Most people might take their stealth tips from Solid Snake or Sam Fisher. Me, I'm more in tune with, uh, the Kool-Aid man. Seriously. Just burst into the room in the most reckless way possible and "problem solve" by shooting people up close in the face—that's how I do things. Patience, finesse and furtiveness aren't my thing.

So before starting Mark of the Ninja up, I assumed my brash nature would be at odds with what the 2D game required of me. I was right—at first. The game starts with the assumption that you are already a smooth killing machine, and the pith lies in the tension between a player's clumsiness and the eventual embodiment of the refined ninja. The ultimate revelation comes in the transformation, in the metaphorical gain of the black belt. The game teaches you to feel at home in the shadows, to become quick on your feet, to bear the mark of the ninja proudly, with honor. And honor is one of the most important things in the game, but more on that in a second.

This much I can tell you about the premise, because I had a difficult time piecing the narrative together and not only is it lackluster, it's not really why you'll be playing the game anyway. You're a ninja. You're a part of a clan that is endangered. And there's a corporate giant of sorts that threatens you. You bear the mark of the ninja, which is dangerous and will eventually require you to kill yourself. But before then, you're to rid the world of Evil Dudes—and you know they're evil because they hide behind their technological doodads and you, you have honor. Honor means fighting with your sword, your fists, and using tools like smokebombs and bamboo daggers.

A curious approach to characterizing the Ninja, given that a quick Wikipedia search tells me that though their unorthodox methods of warfare allowed them to specialize in infiltration, sabotage and assassination, it was the samurai who upheld rules about honor. Doesn't hiding in the shadows and killing people secretly strike you as...well, not honorable? Wouldn't an honorable fight mean a no frills one on one where both people can see each other? And plus, it's not like that sword and dagger aren't technology either, no? Most things around you is technology, tech isn't just stuff like computers. So Mark of the Ninja strikes me like a (typical) conflation of Asian folklore combined with a naive, but common portrayal of how technology inherently erodes tradition (and ruins everything). Still, both of these aspects inform the mechanics and the narrative immensely.

WHY: Mark of the Ninja is a well-designed stealth game that makes the genre fun for both newcomers and veterans of the genre alike. I like to call it stealth popcorn.

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Mark of the Ninja

Developer: Klei Entertainment

Platforms: Xbox Live Arcade

Released: September 7th

Type of game: 2D Stealth Game

What I played: I spent 7.5 hours playing up to the middle of the last level. I've unlocked a number of moves and tools, and have started attempting some of the challenge levels and special level challenges.

Two Things I Loved

• When in the shadows, I look like I'm wearing a black shinobi shozoko—the true color stealth—regardless of what color it actually was.
• Movement feels so good. My favorite is the swoosh you feel as you grapple from point to point.

Two Things I Hated

• Make the laser puzzles stop, please.
• Sometimes, though seldom, the guards would glitch out and not move and just look back and forth, making stealth impossible.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

• Bring honor to your clan with Mark of the Ninja -Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku.com
• "Huh? What's that sound?" -Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku.com

The bulk of the game boils down to having a place that you must infiltrate, and the obstacles in your way change as you progress. First it largely involves mitigating a guard's field of vision and their patrol path while maximizing your own economy of movement. Not stealth—not because this isn't a stealth game, but because stealth is not necessary to traverse the levels of Mark of the Ninja. This isn't a negative thing. Those like me, the initially clumsy and unrefined types, won't get heavily punished for being unable to be sneaky enough.

It wasn't uncommon for me to go into a room and mess up, have something notice me, and then have to run away while alarms went off. And I could try again and again, for getting away—be it running back to the darkness, or going into a vent—was easy. Thankfully! Feeling like I got slapped in the face whenever I made a mistake in other stealth games would make me resolve to defy the game and do things my way. I mean, if I'm going to get caught anyway, might as well have some fun with it, right? Screw it. But here, trial and error wasn't frustrating. Once you become fluent in the language of the game, you can start doing things the "right" way. Move without being seen. Give your enemies more than just a "peasant's death," which is where you don't kill your enemies gracefully and silently. Or don't kill anyone at all—have it be like you weren't even there.

To be clear, Mark of the Ninja may not be harsh for being inept, but it doesn't reward you for it, either. You get a higher score if you play the way a ninja would, and levels have special sub-challenges that award you better scores and unlocks (and give you reason to revisit levels). That's probably where stealth veterans will find something to do. Having the game tally your performance at the end, with a count of who you killed, who you sneaked by, and so on, in conjunction with becoming comfortable with the way the game worked was the central motivator in learning how to truly become a ninja.

I saw how much better I could be doing, and I got a taste of the devilish satisfaction that comes with, say, slitting an enemy's throat and then throwing them off an edge without others noticing, that the game indirectly encouraged me to become better at it. It was like having the silent hardass—maybe a teacher, or a parent—grade your performance, coming up short, and then scrambling to meet their expectations. Because the truth of it is, they know you're capable of more—but you have to realize it and and apply yourself. Until then all you see is a constant reminder of imperfection—loud footsteps, spotted traps, alarms set off. It's just a matter of how much of of it you're willing to accept...a matter of honor, you might say. Appropriate, then, that levels score you by enumerating your "total honor."

As you go on, the levels become more complex through all sorts of additions—from guard dogs, to shielded enemies, to lasers and deadly gas and even weather effects. Most of these kept the game interesting and varied as you had to reconsider how to move through. At first these are simple configurations, but eventually you move onto complicated spaces bursting with things that can see me or kill me. The way you barely have any room to move seems daunting. But at that point, the game had taught me its secret art. I would crack my knuckles, and tackle the most well-guarded rooms. Still, the moments when the game shone the most tended to when it had just a few guards looking in the worst places (for me). No special high-security gadgets needed, just tight level design with a predilection for letting me approach infiltration in a handful of ways. Mark of the Ninja has this in shuriukens spades.

The exception was when the game started including too many puzzles that involved crates blocking lasers from eviscerating you. Initially something that mixed things up, eventually it became a cause for frustration that didn't feel like it added anything to the game. Other than cursing, I mean.

The ways you can approach the levels also evolve as you go along, too. You start off with items like daggers, which can break lights or smack a guard to catch their attention, and smoke bombs, which can trick sensors and give you room to escape. Then you get fancy stuff like flesh eating bugs, and you learn more complicated moves, like dangling someone out of the ceiling. Heck, you even get a cardboard box at one point—as you should!

I tended to stick to setting up a mine, then throwing a noisecracker that would draw enemies toward it. Sometimes my killing was more personal, in which case I'd have to catch the guard looking away from me, at which point I'd be prompted to press x and either left or right (determined at random). Not meant to be a challenge per se, but it's a good way to monitor if a player doesn't have patience and pushes buttons with a knee-jerk reaction.

The game also gives you ample information on your actions. The audibility of your actions is elegantly visualized—say, footsteps have a certain radius, and running has an even bigger one—and this allows you to plan your actions tactically. You know exactly where to throw a trap without having a guard see it, where a guard will search for you after they've heard something, where guards were last before you lost sight of them, amongst other things. This, in conjunction with ample tools and multiple ways of approaching a room, meant I would sometimes have a sadistic satisfaction in deciding how I wanted to take care of things this time. Is this what Jigsaw killer from Saw feels like? I hope I don't bring dishonor to my clan talking like this!

Mark of the Ninja did something that I find remarkable: it made the stealth game approachable, without compromising the genre. Now if you excuse me, I have a stop a man that's been corrupted by the tendrils of technology. I'll make sure he doesn't see me coming.

Freddie Prinze, Jr. reprises his role as Mass Effect 3 super-soldier James Vega in this December's animated movie Mass Effect: Paragon Lost. The first trailer hit in July. The new one here intensifies the action.

Paragon Lost tells a story about Vega and his squad of special forces as they fight against the Collectors. The feature-length anime from FUNimation and Production I.G., the studio behind anime ranging from Ghost in the Shell to The Matrix.

Paragon Lost will be out on DVD and Blu-Ray on December 28.

Want more? Here's the premiere trailer from this past July.

By far my favorite aspect of Fart Cat!, a fun and utterly deranged iOS game that released Wednesday, comes when you finish a level. A foghorn blares, the gassy kitty smiles and purrs, the screen fills with a stinky cloud and the game tells you, very proudly, "ROOM CLEARED."

You probably will want to play this with headphones if anyone else is in the room, because the symphony of farting and mewling, accompanied by a madcap soundtrack and that no-joke horn blast, will definitely get everyone's attention. Your own chortling will probably drag a complete stranger over to see what the hell is going on, too.

Fart Cat!, by Summer Camp Studios (which include alumni of 38 Studios), requires you to feed a cat his preferred poot-inducing food from one of five bays at the bottom of the screen. If he wants the tuna, flip the tuna-can icon at him. If he wants cheese, flick that. If his preferred food isn't there, touch the cat's tummy. He'll fart and the choices will reset.

Your goal is to feed the cat an increasing number of food items before time runs out, which is represented by a slowly descending woman's arm, coming to pet the cat. Why anyone would want to cuddle a flatulent feline is a mystery to me, but if she pets him, Fart Cat stops farting and a chagrined look comes over him as the game ends. But if you fill Fart Cat up with the grub he wants (that is, get the item counter down to zero), touch his belly and he will, well, let 'er rip and clear the room.

The later levels can be really hair-raising, requiring fast flicking and the means of seeing what Fart Cat wants and what is available through your peripheral vision. Flicking the wrong food at Fart Cat incurs a points penalty (and wastes precious time.) Resetting his food choices when there is an eligible item in one of the bays also dings you, by adding another feeding to that round's total.

Fart Cat! also offers the hilarious FartCraft diversion, an untimed exercise in which you discover 32 "recipes" by combining certain foods and flipping them into the cat's mouth. (My favorite: the dead rat and pancakes, which is the "Shart Stack." Or the rat and the burger: "Fartatouille.")

Fart Cat!'s humor is so sophomoric and its gameplay is so smartly focused that it's easily recommendable to immature gamers both young and old. My only problem with it was the premise: Never in a lifetime of cat ownership have I ever heard or smelled a cat fart. Do cats really fart? This one does, and that's all that matters.

Fart Cat! [iTunes, $0.99]

The last numerical installment of Rockstar's open-world crime franchise has proven to be a goldmine of really awesome mods on PC. We've seen everything from giant megaladon sharks to Transformers to the Back to the Future DeLorean in Liberty City.

And there have been self-referential mods, too, with a GTA IV to GTA III conversion seen in July. The mod above continues that trend and travels even further back in time, replicating the top-down view of 1999's Grand Theft Auto 2 inside the RAGE engine that powers GTA IV. The switch from top-down to the game's normal camera is a nice feature. Work on this mod has reportedly stopped, though. That's too bad. It would've been a nice way to enjoy nostalgia and franchise evolution in one fell swoop.

Footage of GTA 2 powered by GTA IV's RAGE engine [Strategy Informer]

Seen at Square Enix's Final Fantasy party at PAX last week: these posters, complete with game names, dates, and monikers describing each era of the iconic RPG series.

As you can see, even Square Enix has some strong notions about when they got things right. (Although Final Fantasy VI should clearly be part of the Golden Age too.)

I enjoyed getting my hands on XCOM: Enemy Unknown last month. I even liked the multiplayer. One omission, though, kept leaping out to me: there I sat, playing a remake of one of the most widely beloved PC games I could think of, and I had only seen the Xbox 360 version.

Well, no more. Firaxis has sent along a bunch of screenshots showing off how the PC interface looks, to go along with their announcement that PC digital pre-orders are now available. $49.99 gets you the game and the "Elite Soldier Pack," which includes a modern recreation of the default soldier from the original game, soldier armor kits, and armor dyes. The $59.99 physical special edition, for PC, also includes an art book, a fold-out poster, an insignia patch, and various digital bonuses like the soundtrack and desktop wallpapers.

The major difference in look between the PC and console versions is that the PC version has a grid overlay on the world. Lead designer Jake Solomon explained, "It was surprising to us how much the interfaces ended up diverging. It feels different, one of the funny things is that... on the PC, we actually ended up going back and adding a grid on top of the world because in the PC version it was just so irritating not to have the grid in a tactics game." Solomon also reiterated how carefully Firaxis had worked on both the PC and console versions of XCOM natively from the start, rather than creating a port from one to the other at the end. Players will also be able to plug in a controller and switch easily between interface types should they wish.

PC versions of XCOM will indeed connect through Steam and support Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, and other Steamworks features. At the moment, players can't mod XCOM but Solomon mentioned that the team would like to be able to make that happen in the future if possible, through they have not yet explored the options.

While discussing Steam achievements, Solomon also gleefully described himself as patient zero for the "Bubonic" achievement that will be transmitted through multiplayer play, tracing the complex world of who has played with whom through a model of contagion. For XCOM, being a plague on players will apparently be a good thing.

The Skylanders Cloud Patrol game is coming soon to the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD with exciting new functionality that will forever change the nonchalant manner we hand our tablet devices off to our bored children. Exclusive to the Kindle Fire version: in-app physical toy purchases.

In the IOS version of Cloud Patrol, players can enter the codes bundled with their Skylanders toys to unlock the corresponding character in the game. The Kindle Fire version takes this functionality a step further, giving players the ability to purchase the actual toys from within the game with, as the official announcement puts it, "the push of a button." With the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD always connected to Amazon.com, such purchases are easily facilitated, and characters are unlocked in the game as soon as the transaction goes through — players need only wait for the physical toys to arrive.

This is brilliant, in an evil sort of way. It's the sort of functionality the creators of children's cartoons have been trying to figure out for decades — how can we make it easier for the children we've enthralled to spend money on merchandise? If Saturday morning cartoons had a buy button on-screen when I was a kid, my parents would have set the television set on fire. Luckily Amazon's new Kindles are already on Fire (sorry).

As you read this, toy company executives around the globe are staring at the screen, muttering "Wait, we can do this?"

I'm sure there will be controls in place to ensure children don't devour their parents' credit cards ordering colorful pieces of plastic. Thankfully children are innocent and pure and would never dream of hitting the buy button all day long once they figured out their parents' password was their birth date backwards.

In closing, be sure you turn off 1-click purchasing before that $.99 app purchase turns into regular shipments of mystery toys at the hands of tiny terrors.

The Skylanders Cloud Patrol game is coming soon to the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD with exciting new functionality that will forever change the nonchalant manner we hand our tablet devices off to our bored children. Exclusive to the Kindle Fire version: in-app physical toy purchases.

In the IOS version of Cloud Patrol, players can enter the codes bundled with their Skylanders toys to unlock the corresponding character in the game. The Kindle Fire version takes this functionality a step further, giving players the ability to purchase the actual toys from within the game with, as the official announcement puts it, "the push of a button." With the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD always connected to Amazon.com, such purchases are easily facilitated, and characters are unlocked in the game as soon as the transaction goes through — players need only wait for the physical toys to arrive.

This is brilliant, in an evil sort of way. It's the sort of functionality the creators of children's cartoons have been trying to figure out for decades — how can we make it easier for the children we've enthralled to spend money on merchandise? If Saturday morning cartoons had a buy button on-screen when I was a kid, my parents would have set the television set on fire. Luckily Amazon's new Kindles are already on Fire (sorry).

As you read this, toy company executives around the globe are staring at the screen, muttering "Wait, we can do this?"

I'm sure there will be controls in place to ensure children don't devour their parents' credit cards ordering colorful pieces of plastic. Thankfully children are innocent and pure and would never dream of hitting the buy button all day long once they figured out their parents' password was their birth date backwards.

In closing, be sure you turn off 1-click purchasing before that $.99 app purchase turns into regular shipments of mystery toys at the hands of tiny terrors.

They say ‘There's more than one way to skin a cat'. Man, that's such a weird saying. Who skins cats? They should replace ‘cat' with ‘zombie' and ‘skin' with ‘utterly destroy'. That'd make way more sense!

In that vein, here are 19 ways you can utterly destroy the living dead in Resident Evil 6. Served up in animated GIF form! Click through to see.

1. Smack ‘em in the face with the back of your fist!
2. Pick em up by their legs and ‘caber toss' them!
3. Elbow them in their weirdo faces!
4. Kick em in the jaw!
5. Falcon punnnnnnch!
6. A roundhouse kick to the back of the dome!
7. Sneak up behind them and smash their skull against a partition...
8. ...Or a wall!
9. Give em a good old fashioned elbow drop!
10. Get it into a guilliotine from behind and break it's neck!
11. A jumping head slam!
12. Push em over a railing!
13. Crush their brains with a rifle!
14. Get ‘em in a Bulldog!
15. Stab ‘em in the guttiwuts!
16. SUPLEX!
17. An Uppercut!
18. Take their 9-iron away from them and whack ‘em in the head!

19. Or if they're boozy, take their bottle of wine and plunge it into their back!
There! Now you're prepared for the inevitable return of the shambling undead! Here's hoping I didn't crash your browser.

Researchers at Keele University in England decided it would be neat if they had 40 volunteers play either a violent or non-violent video game for ten minutes and then submerge one of their hands in ice-cold water. This study into the sort of silly things researchers can make subjects do yielded fresh information on the effects of violent first-person shooters on pain tolerance.

The study found that that subjects that had played a violent video game kept their hands submerged for 65 percent longer than those that did not, leading researchers to conclude that playing visceral, first-person shooter-type games not only enhanced feelings of aggression, but also tolerance for ice-cold water, or pain.

Now I'm no fan of having my body parts submerged in frigid liquid, but I wouldn't exactly call it pain-inducing. After the initial shock I generally find my extremities numbing quite nicely, though I suppose "violent video games increase numbing-quite-nicely tolerance" wouldn't look nearly as impressive atop a study published in the journal Psychological Reports, which publishes the sort of things you'd expect. I also suppose it's tough to get test subjects willing to get punched in the teeth.

Tough, but not impossible — they really need to apply themselves.

It bears noting that the same team, led by senior lecturer in psychology Dr. Richard Stephens, is also responsible for a study that determined that swearing increases people's tolerance for pain. This is a group of people with more ice-cold water than they know what to do with.

From the good Dr. Stephens: "We assumed that swearing eases pain by sparking an emotional reaction in participants – most likely to be aggression – in turn setting off the body's fight or flight response. This latest study was a test of that assumption in which we set out to try and raise participants' aggression levels by having them play a violent video game. We then tested the effect on pain tolerance. The results confirm our predictions that playing the video game increased both feelings of aggression and pain tolerance".

So basically they have determined that aggression increases pain tolerance, and this study demonstrates another way to get aggression going. They've done swearing and now video games. Perhaps next they'll do having someone hit on your girlfriend at the pub, or having someone sit down across from you and start eating your fries without asking.

Violent video games can ease pain [Keele University]