into power enhancements for your entire team. The selection of upgrade choices is a bit strange – you can power up your melee damage but not your ranged, for instance – but the system does allow for the player to tweak their abilities based on how they prefer to play.

Massive and Multiplayer: Many licensed games are developed with single player in mind, tacking on a multiplayer component at the last minute to add to the feature listing on the back of the box. It feels as if Luxoflux reversed that trend, creating an enjoyable multiplayer experience and then adding the story mode as an afterthought. The multiplayer mode contains more characters (with more on the way in the form of DLC) and quite frankly more excitement than the single player experience. Sure, you'll have to deal with listening to a bunch of early teen boys cussing up a storm…I guess that really isn't that much different than any other online console game.

Unlockables: Despite the fact that I already own all of them on DVD, the unlockable episodes of the original television series may have contributed somewhat to the relative lateness of this review. Just saying.

Hated
Triggered Transformation: Luxoflux has managed to take the one aspect of the Transformers that every other Transformers game has gotten right, and do it wrong. Press a button, and you're a car. Easy, right? Instead, the developers map transforming to the right trigger. Squeeze the trigger and you are a vehicle, with the amount of pressure you apply affecting your speed. Release the trigger and you are a robot. It's the mechanical equivalent of clenching your ass cheeks, and while the special moves you can perform when popping out of vehicle mode can make the release somewhat enjoyable, all in all it's just embarrassing.

We'll Call Them Vehicle Physics: Revenge of the Fallen plays fast and loose with its vehicle physics. Ground-based vehicles aren't so bad, with physics akin to your more arcadey racing games. Flying vehicles, on the other hand, are simply sad. Planes bounce off buildings in comical fashion, and maneuverability is quite limited, with even the simplest of aerial maneuvers out of reach thanks to the simplistic controls. Perhaps it is a matter of game play balance, but car should never be able to keep pace with a jet. An airplane moving at 60 miles per hour is an airplane on the ground.

Welcome To Dullsville: I suppose if I our planet actually did have giant robots doing battle in the streets on a regular basis, we'd probably pack up all of our interesting scenery and leave town as well. While the robots in Revenge of the Fallen look spectacular, the environments simply feel like a collection of random structures with different skins on them, which I suppose is what they are. There's just no real character to the setting.

The Story Unfolding: I somehow managed to avoid seeing the film before playing the game, which might be why the story feels like a disjointed series of occurrences rather than a full, compelling narrative. Balancing telling the tale of the game while trying not to delve to deeply into the plot of a film is a tricky maneuver, and one Luxoflux didn't manage to pull off gracefully.

Required Missions: Sam has been whisked away to a far off land where he could be in great danger! We should rescue him, but first, we need to clear the Decepticons out of one particular area, because we haven't unlocked the rescuing Sam mission yet. Unlocking missions in Revenge of the Fallen requires that you complete a certain number of missions previously, which leads to telling your best human buddy to cool his jets while you rescue generic power plant A and B from the enemy.

Of all of the failings of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the transformation feature is the most damning. It's the main focus of the property, and it deserves to be done correctly. Perhaps my main issue is that you can't simply transform and then pan around the vehicle, admiring the details. Instead, triggering a transformation also triggers movement, so you never get the chance. Instead of alternate modes, they are simply travel forms that disappear when they come to a stop. Call me crazy, but I'd just prefer a Transformers game where I can press a button once and BAM - I'm a Camaro.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an odd title that manages to succeed in categories that licensed games generally fail, while floundering in areas that should have been easy to get right. It's a movie tie-in that excels at multiplayer yet flails where the actual story is concerned. I'd use the term ass-backwards, but those muscles need a little rest.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was developed by Luxoflux and published by Activision for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on June 23rd. Different versions from different developers exist for the Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, and PC. Retails for $59.99 USD. Reviewed the Xbox 360 version. Played through Autobot and Decepticon story modes to completion, and played multiple multiplayer matches across all game types.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

It includes a soundtrack CD, an original accessory set and a special sleeve. Those who pre-order can get a "Starter Set" that includes a Ninja Gaiden guide book.

Names carry weight. They give a group of people and the products they create an identity. For companies like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega and others, those names are associated with memories, even if those words have little meaning.

Sega, for example, is simply a portmanteau of the words "service" and "games." Nintendo, officially, a direct translation from the Japanese to mean "leave luck to heaven." And Sony, well, that's a fabricated word, a twist on the Latin word "sonus" and the familiar "sonny."

But how did video game developers decide upon the likes of Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Harmonix, and the recently re-christened Visceral Games? And what the heck is a Capybara, anyway? We asked game development studio founders to explain themselves.

The studio that started us wondering just how one settles on an identity was the young Capybara Games, a Toronto-based independent group of initially a dozen game developers. The team most recently had a double showing at E3 2009, with Critter Crunch for the PlayStation Network and Might & Magic Clash of Heroes for the Nintendo DS.

The studio is named for the world's largest rodent, the capybara, a relative of the guinea pig that can weigh more than 200 pounds. How exactly does one decide to identify oneself with a giant South American mammal?

"Unfortunately, with 12 very different opinions on what makes a cool name, coming to a unanimous decision was impossible," Nathan Vella, Capybara co-founder and Art Director said. "We bitched at each other for far too long before deciding on a fair and democratic process. Names of varying quality, from ‘surprisingly awesome' to ‘literally the worst name ever' were tossed out by members of the group, and each person chose their Top 3 from the pool."

No one, however, decided the name "Capybara" was "surprisingly awesome."

"In the end, Capybara was unanimously everyone's second or third choice… and so it won the name election," Vella said. "It was the name everyone thought was 'ok' but didn't really want to win. That's democracy for you... you're not picking the best, you're picking the least-worst."

There was an unintended metaphor in Capybara's "least-worst" choice, Vella says.

"At this point we had not yet realized the irony or accuracy that we were naming our 'guinea pig' of a company after the world's largest guinea pig. In hindsight we totally should have caught on to that earlier."

The developer informally calls itself Capy, as seen in its logo. But it employs a "modern day mustache hero" known as Hank Hudson as its official mascot, not a capybara—though Vella jokes it has flirted with taking an Argentinean agency up on its offer to open a capybara farm.

Another developer that didn't go with its first choice for a studio name was Resistance and Ratchet & Clank developers Insomniac Games.

Before the Burbank, California area developer shipped its first game—the first-person shooter Disruptor for the original PlayStation—it went by a trio of other names: Planet X Software, Outzone Software and Xtreme Software. That last name almost stuck, as the company had already incorporated itself as Xtreme prior to announcing Disruptor. Then it found out someone else, a database company, was already using it.

"We only had a few weeks to come up with something new," says Ted Price, president of what we now call Insomniac Games. "So we hung a whiteboard in the office and began writing down everything we could think of. There must have been 200 names on the list."

Some of the rejects? Ragnarok, Black Sun, Ice-9 Games and Blue Moon Turtle.

"Seriously, Blue Moon Turtle," Price admitted. "However, every name we liked was already being used by someone else. We actually got permission from Kurt Vonnegut's estate to use Ice-9 but someone else was already using it without permission."

Faced with the prospect of launching Disruptor anonymously, a last minute suggestion arrived—Insomniac.

"It was one of those rare moments when everyone looked at each other and said 'Yeah, that works,'" according to Price. "It definitely described us at the time. We sure weren't sleeping much."

From our discussions with game development studio founders, it seems like the best piece of advice they can impart about naming one's studio is to check early (and often) to see if someone else is using your descriptor of choice.

Such is the case with Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and, when it first formed, "music software technology."

Eran Egozy, Harmonix co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, says that he and general manager Alex Rigopulos debated over a key aspect of the developer's name, whether to spell it Harmonics or Harmonix.

"The 'ix' ending won," Egozy says. "Hey, it was the mid-90s." To be clear, the company's full name is, in Egozy's words, the "somewhat awkward" Harmonix Music Systems.

"Unfortunately, we did not check to see that harmonix.com was already taken when we named the company," Egozy says. "So our domain name is harmonixmusic.com. If we had checked, maybe the company would be called something else now."

One video game maker that did get an opportunity to change its identity was Dead Space and Dante's Inferno developer Visceral Games, once known by the more sterile EA Redwood Shores or, unfortunately and informally, EARS.

Glen Schofield, general manager of the newly re-branded Visceral Games explains.

"There were a bunch of names we threw away," he says, culling hundreds of ideas and concepts solicited from Redwood Shores team members. "I got tons of great ones but I really wanted a name that had a real meaning for our studio. Visceral just worked perfect as it is a term we use all the time to describe the feeling we want in our combat. It captured our more mature or action type games we make."

The developer's very web site is behind an age-gate, highlighting its mature focus.

The name change had support from the top, with president of EA Games label Frank Gibeau and CEO John Riccitiello supporting a more autonomous model, already seen at individually named EA developers like Criterion, BioWare and Pandemic.

"They welcomed the idea of studios having a distinct identity," Schofield says. "Once I mentioned it to Frank he kept asking me when we were announcing the name. He wanted it changed right away, it was pretty funny. But obviously once you have a name you then have months of creative and legal wrangling before you can go live with it."

Visceral's coming out party, as it were, was a little different from start up studios who sometimes choose their names under the gun. It had time to plan, hire an outside brand agency, and build a style guide for the new identity. Then it went public with a studio-wide meeting, press release, site launch and a tasty visceral treat.

"We painted the walls and hung up mounted artwork from our games," Schofield says. "We had posters, decals and a shirt for everyone. There was even a huge Visceral skull cake waiting. It's the only time we've ever had to have a cake maker sign an NDA!"

And that was that. "When the meeting was over the entire place was now changed and we were ready to move on as Visceral Games."

That sense of identity is something that Uncharted developers Naughty Dog share, with employees (positively) referred to as "the Dogs." The explanation for that choice is much simpler than some of the other stories we'd heard.

The company, formerly known as JAM—hey, it was the mid-80s—when it shipped its first game Ski Crazed for the Apple II, was changed to Naughty Dog the next decade. Founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin were "dog lovers," with Rubin often taking his puppy to work.

That continues today, with current co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra giving their dogs a second home at the Naughty Dog offices.

And the names of their dogs? Pogo and Trumpet. How those names came to be, we'll just have to wonder.

[Photo Credit]

(The following stats are pulled from the usage data shared by more than two million Wii users through the system's Nintendo Channel. For more information about how we calculate these total playtimes, check out this week's earlier Wii stats post)

Average Per-Gamer Playing Time For Nintendo's First-Party Wii Games (as of July 1)
(Release Dates in Parentheses)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (March 2008) — 68 hours, 51 minutes
Animal Crossing: City Folk (November 2008) — 54 hours, 16 minutes
Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn (November 2007) – 46 hours, 40 minutes
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (November 2006) — 46 hours, 9 minutes
Wii Sports (November 2006) — 35 hours, 47 minutes
Mario Kart Wii (April 2008) – 31 hours, 40 minutes
Super Mario Galaxy (November 2007) — 27 hours, 37 minutes
Super Paper Mario (April 2007) — 24 hours, 13 minutes
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (August 2007) 21 hours, 37 minutes
Mario Party 8 (May 2007) — 20 hours, 39 minutes
Pokemon Battle Revolution (June 2007) — 20 hours, 2 minutes
Wii Fit (May 2008) — 18 hours, 18 minutes
Mario Super Sluggers (August 2008) — 17 hours, 39 minutes
Excite Truck – (November 2006) 12 hours, 39 minutes
Battalion Wars 2 (October 2007) — 12 hours, 23 minutes
WarioWare: Smooth Moves (January 2007) — 11 hours, 39 minutes
Excitebots: Trick Racing (April 2009) – 10 hours 56 minutes
Wii Play (February 2007) — 10 hours, 7 minutes
New Play Control! Pikmin (March 2009) – 9 hours, 44 minutes
Endless Ocean (January 2008) — 9 hours, 41 minutes
Wii Music (October 2008) — 9 hours, 17 minutes
Wario Land: Shake It! (September 2008) — 8 hours, 47 minutes
Punch-Out!! (May 2009) – 7 hours, 55 minutes
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (June 2007) — 6 hours, 56 minutes
Mario Strikers Charged (July 2007) — 6 hours, 18 minutes
New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis (March 2009) – 6 hours, 14 minutes
Link's Crossbow Training (November 2007) - 4 hours, 55 minutes
Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast (October 2007) — 4 hours, 41 minutes
New Play Control! Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (May 2009) – No Data Listed

The premise is simple: take Battlefield, then make it absolutely free to play, by stripping some elements out and reserving them for paying customers, while supporting the whole thing via front-end advertising.

Such a move is like walking a knife's edge. Make too much free and there's no point running it as a product. Make too much paid content and you'll piss people off who want to play for free.

Question is, then, can Battlefield Heroes manage to walk that line?

LOVED
War Is Not Hell, It Is Gorgeous: Battlefield Heroes' design initially drew "TF2 clone" accusations, but those are unfounded. This game has a look all of its own, part Max Headroom, part, well, Wind Waker. It's charming, it's attractive. Even the theme song is catchy, and we haven't stopped whistling it all week long.

Learner's Permit: Being a Battlefield title, vehicular control is a big part of whether the game succeeds or fails, and Battlefield Heroes manages just fine. Land vehicles are quick and responsive (the tank's power has been reduced in exchange for added speed), while planes can even be controlled semi-successfully with a mouse.

Money Can't Buy You…Poisoned Knives: Had EA restricted certain special powers and weapons to paying customers, this game would be an instant failure. Thankfully, that's not the case. Money can only buy you a few things; mostly avatar clothing, along with a few upgrades that do things like level you up faster. Everything else is paid for via XP, gained only through playtime and accomplishing missions, and while paying customers can get access to higher level weapons faster, they're not locked out for those playing for free. If you think that's slightly unfair, remember, you're playing for free.

Walk Right In, Sit Right Down: Battlefield Heroes is all about jumping right into the action, and once in, staying there. To play, you just visit the site, login, then hit a giant yellow button that says "PLAY NOW". You'll be automatically whisked away to a server. Then, while in the game, respawn times are kept to an absolute minimum, at most 6-8 seconds, but sometimes only 3-4.

Smooth As Ice: We played Battlefield Heroes for a week, and in that whole time, only once encountered connection or server issues. Considering the game is still technically in beta, that's not too shabby.

Spongeheads: There's only a single one-shot kill in this game, and that's if you're run over by a land vehicle. Everything else, from sniper headshots to grenades to dynamite, only takes off part of a player's health. It means that you're never blindsided, and never killed off instantly because of something you never saw coming.

HATED
Spongeheads: Yet this is a double-edged sword. It's great that you can't instantly be killed by a camping sniper from across the map. But if you're the camping sniper – or anyone else tricky enough to lay something like an ambush – it's frustrating as hell. Vehicle damage could also do with a tune-up, as it shouldn't take 3-4 shots from a tank to kill infantry. 2-3 would do just fine.

Matchmaker: Like we said, Battlefield Heroes is all about jumping into the action. Which in some ways is great, but in others, quite frustrating. We only want to play vehicle maps, for example. Just vehicle maps. But there's no way of selecting this. You can prefer to play vehicle maps, but when you hit PLAY NOW, you're automatically taken to a server, and half the time, it's for an infantry map. Nothankyou. Favourite servers can be bookmarked, but we'd love a server list option where we can filter for specific maps, or map types.

Class Warfare: Maybe we've played too much Team Fortress 2 of late, but if a map is stacked with heavies, and we join as a heavy, we'd love to be able to respawn as a commando. Mix things up. But you can't. Because when you create a character, you're bound to that character, as is all the XP you accrue while playing as it. You can create additional characters, sure, but you can only play as one at a time.

There's just something about the mix of clean, cartoon visuals and refined multiplayer mechanics that make Battlefield Heroes an absolute blast. The fact you can play it effectively without paying a cent probably helps. Series purists may turn their noses up at the new visual style and slightly more "arcade" feel of the game, but that's fine. For those people, there's alway other Battlefield games. That they have to pay for.

For everyone else, though, Battlefield Heroes is a fun, accessible shooter that retains the best strategic elements of the series while making the game appealing to a broader range of people. If EA can add a few more matchmaking/server options to the game, Battlefield Heroes could be one of the sleeper hits of the year on PC.

Battlefield Heroes was developed by DICE, and published by EA for the PC. Launched on June 25, and is free to play, worldwide. Created two characters, a level 7 Gunner and a level 10 Commando, in the Royal Army.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The company, going by the name la société SAKURA, operates both a store in Paris and an online outlet, both of which specialise in Anime/Manga/Japanese gaming merchandise. The basis of the lawsuit is that Square "denounces SAKURA for the commercialization of products counterfeiting Square Enix's FINAL FANTASY and FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST trademarks and copyrights to the FINAL FANTASY series".

Which is all well and good! Square rightfully own the IP, and that pirated junk is no good for anybody. But you've got to wonder, why go after a single French retailer instead of the people manufacturing and distributing the goods in the first place?

First they sent children's drawings close to Father's Day.

Then they sent a record right before Independence Day.

I assume 2K's next BioShock 2 mailing will arrive, unmarked on.... Labor Day?

The sale to Warner Brothers is expected to close in the next 10 days, according to Midway spokesperson Geoffrey Mogilner. That will put the Mortal Kombat license, the This Is Vegas project, Midway's sports and arcade brands as well as the company's Chicago and Seattle studios under the WB umbrella.

Among the studios and properties not part of WB's acquisition are Midway's Newcastle and San Diego studios. The San Diego team has been working on a new TNA game, according to Mogilner, but neither the team nor the wrestling license is part of the WB deal. As reported on Joystiq earlier today, the team at San Diego, as required by law, was given 60 days' notice on Wednesday. Wheelman studio Newcastle had already received similar notice, though Mogilner was uncertain how long ago that had been provided. Newscastle has been working on the new game Necessary Force. The spokesman said it is "entirely possible" that those studios could be acquired, but no bids are on the table.

One update about Midway's sports lines: The Blitz brand is part of the Warner Brothers deal, but Midway's NBA Ballers and NFL Blitz games, which were a product of expired Midway deals with pro sports leagues, are not.

Kotaku reported WB's interest in Midway in April. The media giant's $33 million bid succeeded after an obligatory waiting period saw no other formal suitors, according to the LA Times.

Midway is one of the original video game developers and publishers in the industry, one of the few active companies that was making games before the rise of home consoles.

The Conduit has everything going for it. It's an exclusive first-person shooter for a console that generally only sees second-rate ports. It features a compelling story of conspiracy, betrayal, and alien invasion on the streets of Washington D.C. And it also delivers a robust multiplayer experience on a platform that isn't exactly known for its only capabilities. What could possibly go wrong?

Let us channel the assembled game critics through The Conduit and see what comes out the other end.

Giant Bomb The game's story is your typical alien-filled and shadowy government conspiracy that doesn't really go anywhere. All you really need to know is that the bug-like alien troops come out of glowing portals called conduits. So a lot of the gameplay tasks you with fighting your way up to a conduit, and then shutting it with a grenade. You'll also have to pull out the all-seeing eye, a glowing orb that acts as your primary way to interact with computers and as a beam that reveals hidden objects in the world. Sometimes you'll use this to unlock doors that block your forward progress. Other times, you'll use it to open up secret pathways to additional weaponry, disarm normally invisible mines, and so on.

GameSpot The real draw in The Conduit is the outstanding control scheme. Conceptually, it's nothing special. You aim your gun with the remote, walk around with the analog stick, and perform various moves by hitting buttons or performing specific motions. However, the execution is nearly flawless. You can aim with pinpoint precision, easily lining up headshots from across the screen or spinning around to cut down a critter creeping up behind you. With more than 10 different actions to keep track of, it can be difficult to find the ideal controller setup, but you can customize the controls to suit your play style.

Game Informer Online play works better than I expected on the Wii, which is to say that it's slightly better than what PC gamers had circa 1998. Matchmaking works well enough, and latency issues are present but not catastrophic. An interesting take on free-for-all deathmatching, dubbed Bounty Hunter mode, subtly changes the game by only scoring points for players who have wronged you in the past, giving you an onscreen objective arrow to the current location of your most bitter foe. Beyond that, the old standbys like capture-the-flag and team deathmatch round out a capable online experience.

Gamervision High Voltage has done a fantastic job showing what is possible with the Wii when a developer actually commits itself to the console. Sadly, the answer isn't as much as you'd hope. Claims that the graphics would reach that of early Xbox 360 titles was a bit of an overstatement, and the game is likely outperformed in some areas by a number of last-generation titles. Some enemy character models look fantastic, and nearly reach Xbox 360 levels, but others look downright muddy. It has that same "next-gen shine" that Perfect Dark: Zero took advantage of, but environments can often look rough. For a Wii game, it's likely one of the best looking, but saying much more is really stretching the truth.

Nintendo World Report This is the paradox of The Conduit. Its disappointing single-player component seems hastily-designed with its cookie-cutter plot, limited range of enemies, and myriad elements copied wholesale from popular recent first-person shooters. On the other hand, its multiplayer component is great, matching online shooters on other platforms feature-for-feature and providing a no-hassle experience that's among the best on Wii. Hopefully High Voltage will learn from The Conduit's shortcomings for their next game, but for now, Wii owners will have to settle for something very good instead of truly great.

Nice to see everyone agrees.

(The following stats are pulled from the usage data shared by more than two million Wii users through the system's Nintendo Channel. For more information about how we calculate these total playtimes, check out yesterday's Wii stats post)

Average Per-Gamer Playing Time For Wii Sonic Games (as of July 1)
(Release Dates in Parentheses)
Sonic Unleashed (November 2008) – 14 hours, 16 minutes
Sonic and the Black Knight (March 2009) – 12 hours, 3 minutes
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (November 2007): 11 hours, 25 minutes
Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity (January 2008) – 11 hours, 1 minute
Sonic and the Secret Rings (February 2007) – 10 hours, 24 minutes

Average Per-Gamer Playing Time For Wii Music Games (as of July 1)
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (October 2007) — 57 hours, 42 minutes
Rock Band 2 (December 2008) — 39 hours, 6 minutes
Guitar Hero: World Tour (October 2008) — 31 hours, 41 minutes
Rock Band (June 2008) — 30 hours, 23 minutes
Guitar Hero Metallica (March 2009) — 14 hours, 38 minutes
Guitar Hero Aersomith (June 2008) — 12 hours, 50 minutes
Wii Music (October 2008) — 9 hours, 17 minutes
Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore 2 (November 2008) — 8 hours, 54 minutes
High School Musical 3 Senior Year: Sing It! (February 2009) — 7 hours, 28 minutes
Disney: Sing It (October 2008) — 5 hours, 54 minutes
Samba De Amigo (September 2008) – 4 hours, 2 minutes

Mario can swim. Sonic would not. A jump in the water used to kill the anti-heroes of Grand Theft Auto. Altair, the deadly hero of Assassin's Creed couldn't get wet. His successor can.

Large bodies of water are fatal in inFamous, act as pools of quicksand in the new Bionic Commando and are just off-limits in games as wide-ranging as Animal Crossing and everything beyond the first 30 minutes of undersea adventure BioShock.

Problem: Swimming Can Be Boring
There are smart and serious design reasons for the omission of swimming in so many top games. But before even thinking about those, a fair assessment is that video game swimming can be dull. There may be fans of Super Mario Bros.' World 2-2 and the opportunity it affords players to throw fireballs underwater at squids. There may be fans of swimming in Metal Gears and Zeldas. Swimming, though, isn't what carries most games, and it's frequently a source of gamer frustration.

"Swimming is not as fast as running or jumping or flying, and is generally not as fun," Darren Bridges, a game designer at Sucker Punch, the studio behind the swimming-not-permitted hits inFamous and Sly Cooper. "The gameplay [for swimming] is often bland: mashing a single button in the best cases, and just pointing the stick in a direction at the worst."

Pete Wanat, veteran producer of many games, including Scarface: The World Is Yours, backed Bridges up. Scarface, which was primarily played on land as an open-world crime adventure in the style of a GTA, allowed swimming — until players got too far adrift and were chewed by a shark. But it also gave players the option to have hero Tony Montana stay dry and summon a boat. That ability, he wrote via e-mail "hopefully kept players in the action and not doing the 300 medley in Miami Harbor trying to reach the nearest dock." That was a merciful decision, explained Wanat: "Because in almost every game, swimming long distances is ultra boring."

So un-fun is a lot of video game swimming that developers who plan to include it often cut it. "Most [development] teams want their character to do everything under the sun, but reality kicks in and they start tearing out the ability to dance and swim pretty fast," veteran game designer Dave Perry told Kotaku. "Many games have you instantly drown. Plenty just let you go up to your ankles. Some let you swim off into oblivion with nothing out there, and then you have to swim back. If there's no good reason to swim (nothing to find or do), then it's a waste of valuable team attention, so that's why so many teams just trash the idea and focus on something more important instead."

Swimming Bans Help Game Creators
Maybe many games are better off without empowering heroes to do the backstroke or the doggy-paddle.

Developers say that omitting swimming helps them. Making a dive in the water deadly can add a core element of the game's difficulty, no matter how absurd that element may be to the game's fiction — or how much the fiction must be stretched to accommodate it. Really, should water barricade a bunch of athletic freedom-fighters and animals?

"Fictionally speaking, it really doesn't make sense to have water as a boundary in the Sly Cooper games," Bridges admitted. "There, I said it. The three main characters are Sly the Raccoon, Bentley the Turtle, and Murray the Hippo. Real raccoons are decent swimmers, and turtles and hippos spend the majority of their lives in water, but our heroes had to swear off water as part of their transition to
the video game universe."

Capcom's Bionic Commando producer, Ben Judd, stressed to Kotaku that the metal arm of his game's hero is just too heavy to keep its hero — a guy who can survive multiple bullet shots and steep falls — afloat.

That's the story explanation.

The real reason they limit swimming from games like Sly and Bionic Commando is to add an aspect of difficulty to their games. Heroes like Sly or inFamous' Cole McGrath are so strong that other obstacles won't do. "Cole and Sly are both excellent climbers," said Bridges, "So tipping a car sideways to block an alley entrance is not enough to keep them out." He noted that "water is often a better alternative than other boundary options, such as 'Steep Mountains,' 'Giant Walls,' 'Flaming Lava Fields,' or 'Infinite Cliffs.'"

Judd described how water was used to add challenge to Bionic Commando: "With Bionic Commando, we needed something that could be used as an obstacle that would both limit where Spencer could go but also prove to be a danger so that if he fell into it he could die… early levels have very few 'pit traps' at all. If you fall, you just need to climb back up in early levels. Around the middle of the game, we use water as a device that people want to avoid. But if they do fall into it, there is a small window in which they can hook onto something nearby and avoid death because we didn't want any insta-kills so early in the game. Toward the end of the game, there are more tried and true pitfalls that will kill you if miss the swing."

And if water won't kill a games' heroes, stuff in the water might, like that Scarface shark. Or, as Drew Murray, lead designer of PlayStation 3 first-person shooter Resistance 2, reminded Kotaku, there's the Fury, a classic deadly-swimming-enemy type seen in that game: "The Fury went through a number of iterations, from its initial design as a 'Chimeran walrus' that would be fast and deadly in the water but slow and lumbering on land (with arm-mounted guns to boot!), to our final design as a purely aquatic enemy that essentially acted like a sign next to a toxic lake reading 'Swimming Here Is Hazardous to Your Health!"" he said. "We also used them in several places as timing-puzzle challenges for swimming sections, where the player would have to time their swimming based on the speed and location of furies in the water."

Just Add Swimming
There are so many reasons not to have swimming in games, that the addition of it can be a feature worth promoting. It's a literal game-changer, as players who transitioned from the death-water of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the pearl-diving-permissible depths of GTA: San Andreas can attest.

To add swimming, developers need to draw more graphics, tweak their camera system, add animations and find that elusive fun in video game breaststroke. Some have determined all that works' worthwhile.

The Assassin's Creed series is making the move from non-swimmable to swimmable with this fall's sequel. The sequel's lead game designer, Patrick Plourde, told Kotaku, "We listened to the feedback of the players who were pretty vocal that the fact that that Altair couldn't swim wasn't feeling right for a master Assassin – they were right. Also our new setting which included Venice has a much stronger need to interact with water. So that explains why swimming wasn't in Assassin's Creed but is in Assassin's Creed II."

Swimming wasn't available in the first game, Plourde said, simply because the team knew water wasn't going to be an important enough part of the game's terrain to make getting in it worth the development energy. The threat of water wound up shaping one port-based assassination mission in that first game, forcing Altair to hopscotch across moored boats. In Venice, new Assassin Ezio will have to have other hazards to worry about than a bad soaking.

Just Remove Swimming
For all the nice things that swimming might add to a game, it's not a must. Some designers have de-emphasized it. See the drop in swimming content from Super Mario Sunshine to Super Mario Galaxy.

Others are removing swimming completely. That's happening in the next Ratchet & Clank. That series' creative director, Brian Allgeier of Insomniac, explained how swimming had served Ratchet well in the past but proved a reasonable omission for the next adventure, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time: "On the Ratchet & Clank games, we included swimming as another means of exploration and felt that it rounded out a nice set of moves for our main character," he said. "Ironically, water was also used at times as a level boundary along with lava, toxic goo, and fall-to-death areas to prevent people from exploring too far. Sometimes we've used swimmable and non-swimmable water together. For instance in Quest for Booty, we had a lagoon area in the Hoolefar Island level where Ratchet could swim, but further out there was deadly water that bounded the level. For A Crack in Time we've decided to change course and not include swimming. We're putting a lot of new gameplay features and modes in this game and decided that swimming wasn't Ratchet's strongest suit. Plus we also wanted to avoid the confusion of swimmable water versus non-swimmable water. So he won't be swimming in the latest game in favor of Hoverboots, Clank time gameplay, new gadgets, and a lot more."

Who would miss swimming in a game, anyway? It's not like Insomniac is cutting the ability to hover, shoot cartoon weapons or smack enemies with a big wrench. That's what the people pay for.

As 2009 turns to summer for many of us, and as you dip your toes in the pool or step toward a crashing beach wave, enjoy this one easy thing you can do that so many video game characters can't.

Swimming can be a chore in games, a hassle for gamers and game makers. But wouldn't we all rather swing giant hammers and double-jump over cars instead?

But loaded down with absurd design decisions that have you playing as a commander of the Wingians taking on an army of the Landians, can Mecho Wars solid design make up for its silly aesthetic?

Loved
Advance Wars On iTunes:The iPhone and iPod Touch need more strategy games. Of all the genres available for a developer to tap into, you'd think it would be obvious what a perfect fit this one is for the touchy portable. Mecho Wars is one of the few out there and its heavy use of the design and mechanics of popular Nintendo franchise Advance Wars makes it the best.

Environmental Effects: I would have been happy with a straight-up Advance Wars clone on the iPhone, but the developers added one little twist: A changing environment. Every turn is measured in hours, not days, and when you slip past midnight the plentiful water of most levels freezes over allowing you to march troops across it. Better still, come morning the ice melts and all of the units still out on the ice fall into the water and are immediately destroyed. It's a minor change that can have a major impact on strategy.

Hated
Art Style: I just can't stand the art style of the game. The unit types are so whimsical that it's impossible to tell at a glance what exactly they are supposed to be, and more important what sorts of attacks they have. That's a major issue with strategy games of this type. Better to be bland than indiscernible in a strategy title.

Mecho Wars, despite its over-the-top art style, is a great little game for the iPhone. It is slightly too short, and without the inclusion of multiplayer, that could be a deal breaker. Fortunately, I'm told that the developers plan to add multiplayer to the game as a free update in the near future.

If you're into strategy titles and need a fix of Advance Wars, Mecho Wars is the best thing currently out for the Touch and iPhone.

Mecho Wars was developed and published by Oyaji for the iPhone and iPod Touch on June 13. Retails for $4.99. Played through the campaign and all challenges.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Tsui was at this week's IGDA demo night in Chicago, Tsui showed off the board controller to the crowd, explaining how the original prototype design set the company back abot $3,000 to make. After getting Activision on board (harhar), Tony Hawk started helping out with product testing, eventually cracking an early prototype trying to perform an ollie.

The most interesting thing to come out of the presentation, it seems was not that Tsui envisions the skateboard being used for other games, we reported that a month or so back, but which types of games it might be used for.

Tsui mentioned that there are plenty of no-brainers, like surfing and snowboarding, but that there are also opportunities for Silver Surfer and Hobgoblin games in the future.

[Thanks news ninja AJ]

The game will be priced at ¥3,990 (US$41) and is slated for release on August 27.

The key difference in Death to Spies is that the player takes the role of a SMERSH (read: badass Russian counterintelligence agency) operative during World War II instead of a bald hired goon. As a SMERSH operative, the player is given numerous sneaking missions and stealth options like disguises that allow them to infiltrate and kill Nazi officials. This formula worked okay for the first game. Let's see how well it stacks up for the second.

What Is It?
Death to Spies 2: Moment of Truth follows main character Strogov's return to the agency from his previous missions and his new assignment to off more high-ranking Nazis and commit all kinds of espionage after infiltrating their bases.

What We Saw
I played an early mission that involved stealing a uniform, stealing a car and then going to three different points on a Nazi base located somewhere in the woods to obtain plans for some kind of Nazi attack.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is due out in late July.

What Needs Improvement?
Mission Should Auto-Fail If You Hose Yourself: Several times during this mission I would botch my first kill and be unable to steal a uniform. I found that it's impossible to complete the mission without that uniform and that there was no other way to obtain a uniform – but the level wouldn't fail me out unless I actually got shot or blown up. I asked if this was a bug and was told that it wasn't – so in other words, you could hose an entire mission in the first five minutes and not actually know it until you got shot or blown up. That's harsh.

Not A Lot Of Cues: I had infiltrated the base successfully and was looking for the kitchen to steal a chef's outfit. However, there was no map to tell me where the kitchen was. Also, there were no audio cues to alert me to the fact that I'd wandered into the wrong building – until after all the Nazis started screaming and shooting at me.

What Should Stay The Same?
Map Overlay Mode: The map the game provides players tells you where you are, where you target is and where all the enemies are looking. The map can be hidden, if you prefer the challenge – or you can move it from a mini corner view to a transparent overlay that covers the screen. It's very convenient and particularly helpful to navigating the massive levels.

Lots of Options: You can chloroform people, shoot them with myriad guns, garrote them or just plain shank them en route to your objective. You can also choose not to kill people if you're feeling magnanimous – a choice that not all spy games grant. Though obviously this goes out the window if you primary objective is an assassination.

Level of Detail In Disguises: When I managed to steal a uniform, I was impressed to find that Nazi soldiers would know I was an imposter simply by seeing my character carry the wrong gun. I was sort of sad to part with my shotgun, but if it's in the name of realism, I count it as a plus.

Final Thoughts
To really appreciate Death to Spies 2, I'd say you'd have to have played the first one. Most of the tweaks to the interface and general improvement in gameplay and graphics were made in response to requests from the Death to Spies community. Even so, however, there is a solid stealth game here that I think people will appreciate. People like me who got burned by Velvet Assassin.

The first game, Bit.Trip: Beat came out in March 2009 and quickly established itself as a tough game with solid rhythm gameplay. Though Nintendo never releases sales figures for its WiiWare titles, it's safe to assume the title did pretty well for itself since we already have part two after only a 3-4 month wait. Oh, and it was awesome, too — even though the later levels got crazy-hard.

What Is It?
Bit.Trip: Core is a rhythm shooter in the same family as Rez and Everyday Shooter. Players control a fixed reticule in the center of the screen and shoot beams in one of four directions to tag "beats" that move across the screen in various patterns. As your score climbs, the music changes and you enter into Mega mode and eventually the new Super mode which award higher scoring multipliers. Mess up too much, though, and the screen turns black and white as the player goes into Nether mode, which is a few missed beats away from player death.

What We Saw
I spent an hour with the game at Nintendo's Redwood City office. First, I watched developer Gaijin Games' CEO and lead designer, Alex Neuse, take on level 2 and then joined him for co-op in level 2 before attempting level 1 two times on my own and dying horribly without his assistance.

How Far Along Is It?
Final. The game is due out on WiiWare Monday, July 6 — the day after my birthday.

What Needs Improvement?
Should Come With a Do Not Disturb Sign: You cannot play this game and carry on a conversation. The beat of the music is so crucial and the timing so unforgiving that you need total focus just to survive the first two levels — never mind the crazy-hard last level.

Co-op Might Cause Break-Ups: The co-op gives the reticule two beams for players to control to hit the beats which both go toward a common score. Smart partners will communicate before the level starts to determine which parts of the screen each is responsible for. Not-so-smart partners will probably shoot at the same things at the same time; but this can still work out because having two beams firing in the same direction at the same time in effect extends the time that the beam appears on screen. This gives you a tiny bit of leeway to be off in the timing. But ultimately, unless you're in perfect sync with your partner all of the time or you can laugh at yourself when you lose for the bazillion-th time, you are going to want to garrote your idiot partner with the Wiimote-Nunchuck cable whenever they mess up. And that, kids, is what they call a relationship breaker.

What Should Stay The Same?
Amazing Music: Gaijin Games outsourced the music to a place called Petrified Productions and I really dig what they did with the soundtrack.

Listen To The Rhythm Flow: When you can get yourself into that Zen state where nobody is talking to you and you're completely in tune with the music, Bit.Trip: Core feels amazing. It's like a form of meditation with an awesome soundtrack.

It's Like Rez For The Wii: What's not to like?

Final Thoughts
I really hope that Gaijin Games does two things: one, that they create a compilation of all six parts once they come out and two, that they create a DSi version. Neuse says there are no immediate plans to do either at the moment, but if the Bit.Trip games continue to do well on WiiWare, he says there's no reason they wouldn't look into it. Rock on.

Click the thumbnails for more details.

Unbound Saga One-Shot... Written by Mike Kennedy; Art by Cliff Richards, Al Rio Via publisher Dark Horse Comics: Rick Ajax ain't got time nor patience for trouble, but trouble seems to make plenty of time for him. If it ain't one thing, it's something else, and those things always seem to need a good old-fashioned pounding to put to rest. Lori Machete, on the other hand, can't help but get into trouble like the proverbial fox in a henhouse. She may be easy on the eyes, but she can be hard on the jaw when the feathers start to fly.

Based on the (not-so) long-running original series and the upcoming video game from Vogster Entertainment, Unbound Saga reintroduces (for the first time) readers to the seedy back alleys of future Toxopolis and the satirical misadventures that follow Rick and Lori like a shadow . . . Rage off the page!''

Gears of War #8...Written by Joshua Ortega; Art by Federico Dallocchio; Cover by Shane Pierce Via publisher WildStorm Productions: A popular element in the Xbox 360 smash Gears of War 2 are the collectibles describing the tragic end of Sgt. Jonathan Harper. A nine-year veteran Gear, he was captured by the Locust during the assault on the Hollow. Eventually managing to escape, he was able to help a family reach the surface before succumbing to his wounds. The full story of this heroic, selfless soldier is finally told!

American McGee's Grimm #3 (of 5)...Written by Dwight MacPherson; Art by Grant Bond Via publisher IDW: Episode 3: Strap on your chaps and ten-gallon hats-Grimm's in the western comic book world! The dead walk the streets of Gravestone as resurrected outlaw Thumbless Jack Hammer squares off against Sheriff Sam Sixshooter in a showdown at high noon. It's a fight the sheriff always wins… but this time Jack's got a Grimm ace up his sleeve!

During the Game Developers Conference, I had a chance to try Kodu, a programming tool created by Microsoft to help give children the experience of writing programming code and seeing that code make things happen.

I was impressed with the demo, especially once I suggested a game idea and the Kodu people at the demo made that game, iterated on it and let us all play it in under 10 minutes. I wrote about the experience at my old site.

My requested Kodu idea was to have a horde of shootable enemies that, when they died, would transfer their health to the remaining enemies. That would continue until one enemy would be left. That lone enemy would have as much health energy as a boss.

Ten minutes later, the proof was in the gameplay. Nope, it wasn't fun.

Still beats giving up a job writing about games and learning a real programming language. (No thanks!)

For those who've downloaded Kodu, let us know what game design ideas you've tried. And which, if any, have proven to be fun.

Kodu is available on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 400 Microsoft points ($5 USD)

The promise of OnLive, which has been shown to work in hands-on demo sessions experienced by Kotaku editors, is that it would enable high-def gaming on any TV or laptop capable of receiving a broadband signal, thanks to patented technology and cloud computing.

OnLive could someday make the need to own a home console obsolete.

Dave Perry said that Gaikai, the streaming Dutch technology group that he is a co-founder of, is not simply a me-too.

In a video on his site today, he showed how it worked, streaming games such as Spore and an emulated Mario Kart 64 to his home PC. Video games — or applications like PhotoShop — are accessed in a browser window as if the user was accessing programs running off their own computer. All the processing happens elsewhere, on remote services, but it feels live and local.

But isn't that, essentially OnLive?

"OnLive is going after the living room audience," Perry said. "They plan to fight with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo all at the same time. They also have to buy every player through marketing, and if they do well, they just steal some market share from Nintendo/Sony or Microsoft. There's no big paradigm change."

What Perry wants to do with Gaikai is provide it to publishers to make their games available to any of those publishers' customers through a web browser. That, he said, would change things by freeing games from the narrow pipelines of consoles and high-end PCs they are currently available through.

"When the iPhone made access to applications and games really easy, it changed everything, they generated a billion downloads on a phone. We plan to do the same for professional games, but online. The iPhone takes two taps (download, wait to install and play.) We are just one click and Spore or Photoshop pops up. Publishers like this idea. So our positioning allows us to help Nintendo / Sony / Microsoft reach out and draw in new audiences, where OnLive will never get 1st Party titles."

So an EA or a Nintendo would use it to let people play Spore or Mario Kart from any computer with a strong enough Internet connection (Perry's claiming that 1mbps works for "most games.") The resolution that the game would play at would be at the publisher's discretion, though Perry says HD is an option. Perry also said that multiplayer is possible and has been tested successfully already.

The motivation for the service, in Perry's words, is "to make games available everywhere, with just one click." He said that casinos, doctors and the military have all inquired but that he primarily wants this service accessible for gamers.

Here's the vision he foresees:

"The convenience we offer really matters. How many YouTube videos would you watch if you had to keep going to YouTube.com and search for them? Or how many would you watch if you had to register before playing each one. How many would you play if you had to download the entire video before you play? This is stuff our industry expects you to do, but that has to end if we want to grow our games virally like Youtube has done. It's changed how we interact with video on the web. Gaikai can help publishers & developers change the way people discover their games."

Perry says the video posted today is just the first glimpse of the service. He's planning speeches this month and next to reveal more of the plans for Gaikai.

With OnLive and Gaikai in development, gaming's future just might be in the clouds.

I've checked with Perry about when he hopes Gaikai will be available for gamers and will update this story with any added info.

[UPDATE: Perry wants beta testers. In California fir a closed beta, then in all of the US for an open beta and launch. Then it's coming to Europe. Interested parties can register via Gaikai.com. Perry says those interested should mention Kotaku. We hope he won't hold that against you.]

While video game publishers aren't quite as afraid to release new titles during the summer months as they used to be, there is still a dry period between the last games of spring and the beginning of the fall holiday season. Just because there aren't quite as many games to play doesn't mean you can't still immerse yourself in your favorite titles. We've compiled a list of quality reading materials to keep you steeped in game culture throughout the hot days of summer and beyond.

Fiction
What makes a great work of video game fiction? Strong writing helps, but it's the more supportive nature of gaming fiction that makes a title stand out. The author must not only tell a compelling tale, but tell it in such a way that, when the reader returns to the game, they find the nature of their relationship to the title has changed. Whether it enhances familiarity with one of the title's characters, or deepens our understanding of the game world, video game fiction excels when it changes the way we experience what we play.

Here is a list of some titles that excel at adding depth to the games they are inspired by, as well as a few that have inspired games on their own.

The Divine Comedy Author: Dante Alighieri Publisher: Various First Publication: 1300's Thanks to Electronic Arts there is a 14,000 line poem on Kotaku's Summer Reading List. If you are going to play and hopefully enjoy the loose video game adaptation of Dante's Inferno, you may as well familiarize yourself with the source material. It may be a dense, allegorical vision of the Christian life and afterlife, but it's also considered to be one of the greatest works of world literature, and being able to discuss such things really impresses the opposite sex at fancy dinner parties.

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne Author: David Gaider Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC Pub. Date: March 2009 Who better to pen a prequel novel to an upcoming role-playing game than the lead writer for the game itself? David Gaider of BioWare has lent his writing talents to such classic games as Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and his work translates quite well onto the printed page, as evidenced by his first novel, Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne. The book tells the story of a Maric, the son of the Rebel Queen, seeking to reclaim the throne of Ferelden following his mother's murder. The story is compelling and entertaining, setting the tone for the upcoming game quite nicely. I really appreciate it when the lore comes before the game, letting the player step into the action feeling as if they have a deeper understanding of the world they are about to experience.

Ender's Game Author: Orson Scott Card Publisher: Various First Publication: 1985 What's a science fiction novel from 1985 doing on Kotaku's Summer Reading list? Aside from the fact that Chair Entertainment is working on a downloadable title based on the novel, Ender's Game is one of the ultimate video game-themed novels of all time. The story centers on Ender Wiggins, a young boy who is part of a class of students at Earth's Battle School, where they train gifted children to take command positions in humanity's war against the alien Formics. The children are trained using simulators - high tech video games that place them in the midst of virtual battles, commanding fleets in what could be the ultimate real-time strategy game. Woven into the science fiction plot is a poignant coming-of-age tale, making Ender's Game a book that delivers on multiple levels. If you've not read it you should, and if you have read it, shush.

Gears Of War: Aspho Fields Author: Karen Traviss Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: October 2008 Author Karen Traviss was at her best when she wrote the Star Wars: Republic Commando novels, and now she takes that same understanding of both combat and camaraderie and applies it to the Gears of War universe, telling the story of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago in a way that the games never could. Her book takes them from childhood to the battle of Aspho Fields, where they must face a dark secret about Dominic's brother Carlos. Traviss seems to understand the bonding of brothers in battle better than most male writers who tackle the same sort of subject matter, making for an entertaining read no matter how you feel about the series itself. Traviss revisits Gears in late July, picking up where the second game left off with Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant.

Halo: Contact Harvest Author: Joseph Staten Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC Pub. Date: October 2007 Wait, isn't the latest Halo novel The Cole Protocol? Yes it was, and that's why I am recommending Halo: Contact Harvest. If you want a novel that tells a compelling story set during the early days of the war between humanity and the Covenant, you'd be better off avoiding Tobias S. Buckell's The Cole Protocol and reading or re-reading Contact Harvest. As Staten did with Sergeant Johnson in Contact Harvest, Buckell tries to develop Captain Jacob Keyes in The Cole Protocol. Wile he succeeds in telling a multi-layered story with well-developed characters, they aren't likable characters that you'd want to know the story behind. On top of that, I'm not even that hardcore a Halo fan and I noted several inconsistencies between the game and the book. In Contact Harvest, Bungie writer Joseph Staten takes a character that isn't more than a caricature in the game and develops him in a way that changes how you'll view his appearances in the Halo series.

Halo: Uprising Author: Brian Michael Bendis Artist: Alex Maleev Publisher: Marvel Enterprises, Inc. Pub. Date: June 2009 While I hate to use the phrase "must-have", this hardcover collection of the four issues of Marvel's Halo: Uprising comic book series is indeed just that, bridging the gap between Halo 2 and Halo 3 with a compelling story and some fantastic artwork.

Hellgate: London Trilogy - Exodus / Goetia / Covenant Author: Mel Odom Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: June 2007 - August 2008 Simon Cross never believed in demons. Despite the fact that his father raised him in a hidden underground commune belonging to the Templar, an organization training in secrecy to defend mankind against a prophesied invasion from the infernal, Simon lacked the faith of his fellows. He left the commune in hopes of finding a normal life. But when the gates of hell do open, Cross finds himself drawn back to London to lead a desperate battle to save humanity. Mel Odom treats Hellgate so much better than the game deserves to be treated. If the game contained just a small portion of the personality Odom gives his characters it would still be operational in North America today. The third book is a bit of a letdown, feeling rushed, possibly due to the game's impending failure, but getting there is one hell of a ride. Forget the bad game. This is a series of good books.

Mass Effect: Revelation / Ascension Author: Drew Karpyshyn Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: May 2007, July 2008 The Mass Effect novels, Crecente's contribution to the Kotaku Summer Reading List, are more prequel than companion. They add to the already-rich lore of the Mass Effect universe. With BioWare's own resident novelist and lead writer for Mass Effect Drew Karpyshyn penning the stories, you can expect a level of detail that no outside author could hope to deliver.

Metal Gear Solid Author: Raymond Benson Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: May 2008 Given that the author has written James Bond novels, one has to overlook Raymond Benson's Bondification of Solid Snake in this adaptation of the first Metal Gear Solid game. The book follows the plot of the game closely, adding little details that should please fans of the series. It fleshes out some of the character's motivations quite nicely. The only issue is the characterization of Snake himself...which one has to admit wasn't all that deep in the game. Benson takes a few liberties with the character, giving him Bond-like quips that don't quite jibe with Snake as we know him today. Still a good read, and with Benson busy penning the novelization of the game's follow-up, Sons of Liberty, we might as well get used to his writing style.

Nova: StarCraft Ghost Author: Keith R.A. DeCandido with an introduction by Chris Metzen Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: November 2006 The tragic and often heart-wrenching story of Nova, Emperor Arcturus Mengst's most deadly Ghost operative. When her parents are murdered by a rebel militia, young Nova lashes out with her devastating powers, killing hundreds in the blink of an eye. She finds herself alone in the streets of Tarsonis, pursued by a special agent tasked with hunting her down. Definitely a book that deserves to be read. DeCandido's portrayal of Nova's plight touches all the right chords, and the tragedy of the situation is made all the more poignant by the fact that this is a novel based on a game we may never see.

Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel Author: A.B. Sina with Art by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puviland Publisher: First Second Pub. Date: September 2008 The Prince of Persia isn't a person, but rather an ideal or spirit that certain Persian princes embody. This is the theme that poet A.B. Sina presents in this lovely graphic novel inspired by the video game series. The book follows the story of two princes, separated by time but entwined by fate, with Sina's words texturing the canvas on which artists Pham and Puviland practice their craft. A bit hard to follow at first, once the separate story threads are braided together the tale truly takes off. As an added bonus, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner provides a brief history of the game series in the volume, neatly counterbalancing the more artistic take on the legend.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy Author: S.D. Perry Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: October 1998 This one goes way back, but when I asked for staff recommendations for the list, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy was the first thing out of AJ's mouth, and so here it is. She claims the first book is the best in the series, with the quality slowly dwindling thereafter. That's a bit odd, because I remember reading an Aliens series by S.D. Perry that followed that exact same pattern - a strong start followed by diminishing returns.

StarCraft: Dark Templar Series - Firstborn / Shadow Hunters / Twilight Author: Christie Golden Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: May 2007 - June 2009 Archaeologist Jake Ramsey, hired to explore an unearthed Xel'Naga temple, finds himself bonded to the spirit of a long-dead Protoss mystic. Driven by the mystic's memories, Jake sets off on a journey that spans the universe. The three book series sees its protagonist pursued by the Zerg, hounded by a powerful Dark Aarchon, and taking a good, hard look at humanity's role in the universe. Author Christie Golden has penned a large number of licensed novels in her time, and there's a good reason she is constantly tapped for said duty. While other adaptation authors simply familiarize themselves with their subject matter, Golden seems to fall in love with each universe she visits, and that love shines through on every page.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Author: Sean Williams Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Pub. Date: August 2008 Sean Williams takes the already-compelling tale of Darth Vader's secret apprentice and fleshes it out in vibrant detail, creating an excellent companion piece to the video game. It's a great example of a novelization that adds a layer of depth to the source material.

Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning: Empire In Chaos Author: Anthony Reynolds Publisher: Games Workshop Pub. Date: August 2008 The battle between the Empire and the forces of Chaos escalates in this solid companion to the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. It's basically a classic fantasy tale - a band of characters from different backgrounds find themselves thrust together against a backdrop of war. You've got your innocent maiden who finds herself in possession of tremendous power; your tough-as-nails anti-hero; an enigmatic elf struggling to overcome the language barrier; and a dwarf who takes the grumpy dwarf routine to a new level. A bit formulaic, but a solid read.

World of Warcraft: Arthas: Rise of the Lich King Author: Christie Golden Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: April 2009 Yes, it's another Blizzard book by Christie Golden, but as I mentioned previously, there is a reason she is tapped to pen some of the most important stories in video game fiction. The story of Arthas' transformation from paladin of the Silver Hand to evil lord of the undead is one of the most classically tragic tales in Azeroth. Golden handles the details with an expert pen, building up Arthas Menethil's world and then slowly tearing it apart.

Non-Fiction
While some of prefer their video game reading to tend to the fantastic, others prefer to take time during the summer months to brush up on their facts, get a little bit of back story, or wax philosophical on their favorite titles in preparation for the busy fall forum flaming season. Here's a handful of more-grounded gaming reads.

Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers Author: Brian Ashcraft Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: January 2009 Didn't think I'd miss this one, did you? Written by our own Brian Ashcraft, Arcade Mania takes us deep inside the arcades of Japan, exploring not only the games themselves, but the colorful people who play them, presenting both history and culture in equal servings. I enjoyed the quirky page layouts almost as much as I enjoyed the actual words, and while I would have preferred a bit more lead in and lead out, all in all it's one heck of a good read.

Guinness World Records Gamers' Edition 2009 Compiled by Guinness World Records Publisher: Guinness World Records Limited Pub. Date: February 2009 Because we have to use the bathroom in the summer as well.

Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games - And What Parents Can Do Authors: Lawrence Kutner, Cheryl K. Olson Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group Pub. Date: April 2008 You've probably seen quotes from the husband-and-wife writing team and references to this book on Kotaku before, and you'll more than likely see them again. The pair studied some of the habits and behaviors of some 1,300 middle-school gamers in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and their findings are some of the most balanced ones I've seen. Many violent video game studies feel like they have an agenda, be it to condemn video games or exonerate them. Grand Theft Childhood moves the focus away from that debate and directs parents' attention where it should be anyway - their own children.

High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, Second Edition Authors: Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Pub. Date: 2nd Edition, December 2003 This one was Ashcraft's suggestion, but I couldn't agree more that High Score! deserves a place on any video game reader's list. DeMaria and Wilson take on the history of the video game industry, from its humble beginnings as dots moving on a screen to the coming of the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox. They break things down by company, era, and geographical region, making it the perfect book to just open up to any random page and begin reading, or as Ashcraft puts it, "Great to pick up and put down whenever you are on the throne."

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy Editor: Luke Cuddy Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: November 2008 If you think far too much about the Legend of Zelda series, then here is a book for you. The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy is a series of essays that explores topics both confined to the game, as in Rachel Robison's "Shape Shifting and Time Traveling: Link's Identity Issues", to more all-encompassing philosophical fare, which we see in Paul Brown's "Hyrule's Green and Pleasant Land: The Minish Cap as Utopian Ideal". It's equal bits absurd and insightful.

This first edition of the Kotaku Summer Reading List presents a rather broad range of titles, from fantasy and science fiction to philosophy and scientific study. Hopefully you'll find something worth a sunny afternoon read somewhere amongst the selection. Of course, this certainly isn't the end of this list. You are all part of Kotaku as well, so now that we've shared some of our favorites, it's your turn to share some of your own. After all, the only thing better than reading a good book is sharing a good book.

Part of Sega's Vintage Collection, Gunstar Heroes is a port of Treasure's classic 1993 shooter, which is still revered as one of the finest games to ever grace the Genesis/Mega Drive.

So, as far as ports go, how does it hold up in 2009?

LOVED
If It Ain't Broke: As far as side-scrolling shooters go, Gunstar Heroes is almost perfect. So Sega were smart to leave the game well enough alone, the only changes being some new display options (the adjustment ones welcome, the graphics filter less so) and, in a welcome move, the addition of online co-op.

Analogue-Friendly: Some retro games – like Bionic Commando: Rearmed – were woeful on 360 thanks to its terrible d-pad. Gunstar Heroes, you'll be happy to know, doesn't suffer from this, as control via the analogue stick is smooth and responsive.

HATED
Premature Evacuation: It's a little unfair to knock a fault with the original game when reviewing a port, but I'm going to vent anyways: Gunstar Heroes' biggest problem is that it's too damn short. The customisable weaponry and co-op adds a bit of replay value to the game, but with only a few levels on offer, you'll be done just as you were getting into the swing of things.

Gunstar Heroes was my favourite game on the Mega Drive. And, thanks to this slick and (mostly) faithful port, it's now one of my favourite downloadable games this generation. The best part: it's cheap, cheaper even than the recent Virtual Console port that didn't include as many features. Treasure fans – or anyone looking to kill a few hours with some mindless, vintage carnage – should definitely look into it.

Gunstar Heroes was developed by Treasure, and originally released in 1993. Reviewed version published by Sega, and released on June 10 (XBLA) and June 11 (PSN). Retails for 400 MS Points on Xbox 360, $5 on PlayStation Store. Played Xbox 360 version to completion, tested online co-op.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Make way for Rune Factory Frontier and Rock Band 2 in our (theoretically) monthly study of which Nintendo Wii games are getting played the most, per user.

We're not tracking sales here. Any game can get bought. We're tracking how much time these games get used by the people who own and rent them as tabulated by the Nintendo Channel's indexing of play time by two million Wii owners. The results should tell us how much people who wind up with these games like them. That's more interesting, no?

Rune Factory: Frontier, a March-released RPG with a deep farming and dating system, was no big seller. But the lengthy FAQs for it are proof that there's more than enough content in the game to justify the playing times reported here by the '09 release. Wii gamers love their virtual farming and dating.

Rock Band 2's appearance is no surprise, as it surges toward Guitar Hero III. Notably, Rock Band 2 has passed the average playing time of its predecessor, while Guitar Hero World Tour has not passed its predecessor, Guitar Hero III.

What's the lesson from July? Hardcore RPGs get a lot of playing time. So do games that are fun at parties. And so do games with strong online multiplayer. Hear that, Wii developers? Strong. Online. Multiplayer.

We'll have a closer look at the playing times of some other Wii games in the next couple of days.

I tracked these numbers for the first of the month since September of 2008 and will continue to here for Kotaku. These stats are through July 1. We skipped the June report due to E3, but Kotaku's newest intern, Andrew Freedman did a great job catching those numbers for our records early last month.

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. We calculate it by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that almost 69 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users (up seven million in two months), for an average of 28.52 sessions per player. That divides to more than 2.4 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 2.4 million people are contributing stats. That is up from 2.2 million people when these numbers were ran for May 1.

Growing up in..., well growing up just about everywhere, my summers usually meant staying outside until it was dark out and my parents were serving dinner. But nowadays I think a lot of folks spend their summers inside playing video games and watching TV.

I have nothing against electronics and gaming, but why not blend the best of both worlds? During the month of July that's exactly what Kotaku will be trying to do: Tapping into the greater world of video game culture to talk about some of the more physical, more cerebral, more out-of-doors ways to have fun in the sun without abandoning your favorite pastime.

We're kicking off Kotaku's Summer of Gaming a bit later today with a great summer reading list of video game books meant to be a handy guide to the novels you should take along while traveling, sunning and kicking back.

Stay tuned throughout the rest of the month for plenty more fun features that tackle everything from game design and summer blockbusters to arcade guides and outdoor games.

Who says you can't get a tan while playing video games?

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At least that's the way the game's name translates according to our own Brian Ashcraft, who pored over the scans to glean what information her could. The Four Warriors of light, the name of which was uncovered in a trademark filing earlier this month, is a traditional turn-based roleplaying game for the Nintendo DS that tells the story of a boy trying to save a princess. The scans contain scant details other than when you change equipment, your character's appearance changes, which is a feature that many RPG fans salivate over. This supplemental Final Fantasy adventure is on its way to Japan this fall.

Now that we know what the countdown image will eventually look like, we can go back to doing more productive things in the middle of the night, like sleeping.

It has a few new game modes (including online co-op), some new characters and a whole range of fixes for the problems that plagued the 360 edition such as better camera control.

The game will be released October 1 in Japan and priced at ¥7,800 (US$81). Those who pre-order the game will get a "starter guide book" and a code for an original downloadable Ryu Hayabusa character costume.

They allege that there were a raft of lawsuits behind the sackings, which stem from Blue Omega being "taken off" their own game by Codemasters, as well as a dipsute between Blue Omega and two subcontracting studios, one of which stands accused of having continued work on Blue Omega's title even after Blue Omega had been stood down, and the other of having performed shoddy work.

In addition to those messy behind-the-scenes affairs, the former employees also stated that poor sales of Damnation were a contributing factor.

The MySims series started out as a cutesy, cartoony version of the Sims series for PC and Wii that would let a younger generation of gamer take a crack at the building and customization of the Sims without asking them to navigate sexual relationships and simulated job grinds. From there, the series experimented with a more structured kind of game – like MySims Racing or MySims Kingdom – that had elements of other game genres around to direct gameplay objectives. However, it was still mostly a free-roaming game without much direction.

Now we have MySims Agents, an evolution in the MySims series toward a serious adventure game. Sure, it's still cutesy and cartoony – and about 85% of the cast is made up of Sims we've seen in other MySims game – but this is a game on a mission. And the mission is to become a secret agent.

What Is It?
MySims Agents is an adventure game for the Wii following the rise of a gumshoe detective to world-class agent as he works to recover the stolen Nightmare Crown. Players take the role of this young detective and progress through a series of mostly-linear levels to find clues, interview people and ultimately get to the bottom of the bigger mystery. Most of the gameplay is centered around gadgets that the player levels up over time – like evolving a basic magnifying glass to a high-tech footprint sensor – as well as the leveling of companion detectives that the main character can recruit.

What We Saw
I sat down for about an hour's worth of fiddling at EA Redwood Shores. The save I was playing on was toward the end of the game, so a lot of stuff was unlocked and gadgets were already leveled up.

How Far Along Is It?
MySims Agents is due out in September just before the mega-October rush. The build looked solid to me, although my hands-on time was limited to certain areas and puzzles because they were 100% finished.

What Needs Improvement?
Mind The Puzzle-Platform Ratio: A lot of Agents involves solving agent-y puzzles like lock-picking or hacking a computer. However, there are some platforming sections where the player has to guide the Agent through a jumping puzzle or across balance beams. Depending on how the ratio of puzzles-to-platforming stacks up, these sections will either blend in seamlessly with the secret agent theme or leave the player grumbling in frustration about how James Bond never got mobbed by butterflies and fell off a cliff.

What Should Stay The Same?
Adventure Gameplay: Part of the problem with the adventure-flavored MySims Kingdom was that there just wasn't enough structure to the story. It was hard to care about what the King wanted when there were endless possibilities for rearranging your house décor and endless numbers of Sims that wanted you to build junk for them. MySims Agent zeros in on the story and while it still that "Hey, let's go rearrange furniture in your secret headquarters" gameplay, there seems to be enough structure to the game to propel you out into the world to start solving mysteries instead of aimless wandering around to provoke local wildlife.

Fixed Camera: MySims Agent has a fixed camera that the player cannot control. This works well with the gameplay, because it allows the level developer to hide things from the player that they have to do detective work to find. It also makes Build mode less tedious because the Agent has to stand on a specific spot to enter build mode so that the camera can fix itself in the best possible angle for seeing the building area – a definite improvement over MySims Kingdom.

Smooth Sim Integration: A big part of any Sim game is working on inter-Sim relationships. This element makes its way into Agents through the recruitment system and the special side missions system. As the player goes through the game and meets all different kinds of Sims, he or she can recruit Sims as secret agent operatives. Recruiting a Sim moves them into the Agent's headquarters and the Agent can send them out to do side missions for other Sims, which improves the Agent's relationship with those Sims. While on these special missions, your Agent can carry on with main story missions and receive updates (or pleas for advice) from your other Agents in the field via text message. So it's almost like you're playing two games at once and that way, you can reap twice the benefits. Depending on who you recruit and how you train them, you can have a crack team of investigative Sims – or a bunch of bums that clutter up your basement.

Masks: There're a lot of hidden things in every level like bonus outfits or special items – but the big ticket items are always masks. Each mask a Sim finds has special abilities attached to it, like charisma or athleticism, and hanging the masks on a particular floor of the Agent's HQ trains all Sims that live on that floor in those skills. This is a neat way to customize your crack team of investigators because different missions require different combinations of skills. You can of course pick and choose different Sims from different floors to go on special side missions or take with you on main story missions – but sending an entire floor of Agents to do your bidding is both convenient and cool.

Final Thoughts
I'm looking forward to MySims Agents because I want to see MySims series evolve into solid adventure games. Between the collectibles and the unlockable hard puzzles, there's enough content here to move MySims away from the stigma of "baby's first god-complex game" and toward a series that appeals to everybody. During my demo, one of the MySims development team guys compared the series to The Muppets, saying that it'd be ideal to have a franchise of characters that you could use to tell any kind of story – or in this case, populate any kind of game. I'd be down with that; and I really hope Agents can lead the charge.

Today marks the halfway point of 2009, a year that brought Grand Theft Auto to the DS, our eyes to the bottom of an Avatar's shoe and some other guy to my old MTV desk.

We and the rest of the gaming press are at risk of forgetting everything that happened in the past six months when 2009 ends and we have to decide which games were best in the last 365 days. So let this post be a monument to the greats of Jan-June '09.

I'll start. But you help out, please. Any categories you want.

(Warning: These selections do not represent the collective wisdom of Kotaku, just one guy.)

Possibly The 10 Best Games Of 2009 So Far (according to the deputy editor): Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Flower, Pictobits, infamous, Red Faction Guerilla, House of the Dead Overkill, Art Style: Boxlife, uh... what else?

Games With Some Good Stuff In Them That People Will Probably Forget: Deadly Creatures, 50 Cent Blood on the Sand

Games with The Best Graphics: Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV, Fight Night Round 4, Resident Evil 5

Games with The Best Graphics and Best Credit Sequences: MadWorld

Best Cut Scenes So Far: Halo Wars

Soundtracks We Shouldn't Forget: Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure

Best Peripheral Game Expected To Be Outshone By Wii Sports Resort: Personal Trainer Walking

Best Downloadable Content That's Not A Full Game But Could Be: GTA IV: The Lost and Damned, some of that Fallout 3 DLC.

Games I Didn't Play Much Of But Maybe Were Really Good: Plants Vs. Zombies, Patapon 2, The Sims 3, stuff on the iPhone

Games You Commenters Have Shamed Me Into Admitting I Forgot: Punch-Out!, Prototype, MLB 09: The Show (best baseball game ever, I've heard?), Bonsai Barber

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On June 23, the United States granted Nintendo patent number 7,5489,923 a more than 11,000-word patent invented by WarioWare director Goro Abe and two other men that is summarized as follows:

A game apparatus includes: a plurality of operation controllers to be operated by separate players; obtained partial area storage locations for storing a partial area obtained by each player as an obtained partial area; a partial area choice mechanism for allowing each player to choose a partial area in turns; a single-player-mode game execution mechanism for, when a partial area is chosen, executing a single-player-mode game for a player who has chosen the partial area; and an obtained partial area adding mechanism for, depending on a result of the single-player-mode game, storing the partial area chosen by the player who has played the single-player-mode game as an obtained partial area of the players in the obtained partial area storage locations.

Untangling that and reading through the patent, we believe Nintendo has affirmed its right to an integration of mini-game video games and the classic black-and-white token-flipping game Othello.

The invention calls for a video game's game board set up like a grid of spaces. Players stake control of those spaces by playing mini-games, by themselves or against the other players. The mini-games get harder for players who have more skill.

The patented concept reads exactly like the description of the Milky Way Delirium mode in 2004's WarioWare: Mega Games for the GameCube. Remember that WarioWare games are comprised of hundreds of mini-games, which are fired at one or more players in rapid succession, leaving the game just seconds to succeed in each one before the next comes along. The GameCube version of the game was focused on multiplayer and included the Othello-like Milky Way Delirium mode.

The Nintendo inventors explain in the patent filing that traditional Othello "is monotonous because it is prescribed so that players can place their pieces on the board whenever their turns come." And they lament that games like Mario Party are potentially imbalanced because really good players can beat inferior ones at every mini-game: "A player of great competence will hold an overwhelmingly dominant position from start to finish, making the development of the game so one-sided that the enjoyment of the game will be spoiled."

The company's solution is the patented technique described here, which tunes the difficulty of each mini-game that is launched in the Nintendo video game to the player it is being launched at. Head-to-head competition among potentially differently-skilled players in the same mini-game only on rare occasions. (One thing we haven't been able to confirm is whether Milky Way Delirium managed per-player dynamic difficulty as described in this patent).

Milky Way Delirium didn't make any headlines in 2004 as far as we can recall, but Nintendo thinks this is an idea worth protecting.

MMA is hot and WWE never quite fades away. Boxing eternally hangs from a cliff.

Since the 1970s, each decade of boxing disappointment has been followed by a decade when those of us who can still name a single active heavyweight realize that the previous decade wasn't so bad. The 90s of boxing? I miss them. Boxing never seems to improve, except in my memories.

Those of us who enjoy the sport can at least celebrate this spring of 2009 and its video game boxing renaissance, which has brought us back Punch-Out on the Wii and Fight Night on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Punch-Out's a fun puzzle game — identify and memorize the pattern to knock Bald Bull out. Fight Night aspires to be what boxing should be these days. It gets close when its controls don't deeply bend one of gaming's cardinal rules.

Loved
The Sport In Full: Ring walks. Round card girls. Choices of trunks. Previous Fight Nights had those too. Lots of fighters, including Ali, Tyson, Robinson (no de la Hoya and Holyfield), can get in the ring. Added to that — and new to Fight Night Round 4 — is a Legacy Mode that lets the player bring an amateur fighter to pro superstardom, one match at a time. The difficulty ramps up uncomfortably early, and the training mini-games between fights are too hard for a novice fighter whose foot speed and power-punching stats are not yet leveled up. But the climb is exciting and just vague enough in detail to let the gamer's imagination build a narrative better than Stallone's first Rocky. There are unexpected challengers, rematches, far-flung venues, annual achievement awards and a novel's worth of a fighting career determined one punch and one drop of blood at a time. (UPDATE: Judging by feedback in the comments I did not sufficiently distinguish how Round 4's career mode differs from that of Round 3. The new one includes multiple championships, the ability to unify belts, defend the title, move weight classes, all to increase one's reputation in order to be named The Greatest of All Time. Different tiers, from Club Fighter to Contender to Greatest have different criteria for players to achieve, including measures of fame and winning percentage. It's modeled off of a realistic career, compared to Round 3's series of challenges.)

Brutal Beauty: No greater compliment may be offered a game's graphics than to say that this game would be playable without its heads-up display (HUD). I tried one fight that way and I could see enough of the expressions of pain and fatigue on my fighter's and his opponent's faces to know how the match was going. Round 4's new physics-based damage system, which makes flush punches more hurtful than glancing blows, can be read by one's eyes without needing to see a health meter. It's all there in virtual-physical form.

Subtlety: A ha! This is what I like about boxing. Fights are seldom determined by one punch. They are determined by the accretion of jabs and hooks painted on an opponent round after round. Head movement and footwork are keys to victory. The game is a little too in love with making the player look for counter-punching opportunities, but even just a steady jab investment pays dividends, as it should. Leveling up offense and defensive stats like body-resilience or punch-accuracy shows small but significant results each time. Boxing's loudest moments follow many quieter accomplishments that the casual observer may not appreciate. They're in here.

Swift Online: I played the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions and went online with the latter. Matchmaking was swift and the fights were fun. I was disappointed that player's boxer attribute stats are leveled, as it doesn't seem to enable me to bring a fighter who is, say, biased toward power and not speed to match up against a fighter aligned the other way. Nevertheless, integrating fights into an online quest to be the champion of the game's three online weight divisions is a smart move. I'll never be champ, but it's fun to know I have a shot.

Hated
Interference: The core of Fight Night Round 4, the boxing, is a smoothly-played delight. But this game's Legacy mode is larded with extra menus and simulation options that slow one's advance from fight to training and back to fight. Then, during the fights, commentators Teddy Atlas and Joe Tessitore devolve into the worst of boxing announcers by repeatedly calling every round they see the best round of their life. What salvages the commentary is the interesting decision to have the two men criticize the state of real boxing. They discuss the proliferation of world titles and weight classes. They lament the shallow talent pool of new fighters. They even lobby for basketball players to become boxers. But all of that and even Atlas' goofy asides — like his comparison of my great fight to the first time he hard Ray Charles sing God Bless America — couldn't keep me from shutting these guys off.

Strict Controls: EA is so fervently behind Fight Night's right-stick punch system that it didn't deliver an option to map punches to controller face buttons this time. The right-stick technique is conceptually sound. Tilt in the direction of a left or right jab. Hook in the direction of a left or right hook. Pull back and arc in the direction of a left or right uppercut. What could be better? The problem is that many of us can't execute those controls reliably, myself included. My view is that game controls should be invisible and intangible. We should forget them and achieve a oneness with what's on the screen: I think an action; I believe I've done it; It happens. With Fight Night Round 4, sadly, what I think will be an uppercut winds up being a hook half the time. Perhaps I will continue to improve, but it's disappointing that EA did not offer a control scheme that lets me do what I want to do. Why not let the game learn what I think is a hook and map that move to my fighter's hook? Why force me to only use EA's pre-defined arcs? It's a narrow option that has led me to question whether I'm failing at the game or whether the game is failing at me. I'd rather focus on boxing than the controls, but players be warned: if you stink at these controls, you're in big trouble.

Fight Night Round 4 presents boxing at its most beautiful, a sport that looks great, is exciting, is full of talent and devoid of corruption.

The game falters in narrowing its audience to only those who can handle its tricky controls. But those who can manage are in for an experience about which there is little else to complain.

Fight Night Round 4 was developed and published by Electronic Arts for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on June 25. Retails for $59.99 USD. Played two brief, faltering careers on the PS3, switched to the tighter analog stick of the Xbox 360 and have had a rocky 13-6-0 middleweight career with 12 KOs on the Xbox 360. Played several matches online. Used to work for Bert Sugar (in real life). Was once prank phone-called by Michael Moorer (also in real life).

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

It stands about 12 inches tall (or will when it's done, this is just a prototype render), and should be out sometime in September, with a price of $120. Along with this Akuma piece, SOTA will also be releasing Cammy, Bison & Guile statues as well.

Sony explains, "By entering into a license agreement with SCE through this program, peripheral and accessory manufacturers will gain access to technical documentations necessary for designing and creating variety of licensed products for PlayStation platforms."

The pictured "Official Licensed Product logo" will appear on product packaging as a Good House Keeping Seal of Approve of sorts — that the product lives up to PlayStation standards.

"How appealing would each of the following potential features be if a new public space was created that was dedicated to the PlayStation brand?"

That's the main question, and Sony then breaks things down into smaller, bit-sized polling that covers everything from PlayStation dev video interviews to trailers of upcoming games to the history of PlayStation.

Feel free to answer in the comments below. Or not. YOU DECIDE.

A Blizzard rep has told Kotaku:

We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we're encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We're looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

Which will no doubt be crushing to LAN party fiends...if, that is, they still exist.

StarCraft II Developers Talk [IncGamers]

Loosely based on the Rafael Sabatini books that spawned an Errol Flynn movie and possibly a 2011 remake by director Phillip Noyce, Captain Blood follows the adventures of a doctor sold into slavery who later becomes a pirate. Developer SeaWolf picks up the story between the time when Captain Blood is no longer a slave and the time when he settles down with Olivia de Havilland.

What Is It?
Captain Blood is an action-adventure game for the Xbox 360 and PC. Players navigate Blood through linear levels on foot and through open water in his ship, the Arabella. The on-foot parts involve hacking and slashing rival pirates with a series of cutlass combos and occasionally shooting them with stolen pistols or muskets. The open water parts involve aiming cannons at attacking ships and clearing the deck of rival pirates that manage to board.

What We Saw
I played one boss fight about five times without being able to beat it and then quit out to the main menu to play a boat level where the goal is to sink four or five attacking ships.

How Far Along Is It?
Captain Blood is due out this winter. Publisher 1C says the game is still in alpha and there are some significant changes to gameplay in the works. It looks like the major gameplay elements are in place and the graphics look a lot further along than alpha.

What Needs Improvement?
Hack, Hack, Slash, Slash, Rinse, Wash, Repeat: A lot of hack ‘n' slash games get a little repetitive and Captain Blood is no exception. Part of that comes from the weapons Blood had on him during that boss fight; as you progress through the game, you're supposed to be buying better and better weapons which can be upgraded for more combos. Unfortunately, Blood only had the one cutlass with him and just two combos that never quite seemed to do enough damage. Worse, a lot of the animations repeated themselves during the boss fight – like a mini cut scene where the boss pulls a weapon out of his treasure chest.

Blood Falls Backwards: During the boss fight, the bad guy pirate would lob firebombs at Captain Blood. Whenever he'd get hit by the fire, Blood's injury animation would cause him to fall backward into the fire. This would cause him more damage and he'd keep falling backward deeper and deeper into the flames until he died or the fire went out. I hope this is one of those "significant" gameplay changes the developer is still working on.

Rage Mode Doesn't Do Much: There's a special Rage Mode that the player can trigger with the right bumper which supposedly makes Captain Blood do more damage. All it did for me was turn the edges of the screen white and fuzzy and make the controller vibrate.

You Can't Control The Camera. Ever: Boo!

What Should Stay The Same?
The Boat Levels: It certainly sounds repetitive to run back and forth across the Arabella's deck, trying to get to different cannons to fire on enemy ships. However, because the firing of the cannon requires actual skill, it's pretty exciting. Each cannon has a limited range of side-to-side movement and its arced trajectory is realistic. A misfired shot might go over an enemy ship to land harmlessly in the ocean on the other side, or it might graze the sails and render the enemy ship sluggish in the water. Distance and timing are key in this part of the game. Small, fast ships can zigzag up to or circle in on the Arabella and rake her while dropping off boarding parties. In the time it takes them to get there, they rarely present a target for more than a few seconds. Even when they do, it can take Captain Blood a long time to get from one side of his ship to the other what with all the deck clutter and frantic crew members in the way.

The Graphics: The colors in Captain Blood were pretty vibrant and the water looked amazing. Surprisingly, the environments reduced the repetitive feel of the gameplay – and since you spend about half the game on a boat or near a boat, water appearance is all-important.

Dodge Roll: It's mapped to the right stick which is really helpful for getting out of bad melee situations and fire that you might fall backwards into.

Quick Time Events: I actually don't mind them in Captain Blood, perhaps because they're not necessarily required for boss fights or opening doors. If the captain gets knocked off a ledge or a cliff, he'll grab onto the edge and a QTE will determine whether or not you succeed in climbing back up – but the timing is forgiving. Also, instead of just mashing a button over and over again to encourage Captain Blood to try harder when climbing up the side of a cliff face, the sly dog will do cool things like parry a cutlass slash or grab a guy's leg and fling him over the side as he climbs up, making the whole QTE both useful in thinning out mobs and way more entertaining.

Final Thoughts
Captain Blood reminds me a lot of THQ's Conan from 2007 – it's a simple action adventure game based on a popular (if way-old) book series. Oddly, Captain Blood is less bloody than Conan; but it still has this over-the-top violence that makes the linear levels feel more fun. So it's like the pirate flavor of a game that was based on a book which was the barbarian flavor of Sabatini's pirate adventures. Awesome. Go check out that Errol Flynn version if you haven't already.

Our guided tour through the halls of Blizzard took us through the mundane—the company's fitness center—to the memento-filled—the company museum, filled with numerous awards, 31 drafts of the WoW meets South Park episode, and a copy of StarCraft that had been sent to space.) But we weren't allowed to take photos during some portions of our visit and not all areas of the Blizzard campus were open to the press.

So what weren't we allowed to take snaps of?

The Global Operations Room
Blizzard's situation room monitors the goings on of World Of Warcraft activity around the world. It also keeps a close eye on things happening in the real world, thanks to CNN and The Weather Channel.

When we peeked into the darkened room, we saw a couple of Blizzard employees keeping tabs on global events, just in case a server went down by act of God or military coup. This room says serious business.

The "Project Hydra" Sign
Blizzard was rumored to be hard at work on something that wasn't World of Warcraft or StarCraft II back in 2007. That something was allegedly codenamed "Project Hydra"—presumed to be the working code name for Diablo III—two words present on a simple plastic placard behind, we'll assume, an extra layer of security access.

Did Blizzard put it there as a clever ruse? Is "Project Hydra" hearsay confirmed via office signage? Has the company just not yet gotten around to updating the sign to read Diablo III? Regardless, no photos, please!

Whatever Was Behind Those Black Blinds
The campus is filled with Blizzard concept art, from a Protoss starship in the library to earlier maps of Azeroth adorning the walls. Interestingly, some of the in-development artwork was hung in hallways, but carefully covered with black blinds that could be pulled down to obscure whatever it is that Blizzard is working on for the next World of Warcraft... expansion? Patch? Sequel? I was tempted to peek, but still had more StarCraft II to play that day.

Sound familiar? If it does and you're not thinking of the anime, Paprika, it's likely because Dreamkiller sounds a lot like Painkiller. Painkiller you might remember is that 2004 PC first-person shooter about a guy murdering his way through Purgatory developed by People Can Fly. You might also remember its 2007 sequel, Painkiller: Overdose, which was way less popular and developed by Painkiller fans at Mindware Studios. Dreamkiller is the successor of that second Painkiller – the fan-made one – and whether you hated that game or not, you have to admit Dreamkiller sounds a whole lot cooler than Painkiller: The Emotional Kind.

Like Overdose, Dreamkiller relies on its absurd premise as a means to give the player a lot of weapons with which to murder pretty much everything the player encounters in various levels. The levels in Dreamkiller are actually the nightmares of patients which psychologist Dr. Alice Drake enters using some weird superpower to "cure" them by killing everything she finds in their dreams.

For our first look at the game, Dr. Alice entered the mind of a young woman who suffers from agateophobia – the fear of being insane. Aptly, the nightmare takes place in an insane asylum that sometimes morphs into an orphanage or a World War I-era hospital, suggesting some seriously effed up patient history. Dr. Alice is dropped into a nice-looking waiting room in the hospital with a graveyard right outside the windows and a grenade launcher by the door leading deeper into the asylum – apparently "left" there by the patient for Dr. Alice. In addition to arsenals provided by patients, the good doctor can also use telekinesis and fire balls thanks to a dragon tattoo on her right hand.

Almost as soon as she left the room, the good doctor was assaulted by insane asylum patients wearing giant head vices that look suspiciously like tiki masks. You can guess the rest: Dr. Alice starts shooting, the enemies keep mobbing and eventually a bigger boss shows up to do a lot of damage before the doctor is able to dispatch it with the grenade launcher. It's early days yet for Dreamkiller, so a lot of dialogue and cut scenes weren't in place. However, it sounds like as the player progresses through a patient's dream, Dr. Alice discovers the source of their deep-seated phobias as well as a pattern to their nightmares that suggests a far more sinister and supernatural problem that prescription drugs just won't fix.

Aside from the plot and the fact that the main character is a chick, Dreamkiller also introduces some new elements to its shooter style that weren't in Overdose. In addition to the dragon tattoo powers, for example, Dr. Alice can "project" herself out of a melee situation by sending her shadow running ahead of her and then magically teleporting to where her shadow winds up. You can't go through doors, sadly, but melee combat and running down hallways should sure be interesting. To power the "projection" trick and the dragon tattoo stuff, Dr. Alice has to collect magic pickups in addition to ammo, health and experience points (which level up weapons, not Dr. Alice). She also has a kill meter which presumably does something cool – but it was hard to tell what with such an early build of the game.

Dreamkiller is coming out for PC and Xbox 360 this October. Death match multiplayer is planned, but there's no word on how many or if there will be split-screen multiplayer or not. So far, Mindware isn't thinking of doing a demo, but that's not a definitely "no demo ever" just yet. Even if the answer turns out to be no and we all have to wait four months to find out if the game is any good, we can still dream.