I suppose I'm not "qualified" to write a "review" because I haven't finished the game, and that something enormous enough to change my opinion of the game completely might spring up in the final three seconds of the end credits. I'm neither a pessimist, an optimist, nor a realist when I say that I'm guessing this isn't going to happen. I'm just being me. For god's sake, if the first twenty-five hours of your entertainment experience are not at least 90% indicative of its overall value, then you're doing at least one thing terribly wrong.

To summarize the experience of Final Fantasy XIII, I would like to use

Once I'm done with this, we can go right into the talking-about-a-videogame part:

When I was fifteen, I played Final Fantasy VI. It was one of the better things I had, by that point in my life, ever experienced. Let me tell you how I got the game: I rented it, once, from a video store that had only one copy of it. I played it for an hour and fell into a mesmerized type of love. Then I fell ill with a terrible ear infection. My fever climbed to around 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Little did I know, I would be suffering these frequent ear infections for the rest of my life. I have Weird Ears. I have the same condition that made Beethoven deaf. They just didn't know, back in his day, how to stick a hypodermic needle through the eardrum to suck the blood out. Poor guy — he missed a chance to hear Beethoven's 9th before he died.

Well, with that ear infection all up in my stuff, I couldn't play the game. This was the precise shape of my torture: I lay there in bed, feeling underwater, and feverish, with severe head pain, thinking about Final Fantasy III (that's what we called it back then), in thatplastic case from our generic video store (this was before they built a Blockbuster right next door) lying on the floor, untouched. What terrible guilt it is, to rent a game and then not be able to play it! It's maybe worse than going to see a movie you really want to see and having to get up to do a deuce right as it's getting to the good part. The guilt, back then, tore me up about as badly as the ear infection tore me up.

The next week, I tried to rent it again. It didn't work. Someone else had the game. Damn it! The next week, the same thing. They said it was due back on Saturday, if I'd be willing to pick it up on Saturday. They said they'd call when it was in. They didn't call. I went in anyway. It turned out the previous renter was keeping it a couple more days. Those couple days would turn out to be a couple of, like, groups of seven days.

Eventually, a minor department store chain called Kohl's hilariously featured Final Fantasy III in their Sunday flier despite their actually not selling games at any of the locations in my town. They said it was $52.96. What a weird price! At Electronics Boutique (that's what we called "EB" back then), it was $79.99, though they also promised to do the price-match thing. I had $48 saved up. I took in a bunch of old NES games — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game was one of them — and prayed that they would amount to at least six dollars. They did. I took Final Fantasy III home that Sunday evening. Of course, I went to bed early, so I could go to school the next day.

In last period of the next school day, the fire alarm rang. Our high school was the biggest in the state, which meant a lot of kids, which meant a lot of potential for pranks. The fire alarm got pulled all the time. This was before they put up surveillance cameras in the halls near every fire alarm. Here's why they put up security cameras: That day, just as everyone was starting to think this was just another prank, just as they were getting ready to go back inside, the brand-new six-million-dollar basketball gymnasium exploded.

We didn't have school for a week. When we got back to school, everything would suck. Metal detectors at the entrances, friskings at lunch; you'd get expelled if you were late to a class, et cetera. However, for that one week in November, by god, I had Final Fantasy VI, and there was nothing like it in the world.

Fifteen years later, I am a Real Adult who fears not expulsion and actually enjoys being frisked; I buy Final Fantasy XIII in the freezing cold at a 7-eleven in Tokyo, and play it for five hours, sleep-deprived, before getting on a train to the airport. For the first time since, well, Final Fantasy IX, I'm spending a Christmas with my family, in Indiana, in the United States of America. Final Fantasy XIII is not the thing I am most looking forward to — I am looking forward to food, to pizza and Chipotle.

Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the anti-humidity in the plane cabin dries out my top lip. As my face contorts with the agony-like joy of three days' worth of well-earned sleep, my lip breaks in three places. I wake up, two hours from landing, with blood between my front teeth. Thanks to the coughs and chokes of infants and children around me, my top lip is already miraculously infected. Twenty-four hours later I'd be eating Chicago-style pizza with green Tabasco all over it, and I tell you I have never felt so much pain related to pizza. That doesn't mean it's not still delicious.

That is what Final Fantasy XIII is like.

Okay, wait, let me say a few things about myself again before we really start talking about this game:

I haven't spent time in the "real" part of America (just California) in the last six years, so I've forgotten a lot of little things. For example, by looking at the medicine on friends' shelves here in the Midwest, I realize that, in Tokyo, over the past few years, I have not experienced:

1. Headache
2. Diarrhea
3. Gingivitis
4. Dandruff

It must have something to do with the diet, and the unavoidable daily exercise (walking).

However, in America for five days, I find myself suffering both headaches and gingivitis. I wonder if dandruff and diarrhea aren't far behind.

So, I am playing Final Fantasy XIII with a weird, meningitis-like spotty localized headache and an effervescent-like fever. I am convinced that this is, probably, the only way to play the game — that the game itself might be responsible for this weird feeling.

My friends Doug and Julie Jones and I played the game for eight straight hours at their house, from the very beginning, past the point I'd played in my living room in Tokyo, right up until the point where the story gets actually interesting. Then, with a fever — a provable, valid excuse to avoid my family for a few days — I stabbed the knife of my life into the meat of Final Fantasy XIII.

Short impressions: The game is entertaining.

Long impressions: The first thing I noticed, when playing the game on an American PlayStation 3, is that not only is it not region-locked — it is kind (?) enough to switch around the confirm / cancel buttons. I'm sure that's old news. Well, I never had any context to notice it before, so there you go.

Annnnnnyway, where the hell do I start with this game? I guess there's the issue of it being a straight line.

This one's easy: in Final Fantasy XIII, you're constantly moving forward. It's a moving-forward simulation. You know that map that emerged on the internet (here is where I type something in parentheses asking Stephen Totilo politely to find that map and insert it above or below this paragraph, whichever looks best. [Note from Stephen: Done, Tim, done!]) that demonstrates how straightforward the game is? The guy who made that map warns that it's only the first "five or six hours" of the game. Do not take this to mean that the game then becomes a Ponderosa Grand Buffet of nonlinearity immediately after the end of this map. No, loyal internetizens, the reason this Japanese dude only upped a map of the first five or six hours of the game is because he was likely playing it at breakneck pace and wanted to upload a map while the linearity of the experience was still newsworthy. He would have posted a map of the whole game if he could, and the lols would have been deafeninger, however, to do so would have been to risk a massive scoop by someone else. So he went with the first "five or six" hours.

"Five or six" is a weird number, by the way, because I got as far as that guy did in about three hours and forty-eight minutes. I know because I have literally 26 save files, because I kept forgetting that the game prompts you to make a new save file by default rather than to overwrite your old one. Maybe this is Square-Enix assuming that we might want to watch every cut-scene multiple times.

Anyway, one way to sum up Final Fantasy XIII is that it is a Horse-With-Blinders-On Simulation. It's about progress, and moving forward. It's not without a little bit of kleptomania, however, as sometimes there are little offshoots from the main path. Usually, you can see these offshoots coming a half a mile away, and, thanks to the mini-map's super-GPS level of readability, you can also see that the offshoots do, in fact, end after a distance of about ten game-world feet. This is crucial: the game's mini-map shows you the overwhelming straightness of the path, indicates the direction of your goal with a large yellow arrow, and then illustrates very clearly to you that every little offshoot is just that — an offshoot, an option. Each offshoot path is clearly a tiny fraction of the width of the main path.

At the end of each offshoot, you will find

1. A treasure
2. A monster
3. Both

You will never find

1. Neither a treasure nor a monster
2. Anything that you couldn't possibly do without

This is very important to understand.

The more important thing to understand is that, the very first time you access a save point (contextualized in-game as a kind of nifty holographic computer terminal thing), the three options are "Save" "Shop" and "Quit." "Quit" doesn't mean "quit the game" — it means quit the save point menu. "Save" means save the game. "Shop" means — yes, enter the shop.

So, there's your first clue: You shop from the save point menus. Whoa. Have you solved the mystery yet?

Here it comes — I'll be gentle: No towns.

You gasp! Sadly, the only towns you see in the first great big chunk of Final Fantasy XIII are destroyed, dilapidated, filled with monsters. The major story MacGuffin is intimately tied to this floating Utopia called Cocoon, which some religious organization sees fit to regularly purge of shady individuals, so in order for this story to work, basically no towns in the "outside" world is kind of a given. Of course, the existence of a utopia doesn't precisely guarantee that all the world outside said utopia consist of straight lines in which large objects regularly fall, obstructing the path backward. Though there's a reason for that, too.

Square-Enix have no doubt done "The Research," and the numbers have come up in favor of "Players like seeing new things." The choice, then, was to drip-feed the players new things, or to bombard them with new things. The producers of Final Fantasy XIII bet on bombardment. Final Fantasy XIII is an impish ghoul standing atop a cliff, rolling boulders of fun down on the heads of unsuspecting players. Once I, personally, learned to stop worrying and love my own willingness to forgive Final Fantasy XIII for not having any towns, I came to applaud the ballsiness of it all. They are taking a genuine risk with this game. Does it pay off? Well, yes — after about eight hours. We're going to get to that in a minute.

Let's be as positive as possible for a minute: No towns means that the story doesn't ever stop and stick. It means no wandering around a town, talking to every NPC until the least likely one gives you the perfect piece of information you need to proceed. No towns means that no caves to the north of town that are locked and inaccessible until you talk to that least likely NPC who tells you that there's a cave to the north full of monsters. With no towns, all actions in the game are seamlessly linked to the story. We are moving forward. Why are we moving forward? Because the enemy is behind us. Why are they behind us? Because they don't like us. Or: Because we miraculously managed to escape in the first place. Why the need to escape; how did it all get started? The chase is so exciting, after a point, that we don't bother answering this question.

Square-Enix's market research must have yielded the result that fans' favorite parts of RPGs are the fighting, the dungeons, the interactions between the characters, and big-budget cut-scenes. By cutting out the towns and focusing on dungeons and fights, they give the game a breathless and relentless pace. They also make the cut-scenes feel more plentiful and closer-between. In short, funneling the player down one straight path gives the game developers more (and bigger) opportunities for entertainment. Also, there's the "artificial" "difficulty" issue — have you ever gotten stuck in an RPG because you didn't know where to go or what to do, probably because the game developers didn't signpost it clearly enough? Well, that won't happen in Final Fantasy XIII.

Now, to be negative: It feels empty. Without some concrete clues that there is a world worth saving, this weird, headache-like feeling of nihilism falls down over the experience like a curtain of ash. You start to feel like the janitor at Disney World — sweeping up empty Coke bottles beneath motionless symbols of dead splendor. I suppose this is a positive as well — the game exudes atmosphere and hokey tension; the "world worth saving," as embodied in a floating utopia seen mostly in beautiful CG cut-scenes, is less a thing we know and more a thing we believe in. The game suspends your disbelief in a religion-like way. It's kind of neat, after a while, and as the characters inevitably whine their little heads off, you think, hey, I'd be [I am] whining, too. Then there's the no-freedom-like no backtracking thing: Is this the game telling you not to look back, encouraging you to enjoy the story as presented, or is it the developers fearing that to let you linger is to potentially kill your interest in the game?

As you move forward, the game delights in dropping your characters head-first into new challenges. The challenges usually require you to Kill The Monster or Fight The Boss, though hell if those monsters and bosses aren't all new. More than merely "new," most of them are near-indescribably inventive. I had a friend in elementary school who used to draw swords. He'd put all kinds of little ornaments on them. Like, there'd be a chain hanging from one side of the hilt, with a little jewel on it. He'd never even seen a Yoshitaka Amano drawing — just the box art for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Eventually, he graduated up a notch and started drawing "cars." No one could ever tell they were supposed to be cars. He used to lie about having a dog that was half-wolf. One day, some other kid said he saw the kid's dog, and that it might actually be half-wolf. I'd like to think that that kid got a job designing characters, monsters, and vehicles in Final Fantasy XIII. Lord knows what any of these things are, or why they're designed that way — you'll know what I mean when you invade and destroy your first flying crucifix-shaped high-speed statuesque bejeweled airship-thing — though hell if they aren't all interesting. Eventually, the weirdness transcends from puzzling to second-nature to first-nature. As the film "Avatar" absorbs you into its world by using familiar imagery of trees, beasts, and insects, Final Fantasy XIII sucks you in by surrounding you with unspeakably foreign, weird things of such staggering design consistency that you start to subconsciously believe in it. Whatever "it" is.

There are so many characters in Final Fantasy XIII that you will lose track of their names within the first twenty minutes. People are introduced, speak lines of importance, and die at a fluid pace. Soon, the game falls victim to "Star Wars Action Figure Syndrome." I just made that up: You know those aliens in the "cantina scene" of the original "Star Wars" film? They never tell you those characters' names, though they sure as hell sold action figures of nearly every one of them, and all those action figures had names. The action figures, in fact, were the only way to learn the names of those characters. Final Fantasy XIII does a lot of things like that, all over the place.

The story is confusing. No, that's not the nicest way to put it: It is masterfully confusing. The plot is a labyrinth that might actually not have a piece of cheese in the middle. The events of the first two hours exist to confound and confuse you by nonchalantly mentioning and then forgetting the weirdest words dropped into the middles and ends of the plainest sentences. A man asks a woman, "What are we doing?" And she says, "We're going after a Pulse fal'Cie." The man recoils in horror at this response. We're sitting there, holding the controller and a beverage, maybe wearing Dolby Headphones, and we're like, ". . . Uh?" My friend Doug said, "I had to read the Wikipedia entry like three times before I understood what was going on in the trailer." I like going into my gaming experiences pure, so I had neither read the Wikipedia entry nor seen any of the story bits of the trailers. The labyrinth of the plot unfurled before me, and damn near put me the hell off, until the opening scenes crescendoed in a weird clash of near unspeakable portentousness that was, at the very least, slickly presented enough to encourage me to play further. Not much further, the game jumped back in time to two days earlier, to a neat little flashback in a peaceful village. The flashback was titled "On The Eleventh Day." The first line of the game, spoken by Vanille, in voice-over, had been, "Thirteen days after I awoke, the end of the world was beginning." I had thought, at the time, that that was a neat opening line. Now the game was showing me "the eleventh day." This was the first time I got the impression that some carefully crafted plot lay dormant beneath the talky, hyperkinetic surface of this game. Hours later, they'd have revisited The Eleventh Day four more times, from the perspective of four more characters. How many more flashbacks are we going to see? I wondered.

After its opening scenes, Final Fantasy XIII's plot primarily deals with the struggle of a group of people branded by some sort of virtual consciousness, tasked with saving the world from a vague apocalypse. If they succeed, they will turn into crystals, lose their mortal lives, and exist forever. If they fail, they will turn into demon ghouls which will sadly wander the earth for eternity. Yes, I realize that's kind of weird. The game manages to treat their struggle with tasteful dignity, and the voice-acting assists the visual presentation in communicating to you what the characters are feeling or thinking. Since the game itself is about forward motion, since the immediate-, short-, and long-term goals are always clear, the writers are able to concentrate firmly on the dialogue.

It's a shame, then, that some of the characters are annoying. Hope, the little boy with a voice six years too old for his little huge-headed body, is the be-all end-all of whiners. Vanille, with her constant pep-talking, is the exact opposite. Together, they represent the absolute worst character traits of Cloud, Squall, and Tidus, split up into some hopefully ironic anti-comedy duo. At the very least, the game never asks us to identify with Hope — and maybe he'll turn into someone cool by the end, who knows? — which is good, because I don't want to identify with him. I am a grown man, for god's sake, with a job and a home of my own, and a big TV and a PlayStation 3 and a copy of Final Fantasy XIII. Kids old enough to identify with Hope wouldn't even be able to afford a PS3! Anyway, let's stop with that.

Then there's Snow. First of all, why is his name "Snow"? That's a dumb name. Hey, what does snow come from? What does it fall out of? Ohh, right, clouds. Snow is annoying. He's big and dumb and super-positive. His hat is terrible. If he'd take the hat off, I bet he'd been kind of a cool-looking dude. As is, you keep expecting him to say, when the camera slides in his direction: "Hey, have you guys seen my keg?" (Things to note: he is dumb enough to misplace a keg of beer. He is strong enough to carry a keg of beer like a Double Big Gulp and then forget that he's not carrying it. He drinks kegs of beer all the time. He drinks them completely by himself. He wouldn't mind just buying another keg to replace the one he misplaced.) In battle, he attacks with his bare fists. The game focuses quite heavily, for a while, on his romantic flashbacks with a girl who is literally half his size. It's a little queasy. Eventually, neat things happen to him, and his accidental-tourist personality becomes genuinely endearing. However, for those first eight hours, he's what the Japanese call a "tsukareru yatsu" — a person who makes you tired [just looking at him / hearing him talk]. He is this big dumb ray of light and he screams happy things in your face and you wish he would go away.

Thankfully, there's Lightning. She is the best parts of Cloud, the best parts of Squall, the best parts of Auron, the best parts of Terra, and none of the bad parts of any of those characters. She's tough and she's hot. She is liquid-hotrogen. She isn't annoying or brooding at all! And she just keeps punching Snow in the face every time he says something dumb. You go girl! She is sympathetic to Hope, which is interesting, because you'd think she'd consider him as unbearable a little twerp as we do. That she has a little sister — the aforementioned tiny girl who has a romantic relationship with Snow — who she cares for quite deeply is even more interesting. She's not the cold jerk she could have been. The fans wouldn't have cared if she was a jerk, too. They like jerks. What Lightning represents is actual effort. Also, what were those things that lightning comes out of again? Oh, right — clouds.

My absolute favorite character, however, is Sazh. Yes, I know. Everyone thought he was going to be a jerk. In the previews, he just yells and screams constantly, like he's incapable of speaking a single sentence in a normal voice. For the first hour of the game, we witness Lighting do Something Fantastic, like jump off the top of a building and hit the ground running, and Sazh just looks down and yells something like "Hey, wait for meeee!" and then starts climbing down excruciatingly slowly. This is the game establishing that Sazh is Not As Cool as Lightning. Well, you get to a certain point, and Sazh is revealed shockingly to just be a Normal Guy. He is our player surrogate. We identify with him more than everyone else, because he's not a psycho-freak super-soldier or helicopter-surfing revolutionary leader, and also because, like us, he has a baby bird living in his hair. And once his little side-plot comes into view, it's interesting and tender and genuinely human.

Vanille — the huge-headed, T-rex-armed little girl — is kind of a tough nut to crack. She's narrating the game, on the one hand, so maybe she's important? Maybe she's the Vaan character. Maybe she's bigger than that? Maybe she has a secret. Then there's Cid — he's pleasantly, toughly hammy. Then there's Oerba. I don't even know how to pronounce that name. God, she's so hot. I want her to beat me with her belt — or, better yet, my belt. My belt is really heavy. It's probably heavier than hers.

What do all of these people add up to? Well, I haven't seen the full curve of the plot, yet, though I've seen enough bits and pieces of a carefully structured under-story to know that, at the very least, all of them serve some greater purpose. I am confident in declaring that the plot officially impresses me — it's ballsy that Square-Enix decided to go with a byzantine, confusing atmosphere-heavy plot that produces so little fruit in its first two hours. Looking at the breadth of the game, at how straightforward it is in its pacing, you'd presume that they were trying to make some kind of Japanese equivalent of Call of Duty or Half-Life — we at least know for sure that Square-Enix has their eye on Modern Warfare (they published it in Japan, after all) — though it seems like, in the end, the linearity of the experience serves to efficiently deliver the tangled plot (and not the other way around), because delivering it at a more deliberate pace would probably be even more confusing. So, in short, rest assured that Final Fantasy XIII does not, at least in its first half, fall victim to Kingdom Hearts's syndrome of tossing you back and forth between disparate worlds and plot threads. Though we frequently switch focuses, episodes, and main characters in Final Fantasy XIII, it all seems to be distinctly adding up to One Big Thing.

The biggest, most negative thing I can say, however, is that it takes to long to drop the first plot bombshells. Every hour or so, something pops up that makes you think, "Oh, that's it? That's what this game is about?" And then you plod forward half-disappointed, half-hoping that there's something bigger. Then it gives you something incrementally bigger. Then you plod forward again.

It's like this:

Cut scene —> Would you like to save? —> Cut-scene —> Walk forward five minutes, fight some monsters —> Save point —> Cut scene —> Boss —> Cut-scene —> Would you like to save?

That goes on for maybe the first twelve hours. If you like Metal Gear Solid, you won't complain. If you like Final Fantasy VI or VII, it's going to feel like a toothache.

In screenwriting, there is a damn-near ironclad rule: the first Hugely Interesting Thing happens at the twenty-two-minute mark. Why don't we have anything like that in games? Let's try to make one, right here:

The Two-Hour Rule Of Role Playing Game Scenario-Planning:

The first Hugely Interesting Thing should happen in the first two hours.

With an FPS, make it "the first ten minutes."

"Fun," however, should come in the first five seconds.

Final Fantasy XIII's battle system is fantastic. It's the old-school ATB "Active Time Battle" system, with Final Fantasy X's strategy, Final Fantasy V's Job System, and Final Fantasy XII's Gambit System grafted on top of it. The best part is, Jobs and Gambits are fused into one thing, which can be activated / changed at any time during a battle with the press of one button. Neat!

It's called the "Optima Change" system, which sounds cool. I hear they're calling it the "Paradigm Shift" system in the English version, which sounds maybe even cooler. Either way, it's the same thing.

An "Optima" or "Paradigm" is an array of "roles." A "role" is kind of like a classic Final Fantasy "job," except instead of saying simply what a character can do, it says what they're likely to do. A "Healer" has healing magic, and is also likely to use it to heal. Healing will take priority over anything else. A "Jammer" has various status-destroy magic spells, and is likely to cast them. An "Enhancer" holds the keys to buffing spells, and will use them ad nauseum. An "Attacker" will attack constantly and ferociously. A "Blaster" will cast attack magic spells. These are just a few of the roles.

Between battles, you go into your little menu thing, and you configure your Optimas. You choose which character is which role for which Optima. A single Optima consists, then, merely of role assignments for each of three characters. You can store six Optimas at a time, so choose wisely.

There are no "Magic points" in this game. You can use magic all that you want. It's just as well — in Final Fantasy XII, your magic automatically recovered, after all. The thing is, battles very seldom stand on the edge of a knife, eager to fall one way or another. So having infinite magic points does not make the game easier. What you have is three ATB bars that all charge at once. You only control one character. You choose what three actions you want the character to take. Some actions cost more than one ATB bar, like Lightning's Area Flash slash move. Area Flash only hits an enemy once, though if several enemies are clustered together, it can hit all of them — the same for Snow's hand grenade attack. Protect spells take one ATB.

Let's say I have an Optima where two characters are attackers and one is a blaster. Then I have another Optima where two characters are Blasters and one is a Healer. Then I have one where one character is a Jammer, one an Enhancer, and one an Attacker. Let's say I use that third Optima as my default:

When a battle starts, my Enhancer is immediately using magic to buff up my dudes' defense. Next round, he casts shell on everyone, boosting magic defense. Your Jammer, meanwhile, is casting de-protect and de-shell — which, in addition to nullifying shell and protect spells, also increase default defense or magic defense. This is a first for Final Fantasy (though a standard for Dragon Quest or Persona, et al). Longer battles become mostly defense-focused: Lowering your enemies' defense while you boost your own, putting all your faith into single impactful attacks. Your attacker keeps wailing on the enemies while the Jammer and Enhancer do their work. Maybe your guys start taking some damage.

This is where you press the L1 button to bring up the Optima menu. Now you choose your Healer, Attacker, Blaster array. Now one of your dudes is healing while the other two attack physically or with magic. Maybe the enemies start to buff up, necessitating a switch back to the Enhancer and Jammer array. Or maybe you decide to force your way through by changing the paradigm to Blaster, Attacker, Blaster, and see if you can just put them enemies away ASAP.

When you win the battle — if you win the battle — you get a star ranking telling you how well you did, and some points to spend on (joylessly) purchasing new abilities or upgrades for each individual role.

The star ratings mean close to nothing for the first eight hours or so of game. All you're doing in the beginning is choosing "Go!", pressing the Yay Button, and then watching breathlessly as your characters score massive damage. The major battle system concepts trickle down the pipe, and after two hours, you have your first Optima change option. After four hours, the game has introduced the support classes; around eight hours, the game plops down a boss that requires you to actually think. Is this too slow? I, for one, think so. Again, I just have to mention the twenty-two-minute rule of screenplay writing: The art of crafting, choosing, and changing Optimas is so interesting in the context of a battle that it really should be something the game wears on its sleeve. It should be forcing you to dip your toe into its ocean not ten minutes after the very first fight. Maybe they could make it, like, Sazh has a healer role, or something. Nope: In the beginning, it's just all potions, all the time. You can use potions (or other items) whenever you want (no ATB charge needed). They take effect immediately, and they heal everyone.

The game's reluctance to roll out the battle system quickly might be an inferiority complex: the game is suspicious that you might not like it. Also, the first item you receive for use in the field is "Sneak Smoke," enabling you to avoid detection by enemies; this is more or less a sign that the developers know very well that RPG players sometimes don't like fighting battles at all.

The last word on the battles: Most of the time, they're really short. Like, ten seconds. Then there are bosses, which can be very long.

The biggest criticism of the game among those who have just started playing it is that you "only control one character." This is an unfortunate criticism, mostly because it's true. However, it's about as valid as the first major criticism of Final Fantasy XII: that there are too many enemies to fight, and choosing "fight" for all of them just takes too much time. This is because the game wanted you to use the Gambit system to program your allies' AI.

Years after Final Fantasy XII, the Japanese gamers still regard it unfairly as an atrocity, in that it made people motion-sick, that the characters were ineffectual, and that the battles were tiresome and confusing at worst and boring, tangentially interactive experiences at best.

Final Fantasy XIII features a much slower field-map camera, which moves at a much more human-head-like speed. The characters are all bottom-up-constructed cosplayers' dreams come true who are carefully and minutely constructed such that each character will be someone's favorite character. And the battles try admirably hard to be like classic Final Fantasy while also not completely ignoring the objective triumph of Final Fantasy XII's amazing, breezy, sticky, frictive conflicts. The Optima Change System makes you feel far more connected to and alive with the characters than the Gambit System did, probably because it requires you to press buttons every once in a while. The Gambit System, love it as I do, turns Final Fantasy XII into a kind of virtual pet: Wind it up and watch it go. Final Fantasy XIII gives you a button to press to change tactics, and then carefully constructs all manner of battles that exploit every nook and cranny of the mechanics. It's hard to explain exactly how a boss battle flows in Final Fantasy XIII. Suffice it to say that, after a point, the system clicks and you are In The Zone. You are Dodging Asteroids and Shooting Aliens at the same time. You are scoring four stars out of five at the end of a battle, sighing, and saying, "Yeah, I guess I deserved that." How do you know you deserved it? What has the game done to you? Who knows. It's got you, though.

I might have given up on Final Fantasy XIII, the way a friend of mine has given up on smoking. He's always saying, "I haven't smoked a cigarette in two weeks." It's like, he knows he's never going to give it up; he just happens to, sometimes, give it up subconsciously. What I'm saying is, I've had the game for one day shy of a week now, and I haven't completed it. I am halfway around the world from my home, and I have family members I haven't seen in over half a decade, though I also have this weird pseudo-illness with which to excuse myself from the world for a while, and I still can't bring myself to plow through the game. All this says is that the game isn't as immensely devourable for a thirty-year-old as Final Fantasy VI was for a fifteen-year-old. Maybe that means something, and maybe it doesn't. Who am I to decide?

This year, I got into a half-argument with a Japanese friend about the Hayao Miyazaki film "Ponyo." I said, I thought it was Miyazaki's best, most fully realized film. The friend said that I was wrong, that "Totoro" was easily the best Miyazaki film. I said I thought "Ponyo" was basically the same movie, only told in a more chaotically accessible form. It's more alive and motion-ful. The friend said, "You don't understand, because you didn't see 'Totoro' as a child." My reply to this was, "First of all, I did see 'Totoro' as a child. Second of all, you don't understand, because you didn't see 'Ponyo' as a child." The friend then accused me of using some evil logical fallacy, which nullified my entire argument. It was apparent that he learned that word while serving on his high school debate team, which in Japan, I think, means they stand on opposite ends of the room staring at the floor asking their rival in whispering tones to "please stop arguing please." I think I won the argument pretty well.

I also think I have matured less than one tenth of one iota since my days in high school. Well, maybe I've matured a tiny bit: these days, when I think of that week I spent locked in my bedroom (the very bedroom I'm using to write this article, in fact) plowing through Final Fantasy VI, all I can do is feel pangs of regret that I didn't force myself to do pushups during the non-interactive parts of every battle, after all the commands are plugged in and the battle turns are playing out. I could have made a game out of it — do a pushup, then grab the controller and input a command when the next character's ATB bar fills up. I'd be ripped as hell by now.

Maybe, though, that sitting and wallowing in the glow of the TV during those battles was half the fun of Final Fantasy VI. Maybe that's why I can't get so into Final Fantasy XIII — because the game just doesn't let you put the damn controller down, even for a microsecond. Then you've got the game world itself, a perfect straight track that offers you glimpses of the unspeakable expanse of the universe. It's like, you know why Americans like the Indy 500? You know why they like Nascar? Because they just want to see cars go fast. They don't like that shit they do in Europe, where the cars slow down to take corners. That's for the weak! If they could get their hands on enough land, they'd make a formula-1 track right here in Indianapolis, one that was 50 miles long and a perfect circle, just one never-ending curve so gentle that drivers could accelerate all the way through. Then they'd put maybe 500 cars on that track and the people would just sit there and go fucking insane watching these cars just endlessly stream by at dog-on-fire speeds, eventually screaming to let me off this crazy thing. That's what Final Fantasy XIII feels like, if you try to play it all day, and it kind of makes you nauseous. You don't feel like you own any of these characters or situations or what have you. The "Crystarium" (Sphere Board / License Board / Materia rolled into one) is so drab and linear: you just choose the next ability in line until your points are gone. A couple battles later, you open the menu again, spend all your points, close it, and go back to The Road. Your characters have two pieces of equipment: weapon and accessory. They have attack and magic attack in their status menu, and that's it.

As a thirty-year-old man-child with spectacular hair, I must say that Final Fantasy XIII does not impress me as much as Final Fantasy VI did precisely half my life ago, and whether that has anything to do with any universal truth or the fact that I've just played so many games since then is neither here nor there. Right now, today, it's not the greatest game I've ever played. It's nice, wonderfully crafted, and certainly a lot more fun than most of the games I've played this year. It is not, however, magical. Maybe that'll change in the last half of the game, though even if that is the case, boo to Square-Enix for not trying to push me into love with the experience a lot sooner.

In the end, I'm going to say something edgy, something off-the-cuff: I talk in this article about how excellent the battle system is in Final Fantasy XIII, though why does it have to be a "battle system"? Why can't it just be a game wherein amazing things happen? In Gamestop for the first time in five years yesterday, I caught a glimpse of an in-store display for The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. One of the bullet points by the game description was: "Complete missions!" Seriously. Who goes into a videogame because they want to "Complete missions"? That's like an ice cream shop advertising to prospective customers by saying "Our ice cream cones will make the palms of your hands kind of cold!" Talk about the precise shape of the deliciousness, man! Anyway, we go into videogames because we want to "do cool stuff" or "see cool stuff", right? And while Final Fantasy XIII shows you plenty of cool stuff, it doesn't really let you do a lot of it. There's the should-be-infamous scene early on where two characters spy a parked sky-motorcycle in a cut-scene. Then the player is given control. You approach the motorcycles. A cut-scene starts. Your dudes get on and then fly away. They look like they're having a lot of fun! Too bad we can't have that fun!

Grand Theft Auto lets you have that fun. Jak 2 let you have that fun. Why does Final Fantasy XIII only let you direct the fun? In battle, it's like, you choose to change your Optima so that your dudes can shoot fireballs out of their fingertips. We don't feel what it's like to shoot fireballs with our fingertips: We just feel what it's like to tell someone to shoot fireballs out of their fingertips. When a player sees something happening in your videogame and says "Man, that would be kind of cool to do in a videogame", the ghost is basically given up.

What I'm saying is, I'm pretty sure "battle systems" are vestiges of a time gone by. I'm pretty sure they were only ever a placeholder for some Massive Fun To Come. Like, the old Dragon Quest games made you walk around an overworld. The town icons were as big as your dude. The forests were green panels. They were translucent if you walked through them. Then there was Dragon Quest VIII, on the PlayStation 2. The forests had real trees you could walk under. It still had a battle system. Dragon Quest IX was supposed to be an action game. A group of maybe two hundred vocal fans didn't like it. The people making the game backed down, made it a battle-system-game again. I'm pretty sure Square-Enix could have made an action game as exciting and accessible as Monster Hunterusing the Dragon Quest franchise.

They could do it with Final Fantasy, too. Final Fantasy XII was a remarkable step in that direction. Imagine, the depth of the Gambit System for two of the characters, and then intensely frictive action gameplay for the one character directly under your control. Then, maybe you press one button to shift the Paradigm (gambit configurations) of the other two characters. Wouldn't that be hot as hell? As it is, Final Fantasy XIII shows your dudes doing cool stuff — summoning twin ice princesses who then fuse into one giant motorcycle, then jumping onto that motorcycle and driving it over the enemies' frightened bodies — though there's such a weird disconnect between the stuff you feel in control of (walking down The Road) and the stuff that you only suggest (aforementioned vehicle-summoning). The "other stuff" always looks like "the fun stuff". There's so much grass, and it's so green, on the other side of the fence, and on our side of the fence, it's cracked concrete. Translation: In cut-scenes, it's all beautiful, expensive CG of gorgeous people doing impossible / awesome things, and in the actual game, it's accessing a spreadsheet, clicking on "go", and watching some guys jump toward a monster, numbers flying everywhere, and then jumping back.

Square-Enix might say that battle systems, that menus, are the most easily accessible means to deliver this kind of big-scale story to the public. I say, the emotional investment required to learn the ins and outs and nuances of the Optima Change System are no less than the emotional investment of every one of the millions of ten-year-olds who play Halo for the first time. Here's where we could play devil's advocate to ourselves, and start talking about the atrocities committed by Square's Western-style shooting experiment Dirge of Cerberus, though it'd be hard to do that without getting mean.

I suppose it'd be best to stop right there. No, let's do this, first:

Love:

The Music: Masashi Hamauzu's score is constantly effervescent and inventive. It's always doing something new. The battle themes are some of the best videogame music since Chrono Cross. People might not like XIII's music as much as the music in some of the other Final Fantasy games because it's clearly not bombastic or pop-song-like enough. Bombastic, pop-song-like music is great, though so is deep, complex, well-produced, musician-like stuff like this. Hamauzu is a talented musician, not just a "videogame music composer," and the quality of the tracks is staggering when you also consider their volume.

The Graphics: My god, I want to eat everyone's hair.

The Math: Some boss battles will make you feel like a genius.

The Structure of the Story: Every once in a while, the game's not about "I wonder what's going to happen?" — it's about "I wonder what already happened before the beginning of the plot to explain why I should care about that thing that just happened?" I am putting this under "love" (note present tense) because, if nothing else, it's a lot better than "I hate these people, I hope they all die, and I don't even care if they don't."

Hate:

Whiners: I want to punch that little kid in the face. I go into every cut-scene hoping someone decks him, lays him out, lambastes him.

Vanille's arms: Why the hell are they so short? They're not even long enough to untie her pigtails. I pray they don't "explain" the length of her arms in a poignant cut scene at some point.

Having a Fever: Why are the words "Optima Change" literally visible on the screen at all times during the battles? I know I can press the L1 button to open my Optima Change menu! Stop crowding my Cinematic Action Movie Like Videogame Battle Experience with your Stupid Buzzwords! . . . . . . and several (infinite) other hot-headed complaints accessible only to people who are playing a game with lots of small text and flipping, flying numerals through throbbing skull pain.

tim rogers is the editor-in-chief of Action Button Dot Net, and will be posting a review of Final Fantasy XIII there shortly. you can also see action button's YouTube channel right here. If you're in Toledo, Ohio on the night of December 29th, come see my band at Frankie's!

Instead the reinvention of Disney's animated world will strive to both entice children and enlighten adult with a meaty, moralistic story, famed game designer Warren Spector told Kotaku today.

In Disney Epic Mickey, gamers take on the role of an edgier Mickey Mouse, using the Wii remote to wield magical paint and thinner to reshape the around them. Mickey uses these abilities as he fights his way through a cartoon wasteland in what Disney describes as an "adventure-platforming game with light role-playing elements."

Spector says that the game won't support the Wii Remote's MotionPlus technology because the technology became available to developers too late to the studio.

"We played with it and I think that it would be a great fit for our core mechanic, but the best I can say is that in the future we'd love to do more with it," he said.

In the game's fiction Yen Sid, the sorcerer first seen in 1940's Fantasia during The Sorcerer's Apprentice, creates a Cartoon Wasteland for Disney's forgotten and retired creations. The first inhabitant of this wasteland is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney's first cartoon star created in 1927.

As the years pass Oswald starts to resent Mickey's growing fame. When Disney's mouse accidentally warps Oswald's Cartoon Wasteland by spilling paint thinner on it, Mickey is drawn into the warped world.

"Having Warren combine creativity and innovation with one of the world's most famous characters takes Mickey back to his creative roots and allows fans to deepen their engagement with him as a character – especially in video games," said Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios.

Spector says that he was drawn to the idea of working on this tale of Disney fiction both because it was a chance to "mess around with one of the world's most recognizable icons" and a chance to tell a story that is interesting to both children and adults.

"We are telling a story in this game that is more sophisticated than save the princess or you are the last space marine on Earth," Spector said. "I think what you will find is that there is some commentary about consumerism and what is truly important in life.

"If I went much further than that it would be the height of pretension."

But, Spector admits, there are some allusions in the game to T.S. Elliots' modernist and deeply influential poem The Waste Land.

In the Waste Land a hero is drawn to a kingdom made sterile by the wounding of its king. To restore the king and the land, the hero must go on a quest. The concept of the poem draws on prevalent proto-themes like the Grail legend.

And while Spector, who started his career as an academic, admits that he's aware of the potential connection, he doesn't want people to draw too many connections.

"You have to throw in literary references every once in awhile," he said.

What seems to have influenced Spector more is a children's book author who deals with heady ideas like theology, philosophy and John Milton's Paradise Lost.

"What Philip Pullman does is inspiration in everything I want to do,"he said. "You can make something that appeals to kids but is interesting to adults as well.

In December 2007, Spector wrote on his blog about how much he would love to create a game based on Pullman's Golden Compass. At the time he was already in the midst of working on Disney Epic Mickey, he said.

"I had my first discussion with Disney in September 2005, then boring business stuff happened and then we did concept art and then we separated for awhile and came back together," he said.

In September 2007 Disney acquired Spector's studio, Junction Point Studios, which was well into game concept work.

I asked Spector if creating a game based on such a beloved and widely known character had satisfied the itch he expressed in his blog about Golden Compass.

"To some extent it did," he said. "But if you ever stop itching it's time to retire.

"I think getting the opportunity to play in the playground that Disney offers, that is what this opportunity is really about for me."

"When you say you're messing with Mickey Mouse people's eyes really light up."

While Spector's vision of Mickey seems to be darker than the character's most recognizable appearances, there are still lines the game won't be crossing.

"There are lines, lines you don't want to cross," he said. "When you talk about Mickey Mouse, people are like 'Give him a gun, give him a knife,'" he said. "I don't want to do that. Why would you want to do that?

"There are lines you don't cross. I discovered there are lines that (Mickey Mouse) used to cross that are now uncrossable. He did some pretty crazy stuff, but nowadays times have changed."

What Mickey will be doing in the game is allowing gamers to make moral decisions about how to change the world around them with paint and thinner. Those decisions will have consequences that affect the environment, interactions with other characters, and even Mickey's appearance and abilities.

"The core of this game is the idea of choice and consequence, and how that defines both the character and the player," Spector wrote in a prepared statement. "By putting the mischievous Mickey in an unfamiliar place and asking him to make choices – to help other cartoon characters or choose his own path – the game forces players to deal with the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, players must ask themselves, ‘What kind of hero am I?' Each player will come up with a different answer."

The initial concept for the Wii-exclusive game was born at Disney Interactive Studios' Think Tank, Spector told Kotaku.

"The idea of a wasteland with lost characters, Oswald's return, the Phantom Blog, that stuff existed, that core was there when they pitched it to me," Spector said. "They were all sitting there showing me this stuff in Power Point saying 'You don't have to do all of this, you can ignore it' and I thought 'Why would I ignore this, it's fantastic.'"

While the heart of the idea came from the Think Tank, the way the game and its look evolved is all Spector and his team.

The team spent huge amounts of time in Disney's many vast archives, pulling concept art and files.

"I'm a research junkie," Spector said. "I started out as an academic and film historian so I had shelves and shelves and shelves of books and articles. I came into this with a good background. But Disney has amazing resources. I spent a bunch of time out there digging through files."

During one of his earliest visits Spector was shocked to have one of the archivists apologize for having only scanned 90,000 images so far.

"Honestly, you could spend days digging through the stuff we dug out of the archives."

One thing that surprisingly didn't inspire Disney Epic Mickey was Square-Enix' hugely popular role-playing game Kingdom Hearts.

"I played the Kingdom Hearts games, but they weren't much of an inspiration," Spector said. "They treated the Disney characters much more conventionally than I wanted to.

"They are not reintroducing or reimagining as much as they are offering these characters as folks you are going to interact with in a new medium."

Spector was coy about how much inspiration the game developers are drawing from the Disney theme parks.

"You might sort of, kind of recognize some scenes," he said. "I don't want to give too much away."

The designer, best known for making games like Deus Ex and Thief, said that he wasn't worried about moving from typically adult-themed games to one that may be viewed as being more for children or families.

"When this opportunity arose I had to decide, do I want to keep working on this original stuff I've been doing or do I want to mess around with one of the world's most recognizable icons," he said. "The opportunity to work with something this recognizable and profound comes around once in a lifetime. The decision was pretty straight forward.

"I'm not making a game for kids, I'm making a game gamers will be happy with."

Some of the scariest experiences I've had in my life come from video games. I can remember running from the family computer room in tears after a wax skeleton in an Are You Afraid of the Dark game chased me through a basement.

My chest still gets tight whenever I hear a burst of radio static, thanks to Silent Hill.

And there is this one scene in Dead Space that gives me goose bumps whenever I think about it.

Horror in video games is more complex that what goes on in horror movies. True, the feeling of terror you're supposed to experience is similar. Scary video games and movies both rely heavily on pacing, shocking imagery and music. However, games are an interactive experience. There are consequences for the player that nobody in a darkened movie theater could relate to. Horror games need gameplay elements that don't distract you, level design that leads you into danger in ways you can't predict and art direction that plays with your head so that you buy into what you're experiencing instead of rationalizing it away as "just a game."

Scare Tactics: Dead Space

Here's how a game can use its gameplay, level design and art direction to utterly freak you out: see Dead Space. In this game, you're a space mechanic stranded on a ship overrun with creepy, crawly aliens. On a superficial level, it's no different than a zombie shoot-em-up game. However, there is so much going on at a deeper level in Dead Space that it creates a multifaceted horror experience.

For example, art director Ian Milham explains that the use of differed lighting over a setting that looks like the inside of a rib cage was a big part of making Dead Space scary. "In a horror game, when you're walking around, you walk slower than … in a shooter game," he says. "You look at the world a lot more intently because you don't know where [enemies] are and you get kind of spooked out. So the ribbed motif created hard scissor-lines in the background and moving shadows — there's a lot for the light to play across."

The effect creates the scene that gives me goosebumps. You're walking down a hall where all you see is harsh shadows. Then you round a corner and see a mutilated person banging their head against the wall. The light from a nearby doorway plays across the gray steel wall and the red, ragged flesh hanging from the man's torso. The image is so shocking that for a moment you don't realize what's happening to this person. Then he shifts backward and slams his head against the wall so hard his skull cracks and he falls down dead. His smashed head leaves a red smear on the gray wall.

That part of the game stuck with me almost more than the creepy aliens that still retain fragments of the human bodies they took over. It's beyond scary to me — it's flat-out disturbing.

"Scary is the result of lot of things," Milham says. "The first thing you've got to do is give the world and what happens in it consequence and reality and make it super-grounded. So … when you see something terrible, you really believe it in a way [that you don't normally believe with a video game]."

A big challenge the Dead Space team had to face was making you believe that you were powerless as the main character – even though you're able to make him run away from danger or shoot aliens with space weapons. "One of the things I said [to the design team] is ‘No Final Fantasy effects with weapons,'" says Milham. "If you're too fantastic with something, you don't really believe it. All the scary stuff just kind of goes away."

Head Games: Arkham Asylum

Here's another game that can freak you out, even though it's not a horror game: Batman: Arkham Asylum. In this game, you're following a story based on familiar characters from a comic book series with an established history. Batman seems nearly invulnerable because of his high-tech gadgets and rippling muscles. But then you encounter a character called the Scarecrow who employs mind tricks to weaken Batman. Okay, fine, that's canon — but the Scarecrow level design in Arkham Asylum isn't just playing with Batman's head. It's playing with yours.

"During the Scarecrow levels we wanted to provide a constant sense of tension and vulnerability, as if they're constantly just inches from the Scarecrow's grasp," explains Jamie Whitworth, designer on Arkham Asylum. "We compared this to common scenes in slasher flicks when the protagonist is attempting to hide from the villain whilst both characters are in the shot and would usually end in a panic stricken dash to safety."

But unlike a slasher flick where you're yelling at the dumb bimbo to run or call 9-1-1, you're the one responsible for getting Batman through the levels unscathed. You see him cough and know he's been Fear Gassed by Scarecrow. Then the lighting begins to change and the long corridor down which you're walking skews to one side. Little by little as you walk down the hall, the pieces of the realistic setting fall away to reveal things you know can't be true — like rain falling inside a building. But your eyes are still seeing them. The gameplay communicates to your hands that, yes, that is, in fact, a gap you can fall through in the floor. You believe the upsetting things you start to see: such as a weeping person who sometimes appears as Batman and sometimes appears as an Arkham patient, depending on the light.

"[D]ropping players directly into the surreal Scarecrow levels wouldn't have provided the necessary set up and it was easy to lose the sense of dread when these rooms were taken out of context," says Whitworth. "The hallucination sequences were used to chip away at the player's confidence and sense of reality so that they were on the edge before Scarecrow even shows up."

The overall effect is unnerving in a way that's similar to that hallway scene in Dead Space, if ultimately a lot less disturbing.

Lingering Fear

Horror in video games is both a tangible sensation and abstract emotion. Unlike a movie, which can only appeal to a limited spectrum of those senses at a time, the horror we experience in video games can come at us both from what we see and experience and what our minds supply us with as we play. When done right, it leaves a lasting impression on a player... like a scar on the mind you worry at whenever the lights go out.

That's probably the best tool developers have to work with when making their games scary: your own mind.

"A lot of the horror comes from not knowing what's coming next, that sort of endless tension," Milham says. "You set up rhythms where you do an obvious scare with obvious foreshadowing and then you do another. And then you do the foreshadowing and you don't [scare them], and you wait a couple beats longer just long enough for them to go ‘Oh you guys, you were going to scare me and then you didn't.' And then... OH MY GOD!"

PIC — Scarecrow
PIC — Batman
PIC — The Ring

At a development conference their answers might have been different, but this is Comic-Con, and this distinguished panel of guests from BioWare, Gazillion, Sony Online Entertainment, Turbine, and Nexon America know full well that the majority of the audience are simply folks who showed to save seats for the Star Wars panel coming up afterwards. The key here, in most cases, seemed to be mentioning their games as often as possible in the hopes that the folks in the audience who weren't members of the press would remember them.

Let's start with Gazillion's Dave Brevik, who is currently working on the Marvel Comic MMO he cannot really talk about. Dave could only speak in generalities throughout most of the panel, and he seemed to struggle with the question of change in the MMO industry more than most, as he isn't allowed to tell us what he's changing. Only that "something different" is coming, and that something different will reflect a positive change in the industry.

Next up was BioWare's Leo Olebe. As BioWare is working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, his example of positive genre change is, of course, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Specifically the fully-voiced NPCs and player characters in the game, which he claimed would spoil players for all other massively-multiplayer titles. I'm not sure that actually counts as a positive change though. Look guys, now you're going to have to spend several million dollars on voice work every time you create a new online game!

The saddest thing? He's probably right about that. It'll be the same feeling you get when starting a console RPG and realizing that all the dialog is simply text-based.

SOE head honcho John Smedley took the opportunity to answer the question by hyping up the upcoming DC Universe Online, stating that delivering action-packed combat "We want you to be able to throw a bus on your PC and have your friend catch it on his PS3. That's the level of gameplay and interactivity we're looking at."

Cross-platform bus throwing is the way of the future.

Nexon's Min Kim gave what was perhaps the most genuine answer to the question, though he had already mentioned Combat Arms five or six times during the panel and was probably feeling a little spent.

"Access is gonna change...the price point is going to drop to free for a lot of these games...but access is going to change. Traditionally when you get a new PC game you have to worry about whether your hardware can run it. Developers are going to realize that it isn't about building the flashiest experience, but making sure the game is accessible to the widest audience."

And then he mentioned Combat Arms again.

That covers four of the five panelists, with Turbine's Henrik Strandberg speaking far too quietly for anyone to really hear him, which is problem Turbine's been dealing with for quite some time.

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.

Anyone who's played through a game like Microsoft's Fable II (who can forget your virtual dog?), BioWare's Mass Effect (with its robust roster of non-playable characters) or seen Sony's upcoming Heavy Rain (whose developer, Quantic Dream, promises a new type of relationship between player and character) may have wondered to themselves whether gaming, which is still in its infancy as an art form, is heading towards its inevitable Citizen Kane threshold. More than the graphics or surround sound, the latest game consoles' processing power are bringing to life AI-controlled characters unlike anything experienced before.

But what are these sentient beings that help or hinder gamers as they explore vast virtual worlds? Are the Locust Horde who hide behind blockades and orchestrate flanking attacks in Gears of War 2 the first step in some type of real-world AI nightmare like the apocalyptic future displayed in Warner Bros. Pictures' Terminator: Salvation? Will Steven Spielberg's next original game for Electronic Arts, which remains untitled, deliver on its promise of making a gamer connect with a female avatar emotionally?

Rather than go to the usual suspects of talented videogame developers, Kotaku set out to ask experts in the fields of Hollywood movie magic, theme park creators, robotics experts and AI specialists to answer the question: Do the AI-controlled characters in games qualify as robots or some other form of artificial life. Are those creatures who are at the player's mercy in Lionhead Studio's Black & White games truly virtual beings?

Akhil Madhani, technical staff director, Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development said that the term "robot" is used to describe a physical system, usually with the ability to respond to a changing or unstructured environment.

"As such, I don't think that most people would consider a videogame/virtual character to be a robot," said Madhani. "Nonetheless, algorithms used to program the behavior of a virtual character (not knowing the algorithms used in this case) may have application for a (physically embodied) robot."

Futurist Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute, has a much more sci-fi vision of gaming and the future.

"In short, our games have indeed evolved into crude life forms," said Frey. "Innovations in the digital world are happening exponentially faster than in the material world, so the digital beings in games will soon become far more lifelike, and will eventually step out of the screens and exist as 3D avatars, interacting with us, much like other people."

Frey believes the not-so-distant future will be inhabited by 3D avatars that will act like digital clones, sitting in for us at meetings and other types of gatherings, and learning from each interaction.

Others have a more realistic vision of the games of tomorrow.

Chris Darken, conference chair for Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment and an associate professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that while game AIs have become more and more lifelike as a general trend and game characters are getting more information about their environment, and are processing it in more realistic ways; game AI is about creating a user experience, and game programmers are right to use whatever shortcuts and engineering tricks they can muster to produce the best possible experience given the budget of their project.

"Most game related AI today falls into the field of expert systems," explained Michael Schmidt, a Ph.D. student at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab. "In other words, they attempt to mimic and reproduce certain behaviors that we might expect a human to do; like path planning, avoiding obstacles, reacting to the user, etc."

"This is indeed very similar to some research that is going on in robotics," added Schmidt. "However, new research is beginning on to how robotics and AI systems can learn and understand their self and environment on their own, such that their behavior is self-emergent. Ultimately, we will have robotic and AI systems that won't need to be reprogrammed and redesigned for every task, but instead emerge naturally on their own".

Over the past four decades, videogames have evolved from the black-and-white graphics of Pong and Asteroids to lush 3D worlds that are actually now playable in full 3D thanks to new stereoscopic technology. Game AI has progressed from Super Mario Bros.' Goombas to Sega's Seaman to the aforementioned "best friend" in Fable.

"AI in games has come a long way, from simple look-up tables, to scripted interactions, and even some machine learning," said Schmidt. "However, it has only begun to scratch the surface of artificial life. The artificial life field is concerned with understanding and reproducing several essential functions in biology, such as evolutionary pressures and dynamics and self-reproduction."

Schmidt believes future videogame AI will likely move from expert systems, such as scripted behavior, toward more and more evolved and self-emergent behavior.

"Ultimately, everything from an AI creature's morphology and appearance to its behavior and interaction with the user could arise naturally from the environment and simulator itself," said Schmidt.

Like videogames, Hollywood technology is evolving at a record pace. Bret Nelson, producer, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, said that if you need an operator, it's not a robot. If it can perform its functions without intervention, it could be called a robot depending on what those functions are.

"I'd say that the game character is a robot if it would normally (or historically) be dependent on player input to perform its functions," said Bret Nelson, producer, Jim Henson's Creature Shop. "In that case, the AI would be serving a robotic function."

"I have to believe that the future of the game industry belongs to game makers whose characters delight their audience by displaying realism and intelligence in new and unexpected ways," said Darken.

At the end of the day, it's still the gameplay that matters. But improved AI does offer more challenges to gamers and helps immerse the player more fully in these worlds.

For those who don't know what those are, know that sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov established three basic laws governing the programming of robots for his works, which later became almost canonical amongst other sci-fi writers, and which remain popular to this day.

Those three laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Simple. It's a paper/rock/scissors sequence of programming that allows a robot to look after itself without ever inflicting harm upon a human — which will be good to know in the dark, distant future when there are robots advanced enough to require such programming!

For now, though, the closest things we have in the real world to the classic idea of a "robot" are automatic vacuum cleaners, giant arms that work on factory floors and bipedal toys wheeled out at Japanese robotics shows.

But what about video game characters? They're governed by AI. And, in many cases, incredibly complex AI, to the point where non-playable characters can behave more naturally than the robots in Asimov's works. So this being robot week and all, we decided to ask a few game developers what their versions of Asimov's three laws were when coming up with gaming AI.

Jonny Ebbert, Relic, lead designer on Dawn of War 2:

1) Fun before difficulty. Always try to level the challenge appropriately at each level so that players feel good about playing. So make your Easy A.I easy, and your Normal A.I. kind of easy. Leave the sadism for Hard and Expert.

2) Add frailty but avoid stupidity. A.I.s need to make mistakes for the player to exploit from time to time but they shouldn't look dumb doing it. A.I's aren't fun to play if they always trigger their abilities perfectly when they have the chance (anyone old school enough to remember trying to Death and Decay a peon line against a Human AI), and they shouldn't always retreat at the perfect health level. But they need to stay in the range of competency when they do make "mistakes." It's a fine line to walk, but an important line.

3) Be a good teammate. Try to support your teammate's army when possible. Help out your opponent's base when it's under serious attack. Players love it when they see an A.I. that cares about how they're doing. They feel like they're cooperating rather than playing next to something.

4) Cheat wherever you can. A.I.s are handicapped. They need to cheat from time to time if they're going to close the gap.

5) Never get caught cheating. Nothing ruins the illusion of a good A.I. like seeing how they're cheating.

Matt Tonks, Epic, gameplay programmer on Gears of War 2:

Simplest answer:

1. Act smart until the player kills you.

Or, to be a bit more specific:

1. An AI must value its own life; take cover against threatening enemies, and avoid life-threatening situations.

2. An AI should attack the most threatening enemy, unless we are threatened… in which case, see rule #1.

The friendly AI has a couple rules added to the top:

1. A friendly AI should never get in the player's way. If you're in the player's way, get out of the way.

2. A friendly AI should stay near its assigned squad leader (usually the player).

And then the other rules:

3. An AI must value its own life; take cover against threatening enemies, and avoid life-threatening situations.

4. An AI should attack the most threatening enemy, unless we are threatened… in which case, see rule #3.

Todd Howard, Bethesda, executive producer on Fallout 3:

"I'll give you one from the old Terminator games, since the new movie is coming out. The Terminator cannot be reasoned with, can't be bargained with, and cannot be stopped. Unless of course he hits a chair, and since he can't path around it, we have him just start shooting."

Star Wars: The Old Republic community manager Sean Dahlberg quieted talk of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes in the forthcoming MMO by writing "As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars" and locking the discussion thread. That lead to further allegations of GLBT "discrimination," with knowledgeable fans pointing out instances of same sex relationships in the extended Star Wars universe.

Gamers looking forward to the new massively multiplayer Star Wars game were largely civil in their requests for BioWare to reconsider its stance.

"I understand where it comes from, but my advise to Bioware is to rethink this," posted user Elikal. "Blizzard got some really bad press when they tried to forbid the usage of these words, and it would be really disappointing if Bioware would follow such a conservative policy in their forum - and their game."

Today, BioWare reps have decided to remove any filters that bar homosexual topics of discussion, reopening the thread and issuing a mea culpa. Star Wars: The Old Republic community manager Sean Dahlberg issued the following apology and explanation:

I would like to personally apologize to "Elikal" and anyone I may have offended. My intention was not to demean anyone but simply to help promote a community that could discuss topics in a mature fashion. When I first built the word filter list, I added a variety of terms to the word filter that have been used numerous times in derogatory messaging. There were some words added to the filter that should not have been – we corrected this today.

I apologize for the confusion that this has created but I would like to be clear that there was never any intent to limit discussion. That said, I have overstepped my boundaries in my original statement and I sincerely apologize for doing so.

Dahlberg went on to clarify that no Star Wars: The Old Republic forum members were banned for discussing matters of a gay or lesbian nature "with the exception of individuals who were being derogatory and insulting to others."

GLBT discrimination in forums? [BioWare]
There Are No Gays In Star Wars [Kotaku]

Spore, Will Wright's far-reaching game about life, the universe and everything, is a journey, not just from microscope to universe, but of discovery and imagination.

It's also the clearest example of how, in creating his games, Wright taps so deeply into the principals of his grade-school education which was based on a pedagogy built on child development first formulated more than 100 years ago in Rome.

Because of this, Wright's greatest achievement isn't delivering the universe as toy in Spore, the digital dollhouses of the Sims or even the planned towns of Sim City.

It's his ability to touch a gamer's imagination and inspire their intellect. To create not just games, but places and spaces of exploration

Interesting Playthings
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

"In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms," Wright says. "You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it."

"Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that's almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model ."

The pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori while working with intellectually and developmentally disabled children as part of her post-graduate research. By removing the idea that children were adults in tiny bodies that had to learn through lecture and memorization, and instead focusing on sparking a thirst for knowledge, Montessori found children could direct their own learning.

"Her aim was to arouse in the children a spontaneous response to the materials and I see that in (Will Wright's) games," said Virginia McHugh Goodwin, executive director of the Association Montessori International, USA. "Creativity is a component to his work and that is also key to Montessori's work, because she sets the tone for creativity, the way she has her educational methods set up.

"To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within."

Montessori's first school opened in 1907 in Rome and her methodologies have since spread around the world. Including to places like Atlanta, Georgia, where Wright attended such a school until sixth grade.

Another important element of Montessori education is the use of self-correcting toys. These Montessori toys allow children to play without realizing they are learning.

"The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy," Wright said. "Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we're going to learn about this.

"The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?"

And that's not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

"I build more interesting toys than interesting games," he said. "I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

"The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy."

And toys and play, Wright says, go hand-in-hand.

"Play is a toy version of problem solving that we're going to encounter later in life," he said. "Getting people to be playful around serious subjects is the most effective ways to develop an intuition to that.

"It gives us ways to kind of map things intuitively."

An Elegant Tool
"Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world" — Maria Montessori

Wright's first experience with Montessori was brief and intense, attending an elementary school in Atlanta until the sixth grade. The school introduced him to the idea of self-directed education through creative inspiration.

"I bring it up every now and the," he said of his Montessori education. "It gives people a grounding of where I am coming from. "

Goodwin says that many Montessori graduates tend to be more interesting in exploring things, in asking a lot of questions.

"They're critical thinkers, problem solvers, because they've had the ability to do that from a very early age," she said.

For Wright, Montessori helped him realize that when he was personally involved or interested in something he learned about it much more efficiently.

"When I was starting to research SimCity I started reading about urban dynamics," he said. "It became more of an obsession, because I was able to play with my guinea pig simulation, instead of trying to learn facts and figures.

"When Sim games started moving forward we wanted to draw that out."

He did that by creating games that were a form of autodidactic toy, that taught by inspiring people to become interested in a subject.

"It's about getting a player creatively engaged," he said. "Computers can get students very motivated to be interested in things."

But Wright contends that Montessori isn't as direct an influence on him as some might think. He doesn't, he says, come up with his idea for games from Montessori.

"I pick themes, things I've been fascinated with, then it's ‘How can I convey this to a lot of people?'," he said. "Montessori seems like a very clean, natural way to make these subjects approachable."

Instead, Montessori's influence is more subtle.

"I don't think it's something you work into a game, I think it's inherit in the structure itself," he said. "It's in the design premise.

"It's an elegant tool. It's not the end state goal. It just happens to be the best tool for the job."

Loops of Super Mario Bros.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. – Maria Montessori

As with the Montessori Method, in Wright's games failing is almost as important as winning.

"Montessori knew that children needed freedom to make mistakes, to develop skills that are unique to his or her personality," said Goodwin. "The freedom allows for the development of the creative thinking and the problem solving skills. To be able to look at things from a different perspective.

"Montessori allows for success and failure. She felt that people learned from mistakes. Mistakes are not looked down upon or frowned upon, they are part of the process."

For Wright, that was one of the hardest things to come to grips with as a game designer.

"One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success," he said. "As long as it's diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game."

All games are made up of what Wright calls interaction loops, events that have both a success and failure side to them.

"In Super Mario Brothers, once you succeed at knowing how to make him move you go on to the next step. Now you go up and hit a creature and you fail a different way."

Wright's games have always had a diverse and interesting mix of what Wright terms the failure space.

"It's the failure that's fun," he said.

But what you won't find in Spore is any form of direct competition with other gamers, another tenant found in Montessori teachings.

"Montessori does not encourage competition in the traditional sense," Goodwin said. "The idea with Montessori is that children strive to do the best that they can do."

Instead, in both Spore and Montessori, the emphasis is on collaboration.

"Children learn to collaborate and work with one another and then each child is motivated to reach his or her potential so they can contribute to the project in a collaborative way, their best skills," Goodwin said. "So there is competition, but it is done in a very nice way. And I don't see Wright with a lot of competition in his games."

Imagination Amplifier
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. – Maria Montessori

Because Wright isn't trying to lecture gamers or teach them the nuance of physics, evolution, of astronomy or biology, the science of Spore wasn't designed to be "dead on accurate".

"If you step way back and look at Spore as a whole it's meant to show a grand arch, the story of life," her said. "The Sims is like the story of life on Earth, Spore is life with a capital L."

"I wanted people to have a sense of the vast scope that their life is inside of. There's a journey in Spore from microscopic to galactic. There aren't too many experiences in games, books or movies that gives you that distant perspective."

And along with that perspective, the different stages of Spore allow a gamer plenty of aesthetic and strategic creativity, all geared at getting players not to learn but to express their creativity.

"A lot of people have a very low opinion of their own creativity," he said. "When you give them a tool to make things that they didn't think they could make it can be very powerful, especially when five or six people comment on it."

Goodwin says Spore "amplifies the imagination."

"When I look at Spore, that's what it seemed to say to me," she said. "That it really uses the imagination.

"Another thing I think I saw with (Wright), is that he is really, really into that idea of discovery and exploration. That is one of the key tenants of Montessori's work. The materials that she designed allow the child to discover"

They are, she said, manipulative materials that go from something concrete to the abstract.

After the game's launch, Wright and his team started to see people step outside the limitations of Spore and continue to create.

"People were creating narratives of who their people are and how they evolve," he said. "It was really about ownership at some level."

Manchild
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist. — Maria Montessori

The more than four hundred pages of Maria Montessori's book, The Montessori Method, is packed with lessons that seem at times written as much for game development as they are for education.

It often talks of creating a system of rules that don't inhibit, but enhance the experience.

Wright laughs in surprise when I tell him that after reading the book it seems to me that many games treat gamers as children, puppets that are lead through games by a strict set of rules, rules that often harm the experience.

He seems to be agreeing with me when he says that Spore was created to be very player focused.

"Where Montessori is very child centered," he says, "we are very gamer centered."

But modern games aren't as condescending in their design. They expect more now from players.

"If you look at them ten years ago they were more linear," he said. "But now the Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even the Wii games or music games, they leave a lot more room for creative expression of the player."

And it's that desire to free that expression that seems to keep driving Wright back to Montessori's methods.

"I'm not trying to evangelize Montessori," he said. "I want people to feel creative and involved and feel like they've doing something constructive. Montessori is a great tool for that purpose."

The cinematic event of, well, this week deserves a proper liveblog.

Beware. This post is wall-to-wall spoilers. So if you plan on seeing Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, and you do not want your viewing experience spoiled do not read any further.

Still reading? Good.

We'll be updating as we view the film so you'll need to refresh the page — that is, until the flick is over.

Do keep in mind that reading this does not compare with actually watching this film, so do support Hollywood's most recent effort at turning your favorite video game character into a feature film by seeing this at the theater. Feel free to print out this liveblog and follow along with the action on the big screen!

12:00 - Hey, it's the Capcom logo!

12:01 - Opening shot: Golden Gate bridge. There's piano music. Piano music means this is a classy movie. In a voice over Chun Li star Kristen Kreuk is talking about how she wanted to be a concert pianist, but things don't always work out the way you expect them. She moved to Hong Kong and everything changed. GREAT, BLAME HONG KONG.

And the opening credits.

12:03 - Rich father, she doesn't know what his job was. (Because his job was being rich?) She and her father practice martial arts in the garden. "Growing up was like a dream. But nothing lasts forever." Uh oh, daddy's gonna die.

12:05 - And here comes Michael Clarke Duncan as Balrog! Her father throws canned vegetables at Balrog, who catches the canned vegetables and laughs. They fight. Balrog chokes and laughs a lot. Yeah.

Guys with bats appear. They fight. Chun-Li's father LIGHTS HIS HAND ON FIRE by touching a candle and then LIGHTS ANOTHER GUY ON FIRE. Bison (Neal McDonough) shows up in a business suit.

12:08 - Bye bye Daddy! Off he goes in a limo. Nothing like being kidnapped in style. Chun Li takes out a spinning bird necklace her father gave her.

12:10 - Big Chun Li. All grown up, and she's a concert pianist. She sees some random homeless dude getting beat up. On his hand, there's a spider web tattoo!

12:12 - Says Bison, "As distinguished members of the Shadaloo Corporation, you are all very important, and I don't need to waste your time." So Vega kills them all.

12:16 - Chun-Li's father is not dead, but in a fancy-schmancy prison — complete with a Mac desktop! Bison is keeping Chun-Li's father in prison for his, wait for it, connections! That's right, Chun-Li's father's connections. Bison has locked him on in a cell so he can email people?! And in return for his connections, Chun-Li's father gets pictures and digi clips of his daughter. He sits in his chic cell all day looking at pictures of his daughter.

12:19 - Says Chun-Li: "Was this mysterious scroll a message? Who was it from? I had to find out." Oh, the intrigue.

Okay, we're about twenty minutes in, it's a Chun-Li movie, and I have yet to see any Chun-Li thigh. Maybe I missed it? How can one miss Chun-Li thigh?

Oh, Chun-Li's mom dies. There's a weepy scene. BUT NO THIGHS.

12:21 - Hey, it's that guy from American Pie! He's an Interpool cop. But I thought Chun-Li was an Interpool cop? No, moron, she's a concert pianist!

12:23 - Some old lady tells Chun-Li to find Gen and something about a spiderweb symbol. To find Gen, Chun-Li has to "leaver her life behind," so she says goodbye to all her servants and leaves her mansion in the rain at night. WE SEE WET RAINY THIGHS.

I think.

There we go, she arrives in Bangkok, about 24 minutes into the movie, and we finally see Chun-Li's thighs. What wonders await us 24 minutes from now? A blue outfit? Just a shot in the dark!

"I had to lose myself to the street. I had to become one with the people of Bangkok." Um, why?

"This was new to me. Every night was a struggle. Every meal was a gift." Cue montage of Chun-Li looking hungry and walking around and looking hungry and sleeping in the gutter. Give this lady a sammich.

12:28 - ANGRY BABY FACE.

12:31 - Gen appears, explains the bit about Chun-Li's father being kidnapped for his connections. He knows who took her father! "I'll tell you when you are ready. But when you put away your anger."

Gen created the Order of The Web. "Your father was a very important man, and his connections could open any door in any country around the world." Even when he's in a fancy prison!

12:33 - ANGRY BABY FACE.

12:35 - Chun-Li does research on Bison at an internet cafe. "Research" is looking at two articles online. Sounds like Chun-Li is ready to write PhD thesis.

12:40 - Something about Bison being an unscrupulous land developer.

12:41 - More Gen and Chun-Li training. He blindfolds her and throws metal balls at her, while muttering some new age mumbo jumbo about harnessing energy. Her face almost hits a buzz saw.

12:43 - Chun-Li in blue moomoo with bun hairdo.

12;45 - Lesbian dance scene between Chun-Li and some evil lady in heels. M'kay.

Don't remember that in any of the games.

12:48 - Fight breaks out and carries over into a strip club, which is playing some hip-hop song about Street Fighter. What a kwinky-dink! The guys with guns are no match for Chun-Li's Spinning Bird kick. Chun-Li wears blue underwear.

*makes note*

They keep referring to Chun-Li as "the schoolgirl" in this movie. Why, why, why.

12:55 - Gather round! It's time for Bison's back story. His Irish missionary parents died when he was a baby, and he became ill, "but where he was no one cared about the sick," Gen tells us. Thanks Gen! Bison grew up on the mean streets of Bangkok stealing stuff — like entire baskets of fish. Baskets of fish? The nerve.

"He yearned for more, so he went to the dark cave." Can't blame him. I mean, baskets of fish? Meh. So Bison shows up in this drippy dark cave with his new, knocked up wife.

Hello shotgun marriage!

Gen says something about Bison wanting to lose his conscience. Bison has his very pregnant wife lay down on some rocks and then starts taking off his wife's clothes and...

...rips his unborn child out of his wife's stomach! Bison's eyes then change color. And that's how he became an unscrupulous land developer? Just think of what Donald Trump had to do...

12:57 - KA-BOOM! No more Gen. *Sad Panda*

1:00 - Chun-Li and Vega fight. Chun-Li knocks off his mask and says, "No wonder you wear a mask." Oh buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurn.

1:03 - Chun-Li gets captured snooping around a shipyard. Bison tells her: "You're not a schoolgirl anymore." Hey Bison! She's not a schoolgirl in the games, that's Sakura.

They throw her in the brig with her dad. There's isn't a Mac in the brig — however will he connect with his very important connections?

1:05 - Bison: "You see, your father has been the milk of my business. But even milk has an expiration date." YES, YES, YES!

Bison kills Chun-Li's father. Jerk.

Chun-Li escapes, and runs through a street markets. Fruit carts galore! Balrog pulls up in a Benz, draws a weapon, and Chun-Li grabs a kid to keep him out of harms way. Balrog fires off a shot, Chun-Li turns and takes it in the back, takes it for the team.

Some little kid throws a rock that hits Balrog in the face. Now everyone is throwing rocks. Ha, this is great. No, really. The rock throwing scene is great. Love it.

HEY IT'S GEN! HE'S NOT DEAD!

He better do some bad ass Rambo type stuff and pull Chun-Li's bullet out with his fingers. Instead he waves his hand over her wounds.

1:14 - Chun-Li shows up at that American Pie guy's safe house and asks him for back up. She gonna try to take down Bison when his shipment arrives at the shipyard.

Explosions, shooting and more shooting. There's kicking when Chun-Li shows up at the shipyard. Ha, Chun-Li finds some girl on the ship and asks her if she's okay. But the girl doesn't seem to speak English and asks where her father is, so Chun-Li tells her to stay where she is. That's probably a good idea.

1:18 - Gen and Balrog fight and Gen MELTS BALROG'S FACE. Awesome.

1:19 - That girl on the boat? That's Bison's daughter, the one he ripped out of his wife's stomach. Not so awesome. She's also put up in a fancy prison cell. Man, if you're gonna get captured, get captured by Bison. His cells have designer furniture.

Hold on, we're actually confused. Why is Bison's daughter on a boat? Like, when he ripped her out of his wife's stomach, what did he do with her? Let's forget about that now, Gen and Bison are fighting. It's a pretty good fight! We hope he uses that milk analogy again, because that was terrific.

"Gen, you are starting to sour." (He didn't say that, but should've.)

Bison throw Gen into a table and then leaves. Leaves? Why does he leave? You cannot BLOW UP GEN, why would you leave him after throwing him into a table? Go over that and finish the job. DAMMIT BISON.

1:23 - Chun-Li shows up and starts smacking Bison with a bamboo pole.

1:25 - ANGRY BABY FACE.

1:27 - And... Chun-Li defeats Bison by twisting his head around. The American Pie guy shows up and says nice work.

1:30 - Another voice over, a newspaper clipping for a Street Fighter tournament, Gen mentioning a "Ryu something," and this looks like a wrap, folks!

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li opens at theaters across the U.S. this weekend. Be sure to see it so we get the inevitable Street FIghter: The Legend of Ryu something!

Capcom says that Dead Rising 2 will take the franchise to a "new level of zombie-killing fun with tens of thousands of zombies" and a chance to kill them in fun ways in the gambling paradise of Fortune City.

Dead Rising 2 is set several years after the zombie invasion of Willamette, Colorado. Unfortunately, Capcom tells us, that zombie virus was not contained at the end of the first game and spread unchecked throughout the U.S. Dead Rising 2 depicts a country where zombie outbreaks continue to strike.

As we had heard long ago, Dead Rising 2 is being developed in partnership with Canadian developer Blue Castle Games as well as a number of members from the original Dead Rising team, including Keiji Inafune, who as the game's Producer, will play an active role in the project.

The announcement promises that further details concerning the story and gameplay of Dead Rising 2 will be made available shortly. But what we already know is pretty interesting: It's multiplatform. Hey Capcom UK, I guess Brian Ashcraft didn't mistranslate that interview after all!

What It Is
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an action game based off the upcoming movie developed by Raven Software, which brought you Quake 4 and Soldier Of Fortune. The story focuses on the X-Men character Wolverine before and after he's given his adamantium skeleton. I found the gameplay closely resembled God of War, surprisingly. You'll be involved in plenty of tight, close-combat battles, as well as many platforming and playable, cinematic sequences.

What We Saw
I demoed the first level of the game at an Activision party for the Xbox 360. I spent about 20 minutes playing before I kindly passed the controller on to someone else. The level mainly took place in a jungle setting filled with various soldiers equipped with guns and swords.

What Needs Improvement
While the jungle environment looked very robust, it was at times a bit too linear. I felt I was always going on straight path. This was the opening tutorial level, though, so perhaps the later levels get a bit more exploratory.

I would also like to see more destructible environmental elements. The only breakable items seem to be clay pots.

What Should Stay The Same
The grotesque violence. Seriously. I wasn't the only person there that was stunned at the amount of sheer brutality in this game. Normally, we don't really see Wolverine hack and slash people to pieces, usually just a punch to the gut with little to no blood. The opening CGI movie and the following gameplay, however, were almost disturbing. The Activision rep proclaimed this to be the way fans wanted to see Wolverine. Well, you guys got your wish. Prepare for a bloodbath!

I also loved the leaping control. Being able to jump on an on-coming enemy and immediately start stabbing their guts felt very satisfying every time.

Final Thoughts
This game has as much over-the-top violence as something like MadWorld. Wolverine uppercuts heads off torsos, jams enemies into the blades of helicopters. and even throws bodies onto spikes coming out of the floor. I know most movie-licensed games aren't very good, but this could one game that everyone will be talking about, even if it's because of the violence.

Confused about our previews? Read our FAQ.

I was a bit disappointed to find out this was not a hands-on preview. An Activision rep played through the first couple levels of the game for a group of us, showing off some of the new abilities and weapons.

The story is a bit convoluted. It takes place in a fictional German city called Isenstadt. Even the rep on hand had some trouble explaining it to me, but it involves ancient amulets and crystals. But I know you don't care about that stuff. You just want to shoot Nazis, right?

One of the biggest included abilities is the "Veil" feature, which enables you to enter into this "otherworld." When using it, the entire environment turns a darkish blue and grants you new, special powers. The ability opens up new hidden passageways, bullet time, and even highlights weak points found on the stronger enemies. It's not unlike the feral ability found in Far Cry Instincts. Basically, it makes the game way easier than it should.

Also, NPC's play a big part of this version. They're there mainly to add more storytelling elements, like something found in Half-Life. The demo was mainly focused on combat, so I was unable to find out how similar this was.

Graphically the game looks pretty good. Although, after seeing the war zone atmosphere found in Killzone 2, this doesn't come close. There was a surprising amount of destructible environments; mostly the cover (such as tables and wooden structures) so it seems you may have difficulty hiding.

I didn't see too many new weapons, but I did see one called the Particle Cannon, which zaps enemies to ashes immediately. You can bring down groups of Nazis in the blink of an eye.

We were shown one mid-boss sequence where this super Nazi soldier wearing steel armor that shoots laser beams chases you. Using the "veil" power revealed his two weak points and he was brought down rather easily.

I honestly had no idea this game was being made two days ago. I must have missed the E3 announcement last year.

The game has no official release yet, but I would look out for it this year for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

You'd easily miss some of the more gorgeous moments in the action-packed trailer, so we're capturing still shots faster than you can say pause button. You might want to refresh the post as more are added, as we are updating on the fly.

My favorite part of the trailer? The English subtitles. I'm a big fan of understanding what is going on, and English subtitles are about as close as many FF games can get to making sense. While the battles themselves look rather...standard...at least we'll be able to look forward to some amazing cutscenes, right?

First announced back in April, the comic based on the upcoming multiplatform Activision game will run six issues and looks like it will cost your $4 a pop starting on April 1.

The comic will be written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti with the art and cover by Darick Robertson and Matt Jacobs. More interesting is this snippet of back story:

"Follow New York homicide detectives as they track a serial killer unlike any they've ever faced, and enter a new era where human extinction and monstrous evolution collide!"

Serial killers AND monstrous evolution? Sign me up.

PROTOTYPE

Fresh from the Kotaku source line come these amazing concept images of what would have happened if Obi-Wan Kenobi turned to the Dark Side.

Here's what Free Radical did to turn the lovable teacher, into a frightening hermit for what would have been Star Wars Battlefront III:

Tatters rags for clothes, like Yoda's but more decayed.
Yeollowed teeth and claw like nails
Relics and artifacts with strong dark side resonance kept in pouches and threaded through his clothes.
Belts and straps made from Krayt dragon leather
Fur lining from Wampa slain on his travels
Mayny layers of robes, cloaks and cloth mask his shriveled wiry frame.
Mostly a hermit, Dark Obiwan wanders searching for places and things with strong connections to the dark side.

I sure hope the new developers take this in the same direction.

Leaked Star Wars Battlefront 3 Gameplay Footage

We've already caught a glimpse at some pretty impressive TimeSplitter 4 and Star Wars Battlefront 3 art. Now we've got what is supposed to be early footage of Star Wars Battlefront 3.

The footage, we're told, was taken at an internal alpha meeting with Free Radical back in November. It looks pretty amazing and features some pretty detailed cut scenes.

OK, most of them are new - you'll find one or two familiar-looking ones - but the looks at character customisation and seriously in-game action are warmly appreciated.

Box art is below, new screenshots below that.

The content will be coming to be the 360 and PS3 version of the game. No specific date or prices have yet been set for the downloadable content.

In the coming months Lucas Arts will release a downloadable content pack featuring additional costumes and character models that can be used to play through the single-player campaign. The new models will include Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ki-Adi-Mundi, and Kit Fisto.

The skins we decided to release were "based on what we heard from fans," Blackman said. "But some were from us. We thought Ki-Adi-Mundi or Kiit Fisto would be exciting to see running around in our game."

While the new skins simply give you a new way to play through the existing content, the new level will be played out on a beefy new map and includes quite a bit more plot.

Due out later this year, the new single-player mission is set in the Jedi Temple on the planet Coruscant. Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice travels to the temple to learn more about his father, and while searching through the rubble of the destroyed building he confronts his inner demons.

(SPOILER)

The level seems to fit in nicely with a moment in the original game when the Apprentice comes face to face with the ghost of his father. I asked Blackman if that was done deliberately, or if that confrontation would be where players would jump off into the new adventure.

"That was a scene we had written into the script to suggest that the apprentice was getting more into his background and in touch with his childhood," Blackman said. "It's in there to remind the player that the apprentice had come from a jedi father that he wasn’t always evil. It coincides nicely with him beginning to question working for Vader."

(END SPOILER)

Blackman said the team talked about having that moment be the jumping off point for the new adventure, but in the end decided it wasn't feasible.

"We wanted players to be able to access it immediately when they download it," he said. "So it’s an added level. A separate campaign."

The new campaign's map is smaller than The Force Unleashed giant level on the junk planet Raxis Prime, he said, but it's larger than Cloud City.

"We hope it hits the sweet spot for size."

This new location, which appears in a different form in both the PSP and PS2 versions of the game, was one of about eight that the teamed talked about including in the final game, but didn't make the cut for one reason or another.

"We had a list of 20 locations in our exploration phase," he said. "Those got whittled down. Which ones were viable and which weren't. The temple hung on and hung on and hung on. We had to make cuts right before production and it was one of those."

And Blackman said it's entirely possible that the internal development team working on this new DLC will continue to work on new episodes, that The Force Unleashed could essentially become a delivery system for episodic content.

"We brainstormed a ton of locations," he said. "There's easily another two dozen we could make into levels. This is a good way to continue the story."

"I wouldn't rule out any future content on The Force Unleashed."

This new content also makes the game that much more replayable, something that could potentially help bump it from a rental to a purchase.

"We hope gamers hold onto the game anyway," Blackman said. "There is already a lot of replayability built into it. There is quite a lot of exploration you can do. If you enjoy the story, the gameplay, the first time through, though, you should enjoy this."

The game will have you playing as Darth Vader's secret apprentice and takes place in the era between Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. The game will have players assisting Vader in his quest to rid the universe of Jedi.

"Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is one of the most ambitious projects LucasArts has ever launched. The combination of a great new Star Wars story with revolutionary new technology and game play means more fun than you've ever had in the Star Wars universe," said Peter Hirschmann, Vice-President of Product Development, LucasArts. "We can't wait until gamers get their hands on it this September."

LucasArts teamed up with Spike TV to air segments about the upcoming game during the channel's upcoming showing of all six Star Wars movies this weekend. The channel will be airing six different segments about the game "each with an exclusive announcement or new game play footage."

Hit the jump for the segment times, more box art shots and some details on the game.

• April 6 at 7:58 p.m. ET/PT - between the premiere of Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones and Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
• April 11 at 10:52 p.m. ET/PT - At the end of Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope
• April 12 at 12:00 a.m. ET/PT - throughout an episode of GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley filmed at LucasArts' headquarters in San Francisco
• April 12 at 5:06 p.m. ET/PT - before Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope
• April 13 at 5:06 p.m. ET/PT - before Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back

More About Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is the first next-generation game developed internally at LucasArts, and will be available on the Xbox®360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system.

As its name implies, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed completely re-imagines the scope and scale of the Force by taking full advantage of newly developed technologies that will be seen and experienced for the first time together: Digital Molecular Matter, by Pixelux Entertainment, and euphoria by NaturalMotion Ltd.

LucasArts and developer Krome Studios are creating an equally enthralling version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on the Wii™ home videogame system from Nintendo, PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system, and n-Space, Inc., is developing a version for Nintendo DS™. All will feature the same storyline, with opportunities to unleash the Force in devastating new ways.

Working with Lucas Licensing, LucasArts is preparing an unprecedented promotional effort around the launch of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, encompassing a full line of toys and game-based action figures from Hasbro, as well as a full publishing program from Dark Horse, Del Rey, Prima Games, and Palace Press.

More information about the game can be found at the official website, www.theforceunleashed.com, which will continue to release details throughout the year.