Major Nelson will talk about anything Live-related that you can dream of. Such as: Why is there no Xbox Live Platinum membership? (I'm sure you can do better!)

He follows the Kotaku Talk Radio guest-appearance trail-blazing of Amy Hennig, Ken Levine, Tim Schafer, Cliff Bleszinski, Jeremiah Slaczka, and Randy Pitchford. And that was just 2009.

On Wednesday at 11am Kotaku Time (that's 1pm ET, 10am PT), you will be able to call in and ask Major Nelson anything you want.

Look for a reminder post about the podcast at 10:55 AM mountain time (12:55 ET) on Wednesday. The post will include call-in info so you can ask your questions. The show will be live at 11am MT, 1pm ET. I'll expect to hear you calling our switchboard then.

After years of cop chases, arcadey controls, and Maggie Q, the NFS franchise took a more Forza-like path for its latest console iteration. The much needed overhaul was a hit with critics, and now SHIFT effectively duplicates that same success on Apple's gaming gadget.

Loved
Role-playing Racer:Like its console counterparts, SHIFT's iPhone debut forgoes the free-wheeling approach that established the franchise, in favor of a racer that plays much more like an RPG. Through a robust career mode, heavy-foot gamers unlock points and stars for performing a variety of tasks. These fall into "precision" and "aggression" categories, and level you up without necessarily requiring you to win races. As you gain levels, you'll unlock new events, earn cash to upgrade and buy vehicles, and pad out your profile with Achievement-like badges. The super addictive format sets you on a path that quickly becomes as engaging as any just-one-more-level RPG experience.

Power Steering: As a gamer yet to embrace accelerometer controls as a superior alternative to traditional navigation, I was nervous about SHIFT stubbornly forcing them on players. Thankfully, my concerns were washed away like roadkill in a rain storm, as SHIFT controls like a dream. Simply tilt the device left and right to steer, give it an aggressive twitch to drift, and touch anywhere on the screen to brake. Additionally, a variety of assists can be turned on to ensure even sim-haters and rookie racers reach the finish line.

Visual HorsepowerSHIFT steals the cup from Asphalt 5 as the prettiest racer on the platform. From the detail-drenched real-world rides to the beautifully rendered globe-spanning locales, SHIFT sports a late PS2 era-like presentation. Even cooler are immersion-amping effects that'll spike your adrenaline and have you checking if your seat belt's buckled; nitro-fueled flames, smoke-spitting tires, and scenery that whips by at 150+ MPHs all do an amazing job of selling a real sense of speed and control. I've played plenty of console racers that don't do this good a job of immersing you in the pedal-to-the-metal moment.

Given that SHIFT's multi-player options look pretty limited next to the brimming career mode, I was tempted to add a "Hated" bullet highlighting this shortcoming. However, the lengthy solo experience is so solid and so polished, it's easy to overlook-and even appreciate-the developers obvious dedication to the single-player experience.

Need For Speed: SHIFT was developed by IronMonkey Studios and published by EA for iPhone on December 18th. Retails for $9.99. A code to download the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed the game's career mode and participated in multi-player modes.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

"A Japanese friend of mine told me very casually, in a totally matter-of-fact kind of way, that the difference between Japanese and American cosplay is as clear as moeru and naeru," says Patrick Galbraith, author of The Otaku Encycolpedia, University of Tokyo PhD candidate and cosplaying Akihabara tour guide. "Moeru" means "to bud", while "naeru"is an antonym and means "to wilt"."

"My friend said that when he sees a Japanese cosplayer, the response is moeru, and when he sees a non-Japanese cosplayer," continues Galbraith, "the response is naeru. He didn't mean any harm, but this is a pretty damn racist statement." It is a sentiment shared by Westerners, too, believing that Japanese cosplay is superior, placing it on a pedestal.

The history of cosplay is intertwined with the West — it was not developed in a vacuum! The word cosplay was coined by journalist Nobuyuki Takahashi and first appeared in print in an article he wrote in a June 1983 article in the magazine "My Anime."" Takahashi shortened the word to "cosplay" after hearing that "costume play" was not actually an English word. A direct Japanese translation of masquerade, with its aristocratic nuances, would not suffice. "Costume" and "play,"" both borrowed words in Japanese, became "cosplay," In the early 1980s, attendees at doujin manga show Comic Market, or Comiket, began drawing pictures of their favorite manga and anime characters on their shirts. This evolved into a handful of individuals dressing up as actual characters.

While Japanese fandom was trying to find its footing in expressing itself, its American counterparts had been dressed up at science fiction conventions for decades. Takahashi was surprised to see Trekkies in full Star Trek gear at the 1984 Worldcon (The World Science Fiction Convention) in Los Angeles. Takahashi hoped that the trend would catch on in his native Japan, and now had the newly minted term he needed to sell it. Geek culture is largely universal. The idea of dressing as one's favorite characters — whether that be from Star Trek or Mobile Suit Gundam — has undeniable appeal.

"Cosplay" is Japanese for "costume play" — individuals dressing up in costume. In Japan, it is not restricted to video game, manga or anime characters, but can encompass dressing in all sorts of outfits: maid, nurse, schoolgirl, etc. The term is a shortened form of borrowed English, yet cosplay is viewed as something uniquely for and by the Japanese.

In the West, dressing up in costumes has a myriad of meanings — all different. There is a rich and long history of masquerade in European aristocracy, which was centuries later appropriated by the sci-fi expos as "costume contests" with participants dressing up as characters from domestic movies or TV shows. The West gave birth to Halloween, a holiday in which children don typically monster costumes. Finally, there is cosplay.

For Japanese, the appeal of dressing up like anime, manga or game characters is understandable. "We see these characters all the time on TV," says multimedia artist Julie Watai, who also does modeling under the name Ai Amano. "And because of that, we view them in the same category as pop stars or actors." But, unlike the popular thespian or rock star, it is not possible to actually meet these characters. They exist in video games, on television screens and in the pages of manga. Dressing up as those characters gives them a chance to, not meet that character, but to become one with that character in a sense. "Not everyone likes these characters in Japan," Watai notes. "But they can dress up as maids or other cute costumes that are sold in Japan." For the Japanese, dressing up and having fun is cosplay.

"It seems that costumes inspired by anime, manga, video games, light novel, figures and so on have come to be called cosplay in the United States," says Galbraith. In Japan, however, Galbraith notes that it would be considered cosplay to dress up as Jack Sparrow or a Stormtrooper. Cosplay could even be considered dressing up as a policeman or a nurse. Americans have separated cosplay with earlier costume costume-wearing traditions (masquerade and Halloween) by East and West — "cosplay" is a Japanese word, so it, for Westerners, encapsulates Japanese popular culture. When the word was re-imported into the West from Japan, it was assumed that the origin was completely Japanese and associated with video games, anime and manga by default.

"In all fairness, I don't think this is really a misappropriation of the word," notes Galbraith. Almost no one in the United States used the word cosplay, or probably even knew it, before the arrival of Japanese culture." Thus, the connection in the minds of Westerners between cosplay and Japanese popular culture is natural and makes sense. What does not make sense is the notion that cosplay is exclusively Japanese or that Japanese cosplayers are intrinsically better at cosplaying than their Western counterparts. It's not that one is better than the other, they're just different.

"A lot of times, American cosplayers are just having fun with it, which is fine," says Patrick Macias, editor of mag Otaku USA. "But in Japan, where the otaku spirit runs deep, I get the sense that you can't be as casual about your fandom, so there's a sort of perfectionist streak that runs through the cosplay community there." That means, far less goofing off, Macias continues, or you don't really see silliness like dressing up as a giant Death Note book. The Japanese seriousness has even given birth to a chain store dealing in cosplay costumes called Cospa." "In America, there's no dedicated chain of cosplay stores like Cospa where you can walk in and buy professionally made costumes or accessories," adds Macias. Those who didn't get a gold star in arts-and-crafts can find the goods they need online. Those that can't must make their costumes. "So Western fans tend be more DIY and crafty, which I think is good." These homemade crafts can lead to spectacularly amazing cosplays or amazingly horrid — that's part of the charm.

"I notice a lot of people tend to focus on cosplayers who have just started out or tend to pick out unflattering photos of Western cosplayers," says American cosplayer HezaChan, who has been cosplaying for 9 years and has made 30 different costumes. "There are just as many "bad" Japanese cosplayers and unflattering photos of Japanese cosplayers." And while the number of "bad" cosplayers could very well be the same, the number of bad Western cosplayers is proportionate to the number of bad Japanese ones. The reason for the higher number of bad Western cosplayer pics isn't necessarily the cosplayers' fault, but rather, the subculture surrounding it. In Japan, the kamekozo ("camera kids") act as PR machines for popular cosplayers, creating a grassroots idol culture. Kamekozo typically specialize in the best cosplays and largely focus on female cosplayers. These images are uploaded onto popular cosplay and even otaku news sites.

This Japan-cosplays-better-than-the-West is hardly a sentiment shared by all. "Online I've seen literally tons of great cosplays from Westerners!" gushes Watai. "Westerners are much better at cosplaying characters designed with an American or European style than Asians are. They can actually look like the physical embodiment of those characters." But many game or anime characters exist in a cultural netherworld, being designed out of a hodgepodge of features and motifs, looking "Western" to the Japanese and looking "Japanese" to Westerners. "Japanese cosplayers routinely voice their jealously of Western cosplayers who have features like green eyes or blonde hair — all the things they have to work hard to make a part of their costume, these foreigners were born with!" says Macias. "Meanwhile, Western cosplayers will sometimes don black wigs and contacts to look more 'Asian.''"

For the nearly the past thirty years, cosplay has been a conversation between 3D and 2D, between East and West and reality and image. It started out in the West under a different name and was appropriated by the Japanese and then reintroduced back to the West. There is no group of people that is stereotypically "better" at cosplay. And the act itself is deeper than Photoshopped images or cleverly staged stage shows — it offers insight into the very fabric of our cultures, what makes us different and what makes us the same.

[Bottom photo Rhys Berresford] [Pic]

"I, being a Pakistani, was so excited at seeing a Karachi map and then immediately so disappointed when I played the map," says the Karachi resident. The map has Arabic written all over, even though that isn't the country's language.

The country of Pakistan has two official lingos: English and Urdu. With somewhere between 60 and 80 million speakers of the standard language, Urdu has more speakers than, say, Italian, Korean or Polish.

"Infinity Ward probably thought, 'Oh hey its a Muslim country so Arabic is the language,'" says Saad.

While Arabic and Urdu use the same script, the words are completely different. For example, the noun "people" is "al-naas" in Arabic (الناس), and "log" or "loug" (لوگ) in Urdu.

"To someone who doesn't know urdu won't be able to tell the difference," Saad explains. "It's like Spanish and English, I guess. Some letters are same, some are different but the words are completely different."

There isn't a single Urdu word on the entire Karachi map and no one writes in Arabic in Pakistan.

Penny Arcade

published Dec. 18

PvPonline

published Dec. 25

ActionTrip

published Dec. 21

Digital Unrest

published Dec. 25

GU Comics

published Dec. 25

Ctrl-Alt-Del

published Dec. 25

Dueling Analogs

published Dec. 14

Nerf NOW

published Dec. 24

Rooster Teeth

published Dec. 26

Monday Night Crew

published Dec. 26

Virtual Shackles

published Dec. 25

Realizing that sports games don't usually contend outside of their classification, Stick Jockey's named an honor roll of nine awards within the sports game genre for 2009. Seven of them conform to awards offered elsewhere in video gaming. Two of them, Rookie of the Year and Comeback Player of the Year, might sound more familiar to real awards offered by some leagues, but they also recognize the annual nature of games produced by this sector.

While a game's technical aspects and ability to execute were considered, more subjective qualities such as a title's innovation, impact, and the size of the gaming population it served also came into play in judging a game's worthiness. By no means were these the only good games made in the year 2009; but they are Stick Jockey's choices representing the best the year had to offer.

Best Presentation and Best Singleplayer: MLB 09 The Show (Sony Computer Entertainment America)
The 30 ballparks of Major League Baseball provide a wonderful canvas to showcase a sports game's visuals, and yet it was only the starting point for MLB 09 The Show. Abetted by such unique venues, and the pace of a sport that allows long looks at your surroundings, MLB 09 delivered a visual polish unmatched by any other sports game. Baseball's pre-eminent simulation demonstrated how high-powered visuals aren't just pretty to look at, but that they necessarily contribute to a game's true-to-life realism and its ability to perfect a sports simulation. For a pure singleplayer experience, MLB 09's Road to the Show again exceeded career modes in other sports, both in terms of the deep participation it offers in your player's progression, and in a game experience better suited to playing as a individual than presently offered by soccer, football or basketball.

Best Multiplayer: Madden NFL 10 (EA Sports)
Madden, a mainstay of online sports gaming, delivered its first online franchise mode this year. While it lacked some customizable features of its other game modes, it was a tremendous improvement over Madden 09's online leagues. 2009 was not a particularly noteworthy year for multiplayer sports gaming - other titles trended toward innovation or execution, but not both. Given Madden's stature as an online staple, all year long, this was the most value-added upgrade to a title's multiplayer package and it lays a strong foundation for improvement in the next year.

Best Indie Game: Avatar Golf (BarkersCrest)
Inside Lacrosse College Lacrosse 2010 was an unusual and very laudable effort, delivering simulation quality to a niche sport with a very passionate following. But for gameplay and overall appeal, nothing comes close to Avatar Golf by BarkersCrest Studios on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel. Just $5 delivers seven courses, three different tee lengths, playable with a full bag of clubs, and environmental effects - as your Xbox Live avatar, both singleplayer and online. If that's not enough, it packaged an entire course editor and the ability to share those creations. For such a trivial price, Avatar Golf is hands down the biggest value in all of sports gaming for 2009.

Comeback Player of the Year: NBA Live 10 (EA Sports)
In many ways, Madden NFL 10 finally felt like the first game in that series worthy of the current generation of console. Madden also roams alone, with no other licensed competitor, so its improvement is welcome but shouldn't get extra credit. That instead goes to NBA Live 10, which while it has its shortcomings, made professional basketball the only seriously contested licensed sports title this year. NBA Live 10 was distinguished by better passing, and the little things, like stronger atmospherics, commentary that adapts to season progression, and player-specific crowd reactions. This award does not mean NBA Live 10 is the best basketball game. It means it made that argument worth having again.

Rookie of the Year and Best Individual Sports Game of the Year: UFC 2009 Undisputed (THQ)
This mixed martial arts title wasn't perfect, but it delivered immediate impact for a fast-growing sport underserved by video gaming's mainstream. As a rookie, yes, there are few new IPs in this genre, and 2K Sports offered two - MLB Front Office Manager, and NBA 2K10 on the Wii. Neither had anywhere close to the impact of Undisputed, nor will they see 2010, whereas THQ has already booked a sequel for May. And UFC Undisputed's upcoming rivalry with EA Sports MMA will be a key story of 2010. Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Fight Night Round 4 from EA Sports also were strong contenders in more traditional roles. But for fun, and for living up to the challenges posed by a new sport, Undisputed gets the nod.

Best Team Sports Game and Sports Game of the Year: FIFA 10 (EA Sports)
A striking 360-degree player motion upgrade helped make FIFA 10 the most lifelike simulation of game action in any team offering this year, no small order for a constantly flowing, moving and contested sport such as soccer. Its new Virtual Pro capability broke the accepted boundaries of created-player modes in other sims, essentially embedding yourself, the gamer, in the roster for use in all modes, with attendant player progression. Rather than completely reboot some major aspect of gameplay or control, EA Canada moved more to improve what was already a critical success from the year before. Subtle, but such confidence distinguishes a best-in-class sports simulation, and that's what FIFA 10 is.

Stick Jockey is Kotaku's column on sports video games. It appears Saturdays at 10 a.m. U.S. Mountain time.

Whether indicative of a game or just the "feel" or "tone" of one still in development, the humble game trailer has become an artform unto itself in recent times. Here's some of 2009's best, which we've picked for their raw entertainment value, not for the job they do depicting the actual game in question.

Mass Effect 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Halo 3: ODST

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Forza 3

The Beatles: Rock Band

Killzone 2

The Last Guardian

And that about does it! For what it's worth, my favourite was the ODST one. Really slick, expensive, powerful stuff. Who would have thought Hungarian would sound so futuristic?!

Did we miss anything? Let us know!

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!

Click thumbnails to enlarge. These are the fronts of the cards, most of which were physically mailed to me.

This one was from Activision and included a note that said that a donation to the USO, a charity for the U.S. armed forces, had been made in my honor.

Update: I apologize, I haven't been online much due to the holidays. I realized that there was an erroneous data point for Andrew Stanton in 2009 that was never supposed to be there. I missed it when I initially looked over the graph, but it's been removed now.

As we've been reflecting on the last ten years, we've been asking ourselves whether any true "masters" of science fiction and urban fantasy have emerged, especially in film and television. It's certainly been a decade of highs and lows, of old masters who've begun to fade and bright new stars just cresting the horizon.

To that end, I've attempted to chart the relative "master levels" of various directors and television producers over the several years. This is an utterly unscientific chart; I looked at the projects these folks have had since 2000 and assigned each one a "master level." The number reflects my understanding of the projects acclaim, its ability to attract an audience (i.e. box office/Nielsen numbers), its awards, whether it succeeded in something unusual (such as a relatively popular foreign language film in the case of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or Dr. Horrible's status as a breakthrough web film), and the nebulous sense that it add or subtracted from the individual's "geek cred." The numbers themselves are largely subjective and, of course, you should feel free to nitpick.

The greater purpose was to offer a watercolory sense of whether any "masters" have emerged from this crowd. Certainly, the last year has brought low some of the genres' promising potentials. Joss Whedon entered into the decade riding high on a Buffy/Angel cocktail. Though his name wasn't enough to overcome Fox's confusing treatment of Firefly, but the show's eventual cult popularity led to the Serenity feature film, and the Whedon brand helped make Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog an important moment for web-based content. Perhaps this all made Dollhouse — which has been, by turns, frustrating and brilliant — all the more disappointing, its impeding demise fairly readily accepted, even by Whedon's fanbase. Similarly, Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, despite being regarded by some readers as the most overrated scifi of the decade, was regarded by many as a turning point for smart, politically savvy space opera. But a rocky final season punctuated by finale filled with dei ex machinae left a lot of folks sour on the entire series. And the Wachowskis, while doing a solid (though Alan Moore-enraging) bit of cinema with V for Vendetta, never quite lived up to the promises of The Matrix.

But there have been plenty of masterful bright spots as well. Bryan Fuller gave us some beautiful urban fantasy with shows with Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, even if many of his efforts (including the truly amazing The Amazing Screw-On Head) were prematurely axed, or shafted before ever getting off the ground. Guillermo del Toro brought us to great heights with Pan's Labyrinth, even if his other eye candy films didn't hit the same heights.

So have we seen any masters? Peter Jackson has certainly come close. Granted, The Lord of the Rings movies are high fantasy, but they showcased Jackson's ability to handle a difficult epic in a way that not only pleased JRR Tolkien's fans, but also won him mainstream accolades. And his remake of King Kong, which should have been automatically anathema, proved both profitable and well-reviewed. The Lovely Bones has been his blip, earning him his worst reviews in 20 years. But it's more likely that 2009 will be remembered as the year Jackson introduced the world to filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, demonstrating that he has a good eye for new talent and the Hollywood cache to bring that talent to light. It's not for nothing that he made this year's power list.

Another power list member, JJ Abrams, has also given us a good spate of fun and thoughtful science fiction. While he didn't give us the decade's best monster movie, he did manage to reboot the Star Trek franchise in a way that was respectful to what came before and drew in folks who never turned into the TV shows. Of course, we still have yet to see as Lost will end and whether Fringe will survive.

Chris Nolan is on the list of promising possibilities for eventual masterhood. Although Memento wasn't science fiction, it took a "what if" concept (here, what if a man searching for his wife's killer had no short term memory) and portrayed it in a thoughtful, suspenseful, and ultimately heartbreaking way. And he not only shot fresh blood into the corpse of the Batman franchise, he made it Oscar-worthy. And now he's continuing the science fiction thread with Inception.

And, of course, there's the question of whether James Cameron will prove the kind of science fiction as much as he claimed to be the king of the world. His foray into science fiction television, Dark Angel, never fared particularly well in the ratings; it was eventually canceled in favor of Firefly, and it never achieved the posthumous popularity of the later show. But perhaps Avatar is the reinforcement of his previous scifi successes, proof that he can still be relevant where other long-time directors have started to fade away. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years to see his next installment.

Personally, though, after seeing the delightful Monsters Inc. followed by the superb The Incredibles and WALL-E, I have my fingers crossed for Andrew Stanton and Pixar Studios. Here's hoping that John Carter of Mars is something phenomenal.

Still, singling out directors and producers as possible masters might be missing the point entirely, even when we're talking about movies and TV. Alan Moore might well be your science fiction master, not just because he has written so many fantastic books, but also because those books have captured the imagination of so many directors in the last several years — albeit with varying results. And in the coming years we'll see how comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan — who has been working on Lost as well as the Buffy Season Eight comics — translates to the big screen when Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways hit theaters.

So who, if anyone, do you see as your science fiction master? Someone from the list above? Perhaps Russell T. Davis for reviving and expanding Doctor Who? Or maybe writers like Jane Espenson, who have worked on so many of the shows we love? And, with filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp and Duncan Jones arriving on the scene, who might prove themselves master of the genre in the next ten years?

Graph by Steph Fox.

Here's a bonus chart, with more data:

You would think that delaying a game is an awkward process. The game is closing in on its completion date. The studio needs to be finished. Ads are placed. The publisher wants to start selling the thing and making money.

You'd also think that Arkham Asylum game director Sefton Hill of Rocksteady Studios might have had butterflies in his stomach when, earlier this year, he and his team broached the topic to the games publishers that the game, which was planned for a late June release, could benefit from being pushed back.

He doesn't tell the story as if he had much fear at all: "We discussed it with Warner Brothers and Eidos and said, 'Look, we believe we have a really good game here.' What we all agreed to do at the outset was put the time in and make sure we deliver a game worthy of Batman. ... [We] said what we really need to do here is spend this additional three months to make sure we tidy the game and deliver the game that we all set out to do. To give Eidos and Warner a lot of credit, they backed that 100%."

For consumers, the delay turned out to be two months. Arkham Asylum slipped from June to late August, when it was released to rave reviews. It seemed such a short delay, in fact, that some gamers thought they sniffed out a different motivation. "I think there were some rumors that it had just been delayed for more sales, but that wasn't true. We were still working on it like crazy."

What did change in Arkham Asylum while the team labored for a couple of extra months? Hill was unable to specify any notable design changes, no new gadgets or altered levels. "Some of the things we worked on that aren't immediately apparent is things like the [data-]streaming times," he said. "You never see any loading screens when you're playing the game. And that's stuff that takes a lot of time to do." Hill said the delay also helped the team optimize the game's framerate.

Hill made the delay sound so easy. Surely it wasn't that simple? He said it was the product of a team confident in their potential, an attitude that would empower other studios to also get their publishers to give them the extra time their games might need. So to get that delay, he suggested, a development team must have "confidence in the game." They also need "to be able to show that [added] time is going to be well spent. I think if you can do that, any publisher is going to buy into that. I think where it becomes difficult is if you're arguing from a position of weakness, if the confidence isn't there."

It sounds like one of those things that's easier said than done. It sounds like one of those things that requires a publisher and a developer to be working together happily, which is not at all a given. And it sounds like something that, as a gamer, would be awfully hard to take.

It also sounds like something that gets forgotten, because as 2009 recedes what lingers about Batman: Arkham Asylum is how good it was. Not how late it was.

Not that it'll go away any time soon; indeed, as I've said, I think the humble d-pad-and-buttons-thing has a few years left as the dominant control method.

But when it does die out, as it inevitably will (everything must come to an end at some point), people will look back to 2009 - and particularly E3 - and say this was the year the rot set in. That the decline began.

Why do I say 2009 and not 2006, the year of the Wii's debut? Because until now, motion-control gaming has been confined not just to the Wii, but to select games on the Wii. Some, like Wii Sports, did it well. Others, like Red Steel, did not do it well, while for many more - from Twilight Princess to No More Heroes - it was an awkward addition, a bullet-point feature that fit the game like a square peg in a round hole.

But in 2009, both Microsoft and Sony revealed controllers and peripherals to support motion-sensing (in case you can't tell, I am ignoring completely, as most developers did, the Sixaxis). What had been a unique point about one of three consoles suddenly became a universal feature. A clear signal of intent that motion control was the future of the entire console industry.

Even Nintendo contributed to the movement in 2009, releasing Wii MotionPlus, an add-on for the existing Wii Remote that brought a finer degree of recognition to a device that had until then only partially delivered on its promise of 1:1 motion recognition.

Both Microsoft's peripheral (code-named "Project Natal") and Sony's controller (with one code-name among many being "Gem") are scheduled to hit the market in 2010, and what's most interesting about their respective launches is not their proximity to each other, but in the different approaches each is taking towards the technology.

Sony's controller is "traditional", if only in the sense that it's similar to the Wii Remote. A controller, with buttons on it, that you hold and wave around, the device replicating an on-screen object or movement. It differs from the Wii Remote, however, in a few key areas. For one, it's got a giant glowing orb on the top of it, which Sony claim allows for incredibly fine recognition of the user's movements.

Another difference is that it appears to be lacking a d-pad, something Nintendo's controller retains so that it can be used on older games. An interesting omission, particularly given Sony's penchant for re-selling you older games, and it lends credence to the rumours of additional peripherals being made available to "attach" the device, similar to the nunchuk available for the Wii Remote.

Microsoft's, meanwhile, is slightly more exciting. And a riskier proposition because of it.

"Project Natal" is essentially a camera that is plugged into the Xbox 360, which can detect a player's movements in three dimensions and replicate them on-screen. No controllers required. It was demoed to good effect at E3, but the sheer audacity of the tech has many suspecting that while it may work fine in tech demos, creating functioning games - for example with accurate movement recognition and no noticeable lag - with the tech may be more difficult.

But hey, it's not out yet. And neither is Sony's. With both devices not expected until late 2010, there's plenty of time to fine-tune them, ensure that they're ready to hit the ground running.

And when they do - entering a market already dominated by the Wii and it's now-improved Wii Remote - we'll be looking at a very exciting time for the video game industry. A time that kicked off in 2009.

[Sony image: T3]

Bayonetta's Got It, Flaunts It:
Without a doubt, Bayonetta was the high-amp vamp of gaming in 2009, and she hasn't even hit North America yet. In Japan, the ass-kicking, pistol-packing, hair-whipping witch with the naughty librarian look earned critical acclaim from no less than the Japanese director of the cinematic tour de force "Would You Like To Get An Enema Until You Poop?" Stateside and elsewhere, she emerged from relentless early comparisons to another gun enthusiast MILF, Sarah Palin, to become the undisputed cosplaying rookie of the year.

GTA: The Schlong and the Damned
The year's first major NSFW story came out of Rockstar, which broke new ground in Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned by becoming the first video game to show flaccid congressman dong. Fahey then bravely examined the historical importance of this depiction by providing a recap of nudity in games, "the good, the bad and the ugly." Hey, two out of three is bad.

Cussing-Outs and Swearing-Ins:
NSFW doesn't just mean T&A. Bad language also qualifies, and we had hilarious highlights for that, too. Grandma Hardcore, the game-playing senior citizen, spewed filth-flarn-flarn-filth-flarn over Brütal Legend. Ice-T (in a video featuring his NSFW wife, Coco) went apeshit playing Modern Warfare before demanding a Snapple to quench his thirst. And Ozzy Osbourne, talking to Fahey at Blizzcon, was just, well, Ozzy.

Just Two Words: Demon Tits
BioWare RPG's are eminently serious affairs, but the sex factor in Dragon Age: Origins' pre-release publicity got a little silly. The game gave us gay hookups with elves, brothel encounters with livestock, and everyone doing it with their underpants still attached. And, of course, Demon Tits.

Sheva-va-voom
Bayonetta and Dragon Age were far from the only titles ramping up the sex appeal. Resident Evil 5 opened the year with Sheva, and enabled gamers to instantly center the camera on her chest. This is especially useful once you unlock her secret tribal costume.

Boob! Headshot!
In October, two elite Counter Strike teams from Russia face off, but the event's promoter throws in a little "force multiplier" - a room full of strippers, disrobing and gyrating beside, over and on their monitors. The team forZe kept its focus and defeated rival Virtus.pro.

Attachments and Oddities
A product called the "Joydick" needs zero introduction, and I'll spare you from the description. And a tiny title offered over the Xbox Indie Games channel, which turns your controller into a rumbling vibrator, added console peripherals to the list of hiding-in-plain-sight sex toys. Slightly less sexy: The handcrafted Pokémon menstrual pad for $8 whose up-side I couldn't correctly identify. Finally, a lawsuit over virtual sex toys in Second Life gave us a darkhorse candidate for the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year: "Fuck Coffins."

Things Seen and Never Unseen
Mario and Peach made a tape that, like much of porn, has sex but is soooooo far from sexy. The Mushroom Kingdom's top plumber also laid some pipe with Lara Croft in this unaccountably weird video from, where else, Germany, which also featured Pong sex. In that vein, have you ever wanted to see a Tetris piece masturbate? No? Too bad, here it is.

The Second Sexiest Game of 2009
Left 4 Dead instantly spun off a robust modding community; too bad it chose to use its powers for evil, giving us the Nude Zoey Mod. Because, hey, nothing's hotter than blasting apart the leprous undead with a saucy deshabille look. It wasn't L4D's only brush with the naughty-naughty. Horny infected took to the personal ads for our Valentine's Day prank, where they hooked up with a horde even more mindlessly disgusting - the Craigslist casual encounter lurkers. Finally, porn gave the zombie FPS the ultimate compliment, a sex flick punning the title, named "Left 4 Head."

Munn's the Word
G4's "Attack of the Show" co-host took (most of) it all off for Playboy in June, despite a relentless haranguing from a Playboy stylist to try going commando under imaginary pants. Munn refused, saying the outfits they had in mind would have made her vadge "look like a Honeybaked Ham." Way to work it, Olivia! Geeks were in high dudgeon, because there is no other kind of dudgeon, over Playboy's beyond-the-pale exploitation of their hormones. Or just that it was a Tuesday. Many made the shocking declaration that she just wasn't hot enough, although Munn, as of press time, had no plans to do any of them.

Porn O'Plenty
In September, Vivid Entertainment's CEO says his firm is interested in getting its seminal works (ha ha, get it?) available for download over the PlayStation Network, an offer Sony ignored discreetly (in a plain brown wrapper.) But he's far from the only figure in adult entertainment to make the games crossover in 2009. Bobbi Starr, the X-Rated Critics Organization's regining "Superslut" finds work at E3 as a booth babe for Dirt 2. Porn legend Ron Jeremy joins actresses Krissy Lynn and Andy San Dimas (taking the whole use-your-address-as-a-porn-name motif a little seriously) in Fairytale Fights trailer promos of a viral nature, but not the one that sends you down to the free clinic. Finally, adult star Raven Alexis, an avowed World of Warcraft enthusiast, closes out the year with her five-step plan to winning the heart of a gamer girl - provided, of course, you know one in real life.

In today's episode, our podcast steering host Stephen Totilo and Jeremiah Slaczka, one of the creators behind Nintendo DS games Scribblenauts and Drawn To Life, talk about all manner of things, from Stephen's desire to return to the lush world of James Cameron's Avatar, to how that decade in the making blockbuster relates to Slaczka's own work; from control concerns in Scribblenauts to theories about how a Wii or Project Natal version may work; from Totilo's continued fascination with a Disney-Marvel game titled Spider-Man Saves Disneyland to a pitch for LEGO Scribblenauts.

You can even learn how to pronounce Slaczka! Impress your friends with your deep well of knowledge by downloading today's Kotaku Talk Radio from the links provided below.

Host: Stephen Totilo
Guest: Jeremiah Slaczka

Download The Show Through These Means:
Chatting With Scribblenauts' Jeremiah Slaczka [Blog Talk Radio]
Chatting With Scribblenauts' Jeremiah Slaczka [iTunes]

Let it be known that I have ventured no further into BioShock 2's first-person guns-and-superpowers multiplayer modes than its playable lobby. Such are the limits of preview builds that playing an online multiplayer session requires coordination with a game publisher that can be compromised by the flu, vacations and other stuff.

But here's the shock: Even just stepping into the lobby it seems that, well, maybe this multiplayer mode can serve as a prequel to the first BioShock. (To slightly-latecomers, the single-player part of BioShock 2 is a sequel to the first game , previewed on this site earlier this week. Also, please note I have no visuals to illustrate what I'm about to describe. The screenshot up top is from single-player.)

The BioShock 2 multiplayer mode begins with a choice. The player needs to choose one of several citizens of Rapture to be. I chose football player Danny Wilkins, though I apologize for not remembering the details of his written profile. I've yet to figure out if you can change your character, as I wasn't able to back out to a character-selection screen.

To start playing my multiplayer experience, I chose a menu option called "Prologue." This triggered a cutscene that put me in an apartment in BioShock's undersea former Utopia, Rapture. From a first-person perspective, my character picked himself off the floor, a dripping syringe of blue liquid near him. On Wilkins' black and white TV screen, Rapture leader Andrew Ryan was making an address to all citizen, celebrating the turning of the calendar from 1958 to 1959. "Andrew Ryan offers you a toast, to Rapture, 1959... May it be our finest year!"

Ryan was wrong, fans know. Rapture endures civil war in the year that follows. That's the content you apparently play in multiplayer.

The apartment, which presumably belongs to my character, is a 3D space like any other room in BioShock's campaign. Amid the decor were a desk and chairs, a working stereo, and a recording machine that played back a message welcoming me into the Sinclair Solutions rewards program. Sinclair Solutions makes the Plasmid super-powers available in the series. I/Wilkins was being selected to test some of the company's "home defense products in the field." Test them well and I'd be eligible for company rewards.

Standard options that you would expect in a multiplayer set-up menu screen were rendered as elements of Wilkins' apartment. At my closet, I could change my outfit and melee weapon. I had my football hero put on a goat mask and wield a football trophy as his weapon. At a Gene Bank device on the wall, I could configure and save up to three weapons load-outs. For my guns, I chose a revolver and shotgun. For my Plasmid powers, I went with Electro Bolt and Incinerate, leaving Winter Blast behind. Other weapons and Plasmids were locked, presumably accessible only when my character levels up (make that: only when my character earns more Sinclair Solutions customer appreciation rewards.)

But before I could even make all my wardrobe and weapons selections, an audio alert played, informing me that there was trouble and people should return to the safety of their homes. Yeah, right. I assumed that was my cue to gear up for multiplayer battle. To do that I'd need to leave the apartment. Before I did so, however, a tape recorder caught my eye. It was sitting on a coffee table. I activated it and discovered that it contained audio messages from all of the playable characters. Each character had one unlocked and two locked monologues. The locked audio clips had messages next to them, explaining which level my character would have to achieve to hear each one. The levels required were different for each clip, meaning that players will be steadily unlocking a new one bit by bit as they level up in multiplayer, until all of the monologues are available in full. Wilkins' first one was all about how he told a young football player that the way to be as great a player as he was is to recognize that, the way Danny Wilkins spells it, there is an I in team. It's no wonder this guy made it to the Objectivist, individualist paradise-to-be of Rapture.

I couldn't get more information out of this lobby/apartment.

To progress I'd have to leave and step into the Bathysphere, located down a hallway containing a bucket catching ceiling leaks. In that Bathysphere, I'd be able to select a multiplayer mode of play — Survival of the Fittest, Civil War, Capture the Sister, Turf War or Team ADAM Grab — and proceed with traditional online multiplayer matchmaking.

I can't say, therefore, whether actually playing multiplayer advances the story and makes the mode feel like a prequel that has narrative to it. I can say, though, that the apartment will be able to serve as a means for telling some story and revealing some lore. That's already more than I expected. It gets me thinking that, as with BioShock 2's single-player mode, I may have been too hasty in assuming such limited potential in the storytelling ability of the series' multiplayer offering.

Style Savvy is a game marketed at girls that's all about fashion - putting together outfits, running your own boutique, and maybe even making waves on the runway scene. The game was developed by syn Sophia, the developer formerly known as AKI Corporation. As you may or may not know, AKI Corporation was responsible for developing some of the best professional wrestling video games of the late 90's / early 2000's, including WWF No Mercy, the first two Def Jam games, and the Japan-only Virtual Pro-Wrestling series. And now they've created Style Savvy, which tickles me to no end.

Now that I've gotten the irony out of the way, let's talk Style Savvy. Is it strong enough for a man, yet made for a woman?

Pull up a chair and let Miss Michael tell you all about it.

Loved
So Much To Do: I spent the first hour or so of Style Savvy helping customers pick out clothing while working as a clerk at an established fashion outlet. Soon things began to open up, and I found myself ordering new items from suppliers, customizing my outfits, and dressing store mannequins. Then the hair salon opens up. Suddenly I can change my hairstyle, makeup, and even take pictures to share with friends. Once you have your own boutique (which happens ridiculously fast), you'll have so much to do you'll find yourself sitting in Starbucks for several hours while your friends watch you, shaking their heads sadly. They just don't understand how much the fashion show means to you.

A Learning Experience: There's a lot to learn in Style Savvy, particularly for the less style savvy among us. Right off the bat you learn the basics of good customer service, paying attention to what your customers are looking and suggesting outfits accordingly. You learn how to maintain stock at a retail outlet; the difference between running a store with a few select styles and keeping a highly diversified but hard to navigate inventory; and how to manage your money. Do you blow all of your cash on a fancy new hairstyle and makeup, or do you make sure you have enough cardigans in stock for your demanding clientele? After several hours of play you'll also find yourself assimilating fashion terms you might have no business actually knowing, like boho-chic, or camisole.

The World's Biggest Closet: 10,000 fashions across 16 different brands equals nearly countless clothing combinations in which to dress yourself, your mannequins, and your customers. Shoes, jackets, sweaters, pumps, sunglasses, jewelry - it's all for sale, and every time you make a new item purchase for your store you get the same item delivered to your personal wardrobe as well. The game uses the Nintendo DS clock to determine what sort of fashions pop up at what times, meaning it's the sort of title you'll want to return to on a regular basis. I mean, if you're into that sort of thing.

Online Shopping: The shopping fun doesn't stop at your own Nintendo DS. Style Savvy players can connect to the internet to shop at other players' stores or set up an online branch of their very own. It's an excellent way for you to share your creations with the rest of the world, and the promise of new clothing available periodically through the DSi download service sweetens the game's online options even further.

Mmm, Unlockables: It's beginning to become an obsession with me. Show me a set of items with placeholders for the things that belong there but aren't there yet, and I will spend hours doing everything possible to fill those spaces. It doesn't matter if it's magical coins, machine guns, or in this case, hair and makeup styles.

Hated
Not Quite Creating Your Own Fashions: Perhaps this is a guy thing, which I somehow doubt, but when I think of creating my own fashions, I think actually designing clothing for the giant-headed women who come to my store to wear. Instead, Style Savvy is all about putting together a look out of what you have available. There is no design aspect. You are an outfit coordinator. This is not what I expected.

Very Girl-Centric: Right from the start, Style Savvy assumes you are female. Your character is female, even if you name her Michael. I've spent the better part of 15 hours being referred to as Miss Michael, and I might be developing some sort of complex. I know, I know - the game is targeted at young girls. Still, I shouldn't have to be called Miss Michael, no matter how adorable my little pink-haired avatar might be.

I shouldn't even have to say it - I wasn't exactly all that serious about Style Savvy when the rest of the staff decided to volunteer me for the review. I expected to get a few laughs out of the game and maybe get negative bragging rights with my fellow members of the press at the next big industry event I attended. "Oh yeah? Well I had to review Style Savvy," I would say, and we'd laugh and laugh. I had it all planned out in my head. And then I started enjoying the game.

What can I say? On a certain level, Style Savvy really clicked with me. It has several elements that I really enjoy in my games. There's the collectability aspect, the avatar customization, inventory management, and a fair amount of logic involved in making sure your customer is pleased with the ensemble you put together for them. Change the scenery a bit and you've got the formula for the sort of role-playing game I'd spend hours lost in. Sure, I've started critiquing my friends' outfits, and I've been saying things like "retro chic" far more often than anyone really should as of late, but isn't that the sort of immersion and involvement we seek in our more traditional games?

If a burly, bearded, six foot, six inches tall man spending countless hours coordinating outfits for virtual women is wrong, then my friends were all right and I should probably not press the point any further.

Style Savvy was developed by syn Sophia and published by Nintendo for the DS on November 2nd. Retails for $34.99 USD. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the game for approximately 20 hours, earning my own boutique and making little Miss Michael the talk of the town. Named my store "Mangina" in protest.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

NOTE: Throughout the month of December, Kotaku will review some of the games that we missed earlier in the year. We're catching up.

Ask good questions!

To listen, head over to our BlogTalkRadio page. Unfortunately, you can only listen live on the BlogTalkRadio website.

Want to be heard on Kotaku Talk Radio? Call us on the air LIVE at (347) 857-3782 or use Skype to dial in!

Listen to the show here.

Feedback about Arkham Asylum has been illuminating and, yes, even educational for Hill in 2009. This was the year he and the rest of the British underdog team at the little-known Rocksteady Studios developed and released one of the leading contenders for Game Of The Year.

Feedback was helpful, but it also was a little weird.

Imagine the beginning of Hill's 2009. The development of Batman: Arkham Asylum, an adventure featuring Batman's one terrible night trapped on an island prison/asylum overtaken by the Joker and the Dark Knight's worst foes, was more than a year under way, yet almost no eyes aside from Rocksteady's and its publishers' were on the project. The public didn't have the game on its radar, nor did much of the gaming press. "I think we felt at the start of the year that a lot of people didn't know much about the game," Hill told Kotaku in a telephone interview. People in the studio thought the game was shaping up. But who could be sure they weren't fooling themselves? "When you're working on something for so long it's quite weird," Hill noted. "You're sort of isolated from the outside world and you sort of lose quite a lot of perspective."

So for Hill one of the most important moments of his 2009 — "a nerve-wracking time" — were the few days in March that Arkham Asylum was made playable for the gaming press during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Rocksteady and publishers Eidos and Warner Brothers let game reporters try some of the challenge rooms, the contained areas in the game, one made for Batman brawling against thugs, the other built for "predator" criminal-frightening stealth.

"We sort of decided to go with a slightly different approach, showing the challenge rooms rather than the story because we were confident in the story we had but we didn't want to approach it in a way to show off flash cutscenes or cinematics to try and sell the game. We thought: Let's show people there's real substance to the gameplay."

Hill stayed back in the Rocksteady offices in England during GDC, plugging away on the game with his team. An Eidos representative e-mailed him feedback. Slight problem, though: "Games journalists can be a bit cagey. Sometimes you guys like to be too cool for school. So you can never be 100% sure." This unwashed horde of gaming reporters playing through the demo (a group that may or may not have included the author of this story) may not have been able to verbalize feedback that would be useful intelligence for Rocksteady, but the way the demo was played was good feedback enough.

"One of the things we were really happy with, with the initial feedback, is that a lot of the journalists played it and then played it again and tried to do it in different ways," Hill said. "One of the design philosophies [of the game] was to sort of create your own Batman stories: You did something a particular way and saw these cool things. It was really great to get that particular feedback to come through."

In theory, the game would then be released a little later, but Arkham Asylum, originally slated for a June was delayed until late summer before it showed up at E3 in Los Angeles. For E3, Hill crossed the Atlantic and dared to get some feedback first-hand. The good news was that he was bumping into developers at E3 and getting the insights of people from Naughty Dog, whose single-player balance of action and story in Uncharted was comparable to the design of Arkham Asylum, as well as from Ubisoft folks, whose Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell series were, like Batman, exploring the gameplay of aggressive stealth. "Developers tend to be more generous with feedback because making any game is really hard — even bad games," Hill explained. They know the way things work, and they can relate to the struggle of making this stuff. "You put your life and soul into them."

Oh, but for Hill there was also sort of something bad — or uncomfortable — about being at E3 to get that firsthand feedback. "To be honest, I hate watching people play the game," he said. "It's watching your baby. It's nerve-wracking. I would kind of watch but I could only watch for a certain amount of time and then I would walk away. But it's nice because you can watch in anonymity and see where they're enjoying it and also where they're struggling."

Hill flew back to work in England and then back to California in the summer for Comic-Con. Also in the summer, the demo came out, the one that inspired people on the Internet to start using that term GOTY. Hill wasn't sure what kind of feedback the demo would get, because he was aware of the awkward fact that this demo, a thing theoretically made to sell a game, was, well, inferior to the game it was selling.

"I think we all felt the game was better than the demo," Hill said. "It's a hard game to do a demo of because it's a journey rather than a staccato experience. The story is important. The characters are important. Sometimes that can be hard to get across in a demo. We were really a little bit worried when it went out... So when people really enjoyed the demo, we felt, well if you like the demo, you'll definitely like the game, because it's a lot better."

Batman: Arkham Asylum was released in late August. Hill had just crammed three weeks of vacation into his August, days banked to take off as soon as the game disc went gold and was out of Rocksteady's hands. He was back in the country the day the game was released. Reviews were out, another odd sort of feedback. "It's such a weird experience making games because you kind of go two years with almost no feedback," he said. "And then suddenly you get all this feedback on what you've done for the last two years in one mad hail of comments. And then nothing again for two years."

He remembers about 40 reviews hitting the Internet almost all at once. He was on his laptop, not back in the office yet. He was calling in, and the team was "shouting the review scores to each other. It was really exciting and really crazy."

But the time warp would continue. As the fall arrived and people were playing the game, many gamers were saying, yes, this is the Game of the Year. They were in the mode of showering praise and awarding rhetorical trophies. Rocksteady was in a different mode. "We're sort of trying our best to enjoy it," Hill said, "But obviously by the time the game comes out we're already a couple of months into the next thing we're doing." Hill's interview was conducted before the announcement of Rocksteady's "next thing," but today we know what that is: Arkham Asylum 2.

"Hopefully whatever we do next," he had said, "People will be excited about as well."

And so the feedback from Rocksteady will abate. Hill and his team are now working on something that no marginally helpful reporter, no more generous developer, no eager demo players will likely be able to provide some feedback on for a while. But maybe, it would be nice to let Hill offer some feedback of his own. What did we think of the game? After all, we've told him in many ways. It's his turn:

Why did he think Arkham Asylum was a special game, a special super-hero game?

"One of the things the team did that was successful was make a game that was uniquely a Batman game," he said. "It wasn't another genre that just happened to have a character with a cape in it. It was uniquely Batman in terms of the gadgets, the detective mode, the predator aspects and the combat. All those elements were built, designed and created to reflect Batman himself.

"Not just with super-hero products, but with licensed products, I think what tends to happen is you get a genre rather than a license and you kind of shoehorn the license into the genre. And you don't get the best of the license.

"I think Batman is quite challenging in some ways. There are some things he obviously can't do. He doesn't kill people. He never uses a gun. And there's a lot of genre conventions which you have to approach in a slightly different way. Your options are to embrace that or not. And if you embrace it, it means you have to come up with more interesting answers. I'd like to think that's what people responded to as well. If you can't kill people, what can you do? [We presented] this whole element of creating the fear and changing the way people behave because of this character and this persona he's created.

"If you can get those elements into the game, I think it's really going to resonate with people. And I think that's what happened. "

That seems on target.

Concluded Hill: "We wanted to make a great game, but also a great Batman game. … Thanks everyone for the great feedback."

Ends December 31.

Don't post entries here. See the link above for full contest rules. The contest is open to residents of North and South America. You must be 18 or older.

Good luck to all who enter!