Heroes of Ruin is a deft, well-implemented multiplayer-RPG—but right now it's lacking in distinctive character. The title, published by Square Enix and developed by n-Space, the team behind the GameCube action-adventure title Geist, is due to launch on the Nintendo 3DS in early 2012. So far, our exposure to the Heroes has mostly been limited to some evocative concept art and a catalog of features meant to exploit the capabilities of the platform's StreetPass and WiFi functionality.

The thirty-minute demo I played at E3 made good on what we've heard about these social and multiplayer functions, and was a compulsive good time; but lacking in artistic originality and a strong sense of setting, it left me just short of being fully engaged and ready to declare the title as a 3DS must-have.

I began my session with Heroes of Ruin by selecting one of the four playable classes available in the game. Each of the classes in Heroes features a predetermined backstory, gender and general shape. While you'll have the option to modify the hairstyle, coloration and apparel of these characters, their overall appearance is fixed—and, in role-playing terms, the type of character you'll play as is largely a function of their gameplay style. For the purposes of the demo, I was asked to to play as a Vindicator: a fierce, lion-like warrior who carried a two-handed sword and was skilled both with brute offensive capabilities and curative magic. My partner was a Gunslinger, a cold-blooded rogue donning a hood and carrying duel pistols. There is no friendly fire in Heroes—a sensible design choice, in light of the fact that I would frequently run headlong into enemies that my Gunslinger partner was firing upon.

The dungeons in Heroes of Ruin are randomly-generated from a set of corridors and chambers; each time a player returns to a previously visited environment, the layout and enemy positioning will be different—and in concept, it's reminiscent of the dynamically-generated dungeons of Atlus' Persona 3. This feature reenforces n-Space's ambition to create a gameplay experience that will survive frequent repetition, by offering those players seeking additional loot or wishing to complete optional side missions something slightly new each time. An area map is drawn in real-time; it was easy to read and was dotted with large, clear icons.

Combat is mostly a hack-and-slash affair, with one button used for chaining basic attacks and the other three reserved for class-specific abilities that consume stamina. Those looking for a role-playing experience driven by careful strategy and positioning might want to look elsewhere; this is a button-masher in the vein of Kingdom Hearts or Rune Factory. That said, I felt that the combat struck a enjoyable balance between allowing for the allotment of diverse skills while still being viscerally satisfying.

Characters can be customized using a skill-tree comparable to those employed in any number of PC and console titles. Heroes makes intelligent use of the touch-screen by allowing players to tap icons during battle in order to quickly reassign abilities to various buttons. Pressing either the left or right shoulder buttons will cause your character to consume a health or stamina potion, respectively—yet another judiciously designed feature that I appreciated in the heat of my the dungeon crawling.

The developers of Heroes of Ruin have promised that the game will contain tens of thousands of unique pieces of equipment and items—many of which are specific to only a single class. I was impressed by some of the clever functions that have been implemented to help players manage this potentially-overwhelming stream of loot. For one, positioning a character near to a dropped weapon or armor will cause the game to display a quick comparison between the fresh loot and the relevant item currently equipped to the character. More detailed comparisons are available with a bit of menu-navigation, but I found that this in-the-moment valuation of an equipment's properties and worth was a fantastic time-saver that kept me immersed in the action of the game. Moreover, tapping down on the 3DS's digital pad will cause the loot to be instantly sold for a welcome bit of profit. Collecting and selling items at in-game vendors will fetch more gold than this quick-and-easy method, but I appreciated the option to bypass the overcrowded inventories that are the bane of many other RPGs on the market. Perhaps the most intriguing element of Heroes of Ruin is that fact that each piece of equipment that you sell will be added to a virtual Trader's Network—and subsequently becomes available to other player's games via a 3DS StreetPass.

The multiplayer in Heroes is drop-in/drop-out, and players in the midst of riffling through menus can pause the game without affecting the seamless experience of anyone else participating in the session. The developers of n-Space have taken a hint from BioWare, and will be offering an online hub that will automatically collect data about each player's adventure. This hub will also be a place that gamers can visit in order to download "Daily Challenges"—though what precisely these challenges will consist of remains a mystery. These challenges excluded, I was told the title's main campaign can be expected to last for roughly 12 hours.

As much as the gameplay was well-executed and appealing, Heroes of Ruin's visual style and world-building left me steeply disappointed. The game's initial concept art, which reminded me of Akihiko Yoshida's rich illustrations for Square Enix properties Final Fantasy XIV and Tactics Ogre, had me hopeful that Heroes would follow suit and feature stylish and unconventional characters and locales. Instead, the game is very much indebted to the bland visual generalities employed by many games on the MMO-marketplace. Giant insects, shambling corpses, sword-wielding beastmen—these visual archetypes have all been done to death, and in tackling them Heroes in no way appears to make them its own.

Likewise, the narrative as expressed in the demo was threadbare and dispensable. Text was delivered in a stiff and unembellished frame, and without portraits of the various speakers or any dynamism in terms of the viewing angle or the player's distance from the action, it had a certain disembodied quality. The narrative content of the mission I experienced was very much a means to an end: go to be point A, slaughter the guardian of the forest, rinse, repeat. Some players will not find this narrative sparseness to be bothersome; for me, it was a glaring barrier preventing me from immersing myself in the game.

If Heroes of Ruin is ultimately delivered in a state similar to what I encountered at E3, it can expect to find favor among fans of loot-driven dungeon crawlers like Diablo and Torchlight. The title makes clever use of the 3DS's connectivity, and has been optimized as an on-the-go experience—I'm a particular fan of how n-Space has been able to streamline what could have been a tiresome trudge through inventory menus and status screens.

But the game is lacking atmosphere—something that even some of the least successful games in the Square Enix library manage to express in abundance. Barring a large artistic overhaul in the coming months, Heroes of Ruin will remain a concoction of fantastic design features, without a strong vision to cohere them together.

One of the more original PlayStation Vita efforts is Gravity, a game from Sony's Japanese developers, specifically some of the people behind the Siren horror games. It's exciting, in that it's not another PlayStation sequel and that it has stylish, comic book-like beauty.

For a clearer look at Gravity's graphics, watch the official trailer. But if you want to see how Gravity plays—and with a shaky thumb, should you have one too—watch me play the Vita game at Sony's E3 2011 booth.

The core concept feels not unlike the gravity-swapping gameplay of Dead Space's disorienting zero-G movement or the also unreleased Inversion. We'll move around this world as an amnesiac girl who has the power to hover and choose her own gravitational pull, a mechanic used in exploration and combat.

What I played, I liked, even if it was floaty, tutorial caliber stuff. The combat in Gravity feels loose, its aiming via gyroscope requiring some getting used to. Having a guide helped, so listen while you watch me learn about Gravity.

But as you can see, it uses the Vita's hardware differentiators in potentially amusing ways. Gravity is planned to hit alongside the Vita's launch.

If there's a star of The War of the Worlds, the upcoming downloadable title for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it's someone working behind the scenes or above the action. It's the score by Chris Hülsbeck, or the writing by Chris Fowler or, not least, the narration by Patrick Stewart.

As a game, however, what I saw of The War of the Worlds is a bit too much of an homage to side-scrolling platforms and puzzles to take it far beyond the interactive retelling of a science-fiction classic, albeit one carrying a lot of polish.

Arriving this fall from Paramount Digital and Other Ocean, The War of the Worlds is conceived as a love note to longtime sci-fi fans, partly because it's made by ones themselves. The game is done in the style of the 1953 film (not the 2005 remake), making use of black-and-white visuals and an orchestral score to give it a classic tone. Other Ocean, which built the surprise DSiWare hit Dark Void Zero, was said to have been given its pick of Paramount properties when they visited to discuss a game and, The War of the Worlds was something both sides had atop their lists for an adaptation for a very long time. (Although Other Ocean said it was, jokingly, interested in doing Barbarella too.)

In the level we saw demonstrated at E3, the protagonist (named Arthur Clarke and dressed to resemble Carl Sagan) was trying to traverse Hyde Park, blasted through with craters by the invading Martians. The only color shown was applied to Martian technology; anything of Earth was desaturated. Yellow death rays strobe-lit the background, heaving up enormous silhouetted chunks of dirt and debris.

The foreground path was one of giant pits, overturned tanks and weaponry, and exposed pipes. This created hiding spaces for the player to avoid the searchlights on the floating Martian drones, whose ray weapons incinerated the panicked soldiers about the scene. The pause between a drone recognizing you and activating its ray seemed slow enough that, running across the screen, you could cross their light without being incinerated instantly. Many of the sequences required a vertical escape, though, but success there was simply a matter of timing the drone's passes.

Save points would be spaced out roughly every 20 seconds, we were told, which is sensible for a game with such a heavy narrative component. Who wants to hear whole pages of text repeatedly as they try to master a jumping puzzle, after all. The climactic sequence was another timed-movement challenge, set on a huge Martian apparatus at the park's center. The hero had to scale it, essentially a giant wheel, and plant explosives at several key points while passing through moving rings whose force fields, when activated, would vaporize him.

We saw the mission succeed and the chapter end. Clarke, we're told, is on a mission to find his fiancée and brother. Later in the game he will be able to turn the Martians' technology on them, so the 11 levels will not all be evasion and defense. The more famous alien threats, such as the black smoke, red weeds, and the fearsome tripods, will all make appearances,m though we weren't shown them. The course Clarke takes through London will be actually walkable in sequence, drawing from Fowler's stature as an expert writer of that city.

In gameplay alone, what I saw of The War of the Worlds appeared intriguing but not necessarily exciting, even accounting for its deliberate homage to 8-bit platformers. It struck me as an interactive graphic novel, although one buttressed by some real writing and acting heft. Originally conceived in a 16-bit throwback style, Other Ocean moved to rotoscoped models and animations when they realized how much the consoles could handle. An information sheet extolls the fact each level "contains over 40 layers of 2D parallax."

When it arrives, the real point for acquiring War of the Worlds may be Patrick Stewart, a figure of profound eminence among the science fiction community. The man could read a Chinese take-out menu and give gravitas to the cashew chicken and potstickers. Here he works with a writer both natively familiar with London and period-perfect in his style. Stewart read 23 pages of dialogue, written by Fowler, so even though he isn't acting a playable character, per se, this isn't a cameo.

The gameplay I saw may not recommend The War of the Worlds on its own, but the storytelling, in the hands of this studio, delivered in a downloadable game, wins it some benefit of the doubt.

Picture Lives, which I sometimes accidentally call Picture This was one of my favorite surprise finds at E3. It's a downloadable game from Nintendo that will be sold through the 3DS' eShop. I'd never heard of the game before and had to figure this one out on the fly. Enjoy the video of this very silly game.

Thanks to Kotaku intern Mike Epstein for doing the camerawork here and providing helpful commentary.

LOS ANGELES, CA | A World War II Sherman M4A3 military tank is on display promoting the World of Tanks from developer Wargaming.net outside of the Los Angeles Convention Center during Electronics Entertainment Expo on June 7, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Backbreaker's Team Checks In Again With Icebreaker

In real life, I skate like a waddling five-year-old forever on the verge of crapping his pants. In Icebreaker, I'm light on my feet, spinning, deking, and sprinting away from the bowel-loosening checks coming my way.
At the end of it all, there's a shot on goal that always goes in. More »

The Big Games, Big Gadgets, Big Surprises of E3

The promise of uncompromising gaming on the go, a sexy new console from the makers of the Wii and a robust line-up of must-have, must-play games topped this year's celebration of all things gaming in Los Angeles last week.
This year's E3 kicked off early last week with a look at what the makers of... More »

Can the Swedish Super-Gamer Conquer Kid Icarus 3DS? Yes He Can.

In the first of three videos I shot of Kid Icarus: Uprising at E3, you can see here the efforts of one Swedish super-gamer who was making his third attempt to conquer the previously-unconquerable third level of the game's E3 demo. More »

These Postcards Are Lousy With Midichlorians

I found these eight postcards at Lucas Arts's E3 backstage meeting room, a place that was also home to a tiny museum and playable copy of Kinect Star Wars.
Enjoy. More »

Watch Me Fail at Super Mario 3DS Over and Over and Over and Over and...

Super Mario 3DS is a wonderful, difficult, though not too surprising, Mario experience.
It delivers the joy of maneuvering Nintendo's titular Mario through a colorful world of moving blocks, anthropomorphic enemies, power-ups and coins. More »

The Long Path to Discovering that God Hand is Awesome

How great was God Hand, a 2006 PlayStation 2 game that IGN gave a 3.0 out of 10 to? Very, very great, Kotaku reader Bondage Zombie finally realized. And with that eureka he has sworn off looking at review scores, as he explains in today's Speak Up on Kotaku. More »

Hitman Absolution In One Sexy Brochure

Hitman Absolution was one of many of the games I saw at E3 that impressed me not only with its new take on an old formula, but in the new story it was trying to tell and the character it was trying to refresh.
Here's a look at the sleek brochure the IO Interactive was handing out during their demos. More »

Fallon Kicks Off Gaming Week Tonight With Modern Warfare 3

Video Game Week kicks off on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon tonight on NBC with the help of Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling who will be playing Modern Warfare 3 with writer and actor Simon Pegg. More »

In Defense of Duke Nukem Forever

Who is Duke Nukem, and why-after all of these years-are we still talking about him? One of our readers has described him as a "character that people actually love or hate. More »

Ubisoft Struggles To Explain How Powerful the Wii U Is

As you can imagine, many reporters had questions about the Wii U's hardware, relative to the PS3 and Xbox 360. One of the few people who actually provided some answers was Ubisoft Quebec's senior technical architect Marc Parenteau, who was brought in to discuss a Wii U Assassin's Creed at a... More »

More than 45,000 people are expected to attend the annual three-day convention to see the latest games and announcements from the gaming industry. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The creative force previously behind Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive series, now on the upcoming Devil's Third, Tomonobu Itagaki, says he has wanted to make games since he was a teenager. He just didn't want to make video games.

The man better known for his fast-paced, reflex-based action games told Kotaku in a recent interview that he grew up hoping to work on the plodding, strategic war games of his youth. These are the games played not on a console or computer, but with paper, dice and pencil. Itagaki, a military buff, says he "stayed up all night" during his elementary and middle school years playing tactical war games, hoping to make it his career.

"I wanted to be a designer of these kinds of games," Itagaki said of the genre. "But there was an industry that destroyed my dream: video games."

Itagaki said that in order to get a sense for his tastes and his passion for war simulation, "I want your readers to check out the following games. They're really fun."

Without further ado, here are four of Tomonobu Itagaki's favorite war games from the 1970s to 1980s.

Advanced Squad Leader by Avalon Hill
A "tactical-level board wargame," that simulates actions of company or battalion size set in World War II. Map boards are "divided into hexagons to regulate fire and movement, and depict generic terrain that can represent different historical locations." Counters "depict squads of soldiers, crews, individual leaders, support weapons, heavy weapons, and vehicles."

War in Europe by Simulation Publishing International
The massive War in Europe—it boasts a 46 square foot map—is "a corps/division level simulation designed to recreate the massive campaigns of 1939 to 1945."

Assault: Boots and Saddles by Game Designers' Workshop
The modern warfare wargame module focuses on "Air Cavalry in the 80's." The description reads: "In order to simulate the modern battlefield on a tactical level, a game must cover both hardware and the human element in detail. Assault includes all the latest technology from Chobham armor to Copperhead, as well as simple but realistic command control and morale rules."

Ambush! by Victory Games
Itagaki specifically mentioned the Ambush! module Purple Heart, but the official description of the core game is: "Ambush! is the solitaire game of combat, adventure, and heroism in World War Two France. Using a ground-breaking development of the programmed paragraph solitaire system, Ambush! gives the player control of an American squad, faced with a variety of missions against an ever-changing, hidden German foe. The variable events, innumerable tactical options, and wealth of unexpected occurrences make Ambush! a solitaire gaming experience unlike any that has gone before. The easily learned rules are specially designed to get the player into the action within minutes. The player selects and arms his squad, providing each soldier with command and initiative ratings, perception, weapons skill, driving skill, and movement capability. After selecting one of the eight missions provided, the player sends his squad into a mission map to conduct operations called for in the mission. Soldiers move freely, as far as the player wishes, checking for events each time they move...until the sequenced action rounds are triggered by the whine of German bullets!"

Though Mr. Itagaki chose to continue working on high speed action video games, he's since moved on to the Western-influenced shooter genre with Devil's Third. Why? For a simple reason: "I picked a shooter because it sells, but also because I want to show my own originality."

"I know a lot about wars," Itagaki explained. "I thought that I could bring something new to this genre, so that's why I started working on Devil's Third."

Prior to E3, as details of the next Wii were becoming clear, I had a dream that I could play the games on Nintendo's next console in my bathroom.

The idea is that the Wii 2—which we now know will be called the Wii U—can stream games that normally run on your TV onto the controller's 6.2-inch screen. No longer would you have to stop gaming just because your TV was no longer available. The Wii 2, I dreamed, would be the game console that would let me keep gaming, using the controller's screen, while taking a bathroom break!

I dreamed too ambitiously, it seems.

"I don't know how far away your bathroom is," Nintendo's Katsuya Eguchi told me, as I bothered the lead creator of the Animal Crossing series and of several upcoming Wii U projects with my bathroom brainstorm.

I suggested that he stop by my house to see, which he laughed in a manner that allowed me to feel as if he was amused by my response and not creeped out by it.

I clarified: Can we use the Wii U controller to run a game even if we've stepped away from the TV?

"The thought is you'll be playing in the same room that the base console is in," he said. And, sure enough, Eguchi's Wii U demos, multiplayer shorts like Chase Mii and Battle Mii are quite fun when you're playing in the same room as your opponents, the rest of whom use Wii Remotes and the TV, while you play off of the controller.

So, unless you move your console into your bathroom or move your toilet into your living room—and why not, considering the Kinect required us to rearrange our couches?—there will be no Wii U gaming on the toilet. At least none confirmed. Naturally, I'll still try it. I'll stretch that wireless streaming through my living room wall, if I can. And if you get a Wii U, I'm sure you will as well.

I'll have more from Eguchi on the Wii U in the coming days...

Sony is trying to make 3D gaming on its PlayStation 3 more affordable with its very own PlayStation branded, stereoscopic 3D monitor—comparatively cheap at just $500 USD for 24 inches of 3D gaming. Better still is the monitor's ability to deliver full-screen gaming to two players at once.

Sony's "official 3D Display," due this fall, can output two screen displays to two viewers, if they're wearing active shutter lens 3D glasses, effectively eliminating the need for a bisected screen. One pair of glasses is included in the bundle shipping later this year, along with an HDMI cable and a copy of Resistance 3. Sony plans to sell additional pairs of 3D glasses for $70 USD each.

The company's E3 2011 booth had the 3D Display on hand, running a looped video of games like Wipeout HD and Motorstorm Apocalypse running in dual-display mode. Kotaku intern Drew Cohen and I strapped on the 3D glasses and watched the tech prove itself. It worked, delivering two distinct images separated visually by the lenses we were wearing. We could switch between the two images on the fly—and while I won't speak for Drew—making for an impressive, immersive display.

There was some hint of ghosting, meaning I could see light traces of the secondary image displayed in tandem with the one I was watching. That said, it was a feasible solution, as the ghosting was not distracting, especially in a high-speed racing game. I'm not fan of splitscreen, so its something I'd prefer.

Sony says that games will require software updates to work with the new official 3D Display's dual-screen output, which given the publisher's push for 3D support, I'd expect to see plenty of (at least on the first party side).

I also got a chance to listen to the monitor's built-in speakers while watching an Uncharted 3 trailer in stereoscopic 3D. They sounded good when I could separate the din of E3 2011 from the audio streaming from the television. We'll have to spend a bit more time with the thing when the display ships later this year.

Who is Duke Nukem, and why—after all of these years—are we still talking about him? One of our readers has described him as a "character that people actually love or hate. Or feel something about. As opposed to military personnel (1) and (1a)." In a sea of "blandness," according to the reader, the Duke is something to be excited about—outdated graphics and overlong loading screens be damned.

When Stephen Totilo posted his impressions of Duke Nukem Forever on Sunday afternoon, the response was dizzying. It consisted of nearly a thousand comments, forming a labyrinth of impressions almost as daunting and erratic as Forever's decade-plus development period. One recurring argument stood out amongst all the rest: the Duke's fans love him not in spite of, but because of his being an anachronism of epic proportions.

Reader evilmajikman chimed in to remind us that Duke Nukem Forever was never supposed to be playing in the same ballpark as Call of Duty or Halo.

Honestly I find all the criticisms on this pretty stupid. Like people hating on it for not being the most advanced shooter, well no shit its not the most advanced shooter. It was never supposed to be.

I am sick and tired of shooters being nailed as bad games for being too different than Call of Duty or any generic war first person shooters. Take Aliens vs Predators for example. It was exactly what it was supposed to be. Aliens fighting Preds.

Another commenter, Ian Paul Freeeley, was content with a Duke title that simply did what it was going to do, even if in doing so it failed to turn the gaming world on its head.

Not every game needs to be made into some highly critically praised blockbuster. Besides, a lot of that shit gets too much credit for its own good anyhow. I'll take this over Call of Duty any day of the week. Pitchford's crew did a noble thing by finishing this, and it's an ode to old school gamers around the world.

Perhaps Duke Nukem Forever is a victim of a lousy port-job to the Xbox 360; commenter richjdonato isn't alone in suggesting that the game is far better when played on the PC.

Sure this game was never going to be GotY material but the complaints I hear of long load times, bad graphics, bad AI. All I can say is play it on the PC. None of those problems exist. My games take a total of 5 - 8 seconds max to load. After dying I have maybe a 4 second screen. Consoles is why your DNF experience is bad. As for the bad AI, well I havn't noticed anything bad and it seems like the stock standard enemy AI that has been used for every single FPS since Half-Life boosted the enemies to attack, run away and throw grenades.

Some readers, like Arctic Tabasco, have argued that by peeling away some of the sub-par workmanship and graphical shoddiness, Forever is, at core, a perfectly competent game.

Without a shadow of a doubt, there is a full, enjoyable game here, that will take a good while to finish as well. And at no point did I feel they padded the thing out with unnecessary levels. The weapons are the good ol' friends you had way back in Duke 3D with a couple alien weapon additions, the aliens are the same motherfuckers as back then (though some have learned some new tricks), there's lots of different things to "fuck around" with (pinball machines, porn mags, answering machines, vending machines etc etc.), and the babes are pure exploitation material. This game is pretty much what I expected it to be - Duke Nukem 3D gameplay with modern graphics.

A reader called Muel made an especially eloquent argument in defense of some of Forever's gameplay mechanics.

This is when the game starts to remember it's meant to be a fun shooter as well as just being Duke. The enemy patterns aren't as predictable, with more space to move around. The weapons have real bite and punch to them, in particular the excellent shotgun and the Assault Commander laser (with its odd gatling gun spin-up time, but relatively low rate of fire). There's a real fluidity to the combat as you duck and weave to take down the enemy groups. Some enemies engage from the front, others teleport around you, forcing you to run and gun; there are different options and you aren't just in a shooting gallery any more. It's far better than the first part of the game and, despite the ropey graphics, manages to be exciting to play.

It even—occasionally—feels emergent in a Killzone or Halo sort of way.

And what about the violence and the chauvinism, the exploding women and microwaved rats? Are these lines that—in the gaming climate of 2011—ought not to be crossed? A reader going by 0LunarEclipse0 had some rather big thoughts on this particular quandary.

No there are no lines. Duke pushes lines always has always will. Just because you can't handle shock humor does not make it not funny. Everything can be funny. I've laughed at some of the most racist and disgusting jokes. Maybe that makes me a horrible person. But that is fine. I am tired of people's delicate sensibilities. Rape, Murder, Drugs. We see it all in games, movie and books. Sometimes these mediums make jokes out of them. This is nothing new. You sit there and cry and I laugh. Sorry shock humor is funny. Just because something pushes you to far doesn't mean it pushes everyone to far. NOTHING is off limits. Not rape, murder, religion or politics. Nothing should ever be off limits. If we sacrifice freedom we sacrafice life.

The very fact that this offends you is more truth that it should be defended. Because you want it silenced. Censored. Well freedom means free. Regardless of how much something offends you, we can say and do what we want. Because your feelings don't matter.

I don't support rape and this joke goes a little to far even for me. But I beleive in freedom. So nothing ever should be off limits.

Okay, so maybe you don't agree that how a person feels about Duke Nukem Forever is a good barometer of that same person's attitude toward the idea of "freedom." But being a fan isn't necessarily about being logical or objective. Of all of the sentiments I stumbled across in the still-expanding thread, the words of a reader going by Nivenus—in which they likened a fanboy to a person defending the honor of a family member—were the most insightful.

A fine analogy might be between a family member and a friendly acquaintance. You enjoy the company of the latter, but you've got nothing invested there and you're far more willing to stand up for and defend the former than you are the latter. The same thing is true for a fan and their favored series/genre - they'll stick up for it when someone who is only casually fond wouldn't.

The difference between a good game and a great game is that a great game is enjoyable by fans and non-fans alike. The mistake you're making is assuming that anyone who isn't a fan is an anti-fan, someone who dislikes the game off the bat. But that's not true. There's a middle ground and it's the middle ground that great art wins over.

Fans of Duke Nukem Forever may not be arguing that the title constitutes high art—but that isn't stopping them from enjoying it.

"We just needed some fun," wrote commentor Obi_Al_Kenobi. This game need[s] to be reviewed not against 90's standards, but [as] a standalone product [come back] from the 90's to complete the circle that now is closed."

The scurvy dogs aboard the SS Lulz have raided Bethesda Softwork's servers after unsuccessfully trying to extort game info out of them. Ah well. They've also released a bunch of internal data from the US Senate's website for further giggling.

The Bethesda attack centered around FPS title Brink, from which LulzSec plundered over 200,000 user accounts. From there, they went straight at Bethesda:

After mapping their internal network and thoroughly pillaging all of
their servers, we grabbed all their source code and database passwords, which we proceeded to shift silently back to our storage deck.

The server data's out in the open, but Lulz is keeping the Brink user info private for now.

All of this because they wanted more information about Skyrim. I mean, I guess it looks pretty good, but, uh.

And then there's the Senate leak. The "small hack" of Senate.gov—which appears to be a dump of the site's root directory—is basically just a mammoth list of file names, including such crazy gems as "The_Senate_Chamber_Desks.htm" and "yellow_warbler.jpg." Nothing that will compromise national security, but an embarrassment to the government's ability to safeguard itself, for sure. And no mention of how they got in to begin with.

But why the US Senate? They don't have any information on Skyrim, do they? LulzSec explains:

We don't like the US government very much. Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren't very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we've decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more!

Oh, well alright. It's going to be a late night for a couple of IT teams in the DC area. [LulzSec]