As it happens, if you are reading this right now in the city of Tokyo, I am incredibly bored and hungry and would definitely be game for an AV Club mini-meetup. You just have to promise not to murder me.

Wow. That was pretty interesting, wo, thanks for passing along the link. The thing is, if Michael C. is trying to create an enduring reality-show character (and I have no reason to doubt Peach), he's doing a terrible job of it. His sassy moments in the testimonials are always pretty limp, and while his sad-sack…

Thanks, LIB, very nice of you to say so. I appreciate it. And CW, I'll stand by "Gordian," but I'll also join you in deferring to the principle of variable mileage.

@ a thoughtful muse: Being three or so months behind can be a virtue (and I know you weren't trying to portray it as otherwise). Sometimes i think it would be fun to have a forum where nobody could talk about games that had come out in the past three months — or six or whatever. Let the stuff sink in a bit first. It's…

JV: Ah, right, it was you. Sorry I didn't give you proper credit on that. (I was at the airport trying my best to navigate the comment thread on my iPhone.) As for Dan Teti, Esq., I don't know that particular Teti. There's always more of us out there than I realize.

Aw. Thanks, you guys. For my part, I was trying to get this recap up as quickly as possible, the impulse being "We have got to talk about what just happened here." I mean, holy crap.

You are correct, of course. My high-school Spanish teacher would be so angry with me. Or, probably, indifferent. She never liked me anyway.

Piggsy is a character in the game, and he is an alcoholic pig-man. Not sure about the sand demon, though.

GhaleonQ: The goal was not necessarily to preview every title of interest coming out this fall, but to hit the big-ticket releases, with a few of the most notable quirky/indie games tossed in for flavor. So not to worry, many of the games on your list will be covered even if they weren't in this mostly AAA preview.

Kirby's Epic Yarn was indeed an omission; I'm looking forward to it. Its absence is partly due to the fact that I haven't seen the game in person; also, the release date was hazy when I filed the preview. In other words, don't take the lack of Epic Yarn here as a judgment on its potential awesomeness.

Metroid: Other M did indeed fall too early for this preview, but I think you summed up the "safety" angle pretty well yourself.

Thanks, Butteri! Much appreciated. I'm sort of looking forward to next year, as well, but given how slippery game release dates are, it will be a little while yet before the first quarter takes shape. (I expect some of the games in this roundup to slip into 2011, as well — that group of undated titles at the end is…

Yup, that's what I was told at a preview event last month — they're going to try producing some smaller downloadable games for a bit.

Given that they apparently won't do it next week, you were just ahead of your time.

Huh. I knew both of these but did indeed mess them up in both cases. Thank you for the note.

They did the model-choosing thing at the beginning of last night's episode—Gretchen stuck with her model, so nothing changed. But weirdly, during the judging, Heidi said that whatever model was paired with the losing designer would automatically be eliminated. So no choosing next week, for whatever reason.

Oops, you're right, thanks for the correction. That's what I get for going by a vague memory of the makeup guy's name.

This hit after our deadline for this column, but rest assured you'll see it in the next one. Thanks for the tip!

Not insulted at all. Sometimes I'll look back on the writeup and have the same reaction.

They continue to develop the code, but I don't remember it being called an alpha or a beta. (I could be wrong, but there's no such language that I could find on their website.) It just has a version number less than 1, which is common for roguelikes.