E3 2009 was a monster. A huge, massive, face-eating beerdemon that erased the agonizing memory of 2008’s meager, emaciated E3 from our minds with a flood of great-looking games, earth-shattering announcements, and a few quizzical oddities we never want to speak of again. After this, we mean, because some things are so good, bad, or just bewildering that you just have to tell people about them. ...

E3 2009 is alive and kicking, and T-Dar is bringing you the first of many updates from the show floor. Up first is a look at Batman: Arkham Asylum, Just Cause 2, Aliens vs Predator, Microsoft’s Natal motion tech, the big three press conferences and oh so much more. ...

Maybe you’re overwhelmed by our constant barrage of tweets and our relentless live blog updates from the floors at today’s Sony and Nintendo press conferences. ...

Whether you think games are art -- a nebulous, easily dead-ended debate -- or not, there's no denying that a helluva lot of art goes into making games, at the very least. But with so many governing channels to go through in the creative process, many bigger-budget games become more researched and focus-tested in their appeal, shorn of any greater risks they might have once taken -- aesthetic or otherwise -- along the way. ...

Anything new and relatively untested will be subject to more misconceptions than facts. Ridiculous and sensational news reports about the seedy underbelly of Animal Crossing and batshit-insane lawyers like Jack Thompson have diluted the truth about gaming. Combine their ignorance with our own misconceptions as gamers, and there’s a lot of nonsense to sort out. We can’t sort it all out, but we can at least hit some of the bigger points of confusion with our hammer of truth and brief internet research ...