The new trailer for Dark Souls comes with a simple warning: Prepare to die.

This warning, of course, serves two purposes. Not only is it for your character, who you can see coming up against creature after creature, but it also refers to the gameplay itself, which promises to be even harder than Demon's Souls.

Good Luck surviving.

We've talked about the games, about the cosplay, the camping and the crowds. But no single story or set of photos can truly encapsulate all that is the world's biggest video game show.

Here's a look at the show through the organizer's own camera lens. Don't forget to click on the bottom right of each image to see if full size.

Creating a memorable shirt design can be difficult, but this one will stick with me for a long time. Whether I want it to or not.

"The Gamer," a hairy creation by powerpig, shows us that gaming is not just skin deep. Look deep into his d-pad eyes and see into the eyes of madness. Or maybe it's just an awesome gamer image, either way. Love it or find it creepy, it's a compelling image. "The Gamer" is currently being sold on The Yetee, who only keep up new designs for 96 hours, so the clock is ticking. You don't want to disappoint...the Gamer.

"The Gamer" T-Shirt [The Yetee]

In the year 2000, Ion Storm unleashed the perfect marriage of futuristic shooter and skill-based role-playing in Deus Ex, a game so unique that even its own sequel couldn't replicate its success. Can any follow-up possibly do it justice?

Deus Ex: Invisible War took the award-winning formula established in the first game and dumbed it down to the point where even Mass Effect 2 fans could play it. Players that reveled in the complicated skill advancement of the original were offended. Game reviewers were disappointed. It felt like the end of the Deus Ex series. Judging by the review scores rolling in for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we're lucky that wasn't the case.

You can read a chart, so you can tell the game is good, but why is it good? For that we turn to the assembled (as in brought together, not manufactured from parts) video game reviewers.

Gaming Age
Deus Ex is one of those franchise titles that's never had a great showing on consoles. The PS2 port of the original wasn't very good, and the Xbox port of the sequel was equally disappointing for me. Thankfully Human Revolution, the third game in the series coming from Eidos Montreal, doesn't follow suit. In fact, it's a pretty damn good prequel to the Deus Ex world in general, and an exceptionally well made game to boot. Like most, I was a bit hesitant to think that anyone could capture what I enjoyed about the original Deus Ex nearly a decade after its release. The sequel in '03 certainly couldn't do it, and if Duke Nukem Forever showed us anything, it's that maybe some old franchises are better left dead. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked Deus Ex: Human Revolution though, and I think a lot of gamers will be as well.

Eurogamer
Sometimes, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is just the best Deus Ex tribute act ever. You can still save the world by crouching behind desks and hacking into people's email if you want, but it doesn't judge you if you want to do something else for a bit. In fact, it rewards you. It gives you an XP bonus for not being seen, but it also gives you an XP bonus for brutally incapacitating two guards on patrol with the same takedown. There is no wrong kind of progress, there's just success. It would be nice if more of the games that wished they were Deus Ex treated us like that.

Joystiq
While the Mass Effect series sheds its stats and inventories in favor of forging an intelligent, emotionally driven shooter, Deus Ex: Human Revolution examines and embraces the structure of Ion Storm's 11-year-old classic, Deus Ex: Didn't Have a Subtitle. Environments don't exist to funnel you through perfectly scripted events — they're complicated, multi-tiered stacks of obvious and hidden pathways. And Adam Jensen, a stoic security manager who returns from dramatic near-death as a grumpy cyborg, can warp himself biologically to accommodate those routes. There is perhaps no greater proof that this is a role-playing game, however, than the ability to conclude just about every conversation by punching your quest giver into an unconscious rag doll.

IGN
Human Revolution takes cues from futuristic cyberpunk fiction, but it finds an identity in the past. The color palate eschews the blues of more pedestrian depictions of the future for a look that borrows from European painters like Titian and Rembrandt. There are visual references to the Italian Renaissance everywhere - from architecture, to fashion and body armor, and to the ornate construction of augments themselves. These artificial limbs don't look manufactured; they seem wrought by blacksmiths and artisans, crafted like the clockwork machina of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. There's so much care and consideration obvious in Human Revolution's look and style and execution that it's easy to forgive some of the game's genuinely uglier spots – see many of its less important NPCs and their botox faces, and a spotty framerate here and there, for example.

Edge Magazine
Even Bethesda's RPGs, with their malleable skillsets and open worlds, rarely allow players such dominion over the environment – even if, with Human Revolution, that dominion is often prescribed in the convenient design of ventilation systems. But it's the way that your larger decisions trickle down through these low-level choices that makes the game remarkable and unique for each player. A decision to help a victim of extortion means that we end up spending half a day experimenting with different non-lethal methods to neutralise pockets of security without alerting the entire Heng Sha police force, just so we can break into a few lockups without harassment and find funds for the side-mission. Our multi-stage solution involving the split-second juggling of tranquilliser darts, dual-takedowns and invisibility is obscenely cool, a heist sequence of such fluidity and audaciousness that it would look the part in a Chris Nolan film, although we suspect he might have got the action in the can in a smaller number of takes.

Destructoid
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, like its augmented hero, is a step above its mundane peers. With its flowing, open approach to mission structure, thoroughly engrossing story and gorgeous visuals, this is the kind of game that all others should strive to be. While there are some elements that don't feel quite as developed as they should have been, and augmentation is more Hobson's choice than true choice, Human Revolution provides a level of quality that only the most adamant cynic could fail to be impressed by. More importantly, it is everything a fan of Deus Ex could want in a game, and it effortlessly embraces the arduous task of living up to the legacy, standing next to its 2000 predecessor and holding its head up in pride. This game is truly deserving of the name Deus Ex. In fact, there's no other name it could have had.

The first game collaboration between Square Enix and Airtight Games will be revealed at a PAX panel this Saturday, 7:00 PM PST. The panel will feature former Valve developer, Kim Swift. Kotaku is covering everything PAX, so check back regularly!

If there are any universal rules or golden constants by which the game industry is governed, one of them is surely this: Never count Nintendo out.

It is not an exaggeration to call the Kyoto firm the world leader in video game production. They have sold more video game hardware than anybody else (Nintendo dominates the top-selling console list; the DS is the best selling game system of all time), their software is among the best in the industry (Metacritic suggests that the only game superior to Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 is GTA 4), and they are one of the few giants in this industry that is willing to take risks.  

Nintendo does occasionally stumble. Their attempts at digital distribution and online games have, thus far, been infantile compared to Microsoft and even Sony, and they can't be happy about dropping the price of the 3DS by $80 only a few months after launch. Their Wii U announcement earlier this year was met with a lot of head scratching, and they recently reported their first quarterly loss since 2004.

But whatever you do, never, ever count Nintendo out.

Nintendo can't be ignored because they are fundamentally different than the other large game industry companies.  They take risks no other company would take, from the PowerPad to the original GameBoy to the Virtual Boy to the DS, Wii and now WiiU.  Sometimes these experiments fail, but mostly they do not.

When Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata announced Nintendogs and Brain Age, two games that resemble nothing else in the industry and are arguably not even games, the incredulity felt by the developer community was palpable. Many developers had a good chuckle over Nintendo's utter cluelessness.  Nintendogs and Brain Age went on to sell over 20 million units apiece, putting them both in the top 20 best selling games of all time (a list which, by the way, contains only one non-Nintendo title, GTA: San Andreas). To put that in perspective, Brain Age has been sold more times since 2006 than The Grapes of Wrath since its first publication in 1937 (Bookrags.com estimates the novel has sold "more than 15 million" copies).  

The key difference between Nintendo and Sony or Microsoft is that they build hardware around their games, rather than the other way around. This approach often results in hardware that is hard to pin down at first. People had no idea what to do with the DS' two screens until Nintendo showed them; they had no clue how motion control was going to work until Wii Sports proved it.  Right now I'm sure people are struggling to understand the benefit of the weirdo controller that is the main selling point of the Wii U, but I'm confident that it's a design that was prompted by the needs of a game.

Nintendo is best when they do this sort of crazy risk-taking. Sony and Microsoft sure aren't going to do it. Nintendo falters when they do not take enough risk; the Nintendo 64 suffered from their decision to stick with cartridge-based media, the GameCube was too conservative, and the Virtual Boy was just a bad product.  The problem with the 3DS is that it's only an incremental improvement over the DS, and so far there hasn't really been any of that compelling first-party content to back it up.  I think we'll see what happens to that console this Christmas; all it really takes is a few great games to give the rest of the industry confidence in the platform.

So it is unwise to bet against Nintendo.  This year hasn't been great for them, but to count them out now would be a very foolish mistake.

That said, at Robot Invader we are not interested in developing for Nintendo platforms, at least not at the moment.  Nor, for that matter, are we interested in Sony or Microsoft consoles.  We believe that the era of traditional consoles is coming to a close.

I recently wrote an article about how the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY has the potential to change the game industry.  It's a long article, but the point is this: when phones are as fast as consoles, the only reason to keep a console around is for the buttons on the controller. If phones with buttons like the PLAY succeed, I think the market for consoles will vanish. It will be increasingly difficult for console manufactures to differentiate themselves from your average smartphone as the quality of smartphones improves, and it's improving at a breakneck pace. Nintendo wasn't even able to be first to market with a 3D screen for the 3DS; an Android phone in Japan with a similar screen shipped a few months before the 3DS launch. I look at the Playstation Vita and I see hardware that will be in phones extremely soon, perhaps even before the Vita itself launches. The business model for consoles for the last few decades has been about selling hardware that could be stretched out over a multi-year lifespan, and in the face of rapidly improving phone and tablet technology that model is no longer viable.

We're in the middle of a transitional moment where the console makers must struggle to remain relevant. The internet is like a plague of locusts, spreading over traditional business models and eating them alive, and if consoles do not change they too will fall. Iwata has talked about "preserving the value" of video games (by which he means the existing pricing structure), but I don't think value is something that any single company is able to control. Once there's a market for similar content at much lower cost, traditional $40 – $60 games start to look pretty expensive.  How can any hardware company compete with a platform that does more and has more content for less?

One solution might be to try to adapt existing technologies to weather this storm; I think Microsoft is headed in this direction with their Xbox Live integration in Windows Phone 7.  Another approach might be to stick it out and hope for the best; this seems to be Sony's idea with the Vita (though, large company as they are, they are also part of the swarm with their various Android devices).

The question in my mind is this: how will Nintendo respond?

Of the three console makers I think the big N is the best positioned to survive this transition.  Their hardware is unique and can succeed without being the most technically brilliant box on the shelf.  Their (game) software is amazing, and their brand power is unbeatable.  But as a company with a lot of pride, I am sure that Nintendo is not content to simply develop for somebody else's device.  Guessing what Nintendo will do next is always tough, but whatever they decide to do will help shape the future of game development.

Make no mistake: Nintendo isn't down for the count. In fact, if there's one company to keep an eye on as the game industry shifts to new types of platforms, it's Nintendo. Developing for consoles doesn't make any sense for a studio like Robot Invader right now, but who knows which companies will stand out in the post-console world? I bet the big N does alright.

The Minecraft folks have teamed up with Mackapar Films to make...something. PigTales, the resulting website, features a customizable video of Minecraft pig sock puppets. You make up dialog, then post to the site. We're still not sure why. [PigTales]

In today's thrilling episode of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Vezroth explains why people need to stop getting angry when every other massively multiplayer online game in the world is compared to World of Warcraft.

I am, and have been a consistent World of Warcraft player since the Burning Crusade expansion. Vanilla I played off and on, but never really got into it heavy. In Vanilla the highest I ever got was a level 40 Undead Warlock. That's beside the point.

I am tired, very, very tired of people complaining about how MMOs are compared to WoW. There is a reason for it. It has now become the description of a genre. Like someone else mentioned, it defines the MMO at large. When you say MMO to someone they'll likely say WoW. Reverse time 8 years... or 9 years. What was the game that EVERYONE knew was an MMO? What defined the genre before WoW existed? Everquest. Same idea. Stop getting pissed off people when they compare one game to the next.

Rift? Compared to WoW because they are similar. Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, all MMOs in recent years have been modeled after WoW because the game was — simply put — SUCCESSFUL. You do NOT break with a good thing. You give it a new face, some new innovation, and hope that it takes on a life of its own.

MMOs are like old cities, or civilizations. They are built on the bones and blocks of those that came before. WoW was built on the bones of Everquest. Taking the most successful parts of it, throwing in a splash of some of the most amazing story-telling in a long history of games and coming out with something (although not entirely unique) was compelling. Much more compelling than Everquest was, much more accessible. 12 million people kind of accessible.

Soon. Maybe not next year, maybe not this game, maybe not even Rift, (which has been growing in popularity) a new civilization will rise up. Building on the tools that made WoW such an incredibly successful game. Is it possible Blizzard will be the crafter of this success? Maybe. but mark my words here and now. When the game is made that defeats WoW, it will become the new definition of an MMO.

MMO: World of Warcraft.
FPS: Halo. (Synonyms: Call of Duty, Gears of War, Doom, etc, etc.)
RTS: Starcraft. (Synonyms: Warcraft, DOTA, Command and Conquer)
RPG: Final Fantasy.
Rail Shooter: Panzer Dragoon.
Beat 'em Up: God of War.

When you think of a genre. You ALL think of one title first. As gamers, when we explain a title to someone that may, or may not have played it we use simplifications. It's natural. Stop being pissed off.

The kid started a New Game+ mode in the celebrated summer indie game Bastion. He bought himself the Gel Canister and spawned some mean turrets from Aperture Science.

He told himself he was only seeing this because he was now in the Steam version of the game, the one that came out last week, the one that seems to have gotten this extra bauble to enhance the quality of Supergiant Games' hit, just a little more.

Bastion - Gel Canister (Turret Opera - Secret 13th Achievement) (SPOILERS) [YouTube, Thanks James!]

Xenoblade Chronicles is out in English right now, but Nintendo of America doesn't seem keen to let North American's play it, so they can't. Not unless they import a copy from Europe and follow Joystiq's guide for soft modding Nintendo's Wii to play imports.

Joystiq's step-by-step guide takes Wii owners through installing the Wii Homebrew Channel (it's an ever-changing process), installing a custom OS to run the game, and even takes things a step further, explaining how to set up the Wii to run games directly off a USB hard disk. They've even got some suggestions on where to import a copy of what many are calling the greatest Japanese role-playing game of the current generation.

Of course there are caveats here. You're messing with your Wii system software, for one, and there's always the chance you could screw something up. And while the article reminds Wii owners time and time again how horrible piracy is, the process does allow for the downloading and playing of games from the internet without a physical copy.

But if you've got the self-control and the means to purchase an imported copy of Xenoblade Chronicles, this is definitely one way to do it.

How to play Xenoblade Chronicles if you live in America [Joystiq]