Ever since it peeked out in early looks at the Vita's launch line-up, Gravity Rush became the game I was most excited about for Sony's new gaming handheld. Japan's had it since the system's launch there but North America's had to wait to hear about a release date. We finally know that the game will be out on June 12th. For an in-depth look at the Japanese version of the game, check out our preview.

Hey Game Club, it's been awhile. 2012 is already shaping to be a year of dramatic changes. We wanted to make sure our next Game Club was suitably epic, so we're playing Mass Effect 3.

One of the year's biggest and most talked-about games, Mass Effect 3 is already a contextual powderkeg, inciting discussions across the internet regarding its stance on gender and romance, controversial casting, and DLC disputes. More importantly, every player will have a different experience based on the choices they've made in the past two, some of which they may have forgotten. Everybody has their own Shepard story to tell and we're going to see how they all converge right here.

If it's your first time playing with the Kotaku Game Club, our goal is simple: We come together each month to play a video game together as a community, sharing our thoughts and concerns about the game's narrative, mechanics, context and anything we think is noteworthy.

Our meetings take place every week on Thursday at 4pm Eastern in the comments section of a special Kotaku Game Club post. Remember that the Game Club is about dialogue as much as anything else, so feel free to speak your mind and discuss other readers' thoughts in addition to your own.

As in the past, we'll have four meetings to discuss Mass Effect 3, starting next Thursday, March 8th. We'll cover the main game during the first three sessions, and spend our last week on the merits of ME3's new multiplayer offering.

Here's the full schedule:

Thursday, March 8th - Campaign: Week 1
Thursday, March 15th - Campaign: Week 2
Thursday, March 22nd - Capaign: Week 3
Thursday, March 29th - Multiplayer and Final Thoughts

As always, there will be a reminder blip on Kotaku each Wednesday to remind you about our meetings. If there are any emergency shifts in the schedule, we'll make sure to let you know as far in advance as possible on the site, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

See you guys next week!

This is the story of a scarf.

I'd knitted it off and on for most of life. I never felt any hurry to complete it; in fact, I never really knew how long I wanted it to be. Just, every so often, I'd pick it up and weave another couple of rows.

Over the years, it grew longer and longer, and became stretched and unevenly discolored by the passage of time. I wore it everywhere I went. First I could wrap it around my neck a single time, then twice, keeping warmer and warmer with each passing season.

It's many years later now, and I lay old and tired in my bed. I've lived a long, full life, and here I am, pushing onwards despite sickness and age. I move the scarf through my hands and look at its oldest sections, where the needlework is most frayed and the colors most faded. I think back to the days when I began knitting it—how young I was then! How careless and strong, how healthy and free! Tears well up as I picture myself then; how could they not? But those days are gone, and this cold struggle is all that remains.

That story sums up what Journey meant to me. What it'll mean to you remains to be seen. But no matter what meaning it imparts, ThatGameCompany's creation is a triumph, a video game that is as remarkable for its discipline as it is for the effortless manner in which it welds its vast reserves of breathtaking beauty.

In Journey, players assume the mantle of a silent desert wanderer. This faceless, robe-clad nomad looks more or less like a ballet-dancing cousin of the Star Wars Jawa. As the game begins, the wanderer climbs a giant sand dune in the middle of a lonely desert. In the distance beyond the dune's crest towers a mountain. As the mountain comes into view, a title screen appears: "Journey." Until the credits roll, this is the only piece of text in the entire game.

It wasn't chosen by accident. That one word presents a clear imperative: Your journey leads to that mountain. Go.

And so you do go, forward through blinding sun and murky darkness, through sunken, abandoned desert cities, through sandstorms masking ghostly, still-operating machinery from a bygone age. Through palaces and temples, places exotic and mysterious. Always forwards, and up; always towards the mountain.

The game's controls are simple—use the stick to move forward. One button to sing, another to float. The rest of Journey's systems (and it does have systems) reveal themselves over time, and those revelations are part of the experience. It took me a while to understand how I was able to do some of the things I was able to do, and that road to understanding was a small journey unto itself.

Do you need me to tell you how visually gorgeous this game is? I can try, anyway. Journey is an astonishing synthesis of technology, animation and art that brings a world to life in a way I've never before experienced in a video game. I could write yards about the sand alone—this sand is more than sand, it is an entity, flowing, shimmering, sighing with life. Sometimes the wind ripples through it like water; other times it billows like snow. Sometimes, the wanderer will surf down a sand dune like the world's most graceful snowboarder.

Moments of jaw-dropping, eye-moistening beauty come on fast and then melt away. One early section in particular is less a game than a tiny symphony, a cascading build to a climax of searing visual splendor. Austin Wintory's musical score, punctuated by Tina Guo's lovely solo cello work, combines with the vast horizon and flowing scenery to conjure a space that is mournful, beautiful, playful, and sad.

Over the course of the journey, the wanderer slowly knits a scarf. It grows longer and longer, and with it comes the power of flight. At its longest, it is a flowing banner, a symbol of proud accomplishment, and a vital tool for progression. Rarely have I encountered a purer vessel for metaphor than that scarf.

But for all of the lofty things that can (and will) be said about it, Journey is a remarkably unpretentious game. I've already joked with some friends about how this game, like Limbo and ThatGameCompany's own Flower before it, will bring out the lyrical, self-indulgent side of many a game critic. (It's not lost on me that I opened this review with a story about knitting a scarf.) But more than its predecessor Flower, Journey is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, and it is methodical and minimalist in how it achieves that goal.

It says it right there in the title, after all: "Journey." In fact, it's the journey, a stripped-down version of the classic hero's journey, also known as the monomyth. Many tales, from Beowulf to Star Wars, have followed this template. Journey presents a particularly minimalist version of it, and as a result feels universal in a way that few stories do.

Journey's pacing is impeccable. You'll never repeat an area or challenge, and not a single moment of the game feels wasted. In fact, you'll blow through each bit so quickly that it won't be until later, looking back, that you'll realize how far you've come. There are a few of what could loosely be called "puzzles" dotting the game—a Zelda mechanism here, a Chrono Trigger wind-puzzle there—but by and large, Journey requires only that players, well, take the journey. It leaves itself open to interpretation not by chance but by design—this game can be a metaphor for nearly anything, yet it feels entirely distinctive. It's a delicate and admirable balancing act.

The embedded, organic multiplayer component adds another wrinkle to the experience, but it does so gently. At times, other players may wander into your game; you can't see their name or learn much of anything about them. They appear as another wanderer, and can help you along your way. It's all purposefully shrouded in mystery, much like the game itself—this is one of the first video games to allow people to connect online in a way that is entirely in harmony with its single-player philosophy. I've only played alongside one other player, but it seems safe to say that the multiplayer will be one more thing that makes Journey a game to re-experience again and again. I sense that once some of the game's initial magic has cooled, its multiplayer will reveal further layers of meaning to those who seek it.

Journey represents an impressive evolutionary step in the holistic game design work of Jenova Chen, Kellee Santiago, and the rest of the small team at ThatGameCompany. As Flower was to the less fully-realized Flow, so Journey is to Flower. In fact, Journey is so focused that it makes the already-trim Flower feel padded and almost clumsy by comparison.

I've played Journey all the way through twice as of this writing (it took me around 2 hours to complete each time), and I anticipate I'll play it many more times over the coming months. It wasn't until my second time through that I really felt as though I understood what the game was saying to me.

In a later part of the game, I found myself both exhausted and tested. What must the wanderer be going through right now, I wondered? Such pain, such hardship. At that moment, I thought back to the joyful beauty I had witnessed merely an hour ago—leaping through the sand, warm sun on my shoulders, the energy and freedom of youth urging me to jump higher, higher! And now here I was, head down, teeth gritted, pushing through the cold, bitter trials of adulthood.

Those lost moments of grace felt fleeting even as they were happening, and they felt all the more fleeting in retrospect. But there was no way to get them back; nothing for it but to push onward.

And so I did, and so you will too. And round and round we'll go.

Looks like that rumored image we ran last night of the protagonist from Assassin's Creed III checks out—Ubisoft has posted the official box art from the game to Facebook that depicts the same tomahawk-wielding gentleman. In addition, Game Informer has shared the art from their cover story on the game, further confirming the setting.

Looks like Assassin's Creed is indeed going to take place during the American Revolutionary War.

Here's our own Luke Plunkett with an in-depth look at why a colonial Assassin's Creed makes complete sense (and sounds awesome). He's got me convinced.

We all have our secret moves and special style to playing a particular first-person shooter (I like snipers, for instance), but have you ever tried the Bum Bait move? Rooster Teeth introduces this hilarious move in video form.

I think we can admit that some of our actions in games are predictable. After all, seeing a seemingly lost player standing with his back turned is just begging for a quick and satisfying assassination. But things may not be as simple as that, and if you fall for the trap you might soon find yourself bum baited.

• WATCH: What a hilarious way to rack up your kills in Halo: Reach, seen in the video above.
• WATCH: What are first world problems like in the Pokémon world?
• WATCH: There's a movie coming out about gamers and Jason Mewes is in it. But it looks terrible.
• PLAY: Circadia is our Gaming App of the Day.

Did you see a particularly interesting video on the Internet? Know a friend who puts together awesome video game movies? If you have suggestions for Watch This, Play This, drop me a line at tina@kotaku.com and you may just see it featured here the next day.

Circadia doesn't look like much when you start it up. Even after the tutorial, all you're getting is a black screen with a white and colored dots on it.

The goals are simple. The controls, even moreso. All you do in Circadia is tap colored circles to send out musical tones that need to hit their white counterpart. Higher tones travel at faster speeds and lower ones move slower. All the waves need to hit the dot at the same time so you'll need to synchronize the timing on your taps. Circadia's beguiling challenge lies in finding that rhythm.

It's clearly an exercise in minimalism. But as the game goes on, an astounding complexity reveals itself. More white dots show up, as do more circles. More surprisingly, Simple Machines' deconstructed rhythm game does more to make me feel like a musician than Rock Band and Guitar Hero did. Running through a level multiple times isn't just trying to clear a challenge; it's also an exercise to try and make things sound right.

Circadia strips away all of the visual trappings of other rhythm games with the end result making you feel like you're living inside a soundscape. It re-tunes your brain a bit, harmonizing it with a cadence that lets you hear the world differently.

Circadia [iTunes]

Featuring a once-funny Jason Mewes and a Michael Cera look-alike—and a special Adam Sessler appearance!—is this ghastly trailer that will apparently be an actual film at some point (this Summer).

A crew of friends and gamers get together to travel to LA for a Gears of War 3 tournament, dead set on winning the thing. Gears of War also just seems like an odd choice, without assuming it's a sponsored movie of course, but we'll run with it.

Jokes poking fun at gamers can be funny, but this feels tired. Here we go again with the emphasis on being a loser gamer who can't keep a girlfriend. Also we fall a lot, mess up even the most basic of jokes, and overuse the "bro" term of endearment. I hope it ends up being at least unintentionally funny. You know, so bad it's just painfully hilarious.

World hunger? War? Global warming? Nonsense! Too long have the beleaguered Pokémon trainers of the world suffered quietly under their own first world problems. With one video, Kotaku reader csanders984 has become the voice of millions.

Trust a member of the Kotaku community to have his finger on the pulse of the problems facing the world's Pokémon-playing populace. I thought my life was pretty worry-free until he opened my eyes to the endless array of issues I didn't know I had.

I've not seen the vast majority of Pokémon movies. I keep a candle lit on the mantle for Pokémon Snap 2. Digimon WAS the better anime. And damn if not TRACEYYYYYYYY!

How can I raise two children in a world like this? That's it, I am selling my children. Thanks, csanders984.

Top 50 Pokémon First World Problems [YouTube]

Stuff to play, stuff to see, here comes Watch This, Play This. Confused? Read this.

Apparently, it's okay to make fun of sexual harassment in the fighting games community. That's what happened last night, as one of the biggest fighting game streaming broadcasts mocked the controversy that followed an episode of Capcom's "Cross Assault" web series.

Wednesday Night Fights, produced by Level|Up and sponsored by fighting game mecca Shoryuken, aired an episode where you can hear the commentators start referencing harassment at 0:24 in the video above. At 1:24, you hear "Giant Bomb can write an article", an allusion to journalist Patrick Klepek's coverage of comments made by Aris Bakhtanians. The clip above comes from last night's Wednesday Night Fights broadcast that can be seen here.

The defensiveness on display doesn't do much to quiet criticism of the hostile environment that many say exists in the fighting game scene.

The genre's enthusiasts say they deserve respect. It's their passion for video games' various martial arts franchises that keeps the entire category viable. Devotees of Street Fighter, SoulCalibur and Tekken go deep into their games of choice, learning movesets, teaching each other strategies and meticulously cataloguing changes from one iteration of a release to another. And when they feel like they're getting nickel-and-dimed with incomplete games that get filled out with paid DLC, they'll hold a publisher's feet to the fire.

But they haven't learned to take criticism.

Adherents talk about The Scene or The Community with reverence, citing their devotion and years of dedication. Here's what the mission statement says on the Level|Up website:

Level|Up actively works to improve the cohesion, collaboration, and awareness of local and worldwide communities by focusing on elements that are socially accepted; gaming and entertainment.

Level|Up brings a positive recreational atmosphere in gaming with others at events such as Wednesday Night Fights, Specialists, and premier tournaments. These events help defeat society's video game pessimisms through infallible community appreciation, acceptance, and encouragement to any generation of gamers.

Wednesday Nights Fights is a gathering where friends, new comers, and veterans grind out the highest quality fighting game competition Southern California has to offer.

You can't use the "just having fun" excuse when you want to be taken seriously. And with tournaments, prize money and recognition, partcipants do want to be taken seriously. Sexist macho posturing doesn't deserve respect. Skills get you respect.

Denouncements from on high, like the one Capcom issued yesterday, work on a symbolic level but there's very little trickle-down to the actual individuals. The meet-ups and tourneys fighting game players organize feed into a larger ecosystem that goes all the way up to the genre's biggest stage, the EVO Championships.

When harassment gets mocked and excuses get made that sexually and racially demeaning trash talk are just part of a scene, acolytes are really showing that they're not as inclusive as they say they are. Some may go to a gathering to blow off steam or shed social norms and other people of differing genders and races may be showing up to find a welcoming community. If that's not what they find, then ultimately The Scene or Community will wither or, worse, become solely the domain of a surly few. There's nothing positive or infallible about that.