After Pressing Start: Psychonauts’ Mental Dentist's Office

The human mind . . . six hundred miles of synaptic fiber . . . five and a half ounces of cranial fluid . . . 1500 grams of complex neural matter . . . a three-pound pile of dreams.

Psychonauts doesn’t even give you a chance to press start. Instead it says, “You don’t need to set up a profile or configure the look sensitivity and you already saw our logo when you looked at the box! Let’s get this show on the road!” I reserve a certain amount of praise for a game that just starts the moment you pop it in (or boot it up, since I played the Mac port from the Humble Indie Bundle V).

The Fate of Final Fantasy Versus XIII

The only interesting games to come out of Square Enix in the last ten years have come from Tetsuya Nomura. Kingdom Hearts, The World Ends With You, and Dissidia Final Fantasy respectively gave us crazy cross overs, Atlus-esque insanity and epic aerial combat to relieve fans from a stagnant slew of turn-based RPG’s. And now we’re being told that Final Fantasy XIII, a game that would promised the incredibly fun combat of Kingdom Hearts in a mature* setting with characters that don’t look like they just escaped a zipper factory, is cancelled.

4 more possible stops on Wreck-it Ralph's Tour de Video Games

Sega has announced that Wreck-it Ralph will be joining the roster of racers in the upcoming Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing Transformed. For those of you who haven’t seen the trailer for the best movie coming out this year yet, Ralph is a game villain who decides to travel to other games for a chance at being “the good guy.” This makes his actual appearance in S&SAST even more awesome since it can be considered just another stop in his tour of game worlds. I ask, why stop there? Let’s make Wreck-it Ralph an industry-wide event and have him show up in more games leading up to the release of the film by way of DLC for existing titles or those in development.

After Pressing Start: Sonic Adventure 2

Our patience for entertainment wanes as we get older, leading to plenty of frustration from the inevitable “right in the childhood” moments when we open the ol’ nostalgia box only to discover that Kingdom Hearts wasn’t the narrative masterpiece we thought it was at age thirteen. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better that I don’t find out whether Austin Powers was actually funny or the possibility that Sonic Adventure 2 doesn’t deserve the praise I gave it as a kid. This is a story about the latter.

5 video game action figures you didn't know you wanted

Who’d have thought that adults with disposable income and a love of video games might throw their money at well-crafted action figures of their favorite digital avatars? From weird, jointed action figures of Sonic targeted at children to the various offerings from Square Enix’s Play Arts masterfully sculpted with collectors in mind, video game action figures are more popular than ever. Although there are some amazing, long-awaited, criminally underrepresented and wallet-draining video game figures in production, this list will be limited to figures that are out and will be waiting for you when your next browser tab arrives at Amazon or eBay.

3 fictional universes that should go MMO

It’s really easy to imagine a well-established fictional world as an MMO. Any imaginative world beyond our own has factions, races, neat archetypes and cities that could be strung together into another WoW clone. As much as we all would like to see innovation beyond that, here’s my top three “why by Odin’s raven does this not exist?” contenders for fictional universes that haven’t already been made into MMO’s. Expect the “verse” suffix attached inccorectly to many words and plenty of foolish optimism.

Ten tips for a better Dragon's Dogma experience.

It may be hiding under a few rough edges, but Dragon’s Dogma is one of the best fantasy experiences money can buy. As someone who is favors the adventure, over-the-top action and mystery that fantasy role-playing games often promise in the form of CGI trailers only to drop you into spreadsheet land, DD has already become my favorite game of this year, perhaps for all time. So allow me to enlighten you on the game’s most enticing features and some simple ways to get around a few minor flaws that seem to be driving people away.

The new Amazing Spider-Man game is doing automated gameplay right.

We all hate quick time events. At least, we’re supposed to hate quick time events because, reasons? I never understood it myself. They can get overused like any other game mechanic, but well-integrated QTE’s let us do things that developers just haven’t quite figured out to turn into actual gameplay. I’d be happy to get rid of them once a sequence like the scorpion-water-horse-things fight in God of War 3 becomes feasible in real-time gameplay. Dragon’s Dogma has gotten pretty close since I can climb a hydra and sever one of its heads as I leap to the next one without a single “press x to not die” moment, but we still aren’t quite there. It’s all about at least having some control over your actions instead of being herded through a scripted sequence. Beenox seems to have gotten the right idea with its Web Rush system in The Amazing Spider-Man.

The least interesting video game characters make the best action figures.

Based on my reaction to today’s news of a fully poseable, well-made action figure of Link and a quick look at my personal collection of plastic miniature gaming heroes I have come realize. The more deep or developed a character is, the less likely they will make a great action figure. Master Chief, Sonic, Kratos, Dante, Cloud, Squall, Sora, Altair and many more are all hanging out on my shelf and look great together in glorious crossover fashion, but I can’t say I’ve really ever cared about these characters when I play their games. They’re just a lot of fun to look at and play as.

Smart phone connectivity is a way better industry fad than motion controls.

Easily the neatest rising trend in the game industry right now is the connectivity we can have with our games when we’re not playing them. Thanks to smart phone connectivity, we can bid on auction house items in WoW and keep our galactic readiness in Mass Effect 3 at a reasonable level without even booting up a PC or console. There’s even an app for an interactive map of Skyrim out there.

And so early in the event that keeps our YouTube and Google Reader tabs constantly open we have already have seen how Nintendo and Microsoft are making sure we don’t ever escape from our little gaming worlds.