I used to have one of the hugely impractical, super-expensive controllers for the original Steel Battalion. It went MIA somewhere during the various moves of my adult life, but before it did, I remember that I broke it out in all its glory maybe one or two times. I never got very far in the original game but I remember giggling at how goofy the whole enterprise was. A single switch to turn some fans on, another button that served only one function, all on a massive apparatus that would only ever work with one game. Like, I said goofy.

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor wishes it could be goofy. Instead, it's just bad.

In the opening cutscene that sets up the war-torn future the game takes place in, a man's silhouette puts a gun to his head and shoots himself dead. Heavy Armor made me want to follow suit. No amount of M-rated battlefield carnage and cussing can cover up the fact that this release is immature in the worst ways: aggravatingly unresponsive in its mechanics and sensationalist in its storytelling. In this new Steel Battalion, you use both your hands and a Xbox 360 controller to control a massive, two-legged tank. The game represents an instance where the fusion of motion controls and button presses are supposed to open up possibilities. In actuality, the whole affair winds up feeling cramped and poorly co-ordinated.

This Kinect game casts you as Sergeant Powers, a formerly retired tank pilot who re-enlists into the war between the American Army and an evil, tyrannical reincarnation of the United Nations ruled by a Chinese despot. An apocalyptic event called the Datacide breaks most of the high-end technology on Earth, except for walking armored weapons called Vertical Tanks. Playing as Powers, it's your job to fulfill the military objectives that will liberate the United States.

Loads of trite and terrible cliches get fired at the player, many used in bad taste. So, your crewmates in the VT are a constantly swearing loudmouth, a naive hero-worshipper and a cool-cat black guy straight from War Movie Template #I8B42. And the reason Powers signs back on to active duty? Enemy soldiers kick down his door and riddle his wife and family full of bullets, and then set them on fire. But worse than the poor deployment of story beats that you've seen dozens of times before is the fact that you're left feeling nothing in terms of motivation. No anger at watching innocents get killed, no rousing need for vengeance. Just an incredulity that something this bad exists.

That's just the story elements. Mechanically, the experience is even worse. The game gives you an annoying assemblage of reaches, grasps and twiddles and then asks you to believe you're managing processes essential for the survival of your armored juggernaut and its crew.

So, closing an iron shutter when your windshield's blasted away stops bullets from tearing through and killing the crew. Pulling out a control panel and yanking a chain on its face turns on fans that prevent everyone in the VT from choking on fumes. But unlike most Kinect games, Steel Battalion has you using both gestural and controller inputs. Reaching forward to "tap" a button on the VT's dash switches ammo types, which you then fire by pressing the right trigger. The problem with the gestural controls is that too many get crammed into too small a space, so you're constantly triggering things that you don't want to. Or are left unable to push the buttons, or pull the switches that you need. A better design could've trimmed some of these gimmicks or at least mapped some functions to the d-pad or bumpers.

At times, you'll need to respond to events quickly, like when an enemy reaches in and tries to slit the throat of your co-pilot. In that moment, I'd need to swipe to turn my head and change my view and would then hold my arm out to aim a sidearm at the enemy. This worked maybe 70% of the time and I watched my squadmate die horribly over and over.

Each level has multiple missions and some are only minutes long when things work right. But they're chock full of poor design directives, terrible feedback and hackneyed characterizations. Even if Heavy Armor worked as it was supposed to, it would still be a poorly realized war game. Dialogue cues from your tankmates trigger at the wrong times, giving you information too early or too late. Many levels are poorly lit with grimy textures, meaning that you won't be able to see where the RPGs tearing you to shreds are coming from or where enemy VTs are advancing from until they've dealt you crippling damage.

If Heavy Armor worked consistently, it might crawl up to so-bad-it's-good status. But its mechanics fail so often that you're never able to recline into the idea that you're playing through an incredibly cheesy war movie. One could possibly argue that all this jankiness is intentional and that Heavy Armor is meant to deliver the experience of an under-supplied war effort, where huge holes in a tank's armor plating can't get patched and you need to carefully ration bullets and explosive shells. But any such ambitions get torn apart by the sheer unplayability of the final product.

The best Kinect games so far have mined the cognitive dissonance inherent to controlling games with the Xbox 360's motion-sensing peripheral. With The Gunstringer, it was turning your gestures into the vengeance of a bad-tempered, undead cowboy puppet. And in Child of Eden, your swipes, pushes and claps opened up a beautiful, hallucinatory mindscape that grew ever more trippy and lush. Those games took the silliness of standing in front of a fancy camera and waving your hands to play a game and made you feel either ornery or awash in sensation. Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor takes that silliness and makes the player feel like the butt of a joke. No one gets a medal for delivering that kind of game.

One of my happiest discoveries at E3 a couple of weeks ago was that this fall's strangely-named Need For Speed: Most Wanted could and maybe should be called Burnout Paradise 2.

This fall's racing game comes from Criterion, the EA-owned studio that made the Burnouts, including the magnificent, open-world Paradise, before apparently getting the assignment to make new Need For Speeds in years neatly divisible by the number two. In 2010 they releasesd the cops vs. racers Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, which was as beautiful and blazingly fast as Paradise but abandoned an open-world drive-anywhere layout for a more conventional level-by-level series of races.

The new Most Wanted, which bears the same name as the very good non-Criterion Need for Speed from 2005, is a return by Criterion to open-world racing games. You will drive around a metropolis called Fairhaven, looking for races and challenges, while the time it takes you to drive down any of the city's roads is instantly compared to that of your friends, Paradise-style. Every piece of pavement is potentially a ramp to the top of some new leaderboard. (You're also trying to evade the cops, which is what the "Most Wanted" part refers to.)

Paradise had some of the best online gaming systems ever, ditching matchmaking lobbies and just grouping friends into the same open-world on the fly. As soon as players were linked, they were competing for speeds and times and were being coaxed by the game to converge at one spot on the map to initiate a multiplayer race. The new Most Wanted functions similarly, though there is now the option to either have a computer-controlled "playlist director" or a player themselves dole out the challenges for the joined racers. A bar across the bottom of the screen shows the next events in the queue, indicating that, say, a head-to-head race will be followed by a speed test or a test to get the most air. In public games, the game will control that; but in private games, a player can run their best playlist. Gamers who are joined in games still have to drive to meeting points to initiate each challenge, and the developers still haven't determined if or how they will punish players who refuse to converge to kick off the next event.

As players compete, they'll earn speed points, which unlock new cars or parts. Thankfully, however, the game seems more about the actual gameplay of competitive driving than of car-shopping. The developers gleefully encourage players to try to ram into each other to derail their efforts to score top speeds in timed challenges. They want players to feel like they're always in some sort of racing contest. And here's something interesting from one of the creators who showed the game at E3: "With our handling, players are able to 'dance' with their cars." Sounds good to me!

Criterion is an extraordinary racing game studio and a consistently, pleasantly cheeky one. One more carry-over from Paradise: the game's city is filled with billboards you can smash through. The twist this time: the billboards show the names of other EA development studios such as DICE, BioWare and Visceral. Smash through them and they're replaced with Criterion signs.

Welcome to Kotaku's official forum, known affectionately as Talk Amongst Yourselves. This is the place where we gather on a daily basis to discuss all things video game and existential. Want to talk about new games, old games, games that aren't even out yet? Knock yourselves out!

Sure, Botticelli's "Spring" is fantastical, but it's no Final Fantasy . At least not until God of all TAYpics Pan1da7 gets his hands on it and makes it into a scene straight out of FFX. Mmmm… love that Auron.

You can do funny things with pictures, right? Want everyone on this fine web forum to see? Here's what you do. Post your masterpieces in the #TAYpics thread. Don't forget to keep your image in a 16x9 ratio if you want a slice of Talk Amongst Yourselves glory. Grab the base image here. Don't forget to keep your image in a 16x9 ratio if you want a slice of TAY glory. The best ones will be featured in future installments of Talk Amongst Yourselves.

The remastered edition of Doom 3 announced a few weeks ago will hit PCs, PS3s and Xbox 360s this October. The BFG edition of the classic first-person-shooter will also include full versions of Doom 1 and Doom 2, along with seven new Doom 3 levels and the Resurrection of Evil add-on. The whole shebang will cost $29.99 for PCs and $39.99 for consoles.

Just in time for next month's San Diego Comic-Con, UDON presents Marvel vs. Capcom: Official Complete Works, 192 pages of art from every collaboration between the comics company and the Street Fighter people, from the Punisher arcade game to Marvel Vs. Capcom 3.

This comprehensive tome, due out in November in softcover format, is a comprehensive art history of everything Marvel's done with Capcom since the beginning of time. The Punisher, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Vs. Capcom, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3; when UDON says comprehensive, they mean comprehensive.

The art book people worked closely with Capcom creative head Shoei Okano, scouring the game-makers' archive for rare high-resolution artwork from beyond the edges of time (1993) to the present. The book's got design sketches, concept art, promotional work — it's even got bios for every character that's ever raised a fist, foot or fireball in cross-continuity battle.

Marvel vs. Capcom: Official Complete Works debuts next month in limited edition $100 hardcover format at San Diego Comic-Con. I'll be there to bathe it in saliva.

The lead designer of StarCraft II says there are several ways the popular real-time strategy series could make its way to consoles—and that under the right circumstances, Nintendo's upcoming Wii U might be a good fit.

Blizzard has traditionally focused on PC-only titles, but the brains behind massive franchises like Diablo, Warcraft, and StarCraft are no stranger to console gaming. The studio has confirmed that it's exploring options for a console version of Diablo III. Ports of the original Diablo and StarCraft have made their ways to PlayStation and Nintendo 64, respectively. And of course there's Blizzard's most infamous piece of vaporware, the elusive console game StarCraft: Ghost.

So while speaking to StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder in an extensive phone interview last week, I asked if he thought a game like StarCraft could work on consoles, particularly a system like the Wii U, which seems like the perfect fit for strategy games. He confessed that he hadn't seen Nintendo's upcoming console in action, so I gave him the basics: it's coupled with a touchscreen tablet controller that's sort of like an iPad with joysticks, buttons, and triggers. Basically, the whole kitchen sink.

"The problem I have with the iPhone interface is the big meaty sausages called my fingers that are always in the way," Browder told me, explaining that he thinks devices like the iPhone and iPad work well for games that allow you to casually lift up and put down your fingers, like tower defense.

"If I can control a cursor on the television with my hand on the touchscreen, that might be able to work," he said. "[But] because of the hotkey scenario, it's not like players actually play StarCraft with the mouse only—they play with the mouse and keyboard... We obviously allow new users to play mouse-only and that's really fun, but when you get serious about the game you do move into the mouse and keyboard space."

So maybe the Wii U wouldn't work for a real-time strategy game like StarCraft II. Or maybe it would, with some tweaking. Maybe if Browder and his team got a chance to play around with the tablet, they'd figure out a proxy for the keyboard. Maybe they'd come up with an entirely new idea for the franchise. Or maybe they'd leave with nothing at all.

I asked Browder if Blizzard has a team "exploring" console versions of StarCraft II like they do for Diablo III. He said no—nobody is working on a console StarCraft, although he confesses they've thought about the possibilities.

"Every now and then we do have people show us things," he said. "Or we will see demos to kinda dip our toe in the water and say, 'Is this real yet?' But we've never been able to convince ourselves."

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Back when Sony was first showing off its PlayStation Move motion-control accessory, their people came to Blizzard to demonstrate how it might work for a game like StarCraft II.

"The demo that I saw was really fun because the guy who came in and showed it to us was a big StarCraft fan, and he put a significant amount of effort into trying to make it work," Browder said.

"And when I tried it, I wanted to kill myself. I found it very difficult to make it work. I believe that if I had practiced as much as he had, I would've enjoyed it more... but for us it felt like it was gonna be a lot more effort to still make that work, to still make that really sing. And for us, control is king, and it's so critical. Everything's gotta move when you tell it to move. It's gotta be really tight. You can't feel like you're battling the interface."

At this, Browder paused and laughed. "Although people could argue that StarCraft is such a challenging game, you're always battling the interface."

Still, Browder says any sort of controller would have to live up to what he describes as Blizzard's "ridiculously high standards."

"It needs to match a very high quality level for control for us to consider a StarCraft move in that direction," he said. "Again, if there is enough there, totally we could make a port. And if there's not enough there, it still might be exciting to do a whole new title."

Blizzard doesn't want to do "kinda crappy ports," Browder says. They don't want to put new users in confusing or misleading situations. "Like, if I'm a new user, I don't wanna come over and see StarCraft on the Wii platform and StarCraft on the PC and go 'oh, I guess it's a Wii game,' and get it and find out that was the bad version."

In other words, they don't want another StarCraft 64.

"So [a console StarCraft] would have to be just an awesome experience. As an alternative, we'd have to redesign the game for that UI which could be something we can do down the road, but that wouldn't be a port anymore," Browder said. "That would be a much more serious endeavor with lots of design time and lots of work poured into it."

If they were to bring StarCraft to consoles, Browder says, it would likely be a new game. New interfaces. New units. New controls. "Whatever it takes to make it feel really tight, really clean," he said.

"We haven't seen the system that we felt we could easily do it," Browder said. "And that's not to say that some day we won't make a really special effort to get it done, cause it certainly would be exciting. We're just not there yet."

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

I've heard plenty of Final Fantasy music remixes in my time, but OCRemix's 35th free album release, Final Fantasy Random Encounter, is the first one I've heard that combines metal guitars with vocals in the style of "Airplanes" as made famous by Haley Williams of Paramore.

Project director Brandon Strader sent us a link to this ridiculously entertaining free release, which as it turns out is the first in a trilogy of albums based on the first three Final Fantasy games. It's very metal guitar heavy, as is the style these days, but then around track five of the first disc things get all crazy.

Josh Whelchel and Ryan C. Connelly's lyrical take on "The Travelin' Song" is... well dammit, you've just got to hear it. It's got singing, I guess you could call it. And then a little bit of really horrible rap. It's so wonderfully random it immediately earned a spot on my MP3 player.

The rest is pretty good, but the fifth track is worth the price of admission. Did I mention admission was free?

Final Fantasy Random Encounter (Download, Artwork, Goodness) [OCRemix]

When I'm not playing Drop7 on my subway rides through New York City, I am trying to burrow ever deeper into my second-favorite iPhone game, Bejeweled—specifically that game's Diamond Mine mode which challenges me to match gems in order to dig ever deeper down into the dirt at the bottom of my screen, as I race against a timer.

The next game from Zynga, the massive game-maker/studio-acquirer behind FarmVille and Words with Friends will soon have their own riff on Diamond Mine on Facebook and Zynga.com. Their version is called Ruby Blast.

Ruby Blast uses the same basic idea as Diamond Mine, such is the way that so many new so-called casual or social games tweak or evolve each other's systems (cynics call this cloning; glass-half-full people call this iterating). You will be matching clusters of similarly colored gems in Ruby Blast while digging ever deeper and racing against a timer.

The novel twists: 1) you're connected to a friends' leaderboard; 2) you can unearth drills that bear the faces of your friends and will clear rows for you, incentivizing you to have more friends playing; and 3) you can bring several power-ups into each round of the game and then have to strategically fill their power meters as you color-match in order to unleash them and destroy rows of columns of gems.

"Match-3 games have been around as a category for more than 20 years," the game's lead designer, Jonathan Grant, told me yesterday during a hands-off demo of the game. "We recognize that there are a lot of Match-3 games there. What we wanted to do was take a familiar concept and innovate in a way on top of it but add new twist for players."

The most unexpected thing about Zynga's push for this game is that they're promoting the graphics. Grant said he wanted the game to be "visually spectacular," which is not something the Zynga folks tend to talk about. He says the game is Zynga's first to use Stage 3D technology from Flash 11, which gives them the ability to generate more particle effects. That's their way of explaining that explosions of starbursts will be more sparkly and kinetic than you'd usually see from this kind of thing. "We wanted to make one of the most visually-spectacular game in the Zynga catalog and also on Facebook," he said.

Ruby Blast is made by Grant's team in Zynga Seattle as well as developers in Zynga China. It'll go live for free some time this week through this link. Zynga is also working on a version of the game that will feature simultaneous multiplayer—Puzzle Fighter-style, presumably—for later this year.

When people think of Square Enix and online games, Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV—and perhaps the upcoming Dragon Quest X—are probably the games that come to mind. But late last year, Square Enix tried its hand at a free-to-play browser game by the name of MONSTERxDRAGON.

MONSTERxDRAGON is a strategy RPG/card game hybrid where players move around a grid map and attack other players by summoning monsters via cards. Unlike most card games—and SRPGs for that matter—MONSTERxDRAGON is not turn based. Rather, actions and summoning monsters requires AP which fills up over time. But if you have enough AP, you can attack almost constantly.

When a round begins, you and your opponent are far apart. At this time, you can choose some of your monsters from your hand to act as defense for your life-points (which they will continue to do until destroyed). Before attacking, you must move into range of your enemy, but this is where the strategy element of the game comes into play. Each square on the map has a set of elemental properties. These properties will boost certain monsters' stats. Therefore, if you are playing a water deck, you want to stand on a lake so your water monsters will become stronger.

Attacking works like a cross between War and Yu-Gi-Oh! If the card you attack with has a higher attack score than the defense score of the defending monster, the defending monster dies. If not, the attack bounces harmlessly away. Either way the attacking monster is discarded and a new monster is drawn from your deck. To prevent the game from just being about who has the better deck, even the strongest defending card can be destroyed by a critical hit—which tends to happen at least 25% of the time. If your defending monster is destroyed, you are able to choose another one, but at the same time, the other player will be racing to attack you before you can get your new defense in place.

You are able to play missions against the computer or battle live against real players. The problem with the single player missions is that the computer is faster than any player. So if you destroy its defensive monster, it can choose a new defensive card and attack you with another card before you can even make a single click.

The multiplayer team battles are surprisingly fun however, as they bring team strategy into play. Teams will often pick a time (on the game's countdown timer) and attack a single opponent in a coordinated attack. Of course, at the same time, the other team is planning its own movement, strategy, and time to attack. The winners are not usually the teams with the best cards, but those with the fastest movements and best teamwork.

For winning a match, you receive a small amount of in-game money which can be used to buy new cards in packs or at the auction house. Of course, you can also spend your real world money to buy packs and cards even more quickly.

For a browser game, MONSTERxDRAGON was much deeper than I expected. It's definitely one of those games that's easy to play but hard to master. The missions were somewhat boring but the team vs team battles I tried were a ton of fun. If you have even a beginner's knowledge of Japanese, this game is playable; so feel free to try it yourself—though you will need to make a free Japanese Yahoo account to do so. If you just want to see the game in action, however, check out the video above.

MONSTERxDRAGON was released on October 13, 2011 for web browsers.

MONSTERxDRAGON

Platinum Games upcoming online brawler Anarchy Reigns has been pushed to early 2013 in both North American and Europe, Sega stated today. The game will be released in Japan as originally planned next month. [Twitter Thanks KingKellogg!]