Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week's best content.

This week's best image is a "digital" graffiti found in Bologna, Italy, by Andrea Vannini. Thanks to Copiously Geeky for the find.

Moving on to our Best Of content this week, we kick things off as usual with a comment from the community.

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The Best Comment From The Community

Our favorite comment of this week comes to you from rtanger with a caution against formulaic games:

Zelda games are handicapped repeatedly by a checklist of its own self-contained tropes that the designers apparently must fulfill for it to qualify as a Zelda game. I have loved the games in the past, LttP & OoT especially, but over the years they've worn thin because each feels more like a set of the same conditions that must be met each game, each dressed in a slightly different skin. It's collecting the same basic items from the same basic dungeon themes in a slightly different order, with the same story contrivances painted slightly differently.

Even the ones that dare to be different, like Link's Awakening or Wind Waker fall into many of the same traps.

Over the years, the formula's worn thin. Because it's exactly that.

A formula.

I really do think it speaks volumes that even people behind the series are frustrated with it. This graphic novel idea sounds interesting. May be something I would consider picking up if the art grabs me.

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Zerg Rushes, Suicide Attacks and Splash Damage: How Real Insect Warfare is Similar to StarCraft

Rajee Rajakumar compares the creatures of StarCraft to real-life insects. More »

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007 Legends: The Kotaku Review

Patricia Hernandez doesn't feel like Bond in the new Bond game. More »

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G4 Canceling X-Play, Attack of the Show. Gaming Programming Nixed

Once the go-to destination for game-friendly programming, G4 said it was ending both X-Play and Attack of the Show. More »

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Why Japan Should Thank Nintendo. And Why It Shouldn't.

Brian Ashcraft explains Nintendo's reputation in Japan. More »

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Unity of Command: The Kotaku Review

Luke Plunkett enjoys the strategy and sexy interface of Unity of Command. More »

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It Only Took Seven Months For Apple To Make Me Feel Like A Chump

Jason Schreier feels shafted for having just recently bought an iPad. More »

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The Ugliest Images From BioShock Infinite Are the Ones That Make Me Want to Play the Game

Kate Cox is intrigued by the underlying themes of BioShock Infinite. More »

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The Complicated Truth Behind Games That Want To Change The World

Patricia Hernandez tells us about the difficulty of developing games with social messages. More »

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Kotaku Timeline: Blizzard's Next Big MMO... Titan

András Neltz & Stephen Totilo track the vague history of Blizzard's codenamed Titan MMO. More »

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Medal of Honor Warfighter: The Kotaku Review

Kirk Hamilton is all around unimpressed by Medal of Honor Warfighter. More »

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Skyrim, Classic Arcade Games and Game of Thrones All Inspired Dance Central 3. Seriously.

Evan Narcisse shows us all the references hidden in the backgrounds of Dance Central 3. More »

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World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria: The Kotaku Review

Kate Cox and Mike Fahey tag-team World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion. More »

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Is Competitive StarCraft Dying? Blizzard Weighs In.

Jason tells us why StarCraft II eSport's biggest competition may be in keeping up with the likes of Valve and Riot. More »

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Here's Everything I Learned About Borderlands Legends

Tina Amini tells us about Borderlands Legends, an iOS game that features the original four vault hunters. More »

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Why So Many Games These Days Are "Japan-Only"

Richard Eisenbeis explains why Japanes games often don't make it over the ocean. More »

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Silent Hill: Revelation 3D: The Kotaku Movie Review

Matt Hawkins talks about what the Silent Hill: Revelation 3D movie does right and wrong. More »

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What Went Wrong With Silicon Knights' X-Men: Destiny?

Andrew McMillen spent over a year trying to find out what went wrong with X-Men: Destiny. More »

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Return To New Vegas: God Bless V.A.T.S.

Kirk is really grateful for Fallout 3's time-freezing "Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System." More »

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Let's Worry About The Games We Already Have

Jason wants us to appreciate the games we have, not the exciting new games we don't have. More »

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We Are Explorers: In Search of Mystery in Videogames

Tevis Thompson is mesmerized and intrigued by the mystery in video games. More »

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I'll take, "Things I don't know the first thing about" for a thousand, Alex.

On Friday's Jeopardy, the Final Jeopardy written question was: "The villains in this game were inspired by the swine flu epidemic scare." The three contestants' guesses were… not close to the actual right answer. You can see it go down in the video above, tweeted and posted by Erik Brudvig.

My favorite is the second lady, who puts a ruinously high bid on her guess that the ancient dragons in Skyrim were somehow inspired by the Swine Flu. Maybe she was thinking of the boars from Oblivion?

In all of their defense, I'm actually not sure I would have guessed the right answer, obvious-in-retrospect though it may seem. Still, pretty funny. This makes me want to go watch some Celebrity Jeopardy.

"We meet again, Trebek."

There's a new insane study of children and video games out there, and it makes me grateful the Wii died without that ridiculous Vitality Sensor ever coming to market.

Let's say you're playing a video game, a space shooter (can't tell if this is top-down or side-scrolling). Your job is to shoot down enemy spacecraft and avoid friendlies. However, if your heart rate becomes too fast (signaling aggression), your ability to shoot is disabled.

What would you do then? What would I do? WHAT THE HELL? STUPID FIRE BUTTON GODDAMMIT WORK YOU BASTARD and then there's a broken window and a controller on the lawn outside.

But that's the structure of a study at Boston Children's Hospital, designed to teach kids to deliberately calm their emotions. In the case of RAGE Control (the game's name), you can't reacquire the means of shooting until your pulse drops below a certain threshold, I guess by listening to Al Jarreau or something. But hand it to these guys, they've managed to create a system that mandates being cool under fire.

This study examined kids between the ages of 9 and 17 years old who were undergoing inpatient treatment at the hospital's psychiatry service, diagnosed with "extremely high levels of anger." So those are some pissed off kids. One group got the standard anger-management therapy, a second got the therapy plus the video game. Those who played the video game did better and said it helped more.

Researchers Use Video Game to Help Children Control Anger [Game Politics]

You have likely already seen Drunk Jeff Goldblum enthusing about things. The internet, pizza, and more. This latest video, in which he slurredly marvels at the ubiquity of PayPal, might be my favorite.

(Part of that may have something to do with the fact that I see the actual full-speed version of this ad approximately five thousand times a night while watching Hulu.)

If the people hiring Jeff Goldblum to shill for their products had any sense at all, they'd actually get him liquored up for his next ad and let him do it while actually drunk. (It's cool, ad companies, just credit me for the idea at some point and it's all yours.)

Would drunken spokespeople make it more likely for you to buy a given product? Should more ads for alcohol be feature actual drunk people? Do you want to rewatch Jurassic Park as much as I do?

Feel free to discuss Goldblum, drinking, or whatever else, here or over in the Talk Amongst Yourselves forum. Have good chatting, and remember: When Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

Download a game on the Xbox 360 or the Wii and you're good to go. You can play it. Download a game on the PS3 and you just might have to then tell the PS3 to install it.

You have to manually install any game that you have downloaded in the background. This is strange, sort of like the PS3 is getting back at you for being an efficient multi-tasker. By allowing background downloading, the PS3 is respecting your time and not forcing you to sit through a download. But by requiring you to find the bubble icon that represents the game you just downloaded, click it and install the game, it's just finding a different way to hassle you. Why do I need to tell the PS3 I want to install the game? What else does this system think I want to do with the game I just downloaded??

This wouldn't be so annoying if installing a decent sized game on the PS3 didn't take a couple of minutes—and block the PS3 from doing anything else while the installation is happening. Ugh.

Sony seems to know this is an annoying requirement. It automates installation if you're downloading the game regularly (not in the background). It installs games automatically if you've set your PS3 to shut down via the shutdown option in the system's cross-media bar. (Thanks for that tip, Twitter friends!)

Why does this requirement exist? I never remember to ask Sony people, but I have a theory: you probably have to install background-downloaded games manually because the installation process takes over the PS3 when it starts. As annoying as the installation process is, it would be worse if it kicked in and took over the PS3 while the person operating the PS3 was using the system for something else. Hey, your background-download is done! We're installing the game now, so you just sit tight and don't mind the long interruption!

Six years in, this is one of the PS3's just-deal-with-it flaws. Every system has its annoyances. Don't get me started on the 360's miserably slow Game Library interface. PS3, your mandatory installations are your worst! (Oh, and I wish the machine would remember that I want the Y-axis inverted. My 360 does.)

This post was part of Anger Management, the label we give for all of our belly-aching and some of yours. Anger Management stories run on Friday evenings, mostly.

Welcome back to "Backhanded Box Quotes," a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic and elsewhere.

What are you dressing up as for Halloween? I'm going as Medal of Honor: Warfighter's Metacritic score. No, make that Sexy Metacritic Score for Medal of Honor. Because the real one is ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road. Some civilian critics didn't see it that way, though, so we begin with a couple of 10 scores given to it.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter

Released: Oct. 23

Critic: GameInterpretor (Metacritic)
• "Looking forward to DLC and even a sequel!"
Score: 10.

Critic: Drazat (Metacritic)
• "The graphics blow me away with there astounding browns and shades of brown there is more brown in this game than any game before it."
Score: 10.

OK, now back to the hating.

Critic: Hurricane 9 (Metacritic)
• "If there were not an EA logo plastered all over the place, you might think it were a F2P indie game."
Score: 3.

Holy shit, slamming both EA and indie devs? That is coldblooded and backhanded.

Critic: GamesMaster4Life (Amazon)
• "This game is not to be recommended to anyone,no matter how much you hate them."
Score: 1 star.

Critic: NinjaTwin (Metacritic)
• "Save your money and buy yourself a new shirt instead of wasting it on this rubbish."
Score: 0.

The Unfinished Swan

Released: Oct. 23

Critic: kasparov5 (Metacritic)
• "It is good but the graphics are lacking compared to modern fps games like Call of Duty."
Score: 5.

Hotline Miami

Released: Oct. 23

Critic: UnbiasedOne (Metacritic)
• "It would have been a hit in the year it's taking place in (1989) but for 2012, the eye strain, the aggravation and the urge to drive to the developers and beat them within two inches of their lives is not worth it, and $9.99 is defiantly not worth it. Again yet another pile of trash that will go straight to the top of the charts."
Score: 0.

Take note folks: No matter how much you insist on Hotline Miami being worth it, it will refuse. For it is defiantly not worth it.

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This auctioning of assets belonging to 38 Studios, the makers of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, brought in a combined $830,000, reports Joystiq. Sounds ... good? Well, according to the Associated Press, that will barely dent the $100 million taxpayers may eat in Rhode Island, which guaranteed the loan for which someone gave themselves this award (courtesy of ex-38er Rich Gallup)

Now, that was for physical assets sold off this week (and last week at 38-owned Big Huge Games in Maryland). The court-appointed official also told Joystiq that the sale of the studio's intellectual property, which includes works in progress such as a grandiose, free-to-play Kingdoms of Amalur MMO, will be sold off over the next three to six months. What that brings in, who knows, but Rhode Island is almost certainly looking at a loss here.

38 Studios auction in Rhode Island earned around $650,000 [Joystiq]

Only a few days old and already I'm desperately trying to breed a beast before the end of Gizmonauts' Halloween spooktacular. OCD and me.

Sleeping Dogs! Kingdom Hearts! Dead Island!

Lots of neat Square Enix games are on sale this weekend, so head over there if you think something will strike your fancy.

Particularly hilarious: the PC remake of Final Fantasy VII is on sale for $6.99. Instead of $11.99. Final Fantasy VII!

Medal of Honor: Warfighter was supposed to be the big military shooter of the fall. Or at least, of the fall until that other big military shooter comes out in a few weeks.

Comparisons between Medal of Honor: Warfighter and its competitors, Call of Duty and Battlefield, have proven inevitable—and Warfighter does not fare well in the comparison. Opinions run the gamut, from "uninspired" to "awful," but never actually make it up to "good." Will more post-launch multiplayer change hearts and minds? It's not looking good.

Perhaps the silver lining in a bad game is that it can produce excellent writing. Read on to find what reviewers 'round the world made of the muddled mess.

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Joystiq

It's impossible not to compare Medal of Honor: Warfighter to the Call of Duty franchise, the series that dominates the genre and so clearly serves as an inspiration for Warfighter's large-scale moments. While the Call of Duty series has shown solid and creative iterations year-after-year, building upon its core foundation with interesting additions, the sum of Medal of Honor: Warfighter's parts instead comes off as an estimation of what a shooter must have to be considered competent.

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Polygon

Danger Close purports to have nobler goals than just another war story. It's talked at length about their quest for authenticity, if not realism.

Very little of it shows in the final product. Medal of Honor Warfighter fails in almost every regard. Warfighter's campaign is a jumble of flashy parts that Danger Close unsuccessfully tries to glue together, and the solid foundation of its multiplayer is buried under a broken interface, small maps and poor interface design.

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Destructoid

Charmless, cynical, and uninspired, Warfighter encapsulates everything wrong with the annual big budget shooter industry. It's really not an awful game, it's just insipid and shallow, a title that exists solely to exist, and squeeze whatever profit remains to be had from serving the same flavorless porridge to the same unadventurous customers. It will make its money, and keep the FPS factories in business for another year.

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Game Informer

Outside of a few thrilling (but out-of-place) car chase sequences that would feel more at home in a James Bond or Jason Bourne game, Warfighter brings nothing new to the table. The level design is painfully linear, and Danger Close puts a strange over-emphasis on breaching techniques. The laughable enemy AI is prone to taking cover from grenades in the middle of the street, and your oblivious squad members set up shop in your line of sight or even push you out of cover because they are scripted to position themselves in that spot. The occasional audio glitches, ugly building textures, and awkward lighting choices prove Danger Close isn't comfortable controlling the powerful Frostbite 2 engine, as well. I even experienced a checkpoint bug that forced me to restart an entire level.

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Eurogamer

That Medal of Honor: Warfighter is utterly generic and devoid of personality doesn't come as much of a surprise. Clearly dusted off to fill the years when DICE can't provide EA with a new Battlefield game, Medal of Honor's rebirth as a khaki placeholder is now complete. This is not a game that seeks to challenge or innovate. It's here to give you exactly what you expect and nothing more. Yet even when following in the footsteps of others, it can't help tripping over its own boots.

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PlayStation Official Magazine UK

Warfighter is at best competent. A slightly damning indictment meaning that at its highest shooty peaks this is basically average. And a five-year-old average at that, with dialogue and gameplay that crib so hard from the Modern Warfare/Generation Kill school of American foreign policy that it touches down somewhere between parody and homage. Apparently this season's way to talk in armyland is to call everyone "brother". Roger? Over. Review actual. Hard copy, out.

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GamingTrend

I don't know which General Officer Bright Idea thought it was a good idea to rush this game (I'm sure it has everything to do with the timing of another upcoming military shooter) but the experience has suffered for it. While some little things like having to account for bullet drop compensation (BDC) while sniping, the inclusion of a HUD color blindness mode, excellent voice acting, the ability to lean, and a very solid driving level makes for a compelling product, the fractured and seemingly random storyline and currently-busted multiplayer can't be ignored. Danger Close has a short window to get themselves squared away before it's too late. Medal of Honor's reboot in 2010 was high speed, low drag, but this year's title just feels like a rush job – a little 6P (Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance) could have gone a long way.

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Kotaku

If you have played a military shooter in the last five years, you've already done every single thing you'll do in Medal of Honor Warfighter, and done it better. The game so epitomizes the thoughtless, drab military shooter that it frequently lapses into inadvertent self-parody. It is lackluster in almost every way. But hey, at least the flashlights look pretty good.