That's some quality cinematography.

I forgot all about Erector! Seems like he might be overcompensating, though, being a (cough cough) Micromaster.

Hubba-hubba. Look at those data-lines! She's Farah Fawcett for the Dalek community. I bet all you guys (things?) have her poster up inside your pepper-shaker armor.

Is there a more phallic name than Rodimus Prime? Other than Peter O'Toole, I mean.

Right, which is as it should be, but that one was extra dorky. Shoot the things so that the other things open so you could shoot the main thing, rinse, repeat. The earlier boss battles were ridiculous, but they at least gave the impression of superhuman cyborgs going at it (albeit for way too long...those marathan…

Yeesh. That final boss fight in Deus Ex: HR really killed it for me. All of the boss fights were obviously aggravating, but that was like some previous-previous gen shit, totally dorky and videogamey. Any sense of coherent, thought-provoking narrative just disappeared, as did the atmosphere these guys are referencing.

Wait, you mean you cover up UFO-related incidents? I can only assume you guys are bonkers for Conspiracy X.

I'll see your Cthulhu Tech, and raise you:

Having tried the Wikipad for the last couple of days, I have to say, a 7-inch screen feels like the lower limit, as far as the kinds of Android games I'd want to play (and that really benefit from analog controls). Five inches seems silly small.

Yeah, I can definitely imagine a metric ton of incredibly lame user-generated "games" using Spark's tools. Even LBP had a real dearth of quality fan-based content. And how about those Infamous 2 side-quests? Climb endless, make-believe staircase, jump on bad guys, everyone's automatically dead. Not much game in your…

The fact that any coverage of or footage from Spark bores me to tears seems like a bad sign. It just seems so charmless, like LittleBigPlanet with none of the wit or winning design and aesthetics.

Good point about the developers. So many questions, of course. The more games and devs take advantage of the cloud, the more those 300,000 servers have to contend with. And what happens on launch day for online-heavy games, what happens if and when hacks come in.

Really fantastic story, Stephen. I feel like MS might just be truly, deeply terrible salespeople. I mean, it would have helped if they'd implemented stuff like the cloud-based features without requiring check-ins and raising the specter of built-in DRM. But there are real positives here. It seems like, if they'd…

That's an interesting point, but I honestly don't think there's anything specific to the X1's architecture that makes it more cloud-friendly than the PS4. After all, Sony bought the hell out of Gaikai, and is making its own, though different (for now) push into the cloud.

At $20, that's a tough call for PS3 owners. $18 gets you three months of PlayStation Plus, including this game. Even if (as I'm assuming) you lose access to the game after those three months, I can't really imagine playing it for longer than that.

Agreed...and, I swear this is true, there's the assumption that a smartphone has a better camera than a non-smartphone. That might actually be true, but it's still a pretty tragic reason to go with one.

Good point, about Rainbow 6 Patriots. But even if anything was ready to show, I can imagine them not wanting to go up against the CoD and Battlefield reveals.

Well said.

That top image is incredible!