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UFC Undisputed tried to come back too soon. Following a breakout season in 2009, it returned with a good-but-not-great sequel in 2010. Publisher THQ recognized the franchise didn't deliver enough and shifted it to two-year production cycle. So is UFC Undisputed 3 the game mixed martial arts fans should have gotten last May? Or is it a title that can last them another two years? More »
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As I played through the first single-player mission of the new Twisted Metal I felt oddly disconnected from the previous games in the franchise. Perhaps my appreciation for the car combat genre had waned over the decade separating the latest title from PlayStation 2 classic Twisted Metal Black. Maybe I was just too old for this shit. More »
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There were normal action figures based on Batman: Arkham Asylum. They came out a while ago, and they were fine. These premium figures, though, are brand new. More »
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The door closes behind you with an ominous click. It's bright in here—too bright. Before you can get your wits about you, your host begins to speak. More »
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When I see the term 'gaming laptop', the first word that comes to mind is 'performance'. And when I hear of a gaming laptop with a price tag of nearly $2,800, I imagine a system that can readily outperform any less expensive machine. More »
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Batman's had lots of sidekicks over the years. Imps from other dimensions, mask-wearing dogs and his own kill-crazy offspring have leapt from the shadows with the DC Comics superhero. He's trained them, scolded them and in case of Ace the Bat-hound, probably picked up their poop while out on patrol. But there's been a tacit Bat-approval for all of those partners. More »
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Gyakuten Saiban—the movie based on Capcom's visual novel series, Ace Attorney—was released in Japan to sold-out theaters this past weekend. More »
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Racing games on handheld systems can be a tough sell—with a smaller screen and lower hardware horsepower, it can be difficult to convey the sense of speed that makes great racing games great. The new PlayStation Vita handheld seems designed to address the racing genre head-on—its processing power is closer to a current-gen console than any handheld before it, and its sizable OLED screen seems custom-made for driving games. More »
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When Sony unveiled its PlayStation Vita handheld at last year's E3, Uncharted: Golden Abyss was one of the first things they showed. This sent a clear message: "Our new handheld is a portable current-gen console. To prove it, we're going to show it running one of our most technically demanding current-gen games." After all, the Uncharted franchise is synonymous with everything that Sony wants people to think of when they think of the PlayStation brand—polished, fun, classy, high production values, and amazing graphics. More »
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The first thing I ever heard about the PlayStation Vita game Little Deviants was that you could touch the Vita's rear touch panel to poke flat ground in the game into hills. Doing that would cause a spherical deviant who was sitting on the flat ground to roll. More »
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The best physical attributes of the PlayStation Vita are the machine's big screen and twin analog sticks. More »
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If you're in a hurry, you simply need to know that the PlayStation Vita is a very good portable video game machine that excels in ways that Sony hasn't bothered to hype. More »
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Dear Esther is a terrible video game. More »
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At E3 in June, I watched Konami's Shinta Nojiri play NeverDead and struggle to reassemble his dismembered, immortal hero just to dispatch what looked like the game's run-of-the-mill enemies. These people have a real problem on their hands, I thought to myself, if they think that's anyone's idea of fun. More »
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The first Darkness game was released in 2007. With some original ideas for the genre and a setting that wasn't space or a war, it was a surprise hit, and people still say nice things about it today. More »
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The lead designer of The Elder Scrolls III and IV, a New York Times bestselling fantasy author, and one of comics' most notable creators walk into a development studio to create an action role-playing game based on an entirely original fantasy world. Stop me if you've heard this one. More »
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Over the course of several years I've painstakingly migrated all of my gaming and electronics equipment into a single area, an impassable tangle of wires and blinking lights, all in the name of making sure I had a stable, wired connection at all times. Once I got everything just right, Diamond Multimedia sent me the Powerline Internet AV Kit, a pair of devices that turn any power outlet into a wired network connection. More »
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Soul Calibur V, like almost all fighting games nowadays, finds itself having to serve multiple purposes for a broad and fragmented user base. Fighting games demand investment if you're actually trying to excel at them. You've got to pick a character that speaks to you and then master enough moves to be competent and diverse. Nobody's just showing up to get beat down, after all, and winning ugly is worse than losing. More »
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In an epic tale of time-traveling heroism, Square Enix travels two years into the future to rectify the mistakes it made with Final Fantasy XIII. Have they found redemption with Final Fantasy XIII-2, or is history doomed to repeat itself? More »
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Resident Evil: Revelations is a wonderful surprise. It benefits both from the low expectations set by the previous, shallow Resident Evil on the Nintendo 3DS and from the fact that it is a very good Resident Evil. More »
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We're a little late reviewing Hori's official Mario Kart 7 Wheel peripheral, but I'm somewhat glad we are, thanks to some of the non-racing games I played with it on a whim. If this was just a piece of plastic meant for one game, the wheel is a $13 novelty at best, a luxury at worst, and not something where any recommendation really means much. Playing other games, however, shows the wheel has more value than that. More »
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Making a consumer recommendation on a video game is rather simple: new ones typically cost $60, so the question is whether the thing is worth that. Hardware and peripherals are a bit trickier as a manufacturer can pile on features and conveniences, jacking up the price but, inevitably, making a recommendable luxury. More »
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While dozens of video games have strived to capture the hearts of Star Wars fans through previously untold tales of epic space fantasy, BioWare's massively multiplayer Star Wars: The Old Republic is the first that's attempted to tell eight stories to thousands of people at the same time. More »
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When I fired up the PS Vita for the first time this past weekend, I couldn't help but think back to Dec. 2004. So much has changed. I had a one-year-old son, who is now eight. I hadn't started writing for the blog you are reading right now. Sony entered the handheld fray, with the battlefield littered with fallen portables, with the goal of not only holding its own against mighty Nintendo, but succeeding. Sony wanted to build a better handheld. More »
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Real men (and women) who play games (well, fighting games) don't use control pads. Those are for children. Real men (and women) use sticks. And some of the best around are HORI's sticks. More »
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Upon finishing up the initial download and install of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from Steam and launching the game, the game determined that the optimal graphics settings for the MSI GT683DXR-423US gaming laptop I was playing on were "Ultra High", and that was good enough for me. More »
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There's a spot on the couch where Mario Kart 7 sits, a well-worn seat where the pillows and cushions have been arranged just so. Over the years, a multitude of previous Mario Kart games have all occupied that spot, and so Mario Kart 7 knows just how to hold itself, just how to sit, just how to remain comfortable. This game feels so confidently Mario Kart—every aspect of its design and presentation is just in there. More »
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For all that's been written about Minecraft over the past few years, you'd think it was one of the greatest video games ever created. A liberating experience that's showing big-budget game developers what the public really wants and helping revolutionise the way games are developed and sold. More »
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Square Enix's first two Street Fighter IV figures, based on series "heroes" Ryu and Chun-Li, have just hit shelves. Part of the company's Play Arts line, they're big, they're detailed and they're a little on the expensive side. More »
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A couple of months ago, a box arrived from headphone specialists Turtle Beach containing a set of PX3 headphones. Just in time for my family to go overseas and talk to me for a month on Skype, and just in time for Battlefield 3, where I'd want my friends to hear me scream as I flew a helicopter into the side of a building. More »
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Despite only visiting it once in my adolescent years, I've never forgotten the Cradle of Aviation Museum in the suburb of Garden City. Row after row of majestic aircraft stood next to each other, shiny but defunct evidence to the pivotal role that Long Island played to the science and practice of aeronautics in the 20th Century. Even throughout the guided tour, there was a stately kind of quiet, an air of reverence that hung throughout the space. Playing through Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary reminds me of walking through the Cradle of Aviation Museum. That place isn't a world-renown venue like the Museum of Natural History or the Guggenheim, but rather it's one of those mid-tier shrines dedicated to a particular phenomenon. It's a physical space reserved for a special kind of contemplation and the 10th birthday re-master of the first Halo game strikes me as a virtual equivalent. Stretching out the metaphor a little more, it's almost like looking at carefully restored masterpiece painting—craning your eyes upwards at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, perhaps—after preservation work's been done. There's a new vividness to be found in something you might've known intimately before. More »
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What do you want out of a video game? What should you hold against a video game, and what should you let slide? More »
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Kanye West's "Power" plays a central, recurring role in Volition's new open-world crime game Saints Row: The Third. The tune has been featured in the game's exhaustive promotional materials, plays regularly on its in-game radio stations, and makes bookending appearances in the single-player campaign. Considering the song's lyrics and the man who wrote them, Volition couldn't have chosen a more appropriate theme song. More »
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About 20 hours into playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, one of the Wii's most ambitious games, I shook my head and realized why I was frustrated with a game that I was enjoying. More »
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The tantalizingly brief Skyrim teaser trailer debuted by Bethesda Softworks late last year filled my mind with visions of titanic battles between man and beast; of shining steel bathed in ancient flames; of a champion rising from humble origins, prepared to sacrifice everything for the fate of the world. After 60+ hours with the game those visions have been fully realized — and rendered largely inconsequential. More »
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When resourceful fans discovered More »
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Liquid fast, meticulously polished, wickedly consuming: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 doesn't deliver stories or engender emotion in its players, but rather deals in raw adrenaline. A match of Modern Warfare 3 is punctuated by the rush of a well-placed shot, the anger at a surprise, unjust death. More »
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Even after 20 years, it's amazing how quickly muscle memory returns. And not just in the hands or the arms; I'm talking in the extraocular muscles—the ones that move your eyeballs. Blasting through that first, long runway that opens good old Green Hill Zone, Sonic the Hedgehog plowed headfirst into a garden-variety badnik. On restart, he did it again. My eyeballs literally were not tracking. I thought for sure this review of Sonic Generations would provide a cruel awakening to the fact a young man's game had passed me by. More »
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Why didn't Gandalf have his giant eagle friends drop the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom and be done with it? More »
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Telling a story is as much about what isn't included as it is about what is included. It's easy to overwhelm with too much: Too much story, too many people, too much detail. Artful brevity, careful selection is key to how a story is told and perceived. More »
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