Nintendo just dropped 75 new tiny 3DS screens on us for the upcoming, very-fun-to-play, Super Mario 3D Land. So we turned them into a video and added... disco! Why not? OK, all reasonable answers. But I did it anyway. :D

Super Mario 3D Land hits stores Nov. 13. I had a chance to play through all of the first world earlier this week and really enjoyed it. I'll be writing my thoughts up a bit later today.

Until then enjoy the images.

In today's final and fantastic episode of Speak up on Kotaku, commenter Paradox Me has an absolutely brilliant idea for Square Enix: Trash the failed MMO and recycle its assets for a new single player Final Fantasy game.

Why is Final Fantasy XIV so goddamn pretty and why can't we get this style in a single player Final Fantasy? I'm tired of the futuristic stuff, Square.

Just can XIV already, give Naoki Yoshida's team the green light for a single player Final Fantasy XV (recycling XIV's art direction), have Akihiko Yoshida do the art/character designs, find yourselves a good writer (maybe work something out with Yasumi Matsuno/Level-5) and then pretend to be surprised when your game sells well and is received well by fans.

Huntington, New Yorkers spend more than four times the average amount of video games, according to a recent study by credit card spending tracker Bundle.

The study looked at spending at GameStop, EB Games and Steam from July 2010 to June 2011 for the top 100 cities in the U.S. by population. Bundle based their study on aggregated, anonymized spending data from 20 million Visa and Mastercard customers. So that means that the results are impacted heavily by the sorts of people who have a credit card and use it for purchases regularly. But it's still an interesting study.

Here's the full list of the top 50 cities that spend the most on video games, check out Bundle for some other interesting facts about gamers.

Click on the bottom right of the image to see it full sized.

1. Huntington, New York
2. North Hempstead, New York
3. Laredo, Texas
4. Chesapeake, Virginia
5. Modesto, California
6. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
7. El Paso, Texas
8. Cincinnati, Ohio
9. Buffalo, New York
10. Virginia Beach, Virginia
11. Rochester, New York
12. Birmingham, Alabama
13. Miami, Florida
14. Honolulu, Hawaii
15. Toledo, Ohio
16. Baton Rouge, Louisiana
17. Corpus Christi, Texas
18. Plano, Texas
19. Fresno, California
20. St. Louis, Missouri
21. San Antonio, Texas
22. Wichita, Kansas
23. Montgomery, Alabama
24. Tulsa, Oklahoma
25. Hialeah, Florida
26. Riverside, California
27. Lubbock, Texas
28. San Bernardino, California
29. Fort Worth, Texas
30. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
31. Fort Wayne, Indiana
32. Bakersfield, California
33. Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky
34. Chula Vista, California
35. Albuquerque, New Mexico
36. Akron, Ohio
37. Jacksonville, Florida
38. Greensboro, North Carolina
39. Tucson, Arizona
40. Raleigh, North Carolina
41. Stockton, California
42. Arlington, Texas
43. Durham, North Carolina
44. Long Beach, California
45. Chandler, Arizona
46. Lincoln, Nebraska
47. Anchorage, Alaska
48. New York, New York
49. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
50. Aurora, Colorado

Game-obsessed: U.S. cities that spend the most on video games

There are new comics to buy each week, and, as always, I have some suggestions...

Comics You Should Consider Buying (from comics shops)

Action Comics #2 Grant Morrison continues his tale of the re-booted Superman, back when Superman was young and an anti-authority super-hero activist. Morrison's first issue was superb.

Animal Man #2 One of the critical darlings of DC's New 52 back for another issue. Official summary: "Maxine's new abilities continue to terrify Ellen and Buddy Baker, and things take a turn for the worse as Buddy begins a startling transformation of his own that will lead him on a journey into the heart of The Red. Meanwhile, The Hunters Three arrive on Earth and set their sights on the Baker family. The Hunt is on as DC's most surprising new series continues to take Animal Man in shocking new directions."

Avengers 1959 #1 One of comics' best, grittiest, bawdiest writer-artists, Howard Chaykin, begins his mini-series about 1950s'era Avengers.

Chew #21 You people love your Chew. There's a new one out (sorry, I still haven't read past the first issue). Official summary: "Baseball, Hot Dogs and Apple Pie, Part One... Mike Applebee's good day, Tony Chu's first day and John Colby's last day. An issue of beginning and endings, as we head into the fifth story arc of the multi-Eisner award nominated series about cops, crooks, cooks, cannibals, clairvoyants and...meter maids?"

Last of the Greats #1 A week ago, I wouldn't have cared, but then I read writer Josh Fialkov's shockingly good DC New 52 comic I, Vampire. Suddenly, I'm interested in his work and he's got this new book out for Image. Official summary: "There were seven, possessing the power of gods, and representing all that could be right with the world. But now... he is the Last. As humanity stands on the brink of annihilation, he is our only hope. And he hates us for what we've done."

Swamp Thing #2 Another new issue from one the best New 52 DC books. Official summary: "Alec Holland thought he knew the history of the Swamp Thing—but he was wrong. The creature's roots run deeper than he knows, and the Parliament of Trees intends to make him understand the responsibility he wants so desperately to avoid! With this issue, the mythology of the Swamp Thing branches out in ways you never saw coming - don't miss it!"

X-Men Schism #5 Final issue of the best Big Event book of the year. Official summary: "After years of fighting side-by-side the X-Men are torn irrevocably in half. On one side, X-Men team leader, Cyclops. On the other, X-Men mainstay, Wolverine. Between them lies the fate of mutantkind, and surrounding them, the foes who want to end them forever! Be there for the conclusion of the story that will set the stage for the X-Men universe for years to come, from Marvel Architect writer Jason Aaron and art legend Adam Kubert!"

X-Men by Chris Claremont & Jim Lee Omnibus, Volume 1
For a mere $125! Official summary: "What happens when you combine an industry veteran at the top of his game with a hot, up-and-coming young artist, and let them loose on Marvel's mightiest mutants? You get a fan-favorite, multi-year X-Men run unequaled in style, pizzazz and wall-to-wall action! It's Chris Claremont's most ambitious story arc ever, featuring Jim Lee's dynamic debut issues and major changes to the X-Men's status quo! Jubilee debuts just as the X-Men disband, granted new lives by the Siege Perilous! The Reavers enact gruesome revenge on Wolverine and decimate Muir Island, while Psylocke is transformed into a ninja! The Shadow King makes his play for Storm, culminating in the action-packed introduction of Gambit! Wolverine's hidden past with Captain America and the Black Widow is revealed! And this is just the first volume! Collecting Uncanny X-Men #244-269, X-Men Annual (1970) #13 and Classic X-Men #39."

Comics With Video Game Connections (new this week in comics shops)

Crysis #5 Official summary: "With the knowledge that their powerful nanosuits were made with stolen alien technology, Prophet and the members of Raptor Team head back to Earth to try and stop the alien Ceph from destroying mankind. But have they returned too late… or too soon?"

DC Universe Online Legends #15 Official summary: "Following the tragic events in the last issue, the heroes must pick up the pieces of a shattered League. With Superman AWOL and seeking revenge, will Lex Luthor be the hero of the day? And can anyone keep the Man of Steel from hunting down and killing Brainiac?"

Sonic the Hedgehog Archives, Vol. 16 Official summary: "The best-selling Sonic Archives graphic novel series continues! The hunt for the evil Ixis Naugus goes into full swing as Sonic and his best friend Tails continue the World Tour Saga! Can the power of friendship overrule the wills of interdimensional machine-gods? What is the sinister secret of Sand Blast City? And are those duck-bill platypus warriors riding crocodiles? Collects Sonic The Hedgehog #59-62."

And Over On The iPad/iPhone/Droid/WebBrowser…

The ComiXology Comics app and website offer a fresh batch of new and old digital comics this week (and as of this week, Marvel's are available on Comixology's website, instead of just on iOS… but still not on Droid). Highlights this week include any of the new DC super-hero books you're interested in and Marvel's Ultimate books, since they all hit ComiXology on the same day they come out in shops. Other notables include The Complete Essex County (Jeff Lemire's critically acclaimed graphic novels for just $15) and several issues of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up which paired Brian Michael Bendis with some wonderful artists.

And the best comic I read last week….

Wolverine #14 Not even the newest issue of writer Jason Aaron's excellent ongoing Wolverine series (there have been two since), but the one that caps off a story about a group of people who manage to successfully get revenge on Marvel's most popular X-Man.

I'd rather you read it yourself to see what happens—and I recommend you back up a few issues before that to enjoy the full impact. But let's just say that some folks whose loved ones were killed by Wolverine figure out how to make him feel some pain in a most unique way.

That's it for this week. Tell me what you're reading this week and which great comics I'm missing.

The world lost a great innovator and man yesterday with the death of Steve Jobs. At age 56, it is a death that most definitely came too soon. The loss will echo across multiple industries, but his legacy lives on, and Apple will make it through.

This makes me think though: what other losses have had profound effects on the industries you care about? What potential losses would greatly impact developments of the future? Mull that over if you'd like, or bring up anything else you wish, because it's time to talk amongst yourselves!

Many thanks to Snake56 for today's hilarious TAYpic! I especially like the use of the blue flare we know all too well. Good work!

Want to have your TAYpic featured here?

If you think you've got what it takes, or even if you don't, here's what to do: submit your images to #TAYpics. Keep submitting until you're out of good ideas, at which time, we recommend you keep submitting anyway. If you still need more instruction, check out this thread for details on how you can be a TAY superstar.

Good luck!

In, Mechanic Panic, you're an elevator maintenance guy on his worst and, inevitably, last day of the job. You will die. The question it poses is how will you choose to spend it? Saving your own skin? Or trying to save others?

Maybe that gives a little too much narrative credit to the game, an infinite wall-climbing sprint similar to Gravity Hook (or Canabalt, played vertically.) But every time I get wiped out by a piece of debris or a falling elevator car, I blame the fact I was trying to save a civilian plunging to his doom. Each time I skitter up the shaft and beat my old distance, I think about all the victims —who are given names, mind you—that I ignored.

Jeffrey Yim and Bernie Wong's Mechanic Panic is a one-touch game that has you ascending a never-ending elevator shaft after a repair goes wrong and sets of a huge explosion. You ascend somewhat parkour style, each tap catapulting you up diagonally to the opposite side. A giant fireball boils up from below, forcing you to keep moving. Debris and elevator cars fall from above; electrical wiring, steam pipes and fuel tanks on the sides of the shaft provide hazards and other course variables.

The point is to get as high as you can, with additional goals being either your score, or the experience points you acquire for doing things along the way. The top side job is rescuing falling civilians. As you're clinging to the side of the wall (provided you haven't been slicked with oil) you'll see a little exclamation point icon atop the screen, growing brighter as the victim nears. Time your jump right, and you'll intercept them as you leap to the opposite side. It's really not that hard.

Not in a single case it isn't. Long term, you can fall in love with your ability to time jumps and it takes patience to know when you can't make one. Die once and you are back to the start of the game (with an opening animation that, in Mechanic Panic's only shortcoming, needs to be skippable just so I can get back to the action, dammit.)

Hanging onto the side of the wall requires you to battle your own impatience. The fire coming up from beneath isn't always lapping at your toes. In the early goings I found myself waiting on a falling civilian, only to jump headlong into the path of a falling car just because of the hair-trigger instinct the game conditions in you. Mechanic Panic throws a lot of visual information at you suggesting that you move, move, move! but the real key to beating it is knowing that you have more time to make a decision than you think. And, sometimes, you can't save everyone.

In addition to falling obstacles, the hazards you face include exposed junction boxes that can knock out the lights, fuel tanks that loosen your grip and cause you to slide, and steam pipes that knock you loose. However, sometimes elevator cars will ride up. If you can latch on to the side of one, safely, you can hitch a ride up for a huge distance boost. Just pay attention to the hazard timer counting down from 10 so you know when to leap off.

In addition to the distance and score goals, the game will reward you with experience points that can be used for skill perks. You can also buy experience points outrights to boost your character, including a breathtaking $100 purchase of a million XP. I'm not sure I have ever seen an in-game purchase that large in a $1.99 game.

But by no means is buying XP necessary. You can have plenty of fun with repeated 700-meter escapes and multiple deaths and end up at level 20 in no time. The game is served by charming minimalist visuals and a driving techno soundtrack.

Mechanic Panic is very well suited for its platform and offers a winning, endlessly replayable game design that will help you kill a lot of time on your commute or a flight. For me, it evokes the days of the 1980s arcade games, when hardware limitations forced developers to surround simple short-burst gameplay concepts with some really zany premises. This one pulls it off very well and costs eight quarters.

Mechanic Panic [iTunes]

Half-Shell | NEW YORK: In 2007, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles visited the Empire State Building. (Photo: Marion Curtis | AP Photo/Warner Bros.)

There Are No Music Games. There Are Only Rhythm Ones.

PaRappa the Rapper designer Masaya Matsuura has been called the father of music games. Thing is, he doesn't believe there are music games.
"Strictly speaking I do not believe that 'Music Games' as a genre really exists yet," Matsuura recently told Kotaku. More »

Mario Kart 7 Screens Pull Up. Throw Turtle Shells.

This December, Mario Kart 7, which is actually the ninth Mario Kart, pulls off the line.
Mario Kart 7 features a new first-person mode, hang gliders, and new weapons. More »

In Which Your Favourite Video Games Become Beautiful Cartoons

Artist Gobeur has a neat calling card: she takes video games, sometimes gritty, sometimes less gritty, and makes images in which it looks like there's an expensive cartoon based on them. More »

Stupid-Looking 3DS Slide Pad Gets a Monster Box

Nintendo's dumb-looking and uncomfortable 3DS Slide Pad will be sold separately as well as bundled with Monster Hunter 3 (-tri) G.
Nintendo is releasing two Monster Hunter 3 (-tri) G bundles in Japan. More »

Don't Expect Red Dead Redemption to Ever Come Out On PC

Here is a list of Rockstar games from the past decade that have been, or are about to be, released on PC:
More »

The 3DS Now Comes In a Lovely Shade of White

Nintendo handheld colour change alert: come November 3, Japanese customers will be able to buy a 3DS in a shade called "Ice White".
It looks, pardon my French, shit hot. More »

Imagine the lovechild that would emerge from the coupling of, say, Epic's Gears of War and Zynga's Adventure World. You'd get all the gritty action and polished mechanics of a AAA game buoyed by a constant stream of updates and content. Daddy's eyes and mommy's brains, so to speak. And sequels? With a back-end where developers could create and respond to a game's community much faster than is currently possible, they'd become a thing of the past.

Now, those imaginings may sound like just so much wishful thinking, but Trion—creators of the hit massively multiplayer online game Rift—think that they've got the formula to usher in such a reality. Today, Trion's announcing Red Door, which they're calling both a new publishing/development initiative and a future online destination for gamers. On the development side, the company's looking to offer their technology and services in a bundle that they hope will be a standard like Unity or id Tech but with network support built right into the Red Door package. As for what the average gamer would get, Trion wants you to start thinking of Red Door as a Zynga for hardcore game experiences.

I spoke with Trion CEO Dr. Lars Buttler this week about what makes up Red Door and how it could change not just online games, but the entire industry. "Creativity in the business jumps when new consoles or better hardware hits," says Buttler. "What we're going to have with Red Door is a platform that's going to be continually refreshing and we think that's going to enable a lot of innovation." The colorful codename refers to the sum total of what makes Trion games like Rift work, components that they think are going to be essential to bring AAA quality experiences online in a successful way. What are those pieces, then? Buttler explains that the combo of HD graphics in an MMO environment, the ability to execute and massively scale up a variety of genres and an distributed server infrastructure that supports necessities like billing, customer support and content management.

Buttler uses the Trion games that are either out or in development as an example of how Red Door would work. He says that, in the six months since Rift launched, the fantasy gameworld's seen five major updates which have resulted in the current game having 25% more new features. That results in a stickier experience, with 1 billion quests completed by players over 1 trillion minutes of playtime, all as a result of a powerful ability to figure out what players want by watching how they play. Another Trion game, the Petroglyph-developed End of Nations, aims to prove that a game needn't be a WoW-style RPG experience to thrive as a massive multiplayer offering. When it comes out in early 2012, the massively multiplayer online strategy game will be attempting to assemble players from all over the world across broad, tactical battles. And with Defiance, the platform-agnostic shooter-MMO that Stephen Totilo saw at E3, Trion thinks they'll be delivering a real-time, action-heavy open world that also syncs up to an in-development SyFy TV series, where changes in one medium affect the other. Potential partners wouldn't be tied to the tech powering Trion's games, either. "You could re-write the Unreal engine, for example, to work in Red Door," Buttler says. And the PS3-vs-Xbox 360 magic possible with Defiance would work with other Red Door partner games, too. "We don't care about the end device or distribution network."

However, Buttler says it'd be wrong to focus on the technology. Rather, he observes, it's about what the technology makes possible. "Look at cable TV," Butler offers. "Cable created 25 years of growth in entertainment, because all of a sudden you had these pipes that could deliver new kinds of content. Sure, they started with making sure you could get broadcast network shows in areas where antennas weren't working, but then you got HBO and Showtime and AMC pushing the boundaries of what's possible on TV. You start with the basic and then you get to premium."

So, if social networks like Facebook are the broadband cable, then games like Cityville are the basic channels, at least in terms of content. Buttler sniffs at the kinds of experiences that lots of casual and social games offer nowadays but admits that "Facebook catalyzed a ton of new experiences and we want to do that for premium AAA games." "We want make them more live and more dynamic than the current model of social games where months go by and nothing changes," he continues. "Korean games don't change, for example. Everything takes too long to change, because the platforms aren't built to change. That same jump that cable catalyzed has to come to these social, connected game experiences."

With that jump, Buttler hopes, comes an end to too-safe sequels and watered-down interactivity. Red Door is "exactly what the industry frickin' needs to move forward." And, if you're a developer who's aware that the freemium model is the future but hates the experiences to be found there, "come talk to us," Buttler says. "We want to enable risk-taking again." If you look at the Trion logo, there's always been a door in the "I". "But now," the company founder says, "we're starting to open it and see what's on the other side."

This December, Mario Kart 7, which is actually the ninth Mario Kart, pulls off the line.

Mario Kart 7 features a new first-person mode, hang gliders, and new weapons. It also features Mario. He's not new, but that's okay. We love him.

PaRappa the Rapper designer Masaya Matsuura has been called the father of music games. Thing is, he doesn't believe there are music games.

"Strictly speaking I do not believe that 'Music Games' as a genre really exists yet," Matsuura recently told Kotaku. "We just have 'Rhythm Games.'"

This isn't the first time Matsuura has said this, but it's worth bringing up again, due to the broad brush strokes that rhythm games are painted with. Matsuura, a musician himself, is acutely aware of the difference between music and rhythm.

Before Matsuura made classic titles like PaRappa and Vib-Ribbon, he was a recording artist with Sony, releasing numerous albums and playing stadiums.

Matsuura's music, such as "Angel Night", was used for anime and TV dramas.

Currently, Matsuura and his studio NanaOn-Sha are finishing up Kinect title Haunt for Xbox Live. It's set in a haunted house, and, while not a straight up rhythm game, it does have rhythm elements.

"We can't really grow the genre until we have some games that explore areas of music other than just rhythm," Matsuura added. "I really want us to help overcome this deficiency."

When asked hypothetically what type of game he'd like to make, Matsuura replied that he be keen to do "something that features extremely accurate musical performance animation."

"As an example, if we could zoom in and see lifelike fingerwork in an animated pianist, the opportunities afforded to uncover and develop new methods of playing beyond the capabilities of humans would be a crucial step in musical evolution," said Matsuura. "The ability of 'games' to allow us to take part in such advances is crucial."

And it's crucial to have creators like Matsuura make those advances happen.