I should have been a pair of ragged claws

I love the Nintendo DS and it has been blessed with a growing mountain of great, interesting games, but it has lacked a killer app to point to and say "here's why this is such a great system." Mario Kart DS is the system's Halo. Its Soul Calibur. It's the best in the series and its new tweaked rules and weapons, incredible track design, and multiplayer content make a stunning package that no DS system should exist without. Slipstreaming, the most substantial addition to the core gameplay, introduces an excellent risk/reward component to the series. Tailing another driver is typically a dangerous practice in Mario Kart games; most items can be dropped behind characters to force any tailgaters to spin out. In Mario Kart DS, driving in a character's wake provides a moderate speed boost. Remain there a few moments, and you're rewarded with a larger boost that often slingshots you in front of the character you were tailing. There aren't many changes to the

In Shadow of the Colossus, you assume the role of a young man trying to reverse the death of his lover. He travels to a temple at the end of the world and is tasked by a mystical voice to defeat 16 colossi to bring his beloved back to life. These colossi are awesome, giant beasts made of stone, hair, and metal. Some tower over you like living skyscrapers and the ground cracks as they walk about. Though they have an unfamiliar shape, they aren't exactly monsters. You don't find them attacking villages or setting fields ablaze; they are most often pacing about a remote cove. While their scale is jaw-dropping, their gaze can leave the deepest impression; while some throw looks with squint-eyed malice, many look with open, empty eyes like a bear at a zoo. Your quest to kill these creatures doesn't allow you the unassailable moral high ground as other games do. You are told to kill all 16 of these creatures to bring your lover back; exchanging sixteen (arguably) innocent lives f

I've been rocking out to Guitar Hero for the last two weeks and wrote the following fan mail to the awesome folks at Harmonix: Wow; Guitar Hero is awesome! The music selection is sublime, the art direction is inspired, the difficulty progression is smooth (ok, maybe not with Bark at the Moon), and the whole feel of the game is great. The loading screen help text is hilarious (the first time I saw the "Freebird" one I almost cried), everything about the game is great. I hope you sell millions of copies of the game and I can't wait for an expansion! Good luck! Soon after I send my message, Mike Dornbrook, COO of Harmonix, replied: Hi Scott, Thanks for the kind words - reactions like yours are the reason we do this. If sales keep up like they have so far, there's no doubt we'll be doing sequels. We've got *lots* of ideas for improvements! Rock on, -Mike Digging around a bit on the company web site, I found out that Mike worked on the Infocom classics Zork, Le

I had the great fortune of being invited by Tracee Wolf to give a talk about gaming to the Human Computer Interaction Professional Interest Community group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Tracee was a huge help in getting the talk ready, with hour long phone calls getting my presentation content to be as useful and interesting as possible, and Jason Ellis (aka Plucky ) was werd as always helping resolve all the technical issues and showing me around his work. Here's slides of the talk I gave, brought to you in PDF form by Mr. Ellis.