There's going to be another round of consoles. There's another Xbox coming, another PlayStation. Anything could happen in the next couple of years before they're released. For instance, Apple could start selling "smart televisions".

There have been "Apple TV" rumors for years, even before there was the current bolt-on AppleTV. (Here's one of today's.) But now Apple's a bit of a gaming powerhouse—despite, at times, seemingly not giving much attention to gaming itself (e.g. the smelly old design of Game Center). And while the imagined Apple smart television likely wouldn't be much more than an LCD panel plus the guts of an AppleTV (which are the guts of the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone, more or less), it's entirely possible that a whiz-bang interface—the one that Steve Jobs reportedly "cracked" before he passed away—would draw in a bunch of new users.

New users that might not have a need for a console anymore. Users who can get their casual game fix from iOS games they download from iTunes App Store, sitting on their couch. Users who might use an iPhone or iPad as a controller.

"Traditional" gaming isn't going to die as long as there are still enough people around who want a dedicated gaming experience. (10 million+, let's say.) But as I was discussing with some readers at the Kotaku party at Blizzcon, I think it's very possible this next round of consoles could be the last, especially if Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo don't fully embrace the capabilities we've always wanted from a do-all set top box. That won't mean just games, but movies and cable television, internet browsing, social interaction—the whole schmear. Heck, Gabe Newell thinks so, too. (Microsoft is heading this way in fits and spurts, but also has a sad history over the last decade of innovating in features but neglecting platforms and branding; still, Xbox is their strongest individual entertainment brand.)

If Apple does throw its hat fully into the living room, the traditional consoles are going to have an even more difficult time getting the penetration they need to achieve the economies of scale on hardware and software-to-hardware sell-through rates that make the console business profitable.

It's a bit of a surprise that the three console makers have stuck around this long—I don't see how the market will support four. Nintendo likes to brag about being the games company that engineers paradigm shifts. An Apple Smart TV as a games content trojan horse could have the paradigm shift right out from their—and everybody else's—feet.

We've reviewed Batman: Arkham City. We've offered tips so you can start playing it the right way. We've cobbled together instructions for how to grab the many downloadable additions to the game (how good are you at leaping through hoops?). We've explained that Catwoman stuff.

Here, in one handy place, is our Batman: Arkham City launch coverage. We hope it helps.

Batman: Arkham City: The Kotaku Review

Batman: Arkham City, like other Game of the Year contenders that are in its league, should be praised both for what it does as a video game and what it does for video games.
It descends, evolved, from video game classics like Super Mario and Metal Gear. More »

Before You Start... Tips for Playing Batman: Arkham City The Best Way

The excellent Batman: Arkham City is now on sale for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and we want you to have the best possible time with it. So, before you start, here are some tips from us about how to get the most out of the game, right from the start.
No spoilers here, just some friendly advice... More »

A Guide to Getting Batman's Arkham City Many Downloadable Add-Ons

By our count, there are 14 alternate costumes or characters you may play as in Batman: Arkham City, through a variety of promotions, pre-order bonuses, and timed-exclusive downloadable content available now. More »

Arkham City's Official Map App Gives Aid to Trophy Hunters

One of the more frustrating aspects of Batman: Arkham Asylum, for me, was the lack of a minimap in the hud. I appreciated the clean view afforded by a minimalist HUD, but it made hunting up Riddler Trophies and clues, with the aid of a GameFAQ, of course, a chore marked by constant pausing. More »

The Surprising Stories That Connect Batman: Arkham City to Arkham Asylum

At the end of 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum, all's well: the Dark Knight's triumphant, the Joker's downed and Gotham City's still a safe, intact place. More »

This is Why Batman: Arkham City's Locked Catwoman Content Makes Buying the Game New the Wiser Choice

One of the teased elements of Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham City is the ability to play as the caped crusader's frenemy/love interest/ally Selina Kyle, aka the Catwoman. More »

Batman: Arkham City's Weird "Bitch" Fixation

Batman: Arkham City is a mature game. I know it's rated "T for Teen," but that doesn't mean it's not grown-ups-it features some really dark content. More »

The Voice Actors of Batman: Arkham City, Unmasked

Good gravy does Batman: Arkham City have some fine voice-acting. Almost every character in the game, from the biggest crime bosses to the littlest thugs, is played by an actor who delivers his or her lines with gusto and energy. More »

Your PC Can Probably Run Arkham City

The requirements for the PC version of Batman: Arkham City have shown up on Steam, and according to the game's information page, they're not too steep!
Take a look at what you'll need to bring justice to Arkham City as the Dark Knight: More »

Batman Fails to Instill Fear in the Hearts of Arkham City Reviewers

Did you know Batman: Arkham Asylum holds the Guinness World Record for 'Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever'? Judging from the initial reviews for Batman: More »

Should You Buy Batman: Arkham City? Yes

Rocksteady's follow-up to its acclaimed 2009 Batman: Arkham City is a fantastic sequel. It'll be out soon for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (and on PC this November). More »

Are we done talking about one of the most impressive games of 2011? Of course not. But that should get you up to speed for now.

The video of Harrison Ford playing Uncharted 3 last week was clearly meant to communicate some kind of blessing from Indiana Jones to Nathan Drake. And Indy's a professor who taught lessons with his fists. This video features Naughty Dog's Robert Cogburn talking about how you can do the same in the studio's hotly anticipated threequel. Even though Dr. Jones didn't fire off quite as many rounds as Nathan Drake does, I think he'd approve.

UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Experience: Way of the Iron Fist [PlayStation Blog]

During BlizzCon 2011 this weekend I got to ask Starcraft II senior designer Jonny Ebbert what was in store for the solo player in the upcoming expansions and why Heart of the Swarm's campaign is nine missions shorter that Wings of Liberty's. You whiny bastards.

Not you folks personally — well, not all of you at least. I'm sure folks that enjoyed the lengthy campaign in Wings of Liberty just sat back and enjoyed it, but those that didn't like it complained loud and hard enough to be heard.

"We actually got a lot of complaints that it (Wings of Liberty) was too long," Ebbert said, causing my brow to furrow quizzically. "Like a lot. We looked at the achievement data, and the completion rates just went (here he makes a schwooing noise, indicating a massive drop)."

About that time I got mad at everyone. I can't play StarCraft II online. I've tried and tried but never seem to make any progress. Even when I think victory might be in sight my opponents suddenly morph into supercomputers, rebuilding entire armies from scratch and crashing down upon me like a wave at the last possible moment. I'm like a walking buff for the other team. So I take solace in the single-player campaign, and anyone that threatens to take even a smidgeon of that away from me is going to get cut (in my mind at least).

It wasn't just the players either. "We got a lot of heat internally about it as well. People on other teams were just 'It's too long!'"

Ebbert assures me that while the Heart of the Swarm campaign is shorter, it'll still be just as entertaining. "We're always talking about concentrating the cool, so we decided to compress it from 29 to 20 missions. We've played through it and we've been 'Yeah, this feels pretty nice.'"

And if it doesn't work out, there's always Legacy of the Void, the third installment of StarCraft II. Ebbert says they're going to see how Heart goes, and they'll reassess for Legacy if need be.

"We're totally cognizant of your type of player. We have ideas for the next one that we're hoping will reward your type of player a lot more...people who aren't online hardcore that want something they can sink a lot of time into in a single-player way. That's definitely at the forefront of our minds."

You heard the man, single-player StarCraft II fans; our time will come. Let's just hope the wait isn't too long. I'd hate to have to complain.

Editor's Note: We ended last week at Kotaku without any review copies of Battlefield 3. So did a lot of other outlets. Console and PC copies arrived in our laps today, a day before release, but a select few outlets, including our pals at Joystiq, got a PC copy last week and reviewed it today.

We weren't the only ones puzzled by this, which brings us to Joystiq's Battlefield 3 PC reviewer, Arthur Gies, who explained on his personal blog, Pragmagic, his own unusual review experience, which we're republishing here. He gave the game a 4.5 out of 5, criticized the campaign but praised the multiplayer highly. He got flack, of course and wanted to set some things straight. Take it away, Arthur...

So, I reviewed Battlefield 3.

The times where Battlefield 3 does its damnedest to go toe-to-toe with Call of Duty are the times it stumbles the hardest. But when DICE is doing what it's always done best, Battlefield 3 is a uniquely mesmerizing multiplayer game with a seemingly endless number of ways to feel like a success.

Man, what a mess. Battlefield 3 might be the biggest game I've ever reviewed, and I can't imagine a way in which the review situation could have gone worse. 3 days to review the campaign and finalized multiplayer is doable. Obviously, since I put a review up. But it's not ideal. 

But less ideal has been everything surrounding the review and Battlefield 3's release. I won't dwell on the weird goalpost moving that DICE and EA have tacitly encouraged over the last few days by insisting that console reviews can't be done because of a day one patch that, I guess, would fix anything anyone could possibly find wrong with the game? That's practically unheard of before a game comes out, and having reviewed… one, two, three, four EA published shooters over the last two years (Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor, Bad Company 2 Vietnam, and Crysis 2), it was especially surprising here. Put more clearly, EA has never done this with any of the games of theirs that I've reviewed. Even Bad Company 2, which I believe also had a day one patch, was reviewed on debug hardware with a near-final version of said patch. 

I just think, having played it, EA made some huge miscalculations in aligning it so closely to Modern Warfare 3. It seems obvious to me that they were scrambling to get it done, and they pushed it right down to the wire. I guess we'll see how things pan out, in that regard. 

I think the hardest thing in all of this was scoring my review. Usually it isn't so difficult, but here, the lows were so low, and the highs were so high…

I wonder if I was nicer to the campaign than I should have been. It's not actively bad, usually, but it's nowhere near what I would consider good, or even acceptable, really. And co-op stinks. 

I essentially had to write off two out of three modes in the game. It's a situation where I have to hope that someone wondering about the game who sees the score will read the review and understand what I tried to say. If they skipped the text, saw the score, and bought the game expecting great singleplayer, then yeah. I feel bad about that. For the number, or stars, or whatever, I just looked at the joystiq rubric again and again, going back and forth between four stars and five. 

That sounds silly, I know. But I take my job seriously. A four on our scale is a must play for (and I hate this phrase) fans of the genre, a five, a must play for everyone. So eventually I just decided to split the difference. Battlefield 3 is a must play for anyone who likes multiplayer games. So I gave it the four point five. 

Is that a cop out? I don't know. I hope not. 

Other things… I wonder why I got a copy of the game when so many other people in the press didn't. Joystiq is a big, big site, don't get me wrong, but still. People I greatly respect got shafted, and it's hard to understand why that would be. I'm hoping I wasn't selected on the basis of what EA thought I would give the game. That's the kind of shit that keeps me up at night, figuratively speaking. 

Speaking of being kept up at night, it's late, and I worked all weekend. So I guess that's all I have to say about it for now. 

Say what you want about their loophole-happy tax practices, but General Electric's a company that understands invention. And the making of things. So, it's kind of a natural fit that the company's GE Show would do an episode featuring the world's most successful alpha release. You'll see Minecraft used to recreate the Edison Memorial Tower, built IRL to commemorate the life of legendary inventor Thomas Edison.

Hopefully, corporate encroachment in Minecraft won't turn Mojang's hit sandbox into a latter-day Second Life, where it's viewed a venue for their messaging. On the other hand, the GE Show's mission statement says it's "here to help us understand the technologies that are changing our lives," so maybe the show's producers think that Notch and crew could be viewed as important as the Wizard of Menlo Park. Or maybe they're readying deployment of an expansive electrical/power grid in Minecraft?

It's Pumpkins Vs. Zombies as PopCap's zombie temp worker tries his hand at gourd gutting and cutting. Then a rave breaks out.

It's great to see the folks at PopCap having a great time preparing for Halloween this year, and any video that starts with the undead and ends with dancing is an instant classic.

Now sit your happy asses down and bring us Plants Vs. Zombies 2.

Pokémon Rumble Blast is the first Pokémon game for the Nintendo 3DS, but it's not a real Pokémon game any more than the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon or Pokémon Ranger games are. This is no role-playing game involving turn-based battles and gym trainers.

You're controlling Pokémon directly in this one, collecting some 600 of them in a beat-em-up played from an overhead view. It's an action game. It's something you could inaccurately but provocatively call Pokémon: Diablo. And it's in 3D. Worth getting?

Stephen Totilo, who has been playing Pokémon Rumble Blast for a week, hoping to make his subway rides: I've played most 3DS games, and this one has the best 3D effects I've seen. They're comfortable even with the slider at max and impressively deep, enabling the game world to recede deep below the system's upper screen while ejecting each captured ("befriended") Pokémon up from the screen at the player. But those are the only depths I can praise in a game that could have been special but is a monotonous bore. In theory, you're picking and training the best Pokémon to battle solo or in teams against a variety of classes of enemy Pokémon. In practice you're just tapping the attack button(s). A lot. For hours on end. The Pokémon Ranger games, which were based on literally drawing circles around Pokémon, had more stimulating gameplay that this.

My vote is NO, unless you know a kid who has high tolerance for dull Pokémon games, in which case, well, he or she is probably under seven and Nintendo recommends those of that age shouldn't play games in 3D, so they'd be missing the best part. So, across the board: NO

Joel Johnson, our obligatory non-player: Here's how out of the loop I am on Pokémon: I had to go to our own website to figure out what Pokémon game was coming out. Now I've discovered it's Rumble Blast, which frankly looks completely boring. I greatly respect the design that goes into the Pokémon series, but the offshoots have never piqued my interest one bit. On the other hand, 3DS owners can't really be too picky right now, and a first-party title shouldn't be ignored.

Still, speaking as the Gut Checker who hasn't played it, I just can't recommend it based on what little I've seen. It looks thin and for die-hards only. NO

Brian Crecente, who has dabbled with PRB: Maybe it's the relative drought of 3DS games informing my opinion, but Pokémon: Rumble Blast is on my short list of games I plan on spending some time with during the long hours of my semi-regular commute to and from New York City this fall. I haven't quite played an hour of this game yet, but what I saw of it I liked. It was a game that had me crawling around dungeons summoning up monsters to do real-time battle for me with an eclectic mix of attacks and powers. It may end up being a little too light, a little too Pokémon for my tastes in the long run, but for now I remain intrigued. YES

I'm the kind of guy who'll always give games that muck with the core precepts of spacetime at least a gander. Rewinding and freezing time, opening up wormholes and otherwise bending the forces of the universe spices up otherwise ordinary gameplay. That's the thinking behind Namco Bandai's upcoming shooter Inversion, which lets you reverse gravity to flip enemies out of cover and create absurd grenade throws. Until then, let's hope all that gravity tomfoolery doesn't have the same effects as it does in Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, the novel by late literary great Kurt Vonnegut:

The gravity is very light today. I have an erection as a result of that. All males have erections on days like this. They are automatic consequences of near-weightlessnes. They have little to do with eroticism in most cases, and nothing to do with it in the life of a man of my age. They are hydraulic experiences-the results of confused plumbing, and little more.

Hi ho.

The latest trailer for Inversion shows off some of the ways you can use the gravity–switching ability to vary up tactics in the third-person action game. Inversion's due out next February. Hi ho.

Blessed with a surplus of ancient Commodore 1702 monitors and a handful of GameCubes, Personal Computer Museum curator Syd Bolton stacked them all together to form a pleasantly confusing cube of cubes.

After debuting his cube of cubes at a recent Game Night held at his Ontario, Canada museum, Bolton took a little time out of his busy schedule of discovering one of the rarest Atari 2600 cartridges in existence to explain how the project came about and came together. I conceived the "Cube of Cubes" several years ago when the museum started receiving a large number of Commodore 1702 monitors (the kind that were used on the Commodore 64 but are still useful today as small televisions for gaming systems or DVD players).

I estimate we now have over 100 of these monitors. At first, I wanted to do a video wall (still looking for a reasonably priced video controller) but then after using them for a Tetris event in 2008, I had another idea.

For safety reasons we wanted to build a shelving unit that could hold them, but my woodworking engineer told me that it was foolish to try and construct this massive unit (which around 7 feet tall) in one piece and suggested I go back to the drawing board with it in 4 pieces that could be moved and stored with ease. That's exactly what I did.

Using simple, low cost pine wood and a durable paint that was color matched to a GameCube itself in the hardware store, the materials for the unit ended up costing under $250 CAD. After the wood was cut (then routed for the shelf stability) it was primed and then painted twice with the Indigo paint by museum volunteers. The final construction used glue and screws and the units were then touched up to fix blemishes that occurred during construction and "feet" were put on the bottom to protect the unit and the floor it would eventually end up on.

The end result is a rather pretty display of 16 GameCube titles: Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II, Dragon's Lair 3D, Starfox Adventures, I-Ninja, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi's Mansion, Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut
Cubivore, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Mario Cart, Finding Nemo, Burnout, Crazy Taxi, NHL 2003, and — appropriately enough — Namco Museum. The 140 or so visitors to the Game Night party had a blast picking up random controllers and then trying to figure out which game they were playing on the wall.

Syd tells us the installment's modular build could also led itself to hosting eight PlayStations, Nintendo 64s, or any console producing a composite signal.

The real question is why don't i have one of these in my living room yet?