"Oh no!" you are almost certainly thinking. "Gawker Media is underwater, desperately clinging to Tumblr like that guy in that movie where the cruise ship sank. But it is Friday! It's 3pm Kotaku Time! What will I do without my favorite weekly JRPG/sex-advice column Random Encounters?"

You are too sweet. But don't worry! I am still here, I've still got power, and I have a serious illness where I can't go more than a week without talking about JRPGs, so Kotumblr will have to do.

Over the next few weeks, the bulk of the gaming industry will set its sights on games like Assassin's Creed III, Halo 4, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. I will not. I'll be playing Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Persona 4 Golden, two Japanese role-playing games that I find more interesting and engaging than any big-budget shooter or adventure.

I'll have lots to say about Mario's latest papery excursion next week in my review, which should be up Tuesday, drowned servers permitting. For now I want to talk about the latest Persona game.

Persona 4 Golden, which comes out for the Vita on November 20, is unusual in a lot of ways. For one, it's a video game on the Vita. It's also 3,137 megabytes, which is particularly insane when you realize that the lowest-end Vita memory card is 4 gigabytes, or roughly 4,000 megabytes. The highest-end Vita memory card, by the way, is 32 gigabytes, and it costs $100. This is a business strategy commonly called "we can do whatever we want because fuck you."

The other interesting thing about Persona 4 Golden is that it's a remake of a video game that came out in 2008. This is sort of like that joke about how the people behind Twilight started planning a remake of Twilight when Twilight came out, except instead of a joke, it's real and actually just happened.

But it's all good, because people love Persona, to the point where it's become the shining example of A Japanese RPG It's Okay To Like. It's common to see gamers and critics write things like "JRPGs? Oh, I hate JRPGs. But boy do I love Persona!"

So one big question I'm pondering as I play Persona 4 Golden - my first experience with Persona 4 in any form - is why? Why do people love Persona so much?

I never finished Persona 3 Portable, a game that Kirk and I have discussed quite a bit on the site formerly known as Kotaku. I logged some 25, 30 hours in the game before I had to put it down for one new thing, then another, and then another, and no matter how many times I promised myself I would go back and finish it, I never quite could find the time. But I loved what I played. I loved the calendar-dictated rhythm of daily life as a student in Iwatodai. I loved the dichotomy between mundane classes at school and harrowing journeys through Tartarus. Something about the whole thing just worked.

It's also very, very Japanese, and I say that not to disparage, but to point out that this is a game that wholeheartedly and unabashedly embraces both Japanese culture and Japanese game design. Aside from the obvious - it's a game about people in Japan - Persona 3 also clings onto a lot of design quirks that Western games try to avoid. Repetitive rituals, for example, like that ticking clock animation that appears every time it turns midnight. While Western-developed games like last month's fantastic Dishonored try to give you the player more control than ever, Persona 3 does quite the opposite. Persona wants you to know that it's in charge. Not you.

Similar trends are rearing their heads in the first two hours of Persona 4 (although I'm sure it'll open up more soon). It's got all sorts of funny little ticks. Every time you head in and out of the game's bizarre TV World, the screen will turn funky and that same old TV World animation will play. Just before you're about to watch television at midnight, your character will close the curtains and walk away from his window. Rituals.

And then there are the moments during which the game tells you what to do. "You should go to bed," the game will tell you. Or "You shouldn't talk to him right now." You won't even have the option. Your character spends a great deal of time performing actions that are dictated by the game, not you.

To many people these things would be unacceptable, the definition of "bad game design." But a large number of Westerners-even the ones who don't typically like JRPGs-have fallen in love with the quirks and trends of Persona 3. What's up with that?

Maybe the series' unique structure-seriously, what other games follow this sort of rigid school-dungeon-school-dungeon routine?-makes it easier to forget about what we'd consider flaws in many other games. Maybe these sort of choices work only for games like Persona. Or maybe we're just too in love with Mitsuru to care?

I'll be thinking about this question more and more as I continue to play through Persona 4 Golden. I would invite you to offer your own theories in the comments, but we have no comments. Hurricane Sandy affects us all.

Nowadays, it seems like all sorts of beefed-up characters in shooter games can sling taunts and emotes. But back in 2008, Army of Two won a crucial bros'-rights battle when the two leads-whose names, c'mon, no one even remembers-were able to express their bro-love for each other in a series of team-based mechanics. With elements like drawing fire from hostiles to give the other guy a chance to mow them down or cradling your fingers together to enable a crucial step-jump, Army of Two exemplified what true bro-dude-ness feels like.

Now, Army of Two did have slight aspirations of political commentary, which were focused on what it would look like private military corporations ran amok. Amidst all the co-op shooting and fist-bumping, you got the sense that someone in there wanted to say something about organizations like Blackwater being active in geopolitical hotspots. But mostly it was about saving your bro from dying a lot. That game's sequel Army of Two: The 40^th Day was set in a Shanghai laid low by an cataclysmic earthquake also had some subtext about the behaviors that bubble up when society crumbles. But, whatever, it also let you do a sweet air-guitar gesture after shooting out a guy's kneecaps.

When a third game in the Army of Two series was announced earlier this year, homeslices everywhere wondered what kind of bro-hemian rapture (that's the name of the tune from Wayne's World, right?) was in the works. I got a brief hands-on with Devil's Cartel a few weeks ago and I swear my baseball cap turned itself around on my head. (Note: I don't even wear baseball caps!)

Devil's Cartel aims its pair of protagonists at the bloody drug trade that's wreaking havoc in Mexico. Tequila-based power-ups? Noiiiiice. (Those aren't in the game. But they should be.)

The bro-mance started right off as my character was shot in the dome-which I assume wasn't lethal thanks to a bitchin' faceplate-and had to help my partner fend off a bunch of jerks until he could come get me back on my feet.

From there, the level I jumped in on had the two mercs storming a villa filled with bad guys. I didn't hear any of the sausage party bickering that charactized the previous Ao2 games (no one calls it AoT, aight, guy?). These badasses were getting along? S'all good. Homies can get along. Bros contain multitudes, too, y'know?

Speaking of multitudes, the art style in Devil's Cartel-done up in the Frostbite 2 engine-seemed more high contrast than in previous Ao2 games. And the violence seemed more amped up. The EA rep on hand said that the Visceral Montreal dev studio was aiming for more of an action movie feel, and the gameplay certainly felt like it would be at home in a Jason Statham movie. (Can Brit dudes be bros? Must research.) Cover-chaining lets the player move from safe spot to safe spot quickly and an assortment of pistols, assault rifles and grenade launchers were on hand to blast enemies with. Every kill and co-op move built up an Overkill meter, which feeds a power-up that gives you unlimited ammo and basically turns you invulnerable for a short time. In other words, it turns you into Bruce Willis, blessed be his name.

Lots of environmental destruction was in evidence as we blasted our way through the level, especially when a helicopter gunship-hey, those are NOT cliché-tried to perforate the two main characters. Pumping round after round into the hovering aircraft was kind of mindless but enjoyable fun. And it crashed under our assault, because that's what's supposed to happen. Kicking butt not only earns Overkill but also banks points that you can use to upgrade guns and gear, too. The plot details of Army of Two: Devil's Cartel aren't being discussed now but whatevs to that. You know what the story's about: you and your bro-back-to-back-against the world.

Hurricane Sandy didn't have an effect on the video game scene the way it would have if it had hit in a city like Montreal or San Francisco, where many of the most popular video games are made. But New York City and the surrounding region does have a vibrant indie gaming scene, millions of passionate gamers, a lot of game shops, the headquarters of the site you're currently reading and at least one game development studio you've all heard of.

So, what did this storm do to us all?

Nothing too bad as far as gaming is concerned. Nothing that comes close to the destruction it did to lives and homes across the Eastern Seaboard. It was more of a nuisance. 

Sandy shut down businesses in downtown Manhattan, which remain, four days after the hurricane, without power. Electricity is supposed to be restored today or tomorrow, according to ConEd, the utility whose 14th street power station exploded when Sandy hit.

Among those thousands of businesses was Rockstar Games, which went dark when the rest of downtown lost power and wasn't going to raise a fuss about it. But word was getting out that a new trailer was supposed to hit this week, so they updated fans to let them know it wouldn't be happening. Not yet. The second Grand Theft Auto V trailer (first in a year!) was delayed because of the storm. While most of the development of GTA V is likely happening in Edinburgh, Scotland, home of Rockstar North, trailers tend to come from HQ in downtown New York. So it makes sense.

Rockstar is pretty much across the street from NYU, which has a growing game design and game studies program called the Game Center, run by game designer Frank Lantz. He told me that they're shut down until Monday but plans are still on track for the second annual "Practice" weekend games conference starting November 9. (Tickets still available.)

One of Lantz's students told me the storm had him playing games, because, with no power, there just aren't as many other things to do for fun. "My girlfriend and I are playing board games each night by candles in our dark apartment," Game Center MFA candidate Shervin Ghazazani told me. He's in Manhattan in the Chelsea neighborhood and has stuck around in the darkzone to feed his and his girlfriend's two cats. "We are rediscovering the joy of classic board games such as Guess Who, Crazy Eights and Blockus," he said. "Playing these games has helped us through this tough time. I don't know what we would do each night when we get home for ~3hrs before we sleep."

I noticed Spelltower game designer Zach Gage talking about having no power on Twitter and hit him up. Maybe he had a story about what he was going through? A photo? He e-mailed back last night: "I've got no power no water and only recently Internet/cell service in my new 11-floor walk-up :) I've just been reading comics, making food runs, and hanging out listening to my girlfriend play guitar and bbqing on the roof. Played a few board games, no photos though. Since there's no power I've had to conserve my phone and keep it off. Trying to charge it off various laptops." He told me he nearly designed a dice game, but it didn't pan out.

The Nintendo World Store-the flagship store for all things Nintendo anywhere on the planet-is in Rockefeller Center, comfortably high up enough in midtown that it's had power. They shut down for the storm but were open again on Wednesday. Back on Sunday, the super-gamer/super-self-promoter TriForce Johnson, who had started waiting outside the store a month early to ensure he'd be the first to get the new Wii U on November 18 decided to go home. He needed to be safe with a hurricane coming down and he was assured his spot would be held. He's back now-walked for three hours from Brooklyn to get back there yesterday. He managed to step off the line to see Wreck-It Ralph, though; the wonders of having pals who will take your spot in the line for you, perhaps?

Sandy also delayed the release of CityVille 2, Zynga's new city-building sequel, from early in the week to Thursday.

The offices for Kotaku parent company Gawker Media aren't far from Rockstar's, so we've been shut down as well. The regular New York team-me, Tina Amini, Evan Narcisse, Jason Schreier, and Chris Person-have been working from home, most of us with electricity and occasionally intermittent Internet, only one of us crazy enough to have shot a video of power lines on fire during the storm.

You may have noticed that our home website went down late Monday. We've been posting this Kotaku-ized Tumblr ever since. (And, yes, we know some of you prefer this layout… next year's will look a bit more like it.) All of the Gawker sites were knocked out when the datacenter we use had its lower-Manhattan basement flooded with about 16 feet of water. We're expecting to be back next week. For now, we're here.

I took a walk last night from my dry home in a minimally-affected area of Brooklyn to the Brooklyn promenade. It was dark, and from the Promenade, lower Manhattan should look like this. (Image via Shutterstock)

But, via my iPhone, it looked like this:

Here's a little more of a view up toward midtown where there is power:

This video shows the sweep of the scene:

But, hey, at least the subways are free right now… as far as they'll go. They still can't run through flooded tunnels or into the blackout zone.

In the surrounding area, from New York to New Jersey to Maryland, many gamers are still without power and undoubtedly worrying about other things than when they'll play a video game again. To our readers who were affected by Sandy, we hope you are en route to a full recovery.

The Mass Effect Trilogy-which bundles BioWare's acclaimed sometimes controversial sci-fi series all in one place-comes out next week. (PS3 owners will be able to download the first game in December.) In case you need a refresher for Commander Shepard's saga, watch the clip above.

The last thing I was expecting from a game built on relativistic physics principles was a gentle allegory about the afterlife. But that's exactly how A Slower Speed of Light starts off. The little protagonist in this title from the MIT Game Lab actually dies right at the start of the game and has to pick up objects that help him along to becoming light itself.

The PC/Mac prototype offers players a look at how the world would appear when traveling at lightspeed, complete with Doppler shift and time dilation. For a game made by straight-up certified geniuses, it's a really approachable experience. It's a free download, so if you're the least bit curious about what it's like to warp one of the universe's greatest constants, definitely check it out.

A Slower Speed of Light [MIT]

There are 495 people playing Halo 4’s multiplayer, if you count the cooperate Spartan Ops mode. That’s over three times more than the amount of people that were playing just yesterday, and the game still has four more days before its November 6 release.

Maybe more people are logging on as the weekend nears? Power slowly coming back up in the North East after Sandy? People losing bets as to how long they can hold out before jumping online? Your guess is as good as mine.

- Tina Amini

If this was a real audition tape for Michael Moore to direct the recently announced resurgence of the Star Wars films, I imagine it’d go pretty much exactly like this. But it’s not real. It’s a Conan skit.

- Tina Amini

There is Now a Kickstarter to Help Fund the Making of the "Tweedpunk" Shooter Entitled 'Sir, You Are Being Hunted' [kickstarter.com]

Assassin’s Creed III is a very good game but also a fairly buggy game. And like many modern video games before it, the console versions were patched before they were even officially released.

This means that the version of ACIII that you might have on disc isn’t really what you should be playing. The game’s creators actually mean for you to be playing that version plus what was, on PS3, a 31MB patch.

What does the patch fix? Well, the video above shows something you’ve probably never seen before: three problems in a major game and, well, two, solutions, captured by us to show you the effects of a day one patch.

SPOILER WARNING: Our clip shows early sequences from the first couple of hours of the game.

The first two bugs that you’ll see in the video we captured both involve gameplay, though the first is really a minor thing. It just makes the game look kind of stupid for a second.

The second, the one involving the guard who seemed to get stuck doing the cha-cha when he walked to a certain spot on the deck of his ship, was mission-ruining for me. The guard was supposed to be on patrol. I was supposed to get past him, without him noticing, if I wanted to earn a 100% completion rate. You don’t have to get 100% in a mission, but you should be able to. Notice the odd but effective way they fixed it… they make him hop over the trouble spot!

I talked about the bugs in my review of the game. While I’ve seen a few more graphical glitches, post-patch, in the 20 hours I played on PS3, nothing other than these couple of pre-patch gameplay glitches had any effect on my ability to complete a mission the way I wanted to. So it’s a mixed bag, possibly one that’s a little worse on Xbox 360, where our Kirk Hamilton has seen more cosmetic glitches (again, as mentioned in my review). The game functions a little sloppily, though less sloppily than without the patch. It remains less than a perfect piece of programming.

“With a game of the size and scale like Assassin’s Creed III, it is impossible to find every single glitch until hundreds of thousands of players are heavily using the game,” a Ubisoft rep told me late yesterday after I e-mailed to ask about the developers’ take on the bugginess of the game. “We are committed to making sure people playing Assassin’s Creed III get the best possible experience, and we will be aggressively addressing the issues with updates over the next few weeks.”

I’ve asked if the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are keeping pace with each other in terms of having their problems patched. They have to get back to me on that one.

It’s hard to know where any blame lies or even if any blame is deserved. Old games seem to have been less buggy and the day one patch certainly has become not just a bandaid but a nearly essential element of every major non-Wii release of the last few years. But old games also weren’t this complex and, to the extent they had bugs (glitches, bad translations, etc), the option to update or improve the software simply wasn’t there. You could argue that the prevalence of patches now helps improve games that all games would benefit from this.

But why so many bugs? Is the complexity of a modern game a good excuse? Clearly, in this case, ACIII’s developers knew the disc they shipped the game on included code problems, hence the day one patch. That’s a little odd, given that the three-year development cycle for the game certainly doesn’t give them the out to claim they were rushed.

Historians and people without access to downloading a patch will be all the poorer for not having access, with just a disc, to the proper ACIII experience. And what happens in the future, if Ubisoft ever stops issuing the patch, say, in five years? Will retro-gamers be without access to a better-playing version of the game? Hopefully they’ll at least be able to develop a strategy to deal with a guard who just doesn’t have that extra 31MB of info to tell him to jump out of the way.

UPDATE: Some readers say that, even post-patch, they’re seeing glitch #2: the guard doing the cha-cha. Here’s Twitter user JasonRoseEh, who was playing on the PS3, same as me:  ”the second bug with the guard wasn’t fixed for me and Cha Cha still occurred. In fact, upon freeing the slaves…… the mission leapfrogged and all of a sudden the entire base was in alert. It made no sense. Playing it again didn’t fix this.” And here’s Xbox 360 player Terrett101: “I’ve seen the Cha Cha bug on 360 with the patch, however it was only after he spotted me & tried to walk over.”

In what is hopefully the last graphic installment of our weekly mobile charts, the classic (if a platform that’s only a few years old can have a classic) Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor skitters to the top of the free charts, and a pair of big budget console game tie-ins make paid appearances.

Need for Speed and Borderlands in the iPad game charts. How surreal. Plants Vs. Zombies’ big Halloween push seems to have paid off, granting the popular defense game another shot at the top of the charts. And hey, isn’t that the new paid version of Wreck-It Ralph up there, with three different types of games packed into one? Nifty!

So go ahead and download all the free games and use the money you save to buy all the paid ones. That’s my winning strategy. It’s also why I am always broke.

— Mike Fahey