I wasn't able to do a dump (not that kind) last week, because Brian Crecente was on vacation and I was doing the Day Note to end my shift each day. I can only write so many soul-revealing personal posts 24 hours, you know?

But the Dump's back this week. My notebook's got some extras.

The IGF Gavel: I'm spending part of my weekend finishing my first round judging duties for the Independent Games Festival. This is something I always want to write more about, but I think judging, for VGAs IGF awards and other awards I'm not running, is best kept private. Nevertheless, it can have a major influence on what I write based on the exposure it grants me to more games (Being a VGA judge, for example, got me to see Assassin's Creed II a little earlier this fall than I would have otherwise). As far as the IGF judging goes, I've enjoyed doing it each of the past few years, getting a chance to see some wonderful, small, mostly PC games early. I played Braid more than a year before it was released, and World of Goo about half a year before it was out. I've played side-scrollers that you control with a Guitar Hero guitar and eventual award-winners such as Blueberry Garden. I don't want to say much about the 17 first-round games I'm judging this year yet, but just imagine having to judge a game called Don't Shit Your Pants on a scale of 1-100 in matters such as graphics, design, sound and so on. It's a fun exercise. Once I'm further into the process and I get the ok, I do hope to turn some of these IGF playing experiences into posts.

EA's PSN/XBLA Future: I interviewed EA CEO John Riccitiello a couple of Wednesdays ago and published a bunch of articles from it. But not everything. It's amazing how much you can fit in to a one-hour chat. I still have big chunks of the interview that I didn't publish. Some of that isn't post-worthy. Other stuff is good food for thought that I'll use as a basis for reporting in the future. Here's a bit I thought I'd get to but doesn't seem like I'll be able to advance any time soon. He had mentioned EA's commercially and critically successful 2009 XBLA and PSN game Battlefield 1943 a couple of times in our chat, and I asked him what his take on that market was. EA had, to the best of my memory, published only one downloadable game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 before that. He said: "We looked at [the XBLA/PSN market] and saw there's a lot of stuff up there that generates about $500,000 in terms of revenue. And they're generally spending $495,000 to a million in dev. And while that equation is very cool, it's a hobby, it's not a business. And while the gamers are having fun with it, they're not having that much fun with it. And to be honest, how many board games do you want to play on your Xbox? So we looked at that and said, 'This isn't being addressed in the right way.' So we tripled our budget and made something we thought would be really good, with no understanding of what was going to happen. We got a really great outcome with not just highly profitable business but one where consumers far and wide lauded it as a great game. We're learning from that and there will be more like that." Got that? More big XBLA/PSN games coming from EA.

Next Year, Already: There's some other stuff in my notebook about games that I can't write about yet. Publishers are always setting up new dates to define when a game they've offered an early glimpse of can be covered. It's part of the deal of seeing this stuff in advance. Let's just say there were games at Sony and Ubisoft events this week that remain under such embargoes. More exciting, though, is that I have preview copies of a trio of 2010 games that I know people will be excited about, and I'll be able to write impressions of them on Monday, Tuesday and the Monday following. I mention this as a way to show how the years keep churning. I just wrote my last disc-game review of 2009 on The Saboteur and I'm already shifting in to playing major-label 2010 games. Some folks rightfully lament the gaming media's constant look to the next big thing. It feels like eons since we last covered Halo 3: ODST in any meaningful way, for example, though that game was a big deal, just three months ago. We're trying to look back a little at least with some of the catch-up reviews we've been publishing. Hopefully we'll find other ways, too, to keep an eye on the games of recent past and the experiences gamers have with them.

Review Addendum: I always jot notes down in my notebook before I write a review, but I realize now that I omitted from my review this week of The Saboteur something that I thought was a telling problem: It takes three button presses to go from in-game action to a pannable view of your full game map. That's got to be a no-no, no?

Games I Got In The Mail This Week But Didn't Write About (Yet?): Tekken 6 (PS3 with fancy fighting stick), Hello Kitty Party (DS).

Check for my weekly review round-up a little later, but otherwise, make way for the night and weekend crews!

I usually use the Notebook Dump as a place to tell readers about facts I've picked up that don't merit their own posts. Today, however, it's more relevant to talk about why I don't have as much to share this week.

A game reporter spends some weeks... distracted. This week was like that for me. I spent a chunk of Monday completing Assassin's Creed II. I spent part of Tuesday sitting for a gaming-related interview for Spike TV (extending my streak of weeks during which I've worn make-up to two). On Thursday, I was indisposed for a couple of hours at one of those secret-for-now preview events for a game that comes out next year. All of this, in addition to spending a few hours chipping away at the Modern Warfare 2 campaign to keep pace with our Game Club, keeps a game reporter from doing that much, well, reporting.

That's not ideal for me, mind you. For years, people have replied to my description of what I do for a living by asking me what it's like to play games for work. They assume I play games from nine to five, but that's something I've tried to avoid. It's less easy to avoid that this time of year. Playing games spills into working hours. Working hours become added gaming time. Less reporting gets done. That's yet another sign that the job of the reviewer and the job of the reporter aren't made to overlap. Some would argue that they should not — or even that one person shouldn't do both. Tell that to all the people who conflate games journalism with games reviewing.

Enough of this irregular Notebook Dump. By the way, that's an image up top of a Mario t-shirt that I photographed at the Nintendo World store this past weekend. Say hello to his little friends.

Games I Got But Didn't Write About (Yet?): NCAA Basketball 10 (Xbox 360, PS3), Assassin's Creed Bloodlines (PSP), Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles (Wii)

Drone Confusion: Last week, right here in Notebook Dump, I posted about Mass Effect 2's helper drones, having held that information out of an earlier preview until I had gotten some details in my notebook confirmed. Turns out that the confirmation I got from BioWare and EA wasn't quite on the money. Thankfully, one of the game's top designers dropped me a line to clear things up. So Dumpers, head on back to last week's updated entry to find out the proper details on the ME2 drones.

FOX'd: The Fox News network made some news on Kotaku due to how they covered the terrorism level of Modern Warfare 2 (the most troubling thing for me was that they didn't even talk about that topic for most of the segment). Later in the week, I showed up on MSNBC to talk about the same stuff. But did you know I made it to Fox today, as well? I was on their online show, with a less skeptical crew. We talked Mario as well. I'd share a link if I could find one. I was on the 11/13 episode of Gadgets and Games. It streamed live here but doesn't seem to have hit the archives yet.

What Reggie's Playing: I interviewed Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime today and will have a lot more from that interview soon. One minor detail not worth a post of its own but fun enough to shareis his mention of which game he'll be dislodging from his DS once the new Zelda is released: Scribblenauts.

A Few Discs: I met with Square-Enix people today to check out their holiday and early 2010 line-up. It was interesting to be with their U.S. PR reps just minutes after the release-date announcement trailer went live. One rep was happily refreshing GameTrailers, marveling at the rise in traffic on the clip. Given the excitement about the date, which promises both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 releases of the game on March 9, 2010 in North America and Europe, I asked a question I see our readers asking frequently: How many discs will the 360 version require? The Square reps recalled that this was mentioned in a developer interview earlier this year and said that the goal is 3-4 discs. While we will know a lot more about Final Fantasy XIII once it is released in Japan in December, it seems that details about the 360 version — which isn't coming out in Japan — may take longer to become clear.

I feel bad that I've got so much stuff in my notebook that I haven't shared, but most of it is full-post-worthy. Be sure to be back next week! I'll be back on the site this weekend, hopefully, with a report from Nintendo's re-creation of the Mushroom Kingdom at the Nintendo World Store in New York City.

Oh, and that silly shot at the top of this post was taken Monday evening at a Modern Warfare 2 New York public demo event. A company set up a green screen and promised people the chance to be added into a Modern Warfare 2 screenshot. I was expecting something a little more Forrest Gump. But it's funny anyway, yes?

Dragon Age Bugs: Fahey mentioned in his review of Dragon Age: Origins that his PlayStation 3 version of the game had a bug that blocked him from completing the game. He had to revert to an earlier save file to get around it. These are the kinds of things that demand follow-up, and so I shot BioWare public relations an inquiry about it on Tuesday, hoping for an update on Wednesday. No update came, and with little to report on that front. I unfortunately let things slip and did not post because, well, there was no news. No sense in reiterating known bugs without advancing the story. This may turn into a post next week if I can finally get an update. To review the problems Fahey had — and hopefully avoid them yourself — scroll down in his review to the part marked "Bugs Aplenty."

Mass Effect 2's New Helpers: While BioWare's Dragon Age people had no word for me about that game, their Mass Effect 2 people were able to clear something up. Omitted from my preview of the game this morning was a mention of the game's partner drones. I left them out of the write-up because I wasn't sure about a couple of details. Turns out, my notes were correct: The new game allows members of the player's party to use combat drones. These floating drones, which looked like balls of light in the build I saw, will seek and engage enemies. Some drones will seek biotic-based enemies. Others may attack tech-based enemies. I had seen one in action a few weeks ago during my most recent demo of the game. But, as of the writing of the preview this morning I didn't have all the details confirmed. So now you know of one new tactic available in the game.

[UPDATE: I heard from Christina Norman, one of the lead designers on Mass Effect 2 at BioWare, who told me that some of the above information is off. Game designers tend to be the most tapped into the technical distinctions of their games, so I was happy to have her clarify some things. Tech drones do not select targets based on biotic or tech-based enemies; they attack who you send them to attack and then auto-select their next targets. They can only be players playing as engineers and by follower characters who are"heavy tech power specialists." She also told me: "They're not really suited to killing enemies their role is more to distract, suppress, and lock down enemies."]

Rabbids Quest: I was supposed to have received Rabbids Go Home last Friday, but FedEx mis-delivered the game. I'd needed it in order to review it this week. I wound up getting a new copy mailed to me by publisher Ubisoft on Monday, in time for me to review the game today. I'd hoped to at least get an adventure out of trying to track down that first delivery. It was sent to a nearby building and even signed for, according to FedEx's records. Last Friday, after writing the Notebook Dump, I stepped out into the New York night to hunt the game down. I managed to sweet-talk my way into the building where it was sent, but the "apartment #3" that supposedly received the package was not easily found. Instead, I wound up on a third floor lined with more than 15 apartments. None of them marked. I was on the phone with Crecente at the time, and it was the day before Halloween. He told me to "run away!" I made my escape, but with no game found, I decided my adventure was too pathetic for a post.

Games I Got But Didn't Write About (Yet?): Hasbro Family Game Night 2 (Wii and DS), Jewel Master Egypt (DS), and three other games.

That's it for now. I've got something artsy for Monday and will hopefully make a fun field trip that I can cover later in the week. This weekend, with luck, I'll get to some people's WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw custom storylines. Or I'll play more Style Savvy. Seriously. More on that later.

Weird week this week for me, with reporting mixed in with new-house stuff and some exciting non-work stuff. But still there are these extra things I need to share.

Gears of War Comic Tops All? This didn't become a post because it was old and nebulous and I didn't have time to try to confirm it. But a report from earlier in the month from Rich Johnston, one of the comic book world's top gossip reporters, indicates that the best-selling comic for Superman and Batman publisher DC Comics last year might have been the Gears of War comic.

They're White? I got my first DSi-only cartridge game, Storm City's augmented-reality game System Flaw. I'll try it this weekend, but even if I wind up writing about it, I don't think the color of its cartridge would merit a full post, right?

There Won't Be Blood I'm throwing out a bag of fake blood that was sent here, to Crecente's attention, months ago. I don't remember for what. I may be sending him some swag he can use at the annual Kotaku charity event. But a bag of blood doesn't travel well. Not if packed by me. So no blood. No post about it. Just chucking it.

Games I Got But Didn't Write About (Yet?) Style Savvy, System Flaw, Tekken 6, Ben 10 Alien Force Vilgax Atacks and some stuff I'm not permitted to mention yet.

There was going to be something else in here about an unusual fighting game. But my draft write-up began to seem like a full post. So it will be one on Monday. Can't hardly wait, right?

To be honest, I was a little distracted this week because I was busy becoming a homeowner. And Crecente was in New York doing his thing. And... biggest speed bump of all, I was distracted by not being mentioned in Hulk Hogan's new autobiography, "My Life Outside The Ring."

Very sad.

I wound up with a few leftovers that I don't plan to turn into full posts.

Ears-On With Ghost Trick: Maybe "ears-on" would even be overstating my exposure to Capcom's 2010 DS game Ghost Trick. It was the one Capcom game I was hoping to see at the company's New York City gaming showcase this week that wasn't there. So I asked a public relations representative to tell me more about it. I knew the game was being made by Phoenix Wright developers. He fleshed things out. I'd be playing as a dead guy, a ghost who can inhabit inanimate objects and prevent people from being killed. And there's a talking lamp or something. That's about all I need to be told to want to play this game, but it's not enough for a post. I will predict right now that Capcom will return to New York, and that they will bring with them Ghost Trick.

Overhead HUDs: I got into a chat with Dark Void producer Morgan Gray about the placement of heads-up displays. His game, which stars a guy on a jetpack and was made by people who developed Crimson Skies games, puts its ammo counter and mini-map across the top of the screen. There's no HUD along the bottom. I asked why, and while he couldn't offer me any theories or share any rules about HUD placement, he said that Dark Void's was placed at the top because that's the tradition in flight games. Makes sense. Somehow these decisions do get made.

Dragon Age Has Been Shrinkwrapped And Unshrinkwraapped: Back when my gaming schedule was dictated by when games were on sale in stores, I never thought that games might be finished, sitting in boxes somewhere, days or weeks early. Well, sometimes they are. As I'm typing this, I have a boxed copy of early November's Dragon Age: Origins for the Xbox 360 on my desk. That's not post-worthy, because it'd seem like bragging. But it's kind of interesting, no? Shrinkwrapped Ratchet & Clank has been on my desk this week too.

A Plant That Eats Meat The always-gentlemanly PR man Rob Fleischer stopped by today at the Gawker Media (aka Kotaku parent company) offices where I work today. He was showing me two games that I can't write about yet. And, somehow, even though I started here in May, he was the first PR person to do a meeting with me here. Most of my meetings are at hotels and other demo venues. Classy guy that Rob is, he brought me a Pitcher Plant. It eats flies. ... Was he sending me a message?

That's enough Notebook Dumping. I need to go home and pack. And if you want to be mightily impressed, check out how amazingly high I rank on the Ratchet & Clank leaderboards. Thankfully, the game isn't out yet.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Oh, man. So late today for a Friday appointment that this post will barely even contain full sentences.

Busy week. Exciting new tech on the site. Our first fashion review. And did I get to everything? No way.

More Dragon Age, Spore Hero, SimsAnimals Africa, EA Sports Active coverage next week. And that's not counting the games EA showed me that they won't let me write about until weeks beyond that (you've heard of these games before; you just don't know about the new stuff in them, unfortunately).

This is Notebook Dump (very special, Terrible Edition). I'm supposed to give an example of something I didn't turn into a post and will never be a post. How about that EA has a game about being in high school coming out for iPhone, but I didn't get to see it? Hmm. (At least I have a screenshot of it in this post. It's called Surviving High School.)

Oh: At the DJ Hero event I played the guitar-turntable combo mode. I played the turntable to a Gang Starr song. A guy from Activision played the guitar. I can't remember what his part of the song was. I played on Medium, he played on Expert. We couldn't fail. I asked if the other player could play drums instead. Not in this version, but the team is open to seeing which kinds of songs people want for the future, he told me.

That's all I can think of now. Sorry folks. Go back and read my massage story, then. It's informative and partially funny, I think.

Have a nice weekend.

I pretty much got to everything I wanted to this week, though we've entered the time of the year when it's less a matter of reporting not getting done but games not being played. I've got Half Minute Hero in my PSP for review and have been sneaking some time in with Uncharted 2 before putting it and any other game I'm not assigned to review to the side.

There were just one thing that got left in my notebook this weekt:

No Zelda: I was able to write a few posts about New Super Mario Bros. Wii thanks to Nintendo demonstrating the game in New York on Monday. I had anticipated writing some posts about The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks as well, because I was sure that the E3 build Nintendo had shown in June in L.A., later that month in New York, then in September in Seattle, would be no more. The game is two months away, so time for a new build to try, right? Not yet. The special E3 demo is all Nintendo will show for now, keeping this highly-anticipated game still something of a mystery as its December release approaches. It's a little odd that Nintendo wouldn't have anything new, but I see it less as a sign that gamers should be concerned than that Nintendo is keeping this one close. (These Spirit Tracks impressions are the freshest we have for you.)

That's it, really. I had a day off and was preoccupied by some non-post-related stuff (apartment drama!) that kept me from filling my notebook with much else. I advanced reporting on some pieces I hope to have until next week, but until then, a lack of Zelda is all I've got for you.

Have a nice weekend, everyone.

I have written all but one of the Tokyo Game Show posts I still needed to get to this week. I've had little time to report on much else. So, today, on the even of the many October New York City visits from many of gaming's biggest companies, I don't have much left in my notebook.

Here are some leftovers:

The Best Thing I Saw In Tokyo: Witness the magic in the YouTube clip above. In a toy store that Crecente, McWhertor and I visited before the start of TGS, I took many pictures of Pokemon. And then, upstairs, I found this five-minute video of Aero Spider, a toy car that drives up walls and on the ceiling. Stupendous!

One such statement — it may have come from Kazumi Kitaue, head of Konami Digital Entertainment — covered the accessibility of American movies. The gentleman who said this explained that, while living in the U.S., he'd realized that there are many non-English speaking people in the country who can nevertheless enjoy going to the movies.

Why?

Because Hollywood "makes entertaining films you can enjoy without even needing to speak the language." I thought this was an odd analysis, even though I understood where he said he was going with it: "To succeed globally we need to look at action games and sports games and games that can be understood globally."

(On my flight home, I watched part of the newest Fast and Furious with the sound off as I transcribed interviews I had recorded. )

Leaving With High Hopes: I usually end my interviews by asking my interviewees if there is anything else they want to tell Kotaku. Sometimes I get good stuff out of that, but I primarily ask it to make sure the person I've been interviewing feels they've been able to express whatever they wanted to get across in the interview. Often, the responses to the question repeat things we've discussed or sum things up about a new game in the most PR-friendly way.

And sometimes, as was the case with Level 5's Yoshiaki Kusuda who discussed the 2008-in-Japan and 2010-in-the-U.S. White Knight Chronicles with me, the response is one of apology and hope: "We are so sorry that we have been keeping it from users for so much time, international users who have been looking forward to it. But over the past months we have worked very hard to incorporate all of the feedback the Japanese users gave us since the release of it in the market and we have also worked to incorporate all the requests from the U.S. users. We hope we can deliver the title.. I would like to ask for a little more patience."

That's all I've got for the ND this week. One more semi-TGS-related piece coming next week, plus my monthly Nintendo stats report and hopefully some hands-on with games I think people will care about. Enjoy the weekend, everyone.

I wound down my coverage this week in preparation for going to Tokyo tomorrow. On Thursday I had my first day of not posting any original stories on Kotaku since I started. Today, I'm only doing two posts... well, plus my Halo 3: ODST review, which will run while I'm away. There's not been as much from me on the site as there usually is, to say nothing of there being less in my notebook.

But there is some stuff I didn't get to and didn't think merited a post. Not surprisingly, it mostly comes from the two interviews that I pulled a number of stories from this week: My PAX chats with BioWare's Greg Zeshuk and Ubisoft's Patrice Desilets. You can learn a lot from 20-minute interviews with game developers, but too much info can clog a story. Because of that I didn't think either of the following needed to run anywhere but here:

Future Mass Effect 1 Expansions Unlikely: Some things just seem too obvious, like BioWare co-founder Zeschuk telling me the following when I asked if we'd get any more downloadable content for the original Mass Effect: "We're getting close to Mass Effect 2, so I would say it's highly unlikely." I had to ask, and had he said yes, that'd be a post. But this answer's not that surprising.

AC2's Short Scenes: Assassin's Creed II creative director Desilets and I spoke about a lot of things, including his series' cut-scenes. In the first game, the real-time cut-scenes permitted the player to move their hero Altair through the scene as they played. In the new game, however, there will also be non-interactive cut-scenes. Desilets didn't want them to be long. So the longest one, he told me, runs just two minutes.

No Cakes: Last Sunday I went to the Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Center where Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment was hosting a Scribblenauts launch event. There was a cake there, and I took pictures. Then I remembered, we don't do cakes at Kotaku like we used to. So I skipped it. But you can see the cake (and me) in this thread. That's the cake in message #997.

The video at the top of this post is self-explanatory, but in case you're wondering why that's here now, well... I ran a lot of other stuff from my visit to Microsoft. This thing wasn't very video gamey. So I thought it'd be best to put in a Dump. So here you go.

I'm off to Japan tomorrow. I'm packing a bunch of portable games for the long NYC-Tokyo flight: Scribblenauts as well as the new Drawn to Life and Mario and Luigi games for the DS. If my bags aren't getting too heavy, NBA 09 and who knows what else for my PSP.

Thanks for reading this week, and please be extra nice to the weekend crew!

I haven't been able to write one of these Notebook Dumps in a couple of weeks and am now giving you one a day early. Tomorrow is a rest day for me, a day of theoretically not doing any work, though I may start writing my Halo 3: ODST review (I played through it yesterday). It'll be embargoed until closer to the game's release. I'll also spend some of the weekend prepping some final pieces that stem from last weekend's Penny Arcade Expo. There were some fun interviews I simply couldn't get to yet. I'll get to that stuff. But there are other things that just don't rate posts. For example:

12-13 Inches: I wrote multiple stories about Bungie and Halo this week and stopped short of making a full post about an interesting fact mentioned by the studio's creative director, Joe Staten, at a PAX panel. Someone asked him about keeping all of the Halo lore straight, so he started talking about Bungie's Halo "bible." He said that if it was all printed out and stacked up, it would be 12-13 inches tall. Post-worthy? Nah. But now you know.

Cave Story Abridged: I'd heard a lot of good things about Cave Story, a Metroid-ish web game that is finally coming to WiiWare later this year. And then I saw an e-mail, forwarded to me by Crecente, by a reader who wanted to be sure we checked it out at PAX. So I finally tried the game at PAX. I played from a mid-game save point and a late-game save point and I was left wondering: How do I post about this fun little game I've played for only three minutes? I could tell you that it's a side-scrolling adventure game with weapons that you can level up. It has pistols and energy cannons and a gun you can shoot toward the ground in order to jump higher. It has fireplaces you can walk through and quests to solve. I could tell you those things, but all of that is known about Cave Story. If it's not news that the game will have an option that lets you switch from its original graphics to its polished Wii ones, then I have nothing for you. Sorry.

Gold Guy Vs Capcom Guy: It's been suggested that I'm not the guy to cover fighting games in any depth for this or any other outlet. There I was at PAX button mashing to Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom on the Wii. I played as the big gold guy who doubles as a lighter in real life. Rather than write the world's least-informed preview, I passed. Sorry and you're welcome.

Free Drinks: I posted a batch of images from my visit last week to Microsoft's Washington State Xbox 360 offices. I showed statues and banners but decided to save the images of Xbox champagne for a more frivolous moment, like the moment you're taking to read this. At the top of this post you'll see Aaron Greenberg, one of Microsoft's top guys of brand messaging, hoisting aloft bottles of Xbox 360 champagne. Greenberg took me on a tour of the offices for the Xbox 360 PR and marketing team, and nearly everyone he introduced me to had one of these bottles, unopened, near their desk. They commemorate Microsoft's E3 press conference, which Greenberg put together. He had a whole box of these bottles still corked in office, possibly to give away, possibly for a more depressing moment. He offered me one. I passed, but said we should take a photo. Here's a closer look at the label.

That's enough dumping from me. I'll be back next week with some interviews, some previews and some sense that Tokyo Game Show is right around the corner. I fly out in nine days. Enjoy Friday without me, folks!

Shifting Responsibility: EA was nice enough to stage a game demo of Need For Speed Shift just one block from my office on Thursday. So I went to it, got past the oddly jokey bouncer and went inside to play some Need For Speed Shift. Short on time and barely competent at racing games, I handed the controller to Ray Wert, commander of Kotaku sister site Jalopnik. They're all about cars. Interesting to watch a guy who might not be a gaming expert but knows his cars take the controls. By his second try, Ray had figured it all out, knowing seemingly better than the game when to accelerate and when to brake as he took each turn. I decided I couldn't write anything informative up about this game, but Ray could. I hope he's able to get to it.

Wii-Less Batman: When games don't come out on the most successful home video game console in the world, I ask why. Especially if the games come out on the other machines. I've been asking Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment public relations this week why the acclaimed Batman Arkham Asylum isn't on the Wii — and whether Wii owners have any reason to hope to play the game on their console. I asked a couple of times this week. And a couple of times WBIE informed me that Batman Arkham Asylum was made for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Games for Windows. I've told them that's a non-answer. They have no other reply. That's not much for a post, so it goes in here.

NBA Ignorance: I'm barely a sports gamer, so I felt ill-equipped to write about NBA 2K10 after seeing it yesterday. I just did a post about the commentary but plan to leave the rest of the writing about the game to others on the team. What I can say without fear of seeming foolish is that core gameplay tweaks to players' turbo meter and shooting techniques are supposedly evident in the 2K10 Draft Combine, a downloadable training camp released this week that will let players start a rookie of their own making before integrating him into the game when it's out in early October.

Embargoes Galore: In the past few weeks I've played Borderlands and checked out two other titles, all of which I'll finally be able to write about next week.

That's all I can dump on you this week. Pax is next week. I'll be in Seattle for it and for some other cool stuff. Have a nice weekend, everyone. Even to the guy who said he hated me. I don't hate you!

What a week. QuakeCon material from last week spilled into Gamescom and Blizzcon bonanzas this week. Not much got left on the cutting room floor or in my notebook. There are a couple of stories I have in the works for early next week, but of the stuff I just can't cram into a post? Not much...

Billy Hatcher's Kind of Back: A couple of weeks ago, I played a bunch of Sega games and wrote about them. The one I didn't get to was Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing. I played it and still plan to write a Preview. But I also was half-tempted to post about how the game surprised me by acknowledging the existence in Sega's past of Billy Hatcher. Hatcher was the star of 2003's Billy Hatcher & The Giant Egg, a GameCube-launching game from Yuji Naka's Sega Team that was the wrong game at the wrong time. While the gaming world was craving Grand Theft Autos and Halos, Sonic Team made a new cute mascot character who rolled giant eggs to safety so they could hatch partner animals for Billy. I believe the game was a flop. But it turns out that this early 2010 kart-racer from Sega has a Billy Hatcher stage, complete with giant eggs rolling across the track. And Hatcher is a racer in the game with his own egg car. So... Billy's back.

An Extra Two Seconds: I sort of already did post this, but no one noticed and I felt it wasn't worth a standalone post. Based on testing the original PS3 and the PS3 Slim, recording their boot-up sequences and syncing them together in split-screen (all of which you can find elsewhere on this site), I discovered that the Slim takes two seconds longer to boot up. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe because it has a single on-off switch and isn't in perpetual stand-by mode like my original PS3, which has an on-off switch in the back and a sleep switch in the front. I used my PS3 controller to shut down each machine, recorded them each booting back up. And, well... I guess two seconds isn't really that big a deal.

Lots Of Screenshots Unseen: There comes a point when enough is enough with all the Gamescom screenshots and trailers. We've slowed that down because that's not what we want the site to drown on. I had some new-screenshots posts in draft I left linger. I'd rather write something that would be read.

I didn't get to a Rage interview I still need to run, believe it or not. And a piece that had me talking to John Carmack about something Hideo Kojima said to me — that one's for Monday. So there's more. I'd suggest you have a nice weekend, but I'm not saying goodbye yet. Gotta do a little more work for the site today.

All hail Fahey, McWhertor, and Crecente, the hard-working road warriors of the week!

This was a weird week, as a story I was chasing didn't quite come together. New facts contradicted old facts. It was a wash. Plus, I did an interview on Monday that I still haven't gotten to publishing and am facing a week next week that'll have me in the office for about a day and a half, spending the rest of it playing Sega's fall line-up and then attending Quakecon in Dallas.

Still, a few things fell through the cracks...

For The Hardcore: I ran a Red Steel 2 story yesterday, built around an interview with the game's creative director, Jason VandenBerghe. During the interview, I had to ask him about his expectations for his game, given the unspectacular sales performances of House of the Dead Overkill, MadWorld and some other games I described as games for "hardcore" gamers. It seemed like Red Steel 2 was aimed at the same players. VandenBerghe smiled and said, "I don't get into the 'Is-there-a-hardcore-gamer-audience-on-the-Wii?' question. There are gamers who have the Wii. And this game is for gamers."

Shopping Mama: This one goes back to last week, but pertains to a posting decision I made this week. I had visited a publicity firm's office in New York to play some of Majesco's games. That included Boy and his Blob, which I did preview. I was also shown Cooking Mama 3, the upcoming DS game in the popular cooking series. I've played the core cooking parts of the series before, using a DS stylus and a Wii remote to slice, dice, stir and all the rest. I was told that one of the new things Mama 3 has is shopping. But I didn't understand the shopping sequence I tried, nor did the PR folks showing me the game. They had just received the non-translated build from its Japanese developers. I used the stylus to direct Mama through a top-down view of a supermarket. The store was filled with people walking in set paths, up and down aisles. And there were tomatoes that I needed to lead Mama to. If she bumped into the people in the store, I had to play mini-games that had the same rapid pace of standard cooking moments in the series. Shake a rattle for a crying baby. Keep sandwiches from falling off a deli counter. That kind of stuff. If I walked Mama over to the tomatoes, I was a success. But why? What does it gain Mama? Certainly she doesn't have to now shop for any ingredients that she's going to use in a recipe? Flummoxed, I decided I couldn't write a full preview of the game.

That's all I left out this week, for better or worse. And now I'm off to get some Prototype into my weekend. And maybe some de Blob too. Yes, it's the time of year when I can catch up on neglected games. Have a good weekend everyone.

Games I Didn't Touch: I saw the fall line-ups for a trio of publishers in New York this past week. Majesco, Sony and Ubisoft were showing more than 30 games between them. Maybe even 50. I didn't count. There were a lot. I'm still in the process of getting at least 10 posts out of them. When you go to these events, you size them up and decide what you think you can afford to skip. At Sony, for example, I skipped the new Buzz games in the interest of time. And I skipped Brutal Legend on PlayStation 3, because the demo covered the same content from the Xbox 360 presentation I received of the game a couple of weeks ago. At Ubi I skipped their DS games, including Cop: The Recruit. Just didn't have the time or the expectation that it'd be worth it. I always worry that I guess wrong, but I have to guess nonetheless.

Games I Can't Preview: There were even games that I did play at the aforementioned events that I won't be previewing. Sometimes, I just don't think I get enough info on them or have sufficient expertise in them to write an informative post. All I could say about the new Ubisoft Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, for example, is that it can be mistaken for a Smash Bros. clone (some of its creators worked on that last Nintendo brawler), that the Ubi rep showing me the game said its combat is more complex than Smash and that both the Ubi rep and ex-Newsweek reporter N'Gai Croal beat me in the game. At the Sony event I had a good time fighting as God of War's Kratos against a computer-controlled Kratos on the new PSP version of Soul Calibur, but, again, I don't have much more to write about it. The game, which is called Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny, had the best graphics I've seen on the PSP, but it also only had to render two characters on the machine's screen. These observations do not a post make. There are other games I tried that I won't be covering, but some of them don't even make this Notebook Dump. (There are also games I played that I'm saving my coverage of until next week. I'll let you be surprised as to which those are.)

Late To The iPhone: The other thing I didn't address in my posts this week — because I didn't know how to write something fresh about it — was the beginning of my experimentation with iPhone gaming. Last Saturday, on a train from New York to Philadelphia to go see this (yes, that), I decided I'd try a bunch of iPhone games. I loaded my phone with a selection of games that I based primarily on the suggestions of reporter-friend's Patrick Klepek and John Davison as well as from Davison's superb list of top iPhone games. (Looks like he just did another!) I feel like it'd be old hat to ask for suggestions or to run through everything I tried in a standalone post. But if you're interested, I sampled: Drop 7 (fun), Fieldrunners (too easy), Flight Control (fun but blocked by my fingers), Galcon (fun, but I prefer similar PC game Dyson — try it!), geoDefense Lite (didn't grab me), Trixel (good, but not my thing), Crystal Defenders Vanguard Storm (surprisingly cool), and Zenonia (ruined by its need for a virtual d-pad). Still need to try a bunch of others. I was excited to try what I understood to be the best games of an existing platform. I haven't had the opportunity to be late to a platform since I got a PS2 in early 2002. How this will affect what I cover, I cannot say.

And that's enough notebook-dumping for the week. Next week should be fun. But right now the weekend beckons. As does the Final Fantasy WiiWare tower defense game, My Life As A Darklord, that I was supposed to review for today. I'm late. Don't tell anyone!

(I snapped the photo for this post in the elevator of the building where Sony was having their NYC event.)

This was a tricky week, as two of our finest, McWhertor and Fahey, were off to Comic-Con and working odd hours because of it. So I wrote more posts and therefore did a little less reporting and left less on the cutting room floor. But still, here are some scraps...

A Rare Studio Visit: You might think that an experienced video game reporter like myself would have visited a lot of game development studios. Unfortunately, I haven't. Blame my being based in the studio-light New York or not barging into enough development company offices or whatever. When I stepped into the Gameloft studio in New York on Tuesday, where I witnessed games actually being developed, well, that was unusual. (I was there to play Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, a GTA-like iPhone game.) I've covered games full-time for a little over four years and my visit to an active game development part of Gameloft adds to a short list that includes a visit at Retro in Austin, Midway's recently-shuttered Austin studio, the recently-shuttered Gamelab in New York, Yukes in Yokohama, EA in Redwood Shores and Double Fine in San Francisco. That's it, though I think having Kenta Cho show me stuff on his laptop counts too. I've been in meeting-room areas at Rockstar (NYC), Nintendo of America (Redwood Shores), Tecmo (Tokyo), Sony (Tokyo), Sega (San Francisco), Konami (San Francisco), EA (Los Angeles) and probably a few others. But if we're talking strictly visits to places where people are at computers developing stuff, it's just that short list.

MotionPlus Calibration Needs Still A Question: Chatting with Nintendo reps in Times Square on Thursday did not help answer one lingering question from my fun time playing Wii Sports Resort on Saturday: Why does the game ask for the controller to be re-calibrated - sometimes by having it placed upside down on a table — before any new mini-game is played? (EDIT: As readers noted below, what I wrote was a little bit of overstatement. Based on my experience and others' the re-calibration is needed several times an hour, of you're playing lots of different sports in the game — but it doesn't need to be re-set for each and very switch. Apologies for not being more clear about that. I phrased the question properly to the Nintendo folks but over-simplified it in this article.) Nintendo's corporate affairs v.p Denise Kaigler referred me to the company's product expert Bill Trinen. He said that he believed the designers required that in order to ensure that each of the diverse sports in Wii Sports Resort can be controlled with fine and accurate motions. But I wondered if this signaled a limitation for the MotionPlus. Could it be used without any interruption for re-calibration, in longer, continuous games that might mix up motion styles? It's a hypothetical question and one Trinen couldn't address at the moment. He sounded confident in the technology, but, as I suggested to him, it's something I guess we'll have to wait and see about, when games that try to do what I'm talking about, come along. Maybe Red Steel 2 will be a test case.

Nutcracker Notes: Finally, I guess it pays to mention in Twitter the games you are playing for review. While I know some reviewers don't like to read other reviews for fear of being prematurely influenced, I appreciated the e-mail from a reader this week who saw that I was playing Little King's Story and sent me some information about it. His note expanded my understanding of how the game's developers were influenced by things like the Nutcracker Suite. I can't say I caught all that on my own, and I'm a fan of learning this extra stuff to make what I do more informed. That added info may not make it into a post or even my review, but it's good stuff to know. Makes me feel smarter. That review was supposed to run today, but I haven't finished the game yet, so it bounces to next week.

That's all for today. Comic-Con madness subsides next week, I book some trips, some more embargoes lift and I get to check out the full holiday line-ups from Ubisoft and Sony, with some Majesco mixed in. Should be fun. Happy weekend, everyone.

Another Chatpad Dream Dashed: On Monday I ran my preview of Dragon Age: Origins. I included most of what I learned about the game's contents in there. I omitted something that is being left out of the game. What the game won't have, not surprisingly, is hot-key support for the Xbox 360's QWERTY chatpad. (Officially: The Xbox 360 Messenger Kit.) This peripheral has been attached to my 360 controller ever since I got it. It doesn't add too much weight and makes typing messages and passwords much easier. While the chatpad usually works with any part of a game that requires text input, I've never seen it integrated into gameplay control schemes. But complex role-playing games and real-time strategy games would seem to benefit from having an optional control scheme that engages it. Imagine being able to map powers or units to some of the keys on the keyboard. I asked one of the BioWare reps showing me the game if Dragon Age would support it. Nope.

Some Fun Hype: On Wednesday I went to an Activision event and played some games. I also watched Drew McCoy from Infinity Ward play Modern Warfare 2. Drew didn't say much during my meeting, leaving most of the question-answering to IW's Robert Bowling (His answers here). But Drew did engage another reporter's question about whether the first level of the new game would be as exciting as the first level of the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Drew's answer culminated in the boast that MW2 will have "more holy shit moments per hour" than MW1. I turned to him and joked that maybe that was because the new game would be as exciting as the first but shorter. He laughed and asked me not to draw that conclusion from that statement. No way, man. I was kidding.

A Blur of Blur: At the same event, I played Bizarre Creations' Blur. It was as we've described it: a fast racer with realistic-looking cars, heavy on neon special effects and charged with power-ups. You can blast rival cars with electricity, shunt them, lay down mines, etc. Think of all the key Mario Kart abilities, but rendered in a more literally electric way. I held back from writing a preview because my experience with the game was almost identical to Crecente's. Just read his Blur preview. That's what I saw and how I felt.

Embargoes: For the record, I saw five games that were under embargo last week, and played four of them. Three of them can be covered by the middle of next week. Two are off-limits until next month. I don't bring this up to tease, but to illuminate how the work we do doesn't always appear on the site right away.

That's it for me for this week. Be nice to Owen this weekend. And maybe I'll have something for you on Sunday. Maybe.

As a game, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra hasn't been all that impressive. I got my hands on the Contra-fied shooter at E3 2009, and the most impressive feature of the game is still the extras they are throwing in for the fans. While the bio cards and concept art are nice, the key draw here is clearly the "Knowing is Half the Battle" series of public service announcements. Of course, those can not only be seen on YouTube, but fans have since made them so much better.

Shadow Complex's Apple Debut: On Tuesday, I met Donald and Laura Mustard, the developer and public relations rep couple who showed me the August-scheduled Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex. A detail they told me that didn't make it into my coverage was that, before Epic purchased their home studio, Chair Entertainment, before Microsoft signed on to publish their game, they were meeting with people at Game Developers Conference 2008... showing a video of Shadow Complex running on one of their iPhones. That iPhone video was a hit, they remembered. Laura mentioned that Epic vice president Mark Rein proudly showed off the phone. He gets excited about what developers do with Unreal tech. But, no, the game never was programmed to actually be played on the iPhone.

Modern Warfare 2 Wii MIA: Call of Duty: World at War was a hit on the Wii last year, selling more than a million copies. At E3 last month I asked Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime whether the series was returning this year to the Wii, or if the then non-COD-named Modern Warfare 2 was going to have a Wii version. He said that that was a question for series publisher Activision. So this week, right as the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 naming news was breaking (not the best timing), I shot Kotaku's rep for all things Activision a note inquiring about whether COD or MW was going to have a Wii presence. The response was that Activision had no information to share. So... we wait.

Xcalibur Is Sleeping: At last night's XSeed event, where I played Half-Minute Hero, Sky Crawlers and demo versions of some other upcoming games, I noticed a guy sitting in a chair inputting a character name into part of the character customization screen of Wii role-playing game Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga. I found this odd, because there doesn't seem to be a good reason to spend time inputting a name for your character in a copy of a game you can't take home. The name he was typing in was "Xcalibur." While he was doing this, Destructoid's Samit Sarkar was interviewing an XSeed official about the game. They were being serious, so I turned to Joystiq's Andrew Yoon to remark about the guy typing in the name. OK. Funny enough. We started to leave. Then I looked at the guy again. He was passed out. Wii in hand. Asleep. Samit's interview continued. I didn't play the game, but even the most amazing games don't exactly have the most rousing name-input screens. So don't blame Valhalla Knights for this one.

Horror Needs Quiet: Also at the XSeed event, I tried the Ju-On: The Grudge sort-of-game, which is labeled by its publisher as a "haunted house simulator." I used the Wii like a flashlight to slowly walk through a dark hospital corridor. I barely got a sense of how this game is supposed to feel, which is a problem for horror titles that might be better demoed in quiet places, not noisy second floors of Japanese restaurants. (Not that horror games are ever demoed in quiet places.) Excellent detail from the official fact sheet: "Unlike any other product on the Wii, this game forgoes slow-paced story elements to offer immediate gratification with scare after scare."

No Help To Nokia: I got a call from a guy from Nokia at some point this week to speak my mind about mobile games. Um, I'm no expert. People like iPhone games, I hear? Our readers are a little interested in mobile games but not hugely interested? I said that I needed to be convinced that there are games worth playing on today's phones in order to think people will be eager for more coverage. Maybe that's happening on the iPhone, but if it's happening on other phones, I'm unaware. It's a blind spot.

I think that's all that I didn't get to this week... other than the stuff I'm saving for next week. Have a good weekend, folks. Don't yell at Owen too much.

New Professor Layton: I played Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box on Monday evening during those Nintendo demos I couldn't stop writing about in the middle of the week. But what can I write about a DS sequel that I played for all of four minutes? The mechanics were similar to those of the first Layton game. The art style was similar, the puzzles were of a familiar sort. I'm told there will be more animated scenes. But the Nintendo reps on hand wouldn't confirm or deny whether there will be puzzles involving filling the proper amount of fluid into a jug with the help of two other jugs.

iPhone Neglected: Oh, and on Monday Apple demoed the 3GS iPhone for me in a meeting that was so fancy that they had one Apple rep whose task was just to bring people up and down the elevator, to say nothing of three more hanging out to show the product. But they also sent Crecente one and put an Apple bigwig on the phone with him. Crecente's been doing a fine job so far on that, so I didn't post. Yet.

Shane Bettenhausen Chopped In Half: I played the new Samurai Showdown (actually this was two weeks ago, sorry) against former EGM editor-turned Ignition development man Shane Bettenhausen, but we all know I stink at fighting games. How can I judge the quality of this game in a preview? I can't just yet. Not when I was distracted by playing more Muramasa: The Demon Blade. And not when the only strategy I know is button-mashing. But I can confirm that I fought Shane in a level set at 5PM. I played as an old man and, true to Shane's word, the game has button combos that allow for sudden kills. The one I accidentally inputted sliced through Shane's guy's at the waist. One body became two halves with two limbs each. Shane squirmed. I won. I promise, I'll get better at covering these fighting games.

RE5 In 3D: On Tuesday night, I ran into Capcom marketing man Chris Kramer at a Microsoft event. He had special 3D glasses for me to put on so that I could see a demo of Resident Evil 5 PC running in 3D through Nvidia's Geforce 3D Vision. The tech requires a special monitor and graphics card. As it was programmed for the demo, there were lots of depth effects. That starter RE5 town we all played in demos had more space to it and ... distance. Nothing was programmed to jump out at me yet, though Kramer said that was possible. Maybe a knife might be thrown toward my face some day through the magic of RE5. But the effectiveness (in this case) or lack thereof is so hard to express in text. So I didn't do a post.

I think that's all that I didn't get to this week... other than the stuff I'm saving for next week. Have a good weekend, folks. Be nice to Owen and the Kotaku's Team Pacific.