Mike Fahey

The Wii U grows exponentially more interesting, with the addition of outstanding modern platformer Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams and classic role-playing game Breath of Fire II in today’s Nintendo Download. What other wonders lurk in this week’s selection of digital downloads? Behold!

Watch The First 12 Minutes Of Call Of Duty: Strike Team

Activision droppeda surprise mobile Call of Duty on iOS today, and it’s two, two, two games in one. Call of Duty: Strike Team gives players the ability to switch between first-person shooter and top-down tactical strategy with the press of a button. Want to see how it works? Keeping in mind that the video recording…

2K Drive skids onto iTunes at $6.99 this morning. 2K cares not for your traditional free-to-play nonsense, and so far the results have been pretty stellar. Hopefully the trend continues with 2K Drive, the ambitious racer/car fanciers’ club from former Bizarre Creations folks, which should be available in the app store within the next few…

Beating People To Music Is One Way To Appreciate It

Zen Studios’ KickBeat hit the PlayStation Network for Vita and PS3 this week, giving me a chance to kick Celldweller’s ass, at least in spirit. The core game features more Celldweller, that one POD song that whores itself out to every rhythm game, Marilyn Manson, because it was just sitting there looking lonely, a bit…

Let’s Play Diablo III On Console, Live

Diablo III is here for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and I’d much rather play it than work, so I’m going to play it as work, and let you watch. For the next hour I will be talking and kicking things and maybe even trying to get into a multiplayer match, but I make…

Stan Lee Has All The Power In LEGO Marvel Super Heroes

Stan “The Man” Lee might just be a walk-on in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes but, boy, he gets to rock on with unimaginable power. It’s like Molecule Man and the Beyonder had a baby, and that baby was Mimic but looked like Stan Lee. I could have explained that better. When you’ve got more than…

The Final Fantasy XIV Server Congestion Relief Effort Has Begun

After a little bit of overnight maintenance, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is back, with reduced load on its Duty Finder and three fresh servers, with Square Enix poised to add more as the need arises. Our connection nightmares should soon be over. I called the re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV a disaster, and…

Now that we know what Day One is, the Microsoft Store sent out an email letting everyone know that the Xbox One Day One Edition’s are still available for preorder, if anyone would like to partake. Web operators are standing by.

I Want To Play The Real-Life Video Game They Built For Capture

The production team behind CW’s reality game show Capture created a high-tech wilderness compound, built their own cellular network, designed proprietary hardware and custom Android software, all so twelve teams of two can hunt each other down in the middle of the woods every Tuesday night. I really want to play this game. Well, play…

Pokémon Rumble U Is Much Better With NFC Toys. Weird.

The coolest feature of Pokémon Rumble U only works with the $3.99 collectible figures purchased separately from the $17.99 downloadable title, making it a mediocre game with optional improvement. Interesting idea. In Pokémon Rumble U, players can collect and battle up to 649 different Pokémon by picking up capsules in the game’s various story arenas.…

Featuring music from Kimbra, Fun. and Vivaldi. Poor Vivladi. The newly-introduced “The Haven” stage for Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved demonstrates just how little music has evolved over the past 272 years. The dangers of being one of the world’s most popular Baroque composers, il Prete Rosso.

The First Time Diablo Came To Consoles

Diablo III comes to consoles today, and I’m just as giddy as I was back in March 1998, picking up my copy of Diablo for the original PlayStation — and the additional memory card needed to save the game. Picking up a new game was a special event for 24-year-old me. There was a ritual…

There’s Only One Really Good Reason To Buy Nvidia’s Shield

Last month Nvidia unleashed the Shield portable gaming system, a $299 Tegra 4-powered combination dual-analog game pad and touchscreen Android tablet with the ability to stream gameplay directly from a gaming PC. One of those selling points is not like the others. When Nvidia announced its intention to make the leap from making video cards…

Okay Yeah, Final Fantasy XIV‘s Relaunch Is A Disaster [Update]

From an unfinished mess that no one wanted to play to a highly-polished gemthat nobody can access in just under three years. Way to relaunch, Square Enix. Update: Added information on this week’s coming server expansion and free game time credit. I’ve been incredibly patient. During theearly start last weekend, when Americans and Europeans were…

GODUS is coming September 13. The spiritual successor to Populous from Peter Molyneux’s 22cans is getting a beta release through Steam Early Access on September 13. The game will be available for $19.99 on PC and Mac. Here’s a trailer to help explain how excited you should be about this.

If Crysis Were A Kids’ Cartoon, This Would Be Its Game

As I watched the first season of Disney XD’s Max Steel, I couldn’t get Crysis out of my head. Here’s a crack paramilitary outfit, a guy in a suit that morphs itself to enhance his physical attributes like strength and speed, he’s fighting aliens — the outfit even has the Crysis suit’s cool honeycomb mesh…

The first trailer for Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate for the 3DS and Vita is rather snazzy, showing off comic book-style cutscenes and some interesting 2.5D interpretation of the console game’s moves. What’s with the big guy at the end, though? Wasn’t Batman’s first encounter with him during Arkham City, some six years down the line?

Assassin’s Creed IV‘s Blackbeard Is Scarier In Real Life

If you thought Blackbeard intimidating in the trailers for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, wait until you see actor Mark Bonnar doing his voice. I peed a little. I spied Bonnar once before in a two-part episode of Doctor Who (2011’s “The Almost People” and “The Rebel Flesh”), and he didn’t strike me as particularly…

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: General McFist gives ustips on cooking bacon the manly way, Patrick Allen and friends take a look at Dishonored in Game Club,and Stormborn’s Pokemon: One a Day arts series tackles Charmander, the greatest starter of all time. And you can always go join the voices…

The Official Xbox One Doritos And Mountain Dew Are Here

A new flavor of Mountain Dew Game Fuel, a shiny bag of Doritos and a card explaining what these things have to do with the Xbox One arrived on my doorstep bright and early this morning, so I made a video and drank some soda. For you. As mentioned in the vid, there’s a party…