Re: Timeliness. Believe me, there is always an effort to make the reviews as timely as possible. We do indeed get advance review/debug copies for many games, including this one. (A couple of publishers don't send them out, and as Goklauou pointed out, the PR process can be very frustrating in any case.) The main…

Yes, the Arkham review will appear next Monday.

Good call. We definitely intend to feature App Store games in this column, hence the iPhone mention in the intro. It's an anomaly that none happened to be featured in the debut.

Yes, the two comments after mine are also spot-on.

Tecmo.

We like to review oddball stuff from time to time. Plus, Madden week is always barren, anyway, so it's not like a slew of big-name reviews were pushed aside to make room for this one.

You make a very good point. I was thinking more along the lines of FPSes (e.g., Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) that put you in the place of a German soldier, or even something like the Fascism mod for Civ II, which pointed up a critical chapter in history that had been expunged from the game.

Well, there's Singstar ABBA for PS2/3.

Yeah, we got rid of the obligatory headings to give the reviewers more room to breathe, as PSSP and others noted. It also happened to make the game reviews match the reviews in all the other sections, but that was really more of a side effect — nobody was losing sleep over the fact that the game reviews didn't look…

Well, Bear, if you're still around when the Tokyo Game Show happens this September, we should have an AVC meetup. Scott Jones and I will be in attendance.

Bear, how did I miss that you were living (vacationing?) in Japan? Are you enjoying it? I lived in Nagoya for about a year in '04-'05, along with a bunch of other scattered visits. I always waver between loving it and feeling terribly isolated, but I keep going back, so I guess I really enjoy it on the whole. It…

There's definitely a lineage there, and agreed, great game.

We figured that the games section had grown up enough to match the format of the other reviews on the site. There was no great disdain for the bullet points, just a sense that they had run their course. (Although I admit there were more than a couple times that I struggled to think of a "frustration sets in" moment…

Thanks for noticing! The Games section has never lacked credence with the AVC bigwigs, it just takes a while to grow things out. We are working on a few things, though, so bear with us.

I haven't played the Wii game, but from what I understand, it's a different game entirely.

No, you either kill the pandas or let them tear your foes limb from limb, but you never get to play as one.

You should try out Overlord. The similarities are more than skin deep.

I'm pretty sure that Esquire wrote the intro for that article; I happened to be there while Jones was putting together that list, and I don't recall him crowning himself the "coolest guy." I would have given him some shit for that.

Thanks, Juggernaut, well put. I will note that, contrary to popular belief, we do generally finish the games we write about or die (on screen) trying. The only exceptions that come to mind are the rare occasions when a game arrives too soon before deadline to finish — and even then we will binge to make sure we're…

Hey, Imminent Disaster.