This Darth Vader may not have James Earl Jones's wicked baritone or David Prowse's imposing height (nor even Hayden Christensen's adolescent whine), but the evil overlord skills on display simply cannot be denied. It just goes to show: there's a little force-wielding maniac in all of us.

Seriously, how great would it be to be able to make the Imperial March start playing on cue like that? I'd walk through life terrifying everyone. Or at least repeatedly startling the cat.

I am quite enjoying Tales of the Abyss 3D, which publisher Namco Bandai released today for 3DS. It's an anime-styled Japanese role-playing game with action-ish combat and a world map packed with towns and dungeons. In other words, it's a Tales game.

I got the game yesterday, so I've only played around an hour or so, but I already have a minor complaint. While Abyss regularly features voice acting for all of its scenes, its optional cut-scenes are silent. Sometimes too silent. It's uncomfortable. (Especially during scenes that cut out the background music entirely.)

As I explain in the above video, this is particularly disconcerting when you compare it to Tales of Vesperia (the last Tales game I played), which featured full voice acting in all of its cut-scenes. They could at times be annoying, but at least they weren't silent.

I'll have more coverage on Tales of the Abyss in the coming days/weeks.

Just a quick reminder that the two-player iPad game Fingle is custom-made to deliver fun, flirtatious Valentine's Day laughs. Give it a go with your Valentine today!

This teaser is only a small part of a larger clip that EA's going to roll out during this Sunday's Walking Dead.

Stephen and I got to see it during EA's Spring Showcase event and it's got us even more pumped for a game that we were already excited about. Even if you hate the AMC horror series, record it for this trailer.

The name of the game is perverted, but Touch My Katamari is still a winner among the PlayStation Vita launch line-up. The game may have touch controls, but who needs them? The Vita has twin analog sticks, and that's what Namco's great everything-rolling game needs.

I play the game on my Vita in this video so you can see what it's all about.

Watch it. Admire it. And furrow you brow at it, because, Touch My Katamari is as weird as all the others in the series.

Social-game megapublisher Zynga has released their financial results for the 2011 fiscal year, reporting a revenue of $1.14 billion. That's revenue, not profit, but still. Dang.

Spider-Man's new movie mask sports yellow eyes. Catwoman's nightvision-glasses-as-ears look works. And I still think Hawkeye's going to be the best character in the Avengers movie. Feast your eyes on the big offerings from Marvel and DC from this year's celebration of plastic (or porcelain) collectibles.

I started off my talk with DC Entertainment's Chief Creative Officer on the wrong foot, by forgetting that Geoff Johns has been writing an Aquaman series. "You just proved my point," he chided me. The point being that people rag on the publisher's amphibious character, which is a phenomenon that Johns is trying to reverse in the DC Comics New 52 relaunch. Johns' Aquaman is powerful in ways that other characters in the DC Universe are not and, when cannibalistic sea creatures come to the surface, the same people who once made fun of the Sea King in the comics have to thank him for saving their lives.

Re-envisioning classic characters has made Johns one of the most respected writers in superhero comics but even he has to admit that taking characters outside of comics presents a whole new set of challenges. Everyone's basking in the success that Rocksteady's had with their two Batman games but DC's flagship character has gotten airborne in the interactive medium.

Johns has written great runs on Superman so I asked him specifically about what he thought the problems have been with bringing the Man of Steel into video games. "We talk about it a lot, about how flipping up robots for four hours would get old," he offers.

There's been talk about adapting Johns' Last Son storyline—where Kryptonian villains escape the Phantom Zone dimensional prison to plague Superman—because it delivers enemies who are credible threats to Kal-El's power level. Cosmic tyrant Darkseid's also been floated as another big bad for Clark Kent to face off against. "I think all games come down to gameplay and the right studio. I'm sure the right studio could crack it. Rocksteady has a real passion for Batman, and I think that's why they make a great game."

Johns knows how to get inside characters' heads and the best example of that right now is in the new status quo of Green Lantern, where villain Sinestro finds himself with former hero Hal Jordan's power ring. "That conviction that what he's doing is right is what drives him. People have gotten hurt and killed and outright murdered because of him . He's very ego-driven but he's not selfish," He is narcissistic but he doesn't really do things for glory. What makes him a compelling villain is the fact that he really knows what a Green Lantern is."

Johns' penchant for the cosmic is reflected in his video game tastes, too. He jokingly asked me if I had any dirt on Halo 5 before admitting that he's got a serious Halo: Reach habit. While Gotham City Impostors represents a video-game shooter with DC Comics roots, Johns is most excited about another game in development form the media company. "We're working on Suicide Squad; it's in development right now," he divulges. The team book where supervillains take on ultra-dangerous government espionage missions that they're not expected to come back from is on the DC Entertainment slate as both a movie and a video game. "I'm really super excited about it. Because of the concept, you have a game where any of the lead characters can conceivably die and it's not a stunt. Some really cool story could come out of that."

Batman's had lots of sidekicks over the years. Imps from other dimensions, mask-wearing dogs and his own kill-crazy offspring have leapt from the shadows with the DC Comics superhero. He's trained them, scolded them and in case of Ace the Bat-hound, probably picked up their poop while out on patrol. But there's been a tacit Bat-approval for all of those partners.

Batman probably wouldn't approve of Gotham City Impostors.

The cult-like Batz gang that idolizes Bruce Wayne's alter ego gets one crucial thing wrong as far as their crime-fighting campaign goes: They kill. A lot. And in this Monolith-developed multiplayer first-person shooter, all the killing happens intentionally and with much glee. None of that "oh, your hand slipped from mine while you dangle over a cliff" guff.

Of course, the rival Jokerz faction murders their do-gooder counterparts, too. But, c'mon, they're modeled after a homicidal clown. This digitally distributed game takes inspirations from the idea that people would want to emulate Batman and his enemies, most significantly from storylines seen here and here. Despite the fact that Impostors happens in the Dark Knight's hometown, the death-dealing doesn't feel all that bad. It feels pretty good actually.

There's a manic tempo to the combat in GCI. Using spring-loaded footwear, grappling hooks and glider rigs to zip around the maps makes for fast-paced, surprise-filled firefights. Even the stealth—generally the most serious of pursuits—feels wacky here. It's gladiatorial bloodsport in the universe of the 1960s Batman TV show. The maps feel tight and intricate, built for speed and constant running-and-gunning.

In between all the dying, you'll stumble upon a sniper-friendly hidey-hole or a great spot to lay a bear trap. The verticality's nicely layered, too, and some maps will offer instances where your death-from-above perch gets drenched in a hot-lead rainstorm by someone who got even higher than you did.

Impostors is a class-based shooter, meaning that you'll need to invest playtime to unlock better armor, weapons, mods and paint options for your Jokerz or Batz avatar. There's a typical array of class types in the game—medics, strikers, scouts, defenders, etc.—and only continued play will reveal the best weapons+gadgets+support gear recipe for you. There's no escaping the fact that Monolith's imprinted off of Valve's success with Team Fortress 2 in a big, big way. The public announcement system updates, the hard emphasis on customization and the random prize-drops in the field of battle all owe big debts to TF2.

Continued play is the watchword here. There's no plot-based campaign in Impostors and, after a brief tutorial, it's up to the player to figure out the best gear and strategies for their playstyle. This is freeing but it also feels frustrating too. You can level up quickly but still feel like you don't have the know-how to earn glory on the mean Gotham streets.

I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that Impostors never quite gels into that special sort of subliminal teamwork that truly great shooters engender. I've had that happen in other games where I've played with strangers. But no such thing happened in this Bat-shooter. In the Gasblaster mode—where you have to capture and hold three control points on the map—I constantly felt like my side went from rock-solid control to abject failure really quickly.

Now, while that may've been a failing of our skills, I felt like my erstwhile teammates and I never had quite enough tactical information or comrade telepathy to shift the tide of battle back in our favor. All the wannabe hero/villain warfare feels like it's missing some special ingredient. The only factor I can chalk that missing-piece feeling up to is the sense that Gotham City Impostors still feels like it hasn't reached critical mass.

My time with the game felt like a bunch of people playing in pursuit of the almighty level-up. It's not a terrible pursuit, though. Hell, seeing all the cool weapons and costume finery that I hadn't unlocked yet kept me grinding in the abandoned industrial parks and back alleys of the game's maps.

Impostors operates in a near-camp space, with goofy voices and a cartoony yet hyper-real aesthetic. Seeing a guy in a Joker speedo caper off after wasting you starts the weird feedback loop of wanting to know what the people who kill you look like. And then I wanted to level up to make my own characters memorable so that I could slay enemies and strut.

As magnetic as that pull is, the whole time I played Impostors I felt like I was being pulled along a series of transaction queues. I wasn't cajoled into spending any actual money and it's not all that different from other online shooters, but Impostors doesn't do enough to mask or sublimate the feeling that you're a cog in a system. You spend a lot of time waving away prompts and cycling through menus just to get back to gameplay. It's fun in that lethal habit-trail way offer but it doesn't feel transcendent. Clever, but not greater than the sum of its very transparent parts.

However, because it's an online-only game, the experience will either grow or wither as people flock to it. Impostors feels like it's figuring things out as it goes along, which might pay off. Or might not. I'll be checking back in a month or so to see how many people are donning capes or facepaint to shoot each other in Crime Alley.

With every new day comes a new excuse for nasty people to crucify video games. This time it's a study by researchers at Brigham Young University, as reported by U.S. News in a story today titled "Spouses Being Pushed Aside For Video Games" that claims gaming is ruining marriages.

The study surveys 349 couples, each of which has at least one spouse who plays a massively multiplayer online role-playing game like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Sixty-five percent of the respondents said they "fight with their husband or wife about gaming," while seventy-five percent say MMOs have "negatively affected their marriage."

As U.S. News writes:

The results confirmed what Neil Lundberg, one of the study's authors, already suspected: "Gaming widows," spouses who lose the attention of their significant other to gaming, aren't happy with their marriages.

Even ignoring the absurdity and sexist implications of the term "gaming widows," this is profoundly dumb. Correlation does not equal causation. Blaming the unhappiness in your marriage on video games is as silly as, well, blaming violence on video games.

Any happy couple will tell you that successful relationships are built on compromises, and if one member of that relationship can't figure out how to balance his or her hobbies, that relationship is not going to work. Whether your vice of choice is World of Warcraft, fantasy football, or knitting, if you fall too deep into the rabbit hole of obsession, your personal life is going to suffer. Blame the person, not the game.

Buried later in the article is a less juicy morsel from the study, one that U.S. News must have not thought was spicy enough for its headline:

On the other hand, it seems like couples who play together, stay together: 74 percent of couples who played MMORPGs together reported gaming as having a positive effect on their marriage.

"The take-home message is that doing things together, whether you're video gaming or doing something else, is better than doing something apart," Lundberg says. "This confirms the idea that doing things that create interaction and bonding is obviously going to strengthen a marriage."

In other words, play video games with your significant other. Happy Valentine's Day!