you're best off just ignoring the insult altogether, instead of dignifying it with a response

Total agreement here. See the hype trains that were Watch_Dogs and Destiny pre-release vs. the more muted response afterward.

So, a long time ago, I developed a pretty basic theory about how we respond to games: the closer to a game's release, the less critical of we are. There's just something about how the act of play changes our brain chemistry, and not necessarily in the best ways.

Good article. If you drove a car long enough you should know how the car NORMALLY feels. If your vehicle starts to feel different, suddenly, pull over and find out what's going on.

It's all about context.

If that 50+ hours is really 15-20 hours of story gameplay, and another 30ish hours of optional side-quests, I generally don't mind it. This kind of thing has been going on for a long, long time and it's not going to get any better. Destiny is a great recent example, actually. The whole reason…

Sounds interesting. Nice to see a game that builds horror through something other than jump scares. A 21 hour length is pretty impressive.

It may have been done to help make that connection, or more so, to give it a place in the worlds time line, but it is all in the same world, so it would have been very odd to have Gollum not look, or sound like the Gollum we all know.

Vote: NCIX

The secondary market is a bit of a grey market — most of the keys are semi-legitimately sourced from other markets (ex. buying keys in India and selling them to people in the West), but you never really know.

From the sounds of it, these are basically phishing attempts, and there are basic precautions you can take against phishing that don't take very much time at all. Taking a close look at the email address you're sending too is a good first step, as is checking the recipient's Youtube page for an email address (not…

Can popular Kotaku commentors get free games too?

Most likely. If you have over a certain percentage of your max equip weight (I believe it's 70%) you'll do the "fat-roll".

Most probably friend. I'm a mostly dodge user, almost no parry and some blovking guy. I use somewhat heavy shields and sorta light gear to make my dodges and blocks effective. At leat in complete Singleplayer I believe this to be a great strategy.

This roll is much slower and covers nowhere near the distance of the Dark Souls dodge roll. The Dark Souls rolls don't involve slowly dropping down to one knee and shifting, they are a crazy dive that would probably be more likely to cause a normal human to break their neck than anything else. There was clearly no…

Realism in games is not intrinsically better*. The most realistic games I've ever played (several mil-sims, most recently ARMA) are also among the least fun.

Didn't you watch Star Wars? It clearly took exactly one Death Star to do the job.

what kind of guns do you get

Then there's the very heart of Dead Space: its inventory. Most people probably don't think about how inventories influence your emotional state while playing a game, but they do. Being weaponless or using a one-hit kill health system in a horror game is all well and good, but it leads to a flat, binary experience.…

I really only truly like the first Dead Space Game. I felt that the others suffered in terms of plot development. Dead Space 2 begins with a literal repeat of the plot from the first game, only the betrayal is done by a different woman. I was so confused when that happened.

No one simply walks into Mordor.