Near the beginning of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, as the noble pirate Jim Raynor and the psychic-soldier-turned-evil-Zerg-queen-turned-confused-human Sarah Kerrigan are escaping from a squad of invading marines, Kerrigan picks up a gun.

"Been a long time," she says.

"Like riding a bike," Raynor says.

Kerrigan walks over. Kisses Raynor smack on the lips.

"Yep," she says. "Like riding a bike."

That's StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

The first thing you should know about Heart of the Swarm—or at least the single-player campaign of Heart of the Swarm—is that you can't take it too seriously. Feel free to snicker at some of the deliciously cheesy banter, and by all means fall in love with the cast of characters, who are great, but don't waste any brainpower giving serious thought to the story.

See, if you start taking Heart of the Swarm's campaign seriously, you start asking questions like "Why is Raynor suddenly in love with Kerrigan when they barely knew each other before she turned into a Zerg?" and "Didn't Raynor vow to destroy Kerrigan for killing millions of people?" and "Psi Disrupter? Why is there ALWAYS a Psi Disrupter?"

The lack of answers will just drive you mad. Like a popcorn flick or episode of 24, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm's story is fun and entertaining, so long as you don't think too hard. Which is okay! Just don't expect much.

Heart of the Swarm, an expansion to 2010's Wings of Liberty (and part two of what will be the StarCraft II trilogy), begins where the first game left off. Thanks to Raynor, Kerrigan is no longer the most terrifying creature in the galaxy. The Queen of Blades is now the Queen of Fleshy Limbs. And she's been captured in a Terran prison, trapped while the humans try to figure out what to do with her.

As tends to happen with prisons, there's an attack and a big explosion, and eventually Kerrigan escapes to a distant planet. She receives some troubling news about her buddy Jim Raynor, and she decides that it's time to enact vengeance on the treacherous Arcturus Mengsk, who has been a grand and menacing villain in the StarCraft universe since Brood War back in 1998.

WHY: Because it's more StarCraft.

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StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

Developer: Blizzard
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Mac
Release Date: March 12

Type of game: Strategy

What I played: Completed the single-player campaign in 11 hours. Played around with multiplayer extensively during the beta, and a little bit today.

My Two Favorite Things

• New buildings and units change up multiplayer entirely.
• Almost every mission in the single-player campaign gives you something new and interesting to play around with.

My Two Least-Favorite Things

• Evolution missions are essentially a waste of time.
• If you start thinking too much, the story makes no sense.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

• "Zerg rushing never felt so good." —Jason Schreier, Kotaku.com
• "Yep, like riding a bike." —Jason Schreier, Kotaku.com

Remember, back in Brood War, Raynor and Kerrigan were sworn enemies. Now they're star-crossed lovers. We are expected to just go with this, even though they were barely even friends before Kerrigan's transformation and Raynor once swore to kill her and...

Uh oh. I'm asking questions again. Let's move on.

Okay. Kerrigan and Raynor are separated by a lot of nasty obstacles, like Mengsk's Terran forces, rogue Protoss armies, and even rival Zerg swarms that need some coercing before they re-accept Kerrigan as their leader—and, yeah, Kerrigan has decided to become leader of the Zerg again. Kerrigan's psyche is less stable than SimCity.

In an attempt to reunite with her now-long-lost lover, Kerrigan must build up her new swarm over the course of 21 missions (and 6 supplementary "evolution missions" that are more like glorified tutorials that didn't need to be missions at all). Some of these missions are pure StarCraft: you build up an army and use it to attack or defend your base from another army. Others are more creative: you get to defend a tram's engines from enemy ships, fly a battlecruiser through space and even fight boss battles—yes, boss battles!—on the ancient Zerg homeworld of Zerus.

The one constant in almost all of these missions is Kerrigan. While in Wings of Liberty Mr. Raynor preferred to stay on his battleship and bark orders from above, Kerrigan spends most of her time in the vanguard, using her ridiculously powerful abilities to lead your army. As you progress through the game, Kerrigan will level up and evolve, and you can pick skills for her to use on the battlefield.

The good thing about Combat Kerrigan is that she's a blast to control; she can blow up marines with her mind, heal allies, and eventually summon a massive Zerg whale that punctures everything in sight with its tentacles. And in a game where you throw around thousands of Zerg soldiers like they're disposable toys, it's comforting to have at least one recurring hero to care about.

The bad thing about Combat Kerrigan is that she makes the game way too easy. She can kill just about anything, and she respawns whenever she dies, so losing her is never a problem. I played the game on Hard—the second-highest difficulty setting—and I cut through most missions like a zealot through Zerglings, mostly thanks to Kerrigan and her special abilities.

Exacerbating this whole "Heart of the Swarm is way too easy" problem is the fact that every single mission gives you very specific instructions about what to do and where to do it. When you're not building and recruiting, you're following arrows and doing what the game tells you to do. Bring this drone here. Leap on this enemy there. There are optional side-quests, yes, but they're almost always marked on your mini-map, and they're way too easy to find and finish.

But it's still StarCraft. It's still a joy to go through the now-familiar ritual of training and killing, and even the easiest missions are designed with the attention to detail that we've grown to expect from this series. Every single mission is interesting in some way. And even the easier moments exercise your mind in the way that only a real-time strategy game can. As Raynor points out, it's just like riding a bike.

Heart of the Swarm's campaign—which took me about 11 hours to finish—is quite good, and I imagine I'll play through it again at some point in the near future. There are some surprises, and most of the dialogue is so silly and endearing that it's kind of brilliant. Here's an example, from the inevitable Raynor-Kerrigan exchange in which they talk about how battling feels just like old times:

Raynor: "My hair's got more grey in it."

Kerrigan: "And my hair's got more Zerg."

But the campaign is just gravy. The real appeal of Heart of the Swarm is that it enhances the StarCraft recipe. More missions, more plots, more units, more buildings, more balancing and tweaking of the formula that Blizzard has been following for many years now. Harvest. Build. Recruit. Kill. Repeat.

The game—not the interactive story, but the set of rules and conditions that form the basis of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm—has grown into a classic, an eternally replayable e-sport that you could seriously compare to chess or even football without making people snicker. (Good luck doing that in 1998.) I have played thousands of matches in StarCraft and StarCraft II over the past decade and a half, and I don't think I'll ever get sick of it.

Some people prefer to play against the computer. Other people like to hop online and delve into custom maps. (SCII ships with a map editor, and tons of friendly modders have hacked up all sorts of crazy scenarios that you can play online for free.) But you really haven't played StarCraft until you've played it against other people. Forget Raynor and Kerrigan: it's other human beings who make StarCraft II great. Two people starting off on a level playing field and fighting to see who's better—not who's luckier, or who spent the most time grinding for gold, but who's better. Who's better at mastering the rules and figuring out how to outsmart their opponents in a game that's as demanding as any sport.

Heart of the Swarm brings with it more units, more buildings, and some heavy-duty tweaks—siege tanks don't need research for siege mode anymore!—that will change the multiplayer game for years to come. And in another 15 years, I imagine we'll all still be playing it.

This week Capcom unleashes Darkstalkers Resurrection on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, bringing fans of the monster-fueled fighting game series both Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge and Darkstalkers 3, updated with online multiplayer, YouTube replay sharing, and a bevy of options to enhance your viewing pleasure. Let me show you my favorite.

It looks a bit silly, but there's just something so perfect about watching the game being played as if you were looking over the shoulder of an invisible person playing an arcade cabinet. It's a simulated out-of-body experience, video game style.

As I mention in the vid, I'd love to see this view fleshed out a bit, not just with fingers and cigarettes, but with ambient crowd noise is different flavors — crowded arcade, the back of the convenience store, pizzeria, back of a speeding pickup truck, being dropped out of an airplane — such possibilities! Why stop at dirty unfinished basement?

Darkstalkers Resurrection is available today on the PlayStation Network for $14.99 and tomorrow on Xbox Live Arcade for 1,200 Microsoft fake-money units.

Disclaimer: I was a key creative in what is often considered one of the more "dudebro" franchises out there, Gears of War. I'd also like to remind everyone out there that I went out of my way in working with our team, the writers, and Epic's artists to make sure that female characters are represented well in that franchise. By the time we got around to Gears 3 the female soldiers were kicking butt right alongside the men in outfits that weren't drastically different than the men's, and with a restrained depiction of hair and makeup. (I was just tired of seeing stripper looking female game characters after all of those years…ironic, considering how exaggerated the men were.)

(I'm also not the best person to post about misogyny on the internet as I'll be the first one to post a sexy picture of my wife or give young boys tips on how to flirt with girls.)

However, I can't let this one slip, because there's a deeper cancer plaguing our business.

 Let's talk about Anita Sarkeesian.

The "Tropes Vs. Women" controversy caught my attention when I noticed, right on Anita's main Kickstarter image for her campaign, that there was Anya, front and center. I was surprised and a bit confused by this. As I mentioned above, she wasn't an object to "win" in the Gears franchise. She was far from helpless as the franchise matured. Even then the franchise was famous or characters such as fan favorite Bernie, who was an older woman who kicked plenty of enemy butt as well.

Once her first video launched, I found it to be smart, informative, and well put together. She clearly knows what she's doing and, even if you knew a lot of the information she was sharing it's worth watching for the nostalgia of how comedic the repetitive nature the business has been with the Damsel in Distress motif. After watching the video I went to my Twitter feed to see what the fuss was about … were there really people out there who were still so very angry at what this woman was doing?

As it turns out, yes, there were. I heard a variety of responses. Before we dive into some of the thinking behind them, let's look at some of the Kickstarter numbers and break it down a bit.

Anita was asking for 6000$ for her campaign. News hit the internet of the campaign, and the Taliban of videogaming responded in droves. Who was this…this…woman who wanted to analyze women in video games? How dare she! An army of bold (and, naturally, largely anonymous) men…no, wait, boys, because even adult males that acted in this manner are boys – proceeded to give her a digital stoning. We saw a public display that mirrored the worst of what the anonymous internet male culture has to offer. That young guy who assumes that a girl playing an online game is fat, ugly or slutty now had a CAUSE to rally behind!

And then a funny thing happened. Anita shared some of the heinous virtual abuse – bullying, in fact – on her website and people rallied behind her to the tune of over 150K. Folks who responded to my Twitter query were enraged by this fact! How dare she ask for money and then get … well, a whole lot more money! One guy even made a flash game where you can beat her up. How much of a bored, hateful loser must you be to even consider doing something like that?!

I'd like to take this moment and remind everyone out there that my good friends at Double Fine, not so long ago, also killed it on Kickstarter. After asking for 400K on Kickstarter they wound up with a final tally of 3.3m. Now, I read the Kickstarter page about campaigns that succeed and I didn't find a single line about doing too well at Kickstarter. As far as I can tell, if you put up a campaign where you ask for 500 bucks to artistically photograph your ham sandwich and it becomes a thing online you're welcome to do whatever you need to with the difference as long as you fulfill your promises to each backer.

So let me get this straight. Doublefine can win Kickstarter but a woman who wants to analyze the treatment of her gender in our business is somehow…exempt from this?

What color is the sky in the world you trolls live in?

I'm assuming you can do a decent web series for a pretty low amount of money. $6,000 sounds like a healthy budget, even maybe a bit much for what the Anonymous Internet Boy Taliban thought was needed for the videos. Here's the thing, though, boys. It's not your call on how much the series should cost, or how much she should be allowed to make on Kickstarter. (The Boys were so enraged by this as they believed she "scammed" money out of people. One man's "scammed" is another's "shut up and take my money.")

You know, maybe people were just happy to donate money to a project that should see the light of day because of irrational immature male fear on the internet. It's called voting with your dollars.

So let's assume that Anita fulfills the promises to all of her backers and is then left with $144,000.00. I'm gathering this project is a self employed gig, so she most likely has to pay self employment tax. Fulfilling everything to the donors also costs money. When you earn that amount of money you are also in a higher tax bracket and you make more, you pay more. I'm not an accountant, but I'd estimate that when all is said and done and this project takes her a year then she might actually be able to pay herself a (gasp) good salary for her year's work.

How dare she!

Heaven forbid a woman actually take a magnifying glass to our beloved hobby and actually try to unravel and figure out why things are the way they are in the effort that somehow she might change things? Why aren't there more female protagonists? Are you protecting Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider or are you empowering her? And god dammit, where's my Buffy game?

Shame on all of you.

My wife and I had dinner with the always amazing Warren Spector and his brilliant (and sharp tongued) wife Caroline last night and this very subject came up. Caroline was rather eager to speak up about it. We went back and forth on the subject and, I'm paraphrasing, but the takeaway that she said to me (and I'm sure she'll do a great talk or article about it) is that we're not supposed to be this crowd.

We're the gamers, the dorks. We're the ones who were on our computers during prom. We're the ones that were in the back of the lunch room who were playing D&D instead of tossing a football around on the quad. We were supposed to be the open, friendly ones, the ones who welcomed all into our wonderful geeky circle.

We're not supposed to be a mob that's storming the gates with our pitchforks and torches.

We're not the bullies. And that's what happened to Anita.

Recently at the DICE summit in Las Vegas David Cage called on the industry to "grow up." In some ways, David, I agree… we can do better in many, many areas. We can make more mature and engaging plot lines and explore unique game mechanics beyond sawing someone in half. The reason we haven't? It's because it's fucking hard and we're looking at an industry that is ever more risk averse as more and more money is needed to craft product.

However if we're going to grow up as an industry we're going to need the consumer to grow up a bit as well. The latent racism, homophobia, and misogyny online are black marks on an otherwise great hobby. Anonymity is the gasoline on the fire of hate that flares up on forums, chat rooms, and Xbox Live on daily basis.

Why are there so many shooters? Because it's easy to make a trace in code to see if you virtually "tagged" someone. Why were there so many princesses in need of rescue? Because it was easy, and for many years we didn't have the tools or desire to try something else. Why did Mario have a moustache originally? Because they didn't have the graphical fidelity to depict much more. The purpose of research is to encourage rational thought in areas where there may have not been much before. If, by watching Anita's videos I, as a developer, can reconsider how I depict women in any future product of mine then her work may very well be worth it.

And maybe, as a result of this, years later we may see more and more girls who are comfortable playing games, online or off, or going to a conference …or joining the industry in a professional manner.

This is where change sometimes starts, merely by asking "Why?"

Cliff Bleszinski is a game industry veteran. He blogs on Tumblr and can be found on Twitter at @therealcliffyb.

Republished with permission.

For several years now, golf fans have been able to create a female professional and play the men's PGA Tour with her. The creation of an LPGA Tour mode in this year's game is another step forward. It's the tour's first appearance ever in a console video game, and the first time gamers may play a career mode associated with a real-life women's professional league.

I'm enjoying the time I've spent so far with the game's demo, which released a week ago, and playing as Lexi Thompson, a newcomer to the game's roster of real-world golfers. But the introduction of the LPGA mode will also present golfers with a choice: Play on the men's tour exclusively—and only a handful of female golfers have ever played in individual men's tour events—or forever forego a trip to Augusta National, the centerpiece of the series for the past three years.

This is a more important choice than you might think. Tiger Woods PGA Tour is a game in which most golfers create a pro rather than use one of the two dozen real-world pros on the roster—and you can't use the licensed pros in the career mode anyway. EA Sports' own figures, related to me, say a majority of created golfers are female, despite a predominantly male user base. I've created and played as a woman and loved the experience, making her my principal avatar.

Because, as I wrote last year, the game constructed a realistic path through which a female golfer could play in The Masters, whose host club just last year admitted its first two female members. The authentic setup allowed for the perfect blend of video game fantasy with real-world conditions. In real life the Masters awards bids for champions from several amateur tournaments that themselves are not gender restricted. Two of these are represented in the amateur stage of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14's career mode. (As an example in real life, Michelle Wie qualified for the U.S. Amateur Public Links in 2005; the tournament's champion is invited to The Masters, though she did not win.)

In Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 you may win the U.S. Amateur or the Asia-Pacific Amateur in that stage of your career and be invited to Augusta. But whether you return depends not on your performance, but on what tour you choose after it. That's even if you go on to win The Masters as an amateur—a feat that was given its own achievement/trophy in the game last year.

And as any golfer knows, you win The Masters, you are invited back forever.

Unfortunately, in Tiger 14, you'd give that up if your ladies' professional then chose to play the game's new LPGA mode. The game's designers couldn't construct a career mode letting female created golfers—again, no small constituency among gamers— double-dip from both tour events

"If you choose to play the LPGA Tour, you can only play the Majors that exist on that tour; i.e. the Kraft Nabisco Championship, U.S. Women's Open, etc.," producer Sean Wilson told me. "You cannot jump back and forth."

(For those wondering, male golfers, as in real life, are ineligible from competing on the game's LPGA Tour in the first place.)

And, just to be clear, there are no LPGA events or statuses (rankings, money leaders, etc.) that qualify a golfer for The Masters in real life. So it's one or the other once you turn pro.

The upside is, as a women's professional, you can play the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the first time an LPGA event, much less one of its Majors, has been licensed for inclusion in the game. EA Sports traveled to Mission Hills Country Club and gave it the full scanning treatment, as one of this year's new courses available in every version. But the Kraft Nabisco and that course appear to be the only LPGA-exclusive event in the tour mode. You may play an LPGA major at Royal Birkdale, scene of this year's Women's British Open, but it's called the "Women's UK Open" in the game, absent licensing.

Sure, right, you're rolling your eyes and probably haven't read this far before commenting. This isn't some tokenist gender-equality issue, it's a gameplay decision a lot of golf fans—many of them men, regardless of the gender of their avatar—need to know of before they get the game, given the primacy of The Masters in this series.

And it presents a little bit of irony, too. For if this year's game denies enough men membership in that tournament, maybe the rules will change next year.

For the first four and a half hours of the new God of War, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the game was made by malfunctioning robots.

They were given the God of War formula and with swiveling clamp-hands, they made what is technically a God of War game. Kratos is angry! Chain-blades must be swung! Beasts will be gored! The first level must be as epic as Mount Olympus! You will be given extra attack moves! And then more attack moves! And then more—the ones you'll never use!

And...then you'll... be....riding a giant... flying... snake. And... remember the big slides in Super Mario 64? Kratos will slide down some slides. And then...

Does.

Not.

Compute.

At about the halfway mark of the game's 10-hour campaign—as the made-by-robots theory struggles with the I-guess-this-studio-spent-their-effort-on-the-new-multiplayer-mode-that-nobody-asked-for theory—you discover something new.

You discover that the game is weird, warped, and way better in its second half. This second half almost entirely absolves the first-half, which transitions from the snake section to the doling out of a bunch of elemental powers (fire! ice! lightning! and, uh, denizens of the undead!) and then to the granting to the player of what I thought was God of War's big new gimmick: Kratos' ability to turn a pile of rubble back into, say, the bridge it once was, and the corresponding ability to turn a bridge into rubble.

Look, we're never going to get an official Lego God of War, so let's settle for this? Actually, let's not. The offering is half-baked. Kratos can't rebuild any old rubble sitting around. He can only rebuild the rubble that glows green. He can only use his new magic to un-make structures that are green. This would work in an abstract puzzle game, but in a game that is richly rendered with all sorts of rubble and structures that beg to be made or unmade, this is just another video game invisible wall.

And then the game makes you backtrack through a bunch of areas you cleared and has the audacity to describe that reverse run as a handful of official story chapters.

Maybe we should move on to the good part.

WHY: Even though the first half of the game is as tired as the next Zelda quest that has you fetching a bow-and-arrow, the game alters and refines the series' combat into an arsenal that feels, by halfway, glorious to wield. Plus, the camerawork's amazing.

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God of War: Ascension

Developer: Sony Santa Monica
Platforms: PS3
Release Date: March 12

Type of game: Third-person ripping of Greek deities into bloody bits. Now also with multiplayer.

What I played: Ten hours, 20 minutes to clear the game's campaign. A sampling of multiplayer modes, but only enough to rank my fighter to level three.

My Two Favorite Things

• A varied arsenal that, at last, feels accessible and balanced, encouraging a winter weather system's worth of attacks.
• The camerawork. Still the God of Cinematography.

My Two Least-Favorite Things

• The sexing-up of enemies that I am then required to cleave into bloody bits. Gross.
• Block-pushing puzzles. Give me a micro-transaction to skip them, and I'll pay double.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

• "Unless you're going to say he got angry because of midichlorians, I'm past caring."
  -Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com
• "Watch the game, and you'll just think the players are sick. Play the game, and you'll understand what feels so right."
  -Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com

The good part: the second half of the game mostly takes place in and on a giant skyscraper-sized statue of Apollo. Levels are named after Apollo's body parts. You're playing The Foot of Apollo! The Forearm of Apollo! The Ribs of Apollo! (Not making this up.) And as you play, you gain a few more ridiculous abilities that may or may not have been swiped from Zelda games. (Hint: Elegy of Emptiness). But you stop caring about the game's problems because you begin to enjoy—at least I began to enjoy—how good the game's combat feels.

You've been given a ludicrous arsenal, and though you are probably neglecting the weak ice moves, you're taking advantage of five hours of practice and five hours of being armed with new powers to switch from chain-blade attack to block to dodge to.... the game's refined grapple system.... the new melee moves that let you disarm enemies and use their weapons on them...the rage mode....the special magic... even that dopey decay/restore magic is good in combat. Moves chain together. Almost nothing is mapped to a many-button (dialed) combo. Almost all of it is a couple of button presses away. And it all feels so good to use against a crowd.

The game is sick with whatever disease the new Zelda games have. Its developers feel obligated to spend a stupid number of hours early on starting you from zero and giving you your proverbial bow and bombs and boomerang. And, as with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, it's only after you get past what amounts to newbie initiation that your move-set has enough new stuff in it (and enemies that compel you to use that stuff) that you get a sense of what Ascension is supposed to feel like. It feels like chaos, controlled.

The robots probably wouldn't have thought of some of Ascension's better tweaks to established God of War combat. The new disarmament system introduces some good risk-reward, as you first try to grab a knock a weapon from the hands of an enemy and then have to take the time to grab it while the enemies nearby are probably still trying to attack you. For all of Ascension's tiresome fealty to the God of War tropes of old—the slow-opening treasure chests, the red, blue and green orbs, etc.—the development team improves the button-combo finishing moves. No longer will you simply press a few buttons, when prompted, to stylishly kill a cyclops or gorgon. Nope. Now you will engage in a "mini-game". You/Kratos will hold the enemy with one hand, stab the enemy via rapid button presses with the other while occasionally needing to dodge the flailing enemy's counter-attacks using the analog stick. The sense of intimate struggle in these moments is Ascension at its best. Its violence is lurid as ever, but now it feels uncomfortably close. It feels like a struggle. And that feels like an improvement.

Ascension's story is as unnecessary as most prequels. Six or so games in, we don't need any further explanation as to why Kratos is so angry or how he broke from Ares. The game's villains, the Furies, are a step down from the Greek heroes, gods and titans of games past. Adding to the nonsense is the fact that this prequel is told and played mostly in flashback. That's right: it's a prequel that nests its own prequels. Spoiler (not really): at the end, Kratos is mad and a bit sad. Same as he ever was.

As you play the game, you may notice that it looks amazing. The series remains king of all games with fixed cameras. The cinematography is astounding, as you retain control of Kratos in combat while the camera glides from distant, epic scenes to close one-on-one battles.

You might also notice that the game contains a lot of breasts. They've got blood and entrails, too. But so do so many other violent combat games. God of War games are the ones that toss in a sex scene and then let us all marinate about why one censored sex scene per game is forever more scandalous than each game's many bloody eviscerations. I didn't even find a sex scene in this game, just a harem scene and an extraordinary amount of toplessness. The harem scene? It's gratuitous, but, hey, it's Greek mythology and Kratos is topless too. Or something. Most of the game's female enemies are topless, too. I'm not sure if it's meant to titillate but it remains one of God of War's less justifiable elements: that it can have its female toplessness and its male loincloths, too. Some private parts must remain private? To satisfy the ratings board? Maybe. But when a close-up kill include the slicing of a half-woman/half-snake from her neck to her breast, my takeaway is that I'd rather the sexualization of video game characters and the gory rendering of the death of game characters not be mixed. Please. Unless you're trying to elicit a reaction that's more "ugh" than "awesome!"

Sexy-death weirdness aside, Ascension pulls together nicely. Its back half justifies the training-wheels of its first half and then ends abruptly, properly leaving players wanting more. The "more" that is offered is a new-game-plus that, as with previous games in the series, lets you play through the game again with some of the moves you've earned and special combat modifiers.

The "more" is also the game's new multiplayer mode, which I've sampled but not soaked in. These multiplayer modes let you play in two-player (or solo, oddly) endurance runs against hordes of enemies or in competitive team or free-for-all battles against other players. Battles are set on levels that are packed with traps and platforms. Some good touches are imported from the single-player game: many of the combat moves, the disarming stuff and the ability to jack a giant troll and ride him like a bulldozer over other players, to name a few. These multiplayer modes justify repeat playing by tying weapon, armor, item and magic unlocks to the accruing of experience points. The foundation seems good. We'll see what players make of it in the weeks to come.

There's something quite tired about Kratos that makes all of these God of War games feel at least partially like factory productions. The loyalty to Kratos' two-note demeanor feels in need of a shake-up, and the game suffers from a wearying checklisting of recurring enemy-types. Plus it all takes place in the same over-familiar setting, telling the same style of story, reusing the block-pushing puzzles (enough! no more of them! please?). For the love of God of War, Sony developers, can we go to Egypt next? Or something else that actually feels fresh?

But for all my belly-aching, there's no denying that this new game feels good. There's no denying that its combat tornadoes into something gloriously varied and responsive. And that's why, despite its shortcomings, it feels like a success.

You know how Rockstar Games rolls, right? There's no clue as to when we're going to get another glimpse at Grand Theft Auto V. So, thirsty fans have gone ahead and made their own. The clip is made up of still images that have been released for the game, with little bits of limited animation sprinkled throughout. With overdubbed music and vocals responsible for the jokes, it's a little reminiscent of the openings from Monty Python's Flying Circus. GTA + Monty Python… that's a mash-up someone needs to make happen.

(Thanks, tipster Kasper!)

Now available for preorder from the fine folks at Gaming Heads, this $299.99 statue of Skyrim's champion would not be possible without the PC modding community. You just don't get this sort of visual fidelity with today's game consoles.

Now I'm not saying a great statue couldn't have been based on the unmodded PC or console versions of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. They're perfectly capable of conveying enough visual data to allow artist Alejandro Pereira to craft a reasonably accurate facsimile of Bethesda's ideal Dovahkiin. He's still be 16 inches tall, cast from high quality poly-stone and dressed in the finest tiny fabrics tailored by what I can only imagine are ridiculously small fashion design students. He'd still be limited to 1,000 pieces for the standard version or 500 pieces for the $329.99 exclusive version with light-up fireball. He'd still ship in Q4 of 2013.

It just wouldn't be anywhere near as smooth and well-defined.

Now that I think about it, I'd pay extra for a special edition jaggy Dovahkiin. Missed opportunity, Gaming Heads.

The hero of United Front's hit open-world title spent most of the game undercover, acting more as a gangster and stirring up trouble to win the trust of the Hong Kong underworld. Now, Wei Shen finally gets to be an out-in-the-open law enforcement official in the new Year of the Snake DLC for Sleeping Dogs.

The teaser trailer offers up details about a crazy cult trying to blow things up and Wei Shen gets busted back to being a lowly beat cop. But, really, it's all about wielding tear gas for me. There's no joy better than getting to make swarms of random strangers cry. Trust me on this.

Players will get the usual helping of new weapons and achievements in Year of the Snake, which is out today for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 at a cost of $5.99/560 Microsoft Points.

I ran a test yesterday. I loaded the always-online SimCity—the game that EA says just can't be easily made to run offline—and then pulled the proverbial cord.

I switched off my Internet to see how long I could keep on playing.

It didn't last long, but what I discovered intrigued me.

Prior to the official release of SimCity, I'd already seen that the game could run offline if a signal dropped. I play the game on a laptop (a powerful one!) and my WiFi signal at home isn't always so hot. So, when I was playing on a press server a few days before release, I'd get a pop-up indicator telling me the network connection was lost. I could keep merrily building my city, and, when the connection came back, there were no hitches.

The folks behind SimCity have long maintained, however, that their game is made to be played online. That requirement isn't just DRM, they say. It's for gameplay—for simulating parts of the inter-city gameplay, for doling out challenges.

They say this all the time, up to and including last Friday, when SimCity studio boss Lucy Bradshaw told the website Polygon: "With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud." This, she explained, is why an off-line is currently a no-go for her team at Maxis. "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

The game has been running better and better this week. The new servers have made connections easy. So an offline mode isn't as direly needed. But, can this game, as it is designed, really not tolerate offline play?

Yesterday, I tested this assertion. I started playing my city, the mining mecca known as Newer Landland City. I turned off WiFi and then tried to zoom out, check the region and zoom into one of the other cities in my region.

Connection lost. Booted to the game's title screen.

I turned my WiFi back on and returned to Newer Landland City (henceforth referred to as NLC). I laid down some roads. I probably zoned more residential, because my cities always need more residential.

While I was doing this, I was running Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4, a program that scans your computer's network usage and shows which applications are talking to the network. You can run this, too, and probably should, because I'm not able to tell you a whole lot about the activity I saw. Most of it is Greek to me. What I can tell you is that SimCity.exe connected to Amazon IP addresses in Ireland—presumably Amazon servers used to network the game. For the most part, my game, running on North America East 3, connected to this IP address. Ireland servers? North America East? Who knows how this works! What I do know is that it seemed like my game was talking to the network a lot, several times a minute.

If my city talked to the network that much, then, turning off the WiFi, I expected to see some catastrophes pretty soon.

I did not.

I could continue to lay down roads. I added a recycling plant. I upgraded it. Five minutes into being offline, I got a notification about a neighboring city.

Fifteen minutes into being offline, I was notified that my garbage trucks had successfully serviced a neighboring city and made some money off it.

The buildings in NLC seemed to be rising and falling just fine without the network. But what of my exports? NLC is a mining metropolis (well, more like a mining manor), and we export ore and coal. About 18 minutes in, my factories were full. My exports weren't going out. Because of the lack of an online connection? Or due to my mining facilities working overtime? I'm not sure, because, 19 minutes in, I got the alert you can see atop this story. The game had decided enough was enough. I had to quit to the main menu.

I then restored my Internet connection, returned to my city and it successfully synched to the region.

What if I had refrained from exports? Could my city have lasted longer? What if I had been playing at standard speed instead of triple-fast cheetah speed? My colleague, Mike Fahey, who runs an education city in the same region on the same server tried to repeat my test while playing at normal speed. He hit the same wall as I did in about 20 minutes.

Last week, I posted the same question about the possibility of an offline mode to Bradshaw that Polygon and others did. Over the weekend, I got a reply.

Me: "SimCity uses its online connection to connect player cities and support online challenges, but it seems clear now that some sort of offline mode would appease many fans. Is EA going to enable this option for the game?"

Bradshaw: "Online connectivity as a creative game design decision was infused into the game's DNA since its inception and so we're fully committed to delivering against that experience first. A significant portion of the GlassBox Engine's calculations are performed on our servers and off of the player's PCs. It would take a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game so that all of those functions are calculated locally without a significant performance hit to the player."

I don't make video games. Maxis does. EA does.

I can't tell how many things were going wrong in my city during the 19 minutes when I played it offline. I don't know how many calculations weren't occurring. And, for the record, I enjoy playing the game online with friends in my region.

Those 19 minutes nevertheless provide a glimpse at an alternate to what we've been required to experience with the new SimCity. I've played an offline version of this game that looked great and seemed to run pretty well. Imagine if we could get more of that.

Yesterday we told you about Star Wars: First Assault, the troubled multiplayer shooter that may never see the light of day thanks to uncertainty at the development studio LucasArts.

First Assault was to be a downloadable "predecessor" to Star Wars: Battlefront III. It was supposed to come out this spring, but LucasArts froze all hiring and new game announcements in September and has yet to decide whether or not to release First Assault.

Today we've got some more images from the troubled shooter. Click to expand: