Dead or Alive 5 is clearly a direct response to the oft-pondered question, “Is gaming art?”

By casually asking the player to choose between absurdly-revealing outfits and regularly-revealing outfits, the game designers force the player to reveal the true natures of their id state. The contemporary Character Select screen, which has always tapped into our Jungian archetypes, suddenly takes on a decidedly more Freudian slant

The greatest statement Dead or Alive 5 makes about our corporeal existence is in the game’s core fighting mechanics themselves. The game lauds its fighting system in its own tutorial segments, detailing a complex yet simple rock-paper-scissors ecosystem, urging the player to study move lists and frame counts. Practice as you may, achieve the last of those existential achievements, but don’t forget to also practice your face of defeat, for when you pass controller two to your ten-year-old niece and lose to the button-mashing of

In stark contrast, the Oxford English Dictionary defines Existentialism as the

Which brings me to the game’s self-described “Danger Zones.” These pre-programmed stage elements, a clear homage to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, your “hero’s journey” is interrupted in the thirty second narrative by a

7.75 out of 10.

Here’s a spoiler-free video I made to poke a little fun at the whole Mass Effect 3 ending upset. You probably have to have some familiarity with Mass Effect to have any idea what I’m talking about up there.

I’m actually not done with the game yet, so please no real spoilers.

And so we have Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s a decent enough game. If you like the original Deus Ex, then you’ll probably like this. If you didn’t, you probably won’t.

But here is the problem: It is just a remake of Deus Ex. That’s it. Rather than improve upon the original, Human Revolution rehashes it: same bad voiceover acting  and accents, same basic level design, nearly the same muddled plot, filled with conspiracy theories, and same awkward ending.

So, it’s not bad, exactly, but we’ve developed so much since then, not merely in terms of graphics (which are decent, but nothing amazing), but in terms of gameplay and story design. The levels are static in a way that no longer makes sense for levels: You can move some crates, and open some doors, but that’s it. So the levels aren’t really “open-ended,” they simply offer 2 or 3 ways of getting to the same goal, rather than 1 (and generally, those other ways break down to: Kill everyone, or sneak through airducts). Characters wander around aimlessly and get in your way, but have no real purpose. If you have the right augmentation (upgrades to your character), then boss battles are simple: otherwise, they’re impossible. And there are cutscenes: Many, many cut scenes. Haven’t we grown past all this?

To be clear: Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a fine game. But the original Deus Ex was revolutionary: a FPS in which you could upgrade your character, your decisions had definite impacts on the story, and you were not forced into solving puzzles in 1 way. Deus Ex: Human Revolution uses all that, but nothing else. There’s nothing new here. There’s no real reason to care about it.

-Curtis Retherford

Developed by NimbleBit (those guys what brought you Pocket Frogs), Tiny Tower is an iOS “game” where–look, I’ll just let NimbleBit tell you:

“Tiny Tower lets you build a tiny tower and manage the businesses and bitizens that inhabit it!”

NEATO! I don’t know what a bitizen is, but that sounds pretty cool, I guess. Fun, yeah? Fun. And look, it’s got this sweet pixelated art-style that’s bound to seduce every old-school gamer reading this right here. I’m sure this might even be attractive to some of you young hipster gamers who weren’t even alive when pixels were a thing we had to deal with. “Hey, remember Pixels?! We do too! Remember Sim Tower? Sorta? Just a little bit? Yeah, us too. Well, take everything you loved/sorta-remember about Sim Tower and put it on your phone!”

Now take everything out of it that makes it a game!

Tiny Tower is charming. God, Tiny Tower is so effing charming, you guys. Okay, so here’s what you do: people move into your tower, you build floors for them to live in, you build floors for them to work in, you stock the businesses with what they need, and you funnel the little pixelated people back and forth in an elevator to get them where they need to be. From doing all of that you make more money to build more floors to move in more people. LET’S NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT HOW ARCHITECTURALLY UNSOUND IT IS TO BUILD A TOWER FLOOR BY FLOOR, OKAY?

So you do all of those things and it’s cute, like a less creepy ant farm–yeah, you know, ant farms, they’re like a less creepy Sim Ant–and it all works kind of like Farmville with a better art-style, only without all of the social aspects of Farmville. This has the benefit of not bugging the shit out of your Facebook friends, while having the boringfit of OH GOD I’M SO ALONE AND THE THING THAT FARMVILLE DOES TO MAKE THIS A GAME ISN’T EVEN HERE, WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!

But that’s the thing. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time, you guys, that’s why we’re here. Tiny Tower isn’t a game. This isn’t something to play around with. Oh god, I effed up, okay, I fucking effed up big time because–although it looked like I was paying attention to what I was writing up there–I really was just restocking my record store… And I had to take that guy in the elevator to floor 15… And we just broke ground on a new floor AND OH EM GOD, WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?

I downloaded this game because it’s free in the app store, but that was weeks ago, and now I’m 64 floors in and I bought an iPad as a productivity tool but now I’m just using it to play this stupid thing and I had to turn the push alerts off because I kept stopping working at work BECAUSE MY TOWER JUST DINGED AND SOMETHING NEEDS RESTOCKING and IS THIS WHY MY GIRLFRIEND BROKE UP WITH ME and DID YOU KNOW A PERSON CAN GET ALL THE R.E.M. SLEEP THEY NEED EVEN IF THEY WAKE UP EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES TO CHECK ON THEIR TOWER? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE SLEEPY? IT FEELS LIKE YOU’RE IN A NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO WAKE? THAT’S WHAT COFFEE IS FOR, YOU FUCKING AMATEUR.

Oh god. What happened. Where am I. Where’s the question mark key on this thing.

Don’t answer that? Don’t download Tiny Tower. Tiny Tower isn’t a game, it’s a grenade, and those assholes at NimbleBit pulled the pin, and thank god I was here to jump on that shit for you. You might look at that bloody shrapnel and think “OH THAT LOOKS LIKE A FUN THING TO PLAY ON THE TOILET” but let me tell you there is not enough time and there are not enough toilets and soon you’re just pretending to be doing things on the toilet–and then it gets worse and pretending isn’t enough anymore and then you’re poisoning yourself by eating at the bad Mexican restaurant with the C rating from the food board, BECAUSE THIS WILL MEAN SOME REAL GOOD TOILET TIME, YOU GUYS.

I took care of this game for you, okay? Look at me–LOOK AT ME–I took care of it. You don’t have to play this. Now run.

RUN!!

Gears of War 3 is the first real ending to a videogame trilogy that I’ve ever seen. So many videogame series call themselves trilogies, but when it comes time to actually say goodbye, most refuse to go. They start to pack up their things, begin to tie up their storylines, but then they smile and nod at you and whisper, “Wait, I can still suck more money out of you! Let’s not tie up everything, okay?” Gears doesn’t do this, either with its story or its gameplay. This is the end of the Gears of War trilogy, and it feels like an ending, and that is the highest praise that I can bestow on it.

The gameplay is tighter than it’s ever been. I played through the game solo, on hardcore difficulty, and it never felt unfair. Every time I died, I earned that death, by doing something really really stupid. Gears of War has always forged a constant push and pull between taking cover and running directly into battle, and sometimes taking cover for too long will let a Locust get the drop on you, and sometimes running into battle will get you blown to bits before you can chainsaw your foe in the face. Gears 3 does a better job than any shooter before it of making you feel responsible for your death, not by punishing you, but by never cheating you. In Gears 3, you earn your success, and you earn your failure, every time.

Each area is expertly crafted, each fallen pillar or burned out car another possible route to destroy your enemy. Since the first Gears, Cliff Blezinski has been talking about how he sees the combat as a top-down platformer told from the third person, and although that’s some pretty hefty game designer talk, you could see what he meant in the earlier Gears games. You could see the inner-workings of his design process. In Gears of War 3, the inner workings are so refined, so confident, and layered beneath so deep a level of polish that what I saw was an adventure. I was led on an action-packed journey to save the last remnants of humanity, with all the explosive action of a Call of Duty game, but with none of the rails or the handholding, and none of the cheap deaths.

Videogames have a nasty habit of throwing super awesome plot-twists and emotionally exciting narrative sequences at their characters, only to make those characters quickly forget everything after the next loading screen. Gears 3 never forgets its moments, and the characters live within the emotional story, instead of just having the story happen to them. It’s something we’re used to seeing in movies, but a refreshing change to videogame writing.

The pacing of the gameplay is so refined, that I never felt like I wanted to stop playing, I never felt like I needed a break. Just when I would be bored with the cover based mechanics of Gears, they’d introduce a new Lambent type that forced me to change my entire approach to battle, and when I became comfortable with that, they’d throw me into a mech. Every time I took a break from the campaign, I was forcing myself to take a break so that I could do something silly like eat sustenance to stay alive. And while I was eating, all I could think about was how I could still be playing Gears.

Gears of War 3 is not going to convert the Gears of War wary. If you’ve never liked Gears of War, then you’re not going to like this. These characters are still douchebags with chainsaws fighting aliens (that aren’t really aliens). But if you’re a fan of these douchebags–or even a casual player–then this is the Gears ending you deserve, with an engaging storyline playable solo or in four-player co-op, a multitude of multiplayer options, and a medal unlock system that will have completionists toiling away until well into 2012.

Speaking of, this has been an okay talk, you guys, I guess, but I really should get back to playing more Gears.

I got the Gears of War 3 Epic Edition a few days earlier (thanks SA Studios, Microsoft, and Epic Games!), so I made this little unboxing video so you all could see all the weird stuff in this big box.

Adam attends the Call of Duty XP 2011 event in LA, but returns home from war a different person.

Here’s a video I edited and did the special effects on. It features a series of scantily-clad women trying (and failing) to answer pretty simple videogame trivia questions. It was produced for Bitmob and Machinima.

Adam attended the Ubisoft Press Conference at E3 2011 and has survived to make jokes about it. Here are the highlights of the show.

Adam gives a quick rundown of the biggest news out of the Microsoft Press Conference.