Batman: Arkham City may be about to hit shelves, but two of these new figures are for the last great Batman game: Arkham Asylum.

This video shows you Titan Joker, Killer Croc and Mr. Freeze, all videoed in as much detail as I could capture with an iPhone through a thick pane of plastic. The Joker figure is a prototype. In fact it's the only one in existence right now. I was told it was finished the day before they brought it to the show. The design is still undergoing some work, including some touch-ups to the face and elbows. It has 16 points of articulation and was a wonder to see in person.

Batman loves to put his fist into people's faces. And developer Rocksteady really knows how to turn that into an artform.

Here's a batch of new screens from upcoming Batman: Arkham Asylum that gives us a look at some other non fist-into-face moments, like swooping and grappling and bats!

Thanks for ruining that, IGN.

Fortunately, we didn't find Arkham Asylum Harley among anyone's video game crushes from the Speak Up on Kotaku of Sept. 2. But if you want to rehabilitate your loving memory of Batman's clown princess, I suggest a glance here.

Of all the things that Batman: Arkham Asylum had going for it—and there were a lot of them—my favorite thing was the Riddler challenges. Placed throughout the game, these optional side-challenges ran the gamut from extremely easy to borderline impossible, and provided a welcome incentive to go off the path and explore.

Last weekend at PAX, I swung by the Warner Bros. booth to check out Arkham Asylum's upcoming sequel, Batman: Arkham City. I was guided by Zafer Coban, lead animator at Rocksteady Studios, the development team behind the game. With his aid, I learned quite a bit more about the new-and-improved (and numerous) Riddler challenges we'll see in the new game and got a chance to tackle one head-on.

The demo started at the very beginning of the game, as the camera pulled into a sweeping shot of Two-Face's Gotham City hideout. Suddenly, the guards heard a noise… it's Batman! No actually, it's Catwoman. It was fun to play as Selina Kyle, flipping through dudes, wha-pishing my whip about, and generally being sexy and awesome as I pounded heads.

Immediately after that, I was given control of Batman himself, free to carom around Gotham City. After playing a quick hacking minigame with Batman's (improved) frequency scanner, I determined that Two-Face was holding Catwoman hostage in a nearby building. Via my own psychic powers, I also determined that this mission was the same one that I saw at GDC, and which everyone has already played, so I asked what else where was for me to see.

I had noticed the green question-marks painted on the walls and rooftops all around Gotham, so I asked Coban about how we could get into some Riddler challenges. He smiled and pointed me towards a nearby challenge, which he promised would lead to something "interesting," should I solve it. Sweet, I thought. I love interesting stuff.

A green glowing question-mark stood on a circular pad on the wall, just above another couple of similar pads, which almost looked like… buttons. Nearby, a familiar green Riddler trophy sat on the street, protected by a mechanical cage. In order to get the cage to lift, I'd have to bounce Batman between the green pressure-plates in the right order. I quickly grappled up to the rooftop and leapt off, and by aiming my glide just so, I was able to hit the first circular pad head-on. Immediately upon hitting it, I was given a button prompt, which caused Batman to pivot on the wall and jump in the opposition direction.

Gliding away from the first pad, I aimed towards the second one, and then the third, which was located flat on the ground and required a careful landing. It took me a couple of tries, and when I finally hit the pads in order, the cage popped open with a *ping* and the Riddler trophy was mine for the taking.

Coban guided me towards another trophy, which was thankfully a bit easier to collect. He also casually informed me that the game world of Arkham City will contain 270 challenges, and each time players collect a certain number of them, the Riddler will inform Batman where to find a new unlockable challenge room. So: 270 in-world challenges, and an undisclosed number of increasingly difficult challenge rooms. My inner Riddler-trophy addict did a little jig.

Upon grabbing my second trophy, the Green Guess-Master hopped onto my radio, tauntingly revealing the location of a challenge room, which promptly came up on my map. In a neat touch, waypoints in the game are marked by the Bat-signal, which allowed me to navigate towards them without the need of a mini-map. Needless to say, I am a fan of this design decision, since we all know how I feel about mini-maps.

Making one's way through Gotham City feels much more like Assassin's Creed than any of the navigation in Arkham Asylum—the areas are much more vertical, and at any moment there are around a dozen different grapple-points available. Basic locomotion is significantly different than Creed, though, and it takes a bit of getting used to; rather than using Ezio's free-run, players must use a combination of grappling and gliding. Fortunately, the end result is that Batman is far faster and easier to maneuver over great distances than Ezio could hope to be. In no time flat, I made it to the Riddler's hidden challenge room, broke down the false wall around it, and strode inside.

Once inside the Riddler's lair (really more of a satellite-lair), Mr. Nigma himself appeared, projected on the wall by a hidden camera, taunting Batman onward in his trademark snide manner. Somewhere within this complex, he informed me, an innocent hostage's life hung in the balance, and the only way to save him was for Batman to successfully navigate the puzzles ahead.

The small hallway opened up into a huge warehouse, the floors of which were covered in electro-charged panels like the ones from the Harley Quinn "boss battle" from the first game. Spinning blades pushed and pulled across the room, and high above it all, an innocent victim hung by a rope, dangling just above his doom.

"Okay," I thought. "This is going to be easy." Then I walked out onto the electrified panels and died.

After reloading, I walked into the room again (skipping the cutscene this time) and remembered I should probably be using detective-mode. Flipping it on, the room went a familiar shade of metallic blue, and points of interest were highlighted in familiar orange.

I saw that I could use Batman's frequency analyzer to hack a nearby power box, which cleared a path of safe panels through the electrified floor. At Coban's urging, I hurried towards a safe space (a timer was running onscreen, after which the floor would be re-electrified) and quickly hit the "duck" button as a low-moving row of spinning blades came my way. To my surprise, pressing the duck button while running resulted in a power-slide, and I came perilously close to dying a second time before centering myself on a safe square out in the middle of the floor.

A quick toss of a batarang disabled a second power box and opened another path, this time leaving me up one level, standing on an outcropping ten feet above the electrified. I proceeded to batarang another power box, scoot across a metal scaffolding to the center of the room, and narrowly miss getting knocked off my perch by another set of rotating blades. (Batman's fairly cumbersome on-foot controls weren't helping things).

A final timed segment later, I made it across the room to a hallway, where detective mode revealed a weak point in the wall. I sprayed on Batman's trademark explosive gel, blew a hole in the wall, and made my way to a long hallway, which ran parallel to the large room beyond. The hallway itself was more like the top beam of a letter "T", with a door in the hallway's midpoint opening off into the main room, allowing a straight shot at the dangling hostage. But of course, there was a snag—the floor here was less a "floor" and more a "giant pit of buzz-saws with floor on both ends." Some gadgetry was going to be required.

Using Batman's line-launcher, I zipped myself across to a safe spot on the other end, but that left me no closer to getting through the door to my right to save the hostage. Coban stopped me and mentioned that all of Batman's gadgets are getting an overhaul in Arkham City, and that the line launcher was now able to redirect mid-line and fire a second line.

To do so, I fired the first line, then pressed the trigger to bring up the targeting reticule a second time while in transit. Time slowed down, and after a couple of attempts, I was able to center my shot and put a second line down the "T" and just over the hostage's shoulder. Batman shot off at a 90-degree angle from his original trajectory, grabbing the hostage in midair and crashing through a conveniently placed window, back onto the streets of Gotham.

The whole challenge room was meaty and difficult, though as far as I could tell it was entirely linear. The sequence recalled nothing so much as the crypts from later Assassin's Creed games, and should prove to be welcome diversions from the action of the main game.

As a little bonus to my demo, Coban let me play through a Penguin-centric combat round, which highlighted the same fun, fluid combat as the first game, only a touch smoother, with better animations, and with more dudes to wail on. As a happy side-note, I can tell you that Nolan North's performance as Oswald Cobblepot sounds nothing at all like Nathan Drake from Uncharted. In fact, if I hadn't known it was North, I never would have even noticed.

So: the map is big, navigating it is fun, the cast of characters is large and varied, the gadgets are upgraded, and combat is even better than before. But of all of those improvements, it's the Riddler challenges that have me most looking forward to Arkham City. Much like its caped protagonist, the original Arkham Asylum had a stealth-factor working for it. It was such a welcome surprise: Who the hell was Rocksteady, and where did they get off making such a spectacularly good Batman game?

Arkham City won't have that advantage, but it will have the benefit of a bunch of working, established systems, and a team that obviously cares a great deal about improving on an already strong foundation.

—

Signal shining bright
leads the way to dark challenge
Gleaming batarang

No, The Joker isn't getting a haircut. But it sure looks like it! The folks from Slabworx, a small, independent mask maker, are doing what they do best: making a mask.

According to Slabworx, it makes its masks from high grade silicon. The pictures are nice, but stick around for the video to see the Batman: Arkham Asylum inspired Joker mask in action. Know what else is nice? That fish tank.

Slabworx [Facebook Thanks Heather for the tip!]

I finally finished Crytek's Crysis 2 last week and surprised myself by immediately firing up a new game and starting it over from the beginning. Sure, Crysis 2 is a slick, well-made first-person shooter, but it's fairly unremarkable on the surface. So why, when I had so many other games I could (or should) be playing, was I nano-suiting up yet another time?

A few minutes into my new game, I hit the right shoulder button to engage my cloaking device and slunk out of an office window and onto a balcony overlooking one of Crysis 2's trademark sun-dappled urban arenas. I surveyed the scene—a group of Cell soldiers were standing across a small park while nearby, another manned the machine gun on the back of an armored car. I slipped, cat-like, into an alleyway, bits of their conversation drifting along as I drew nearer. Carefully, I began to flank them.

And that was when I realized what it is that makes the game so appealing: Crysis 2 evokes the thrill of the hunt.

A friend of mine was talking about Crysis 2 on a podcast earlier this year, and when asked to explain why he enjoyed the game he said, essentially, "It's really fun to hunt people down." After saying that, he paused and kind of laughed, backpedaling a bit. "I realize that sounds a little creepy… but it's true! It's really fun!"

He's right: there's something uniquely satisfying about games that allow me to play the predator. And he's also right that it sounds kind of strange admitting that out loud… I swear I'm not a weirdo! I don't hunt people in my neighborhood after dark or anything! I just like games like Crysis 2, games that engage a natural, animal instinct through a confluence of stealth mechanics, flexible level design and strong enemy AI.

Batman: Arkham Asylum had a lot going for it, but my favorite parts of the game were its predatory stealth segments. As the Bat picked off Joker's goons one by one, their increasingly panicked reactions and erratic behavior gave me a sick thrill. This is what people are talking about when they say that game feels like a "BatmanSimulator." Crime-solving, exploration and brawling are all fun, but the essence of Batman is that predator in the dark, two white eyes glowing in the shadows, striking fear into the wicked. Arkham Asylum perfectly captured that feeling.

Predatory games hinge upon the freedom to be spotted and then hide again without resetting everything—call it "dynamic stealth." Early Splinter Cells fall mostly into the "pure stealth" category. Protagonist Sam Fisher must remain unseen for the most part, and so most of the game is spent lurking in corners, waiting for guards to pass by or turn their backs. Splinter Cell: Conviction did a lot to move the gameplay in a more predatory, engaging direction. And while I do love early Splinter Cell games, I had a absolute blast playing and re-playing Conviction, and at this point I think I prefer it.

While doing a second spin through Deus Ex for our letter series on the game, I realized that as much as the game encourages stealth-based, predatory gameplay, it doesn't quite feel right. The moment I get spotted, enemies start running about all willy-nilly, setting off alarms and charging my position. The levels are too narrow to allow for any escape or improvisation, and in most instances, enemy AI doesn't have any layers between "unaware" and "alert." Striking, setting off the alarm, and then sneakily circling back while enemies close in on your last known position is one of the sublime thrills of a predatory game; but AI has to be advanced enough to pull it off.

In addition to enemy AI, overall enemy design is also very important. Both Crysis 2 and its predecessor Crysis start off brilliantly, but both games get quite a bit less fun as they go on. This is almost entirely due to the fact that both games introduced a new, different type of enemy at the midpoint. When the Ceph were introduced in Crysis, what had been a game about prowling through the underbrush suddenly hinged upon big, open-field shootouts against flying squid-monsters. It wasn't half as much fun. Crytek smartly kept the Ceph on the ground in Crysis 2, but they still weren't as much fun to take on as the hapless PMC drones from the earlier parts of the game.

The sprawling savannas of Far Cry 2 present a remarkably pure dilution of chaotic, predatory gameplay. Pure stealth is rarely an option in that game, mainly because enemies are annoyingly hyper-aware and can spot you a couple clicks away. The key, then, is to move in carefully, strike from a distance and then close quickly, circling at all times while using the natural environment (bodies of water, bluffs and vantage points) to your advantage.

The dynamic nature of Far Cry 2's encounters make it enjoyable for hours at a time. Even better, the game adheres to its core design from beginning to end, dodging the switcheroo-itis that has plagued Crytek's games, including the first Far Cry. It is truly a wonderful thing that there are no extraterrestrial cephalopods or mutant killer apes in the latter half of Far Cry 2.

But there's something else about the game too, a certain quickening of the pulse as I come up over a bluff, crouch, and take aim. These games dig at something deeper, something darker: the hunter in all of us.

When I've used a wounded enemy for bait and drawn out an entire camp of mercenaries, I get a sense of bloody accomplishment that doesn't just derive from in-game progression or increased leaderboard status. It's grim, but it's very real—my predatory nature, working its way to the surface.

The guard post has been decimated, gutted by fire; there are bodies strewn all about. The last man standing has lost his cool and snapped. He's whirling around in circles, shouting false bravado into the shadows in the jungle. "That all you got? You got nothing! Where are you hiding? Where are you?"

I'll tell you where I am, buddy. I'm circling, circling… closing in for the kill…

In today's award-winning edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, cold-hearted commenter Monsieur.Froid wonders if other gamers are beginning to catch on to this whole Game of the Year trend.

So with Fallout 3, I discovered the advent of the gaming industry's newest conception: the 'Game of the Year' edition. Sure, it comes in other flavours, like the Ultimate Edition, Complete Collection or what have you, but the most notable seems to be the GotY (Game of the Year). All of these mean the same thing: Game + all DLC.

Here's a short list of some of the games that have used it.

Street Fighter 4, Super Street Fighter 4, Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 (PS3), Oblivion, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Borderlands, Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

Here's a list of some of the games that I figure will use it in the future:

Dragon Age 2, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Borderlands 2, Uncharted 3, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Arkham City.

So because of having rebought Fallout 3 (for 20 bucks) for the GotY edition, I learned my lesson to wait for the game to come out with the DLC-included version. I waited for Dragon Age: Origins, and am happily playing that now. I waited for Borderlands and GTAIV and again, have been very happy with both. Because of this I'll be waiting for Borderlands 2, I've been holding off on DA2 and New Vegas and I'll be skipping the 2nd MvC3 and will pick up the inevitable 3rd version with even more characters.

Who else is waiting to pick up these big name titles for the bound-to-be-released DLC versions of the games?