If Kotaku is going to have a writer who is a mismatch for a game's vision review said game, it would be nice if said writer's biases were disclosed up front. Tina, on the basis of her other reviews, values aesthetic quirkiness and artistic scenery while not caring much for combat complexities. Dragon's Dogma is meant…

Combat in Dragon's Dogma is much more complex and difficult than in DS/DkS. The demo has you laughably overleveled/overpowered, so you can just mash away. That's not the case with the actual game.

FYI, the Ultimatum Game is one in which Player A is given some amount of money to divide between Player A and Player B. Player B can either agree to the deal, in which case both players get the money as divided by Player A, or refuse, in which case neither gets anything. The "interesting" bit is that Player B will…

The Ultimatum Game is one in which Player A is given $20 to divide between Player A and Player B. Player B can either agree to the deal, in which case both players get the money as divided by Player A, or refuse, in which case neither gets anything. The "interesting" bit is that Player B will often refuse deals in…

A bunch more quests. Like 100 or so.

So Capcom's little experiment ended in failure.

Yes. The Democratic party is center-right and the Republican party is far-right by the standards of other developed countries.

For all their flaws, I really liked how Alan Wake and Asura's Wrath were divided up into "episodes" without being "episodic" in the sense of the Telltale titles.

I really liked the D&D 3.5e psionics system. A character had a given number of power points and a limited number of powers known. Lower level powers used fewer power points whereas higher level powers used more power points. Most powers could be augmented by expending additional power points for increased effect.…

There's a difference between complexity and bad design.

Dark Souls, at least, is a pretty easy game to get into. The early game does a great job of teaching the mechanics of the game in an organic way. Just because a game makes it easy to die doesn't mean it is not suitable for the inexperienced. In fact, a new gamer might very well be less put off by repeated death than…

These points are not irrelevant for experienced gamers, either. A game like Just Cause 2 may be good spite of its poor UI/UX, but not because of it.

FPS controls are the way they are primarily for evolutionary reasons; they were never designed to be intuitive or even rational. Thinking of the right stick as head control is also problematic, given that it is actually used to rotate the entire body (it gets worse with Y-axis inversion, which makes sense for an…

I'd like to see an example review for a modern videogame that is both objective and meaningful. It's certainly possible to run through a checklist of components objectively (WhichGenre? DoesItLockUp? HowLongAreLoadTimes? WhatIsTheButtonMapping?), but I daresay that such a review will be of minimal worth to most…

I would read that.

There's no such thing as an objective review. Not one of any value, at least, in the realm of modern video games.

Great. You make about as much as you would doing one hour of honest work/day at a real job. How much fun is it? How much time do you commit to it?

Haven't yet fallen asleep while playing a game, but watching others play sports games (or watching actual sports), stealth games, and FPSes certainly puts me to sleep. So boring.

The Witcher 2 (EE, Xbox 360) has serious menu problems, as well a map that is both nearly useless and exceptionally glitchy, a terrible camera that gets caught in columns and walls, less-than-optimal button mapping, atrocious audio recording/mastering, and the extremely simple but also exceedingly clunky melee…

Check the options menu. You can turn all that off.