Throughout the year, we here at Kotaku have covered most of the biggest video games on any machine that will play video games. From Arkham City to Zelda: Skyward Sword, from Dungeon Raid to Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery, we covered the biggest and best of them.

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…

What do you want out of a video game? What should you hold against a video game, and what should you let slide?

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…

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.

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+…

When resourceful fans discovered
an exploit showing how to rack up hundreds of extra lives in Super Mario 3DS, some laughed, thinking the game they had seen was too simple for that to be necessary. Let me assure you: Those lives will come in handy—when you least expect it.

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.

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…

Why didn't Gandalf have his giant eagle friends drop the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom and be done with it?

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.

Kirby was always a simple video game character. He was a pleaser. Today, he's a rebel.

Spurts.

Last year, I gave a friend of mine Enslaved because I'd loved the asymmetrical partnership in Ninja Theory's post-apocalyptic action game. After he'd finished, he said to me that he'd had a hard time going back to other games because it suddenly dawned on him how lonely those experiences were. Ratchet & Clank: All 4…

PixelJunk SideScroller is a 1980's style arcade game made for the 26th-century. It's a side scrolling-shoot-em-up that exceeds in everything it attempts to pull off.

Batman: Arkham City, like other Game of the Year contenders that are in its league, should be praised both for what it does as a video game and what it does for video games.

Midway through an early season Hornets-Heat contest the screen cuts to a promotion telling me Friday night, Kobe Bryant and the Lakers take on the Denver Nuggets at Staples Center. Sounds like a good game, I think to myself. What time is that on? 7:30 p.m., the screen tells me.

It doesn't really hit me until about half way through the game. I've been spending so much time worrying over the trick of staying alive that I haven't notice just how insignificant I am.

There's a moment early in Demon's Souls, immediately following the game's first major battle, in which the player must sprint from one end of a castle bridge to another. The looming Red Dragon of Boletarian Palace repeatedly strafes that cobblestone walkway with a fiery blast of breath, an attack that will easily…

The inability to switch off between players was one of the few drawbacks of an otherwise rollicking NBA Jam revival last year. It required some clunky manipulation of your starting lineup and defense, for those who actually played it, often left a man open as you instinctively swarmed to the guy your CPU partner was…