The wait is over, everyone: Game Club is back! September is the beginning of blockbuster season in the world of video games. The release calendar is rife with returning franchises and long-awaited new games. Most major publishers are bringing out their big guns. The CivWorld experience was great, but it's time move on to something fast and loud and exciting. It just wouldn't feel right if we weren't playing wasn't something highly anticipated. With that in mind, I hope all you Xbox players have your Lancers revved up and ready to go, because we're digging into Gears of War 3 for the next four weeks.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Game Club, our goal is to play and analyze video games together as a community. The Game Club meets to discuss our experiences with the chosen game, including its narrative and mechanical themes and our own responses. Each week, there will be a column about the section that we've just played, to get us into the game-discussing mood. The Game Club meeting takes place during the hour or so after the post is published: That's where the magic happens, folks. The goal of the Game Club to get everybody talking, so don't be shy about putting out your ideas - That's what we're here for.
There are a lot of different game types in Gears 3, so we're going to move at a quicker pace than we have in the past two Game Clubs. (Something tells me that a lot of you won't have a problem with that, though.) In addition to the campaign, we'll be taking a full meeting to discuss competitive multiplayer (Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, etc) and another just to discuss Horde Mode.
Here is the schedule:
9/22/11 - Campaign, Acts 1 and 2
9/29/11 - Campaign, Acts 3, 4 and 5
10/6/11 - Competitive Multiplayer
10/13/11 - Horde Mode & Beast Mode
As Game Club vets already know, we almost always meet at the same time every week; 4:00pm Eastern time on Thursdays. I'll send out reminder blips on the site at some point the day before. Of course, if there are any problems or changes to the schedule, those will also be announced on Kotaku.
Talk to you soon everyone!
You can contact Mike Epstein, the author of this post, at michaelepstein@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.