Drafthouse Films. As in, Alamo Drafthouse. As in, the greatest chain of theaters in the world. As in, hell yeah.

I was kinda wondering how the guy's got giant blades attached to his hand, and he pretty much just opts not to use them throughout the entire fight - but manages to get killed with them. Maybe the better fight would have been Vega vs. Yoshimistu?

Mario's a pretty good example of looking at a game that's always focused on gameplay. I mean - does anyone really take the story all the seriously? Was anyone brought to tears at the end of Mario 64? (Except for the fact that you beat the game... Love that game...)

I still need to play Shadow of the Colossus - it's definitely on my "must play" list at this point. However, from what I've heard about the game, it does a great job of building gameplay content that feeds the story. That is to say, the gameplay decisions are dependent on the story decisions. You wouldn't do something…

Mini-games are the bane of my existence. Except the Bioshock tube game for hacking (just because I love that game... even if it didn't make any real sense), I'd prefer most minigames to go the way of the buffalo. There's got to be a better solution than to cram a game inside a game. I mean... we've got to go deeper.

I have no problem with stories being fore-fronted in games. I'd argue that a fair share of games do this and achieve some success with it. My problem is when things get whishy-washy, and people demand - or even claim - great stories from games that aren't going to give you that, and, for their own integrity,…

A little blast (ah - punny) of nostalgia hit me yesterday when thinking about Blast Corps, eventually leading to a point of curiosity.

I'm fairly sure the original Rainbow Six was one of the first games for me that defined righteous rage quitting versus petulant rage quitting. That game pissed me off so much, but got me so excited to re-think what I did wrong and how to fix it. A lot like the ARMA/Operation: Flashpoint series, the original RS was a…

Nope. I've always wanted a desktop that has a gratuitous use of Cold War-esque toggles and switches. Or one of those wooden/retro computers... Either way, really.

I, for one, welcome our new Swedish overlords.

I think this is a lot of the arguments coming from the mobile crowd - that is, that tablets will eventually replace the hardware of the console. You'll plug your tablet into your TV (or it'll broadcast wirelessly through some future magic), and you'll play like that. The giant question mark I take from all of this is:…

Thanks! I'm just glad if I could be of any help.

I've thought about this sort of thing before, too. There seem to be a couple of factors working.

Hmm... I disagree that we can't analyze this game in virtually the same light as a book, that there isn't a narrator, that we "design" the story by our choices, &c. - it seems more likely that the narrator is the cinematographer, that we're given an illusion of choice (Bioware dialogue trees are atrocious), and that…

This is like gaming Oulipo on crack - and I love every minute of it.

I totally forgot about this. I liked that feature a lot, too.

Unless you wanted it to be a mobile feature across the Kotaku programming (as in, Kotaku Melodic can call dibs for a week if they really think that a music project needs to be funded for the sake of our Western-capitalist souls), I'd be alright with anything of a regular round-up - regardless of what that regularity…

Not sure where to put this exactly (and this might very well be the wrong place), but:

Don't forget the death knell sounded by the pike-and-shot formations. The 1500s (far from "Middle Ages") was pretty much the end of knights as we think of them. Really interesting time period for military tech, actually... In fact, Mount & Blade: With Sword and Fire isn't necessarily an exact match for this kind of…

Those sieges have left me screaming "my kingdom for a quiver" more times than I'm willing to admit. Awesome gameplay.