Dan Houser, the 39-year-old chief writer of Rockstar Games and a co-founder of the studio that's delivered the Grand Theft Auto series, admitted to some screen-looking in an interview this weekend with The New York Times: "Anyone who makes 3D games who says they've not borrowed something from Mario or Zelda is lying," he said.

But, Houser added, "in that regard we've certainly been more sinned against than sinning," probably referencing the slew of open-world crime-spree imitators Grand Theft Auto has spawned or at least inspired over the past decade, from Driver 3 to Saint's Row or True Crime.

"I suppose what we've borrowed from cinema is cinematography," Houser told the Times' Chris Suellentrop. "We haven't borrowed a lot structurally. We've borrowed from TV structurally, we've borrowed from long-form novels structurally. Even a short game like Max Payne is 10, 12 hours long. It's several action movies back to back, in terms of how the story works."

Houser and Rockstar are approaching the release of Grand Theft Auto V sometime in the next six months, and just announced that release last week, which maybe explains their willingness to do a Q&A with the Times right now. The old mainstream media controversies, particularly "Hot Coffee" and the series' treatment of women (specifically GTA's notorious prostitute NPCs) are revisited. But Houser is also asked how his British perspective informs the writing of a game that walks the line of celebrating and satirizing American excesses.

"Is it fair to say that your games are satires of American culture?" asks Suellentrop.

"I think it's fair to say that they are set in a world that is a satire of American media culture," replies Houser.

America at Its Most Felonious [The New York Times]

The next episode of Star Wars has its writer.

As rumored yesterday, Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) will indeed write episode VII, announced when Disney bought Lucasfilm last week and slated for release in 2015.

No word on whether he'll be including Luke, Leia, and Han. Also no word on whether if they do, the movie will be set in a geriatric ward. A space geriatric ward?

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

Assassin's Creed III

Released: Oct. 31

Critic: elgringo (Metacritic)
• "They pulled off Mass Effect 3 with this game."
Score: 0

Critic: Skycrimson (Metacritic)
• "I thought I was actually playing AC2 again because GS gave me the wrong game."
Score: 0

Critic: revial (Metacritic)
• "Conner was a mental midget who spends the entire game acting like a petulant six year old."
Score: 4

Critic: Aust1mh (Metacritic)
• "game tries and fails to rip off Red Dead Redemption."
Score: 3

Critic: Comic Book Guy ElSuthero (Metacritic)
• "After spending years studying the peninsular wars and American civil and revolutionary wars as a hobby I was absolutely bouncing off the walls waiting for this game. I'm British myself and couldn't wait to take on the relentless Redcoats and teach them a lesson in manners that apparently all Brits in the media are portrayed to have! This it would seem would be incredibly easy, every Redcoat in AC3 is simply obnoxious, now considering many army regulars were criminals or the lowest in social standing and many would have never seen a native american, a reaction for the worst would be expected, however considering that most 'Natives' sided with the British concerns me with regards to accuracy!...Poor Charles Lee, he had a particularly bad war, he wanted Washington's job. history suggests he didn't get it, but to make him out in early scenes to be a lovable rogue and in later scenes to be a child prodding sycophant is pushing it, he died of a fever with his hunting hounds. Sadly inconsistencies are throughout this game, even the weaponry is incorrect, I know I'm being a nerd here but how long and how many people were studying the history for this game?..."
Score: 4

Critic: NintendoSucks1 (Metacritic)
• "Worst game since Super Mario Galaxy."
Score: 0

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Released: Oct. 31

Critic: Jaha (Metacritic)
• "I bet Super Mario Karts have better car handling."
Score: 0

Critic: Gar (Metacritic)
• "This is a half breed for Burnout and Need for Speed. Bad thing is that they picked the worsts parts of both so its really really bad."
Score: 4

Critic: BSEI (Metacritic)
• "It is however fun and enjoyable for small children or mentally challenged, the same as Mario Kart is."
Score: 2

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Those crazy folks at Atlus have released a whopping 28 new videos to celebrate Persona 4 Golden, their upcoming Vita remake of the critically-acclaimed PS2 role-playing game.

Persona 4 Golden is out November 20. Look forward to the official Kotaku review—which, and get excited for this, may wind up being a collaboration between me and Kirk—closer to then.

In the meantime, here are 28 videos.

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Persona 4 Golden: Extras: Vox Populi

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Persona 4 Golden: Extras: Difficulty Settings

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Persona 4 Golden: Extras: Weather

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Persona 4 Golden: Extras: TV Shows

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Persona 4 Golden: Extras: Home Gardening

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Persona 4 Golden: Personas: Shuffle Time

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Persona 4 Golden: Personas: Special Fusions

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Persona 4 Golden: Personas: The Velvet Room

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Persona 4 Golden: Personas: Persona Compendium

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Persona 4 Golden: Social Links: A Plethora of Bonds

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Persona 4 Golden: Social Links: Ranking Up

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Persona 4 Golden: Social Links: Bonding for Battles

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: Simultaneous Attacks

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: 1 More

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: Costumes

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: Summoning Personas

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: Bike Chases

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: All-Out Attacks

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Persona 4 Golden: Battles: Cheer Up

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Persona 4 Golden: Dungeons: Requests

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Persona 4 Golden: Dungeons: Investigation

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Persona 4 Golden: Dungeons: Ask for Help

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Persona 4 Golden: School Life: Hit the Town

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Persona 4 Golden: School Life: Part-Time Job

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Persona 4 Golden: School Life: Clubs

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Persona 4 Golden: School Life: Classes

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Persona 4 Golden: School Life: School Events

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Persona 4 Golden: School Life: Let's Go Play!

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Xbox Live's latest dashboard update also delivered an increase in the size of the USB hard drives the console will support. The Xbox 360 can now save to drives up to 32 gigabytes in capacity, double the old limit if 16GB.

Joystiq noted the capacity change and sought to confirm it with a Microsoft representative, who did: "The more our customers use their profile and download digital content, the larger the file size necessary to store that content and move it between consoles gets."

Xbox 360 USB data storage limit doubled to 32GB [Joystiq]

Around sports video gaming's water cooler, much is being made of NBA 2K13 clocking in as October's No. 1 seller on the NPD charts, and it is indeed an affirmation for sports video gamers as a whole. Sports video games are, culturally, treated as an outlier in core video gaming, yet they routinely send two, three or even four titles to the NPD's top 10, a kind of Dow Jones Industrial Average for the gaming industry.

But the NPD figure is decreasingly relevant, as it specifically excludes digital sales, the one channel looked to for growth in a business still losing sales—of traditional, full-version video games—month to month. Further, a game releasing on multiple platforms has an advantage as every title sold, regardless of platform, counts toward its overall total. NBA 2K13 released on the 360, PlayStation 3 and PC—and PSP and Wii. Resident Evil 6, by all accounts a bad game, made No. 2 releasing on just two consoles, albeit with an assist from marketing and brand incumbency.

Still, the game's delayed Steam release—it came out Oct. 30—meant that for a full month, PC users who wanted NBA 2K13 had to buy a physical copy—the kind that counts toward the NPD charts. NBA 2K12 released on Steam on Oct. 4, 2011 and NBA 2K11 on Oct. 6, 2010, the same dates as their console launch.

Sports video games frequently show up in the NPD's top 10, and the global popularity of the leagues they emulate is only one reason. The other is that they have been, ever since EA Sports canned Madden on the PC, predominantly console-based products, with a strong majority of sales coming at retail locations. 2K Sports is, to its credit, one of the few sports publishers willing to deliver a PC version of everything it makes (although that will not include MLB 2K next year. FIFA and Tiger Woods PGA Tour likewise offer PC releases.)

Still, it appears to me that this launch month was all about selling through retail channels to make sure NBA 2K13 outperformed its predecessors—and it did, by 19 percent more in October 2012 than the phenomenal NBA 2K11 sold in Oct. 2010.

Across the office at 2K Games, however, XCOM: Enemy Unknown didn't even make the top 10. NPD said 114,000 units of it were sold though, again, that's physical media sales only. It's preposterous to think XCOM's cash register appeal stops there, when Steam showed 70,000 PC users playing it, concurrently, on the weekend after its launch.

You can't convince me that XCOM isn't one of October's 10 best sellers across all channels. You also can't convince me NBA 2K13 is really No. 1 for the month, either.

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Week in Gaming Apps. Its continuing mission — to explore strange new apps, seek out new games and game applications; to boldly make thematically incorrect quotes in an article with a Star Wars title.

Space played a large role in this week's selection of Gaming Apps of the Day. We've got a space shooter. We've got a great coaster that could, theoretically, be in space. There's that Mensa app, which is the sort of thing aspiring astronauts should fool about with. And then there's Angry Birds Star Wars, because Angry Birds Star Trek would only have three bird colors and everyone would just sit around talking.

If you have a suggestion for an app for the iPhone, iPad, Android or Windows Phone 7 that you'd like to see highlighted, let us know.

Your PS3 Controller Can Also be a Phone Controller

Flagship Android phones might be getting bigger screens, but that's not making game control much easier. Sometimes, you really need a controller. More »

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This Rollercoaster Ride of a Physics Game Could Use a Better Name

Last week Ubisoft's RedLynx studio released a fun and challenging rollercoaster-based psychics puzzler for iOS. You might have missed it, as the app icon is a cartoon cat and the game is called Nutty Fluffies. More »

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This iPhone Game Promises To Help You Get Into Mensa

I used to work with a guy who was in Mensa, the "High IQ Society." He had a plaque over his desk and everything. It was super impressive. I remember always thinking, "Man, I wish I was in Mensa." More »

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Star Wars Brings Out the Very Best in Angry Birds

Everything is better with Star Wars. Anyone that's ever cut a graceful arc through the air with a vaguely saber-shaped object while making whooshing noises knows this. Dogs know this. Pizza lovers know this. Even Disney know this. More »

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ARC Squadron Soars in the Wild Pew-Pew-Pew Yonder

The fact I'm sitting here thinking, "Dammit, I really need to get an iPad," explains both the general excellence of ARC Squadron and its one unfortunate shortcoming, though the game still is a highly recommendable rail shooter that shines with high production value. More »

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There's this small problem I'm having with Assassin's Creed III. It's nothing to do with the game itself, actually, and everything to do with me. The problem is this:

Assassin's Creed III is turning me into a kind of obnoxious person.

I've developed this running commentary while the game goes on. It has nothing to do with the game's themes, or characters. It's unrelated to the gameplay and more or less completely unconnected to anything meaningful inside the game. It sounds like this:

"I used to work about a block away from there."
"They haven't changed out those cobblestones since 1773 and they're murder on nice shoes."
"That hill is the Back Bay now."
"That river is the Back Bay now. They put the hill in it."
"Lexington Common looks different when it's full of cows."
"A beacon? On Beacon Hill? I didn't see that one coming."

I grew up in and around Boston, making my home well inside of Route 128 from birth until striking out down the coast for New York City shortly before turning 25. While previous Assassin's Creed games have claimed high fidelity in recreating Damascus, Rome, and Istanbul, the basic fact of the matter is that those cities aren't my home. Boston is.

AC3 certainly doesn't represent the Boston or New England of the 21st century, of course. But the late 18th century setting of the game, a scant 230-odd years in the past, retains much more immediacy than the Italian Renaissance or the Crusades. The creatively imagined Boston-that-was is close enough to my Boston-that-is to give me a sense of familiarity both comprehensible and misplaced.

Games occupy this strange place in memory, where we so clearly go places and explore worlds that never actually existed. Experiences like To the Moon explicitly address this dissonance, but it's true of every game. I can remember how to get around a space station as well as I can remember how to get around my local mall, but my body's only been to one of the two. The mall is real; the Citadel is not.

When game spaces represent real-world spaces, the strange sense of memory gets ever-stranger. I moved to Washington, DC the year that Fallout 3 came out. Controversial advertising sprang up through the city's Metro system depicting a post-apocalyptic Capital, but it wasn't until after the game came out that I felt the full weight of investigating my own ruined city.

The general size and scale of the virtual DC is of course a mismatch to the real one—spaces in games were ever thus—but the details are devilishly familiar. In particular, the ruined Metro that provides the Lone Wanderer a route for getting around a city full of toppled buildings, nuclear waste, and super mutants is uncannily, frighteningly similar to the Metro that federal commuters use every day.

At first, while playing Fallout 3, I'd wander through the game comparing its locations to ones I knew from daily life. But after fifty or so hours of Fallout, a funny thing happened. Instead of comparing game-play time to real-world experience, I began to relate the other way around. While waiting to change trains at Metro Center in the mornings, I'd see a bench in the shadows and think, "That's good cover for avoiding the super mutants," or I'd see a door and think, "Didn't I pick that lock yesterday?"

Two Kotaku colleagues not based in New York reflected that the Grand Theft Auto games had inspired similar deja vu in them. They had played the games first, and then visited the city. On visiting, they handily identified and remembered places they hadn't actually been. As someone who lived a block away from Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza the first time she came to the neighborhood around Outlook Park in-game, I could sympathize. On that memorable occasion, I'd blurted aloud, "I can see my house from here!"

I can, of course, visit the real Boston—or New York, or Washington DC—at more or less any time, weather and cost permitting. I don't need to see them in a game in order to explore them to their fullest—and even when I do use a game, it's not the kind I can put in the PS3. Exploring a real space, and digitally navigating an imagined space, are never the same thing.

Sometimes, though... sometimes, when game spaces represent real spaces, the uncanny and the real cross over in a very strange way. Through the games I've played, I remember the cities of my heart as places I've never actually known them to be. The tall ships of Connor's era are long since replaced with ugly motorboats, but the next time I stand on Long Wharf, part of me will remember seeing Haytham sail in on the Providence even so.

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GungHo Online Entertainment's Puzzle & Dragons is a game that contains both puzzles and dragons. It's generated more than three million downloads in Japan. I'd say a good half of those downloaded it simply because the game's name features all anyone really needs in a video game.

Puzzle & Dragons is an amazing combination of turn-based monster collecting role-playing game and match puzzler. Players collect creatures of different elemental types, form a party, and then attempt to match gems corresponding to those elemental types in order to increase their creatures' attacks during battle. As they level, creatures earn powerful skills that can be unleashed once enough of their element is collected.

It's so much fun.

Remember the card collecting game I wrote about the other day? Ayakashi Ghost Guild? It's got the collection and fusion bits of that game, with gameplay that doesn't immediately put me to sleep.

With some 412 different creatures to collect on top of the naturally addictive puzzle gameplay, I'm going to be stuck on this one for a while, which is exactly what I expected from a game called Puzzle & Dragons.

Puzzle & Dragon [iTunes]

The recent release history for games featuring Sega's mascot has been a tumultuous one. But the blue speedster continues to lure players in with hopes that the new games will channel in some of the charm and challenge of olden times.

According to multiple sources—GameRanx, Official Nintendo Magazine UK, VideoGamer and Nintendo Everything—that cycle will likely start up again with new digital and boxed titles that will be hitting next year. Speaking originally to Toys ‘n' Playthings Magazine, European head of brand licensing Sissel Henno said:

"We will have several new digital titles launching as well as a new boxed game, so there will be plenty of opportunities to link martketing campaigns across games and merchandise."

No further details about the in-development games were divulged but it seems entirely likely that Sonic would find a home on the Wii U and 3DS. Maybe even the Vita, too.