Not everyone is pleased with Ninja Theory's take on the new Dante. That hair, that demeanor, that easy gameplay? These are some complaints I've heard from fans since the reviews started hitting for Capcom's latest entry in the Devil May Cry series, which released just yesterday.

But reviewers love it! They love the action, and the sequence of moves you can pull off. They love the weapon system. So let's hear more about what everyone had to say, from the less convinced review to the most glowing one.

The Escapist

Despite a couple of problems, Devil May Cry is a lot of fun for any fan of action melee, whether or not they're veterans of the franchise. The style rating system gives you a reason to play through multiple times as well as motivating you to explore using the entirety of the arsenal made available to you. Thought it takes a lot of time to get used to, the weapon system does a fine job of making you feel in control, even if you're just frantically mashing buttons. Aside from Dante's cheesy one-liners, the atmosphere of the game is dark and brutal, with the shattered environments adding to the feeling of a world on the verge of annihilation.

Edge

This, it was claimed after we first saw the new Dante, is a genre that could only truly be understood by Japanese studios, doomed to fail. What an overreaction that was to a makeover and some dubstep. This is the best entry in its genre since Bayonetta, and might just be the best game Ninja Theory has made to date.

Gamespot

There's a point in DmC: Devil May Cry where everything just falls into place, a point where—after being mollycoddled through hours of gentle combat—you're finally let off the leash. And at that point, chaos ensues. The gates of hell are opened, once-timid demons become tremendous horrors, and Dante transforms into a fighter of glowing theatrics and tense technical wizardry. Immense, over-the-top combos flow from the fingertips, unleashing all manner of visually enticing carnage with a precise, fluid feel. So entertaining is the combat, in fact, that it's easy to overlook what a wonderful achievement DmC is as a whole.

IGN

Long-time Devil May Cry fans unsure of Ninja Theory's treatment can abandon their fears. DmC hurls Dante into a newer, better world, complete with a glorious combat system and enough style to make old Dante proud.

This is digital action at its finest, steeped in the blood of angels, spiced with gunpowder, and garnished with a middle finger.

Joystiq

It's fast, hard and raunchy, so much so that any small inconsistencies are swallowed up by the next fight, new weapon or new ability. Its story seems crafted specifically for me, or at least for a market in which I am the target consumer. It pokes fun at the real-world machinations of bogus news networks, stars a confident, swagger-laden hunk with supernatural abilities, and leaves a wide array of weapons at the player's disposal. Each of these aspects on its own is a reason to get behind a game, but by far the most important one—for a Devil May Cry reboot especially—is the fighting. DMC does action extraordinarily well and manages to make Dante look like the epitome of cool with every move, and it's wonderful to see this feat in motion. Over and over and over again.

Giant Bomb

I brought no personal baggage to Ninja Theory's take on Devil May Cry, having played and enjoyed the original game way back when but then steering clear of the series after its poorly received second entry. Whether you're a longtime fan (with an open mind) or a total newcomer just looking for a solid character action game, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling overly dissatisfied with this new game. It's almost wholly successful at what it tries to do, and seems like the start of a promising new direction for what was otherwise a nearly forgotten franchise.

Kotaku

It'd be easy to reduce the game to They Live with liberal social commentary with its demonic robber baron villains. This game updates the elements of the Devil May formula—combat flow, maximizing a moveset in a personalized way and slashing around biblically influenced lore—to make it feel like it belongs in the present day. Is it more grounded and serious? Yeah. This new Dante looks like someone you'd walk past in the street. But the surprise is how much that switch works. Ninja Theory's still mining a vein of self-conscious character creation but the winking is far more knowing than it was in the previous DMC games. However, the play is so good that it makes you reconsider the entirety of the work being done. The new Devil May Cry isn't from the netherworld after all. Fact is, for action fans, it's a slice of heaven.

YouTube user Marflus1 has created this musical gem, which is described as follows:

An Arrangement of "Still Alive" from Portal, produced using the Wintersday Bell and Pipe Organ in Guild Wars 2, a little bit of pitch editing in Audacity, and an awful lot of time in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Whatever it takes!

Marflus1 previously figured out how to wring "Billie Jean" out of Guild Wars 2.

Portal's "Still Alive" in Guild Wars 2 [YouTube]

We can expect to hear something official, and soon, about the game Bungie is building for Activision, rumored to be a sci-fi epic titled Destiny. GameSpot reported today that the studio is scheduled to give a talk about its new game at Game Developers Conference in late March, which would indicate a more formal reveal by the publisher is coming before then.

An Activision representative said the publisher had no comment about the appearance.

The GDC panel will be led by the game's art and design directors and will deal with the studio's world-building techniques, GameSpot reported. The panel's title is "Brave New World: New Bungie IP." The event description indicates that Bungie's next 10 years' worth of games will be set in the universe it's creating for Destiny.

A leak of a marketing document back in November established this world as a future Earth where humans have retreated to a single city in the face of an alien invasion. Humanity is protected by a large spacecraft, an alien ally. Destiny is suggested to be "a highly social experience" somewhat like an MMO.

Bungie discussing Destiny at GDC [GameSpot]

Founded in 2003 by the last remaining members of Westwood Studios—fathers of the modern-day real-time strategy game (see Dune II)—Petroglyph Games has spent the past decade continuing to build on that proud RTS tradition. Now the developer has taken an unexpected turn towards mobile social games, to Coin a Phrase.

Coin a Phrase is a pleasant little free social game in which players take turns (turn-based!) trying to solve a phrase before their friend or randomly-chosen opponent. Players can draw cards or spent coins earned through winning to uncover hints to give them a leg up on the competition as they attempt to suss out song and movie titles, popular sayings, sports teams and a number of other categories available for in-app purchase.

Making a move into social mobile gaming is a smart choice for any developer given the state of today's market. It's just incredibly strange seeing a name like Petroglyph attached to this sort of experience. It's like thinking you're eating one thing and then discovering it's something else entirely—not something bad, just not something you were expecting.

Coin a Phrase [iTunes]

A memorable boss fight is not just about gameplay or battle themes—slaying zombies can get tedious after a while, no matter how well-made the fight is. Luckily developers never forget to ensure that we encounter the most ridiculous-looking (probably in a good way!) and nonsensical bosses from time to time.

We collected a bunch of them. Let us know in the comments if you find even stranger ones!

Joe Head Joe (Skullmonkeys)

source: sanata1000's longplay of the game

The Great Mighty Poo (Conker's Bad Fur Day)

source: Conkerkid11's video of the boss

The Master (Fallout)

source: Dap642's longplay of the game

Bob The Killer Goldfish (Earthworm Jim)

source: Tuwoa's video of boss fight

Temperantia (Bayonetta)

source: TriLink12's video of the fight

The Slot Machine (Starfox)

source: MortalP's longplay of the game

Sin (Final Fantasy X)

source: Zashtheman's longplay of the game

Barthandelus (Final Fantasy XIII)

source: MasterLL's longplay of the game

Giygas (Earthbound)

source: AeroClash's longplay of the game

Gaping Dragon (Dark Souls)

source: EpicNameBro's longplay of the game

Almost Everything From Parodius

source: Cubex55's longplay of the game

Every year, a game developers conference is held in San Francisco. In GDC 2013, Valve's Joe Ludwig plans to give a talk about porting Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality goggles in a talk titled "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality."

A summary of the talk:

Several people at Valve spent the past year exploring various forms of wearable computing. The wearable effort included porting Team Fortress 2 to run in virtual reality goggles. This session will describe lessons learned from Valve's porting experience. Topics covered include an overview of what stereo support entails, rendering 2D user interface in a 90 degree field of view display, dealing with view models and other rendering shortcuts, and how mouselook can interact with head tracking in a first person shooter. In addition to the lessons that apply to Team Fortress 2, there are also several lessons that would apply to any new virtual reality game. A game designed for VR could avoid many of the issues that came up with Team Fortress 2. These topics will also be covered.

Naturally, porting to VR goggles isn't easy. So there's another talk by Michael Abrash, titled " 'Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going).'

Hopefully these talks aren't just nods to idle experiments, but a look at what we can expect in the future when it comes to interfacing options on Team Fortress 2. One can dream!

Valve to talk head-mounted display research, Team Fortress 2 VR port at GDC 2013 [GDC News and Information Blog ]

Witness Australia's Firemonkeys as they put more effort into the next installment of mobile's flagship racing series than most console developers put into their $60 games. Not only are they recreating famous race tracks, they're imagining new race tracks in real world locations.

Firemonkeys and EA have been teasing us with footage of Real Racing 3 since last August, rolling out the console-quality graphics and polish every time Apple needed to show off some shiny new hardware. Now they're racing towards a February finish, and we've got the second in a series of videos you hardly ever see with a mobile game — the developer diary.

If they treat it like a console game and promote it like a console game, will the console gamers come? All I know is this is going to be one hell of a reason to have an HDMI out for your mobile device.

For more unfair teasing follow Real Racing 3 on Facebook.

You might think, given the game's abundance of politics and griefing on an intergalactic scale, that the kind of people who play EVE Online are complete psychos.

Well, you're only half right.

Ezra Morris and Ben Ritter from Motherboard went to the EVE Fanfest in Iceland last year, and while there, brought a nice camera and the intent to profile a number of the game's players, to see what motivates them and how their feelings on the game may have changed.

I love features like this. It's so easy to fall into the trap of assuming everyone who plays a certain game is alike, so it's nice to get reminders that, even in the world of tumultuous science fiction MMOs, you can never be sure who the person on the other end of a message/missile salvo is.

EVE Online, Offline: Meet the Geeks Living Inside an Interstellar Virtual War [Motherboard]

We live in divisive times. The public discourse is rife with bickering and malice, and yet there is at least one thing we can all agree on: Scribblenauts is adorable.

Today's Miiverse Moment is a dose of sunshine and cotton candy from the most heartwarming place in the Miiverse: The Scribblenauts Unlimited community. It's a place jam-packed with devoted, creative fans of series that is cute-as-a-button. Below is just a small sample of what they've made. Enjoy.

Miiverse Moments is an ongoing series showcasing the best, the worst and the weirdest that the Wii U's Miiverse has to offer. If you stumble across something exceptionally amazing, foul or funny in the Miiverse, feel free to share it in the comments.

Here is a fascinating dissection by Vimeo user Matthias Stork which is seven months old, but recently written up by Indiewire and tweeted by Roger Ebert, so I thought it was worth sharing. It delves into the relationship held between movies and games—which goes further than simply having more cutscenes in games (though this, too, is explored). The relationship is actually mutual in some cases: I was impressed to see almost identical-looking footage of Spider Man and Mirror's Edge side by side.

All in all, a hugely informative video that I highly recommend watching. It makes me wonder about something a game designer once said to me: that the movie industry is becoming more and more influential in the game world—and yes, not just because of cutscenes and cinematic games.

Transmedia Synergies - Remediating Films and Video Games [Matthias Stork ]