They actually got paid for that crap, you know ...

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 ...

Earlier this week, publisher Capcom announced that Super Street Fighter IV, an expanded, stand-alone follow-up to this year’s fighting megahit, will arrive in stores sometime in 2010. Aside from tweaking the gameplay (like every Street Fighter expansion before it), the new game will introduce around eight “new” characters, some of which - like Korean fighter Juri – will be genuinely new. ...

One reason we like games is that the stakes are high. The good guys are really good, the bad guys are really bad, and the princesses are really doe-eyed. But sometimes, games manage to work in villains that operate in shades of gray… and other times, they accidentally make a villain out of the most sympathetic guy in the story. ...

Waiting sucks. Period. Fortunately, there is a cure. While many iPhone games lean towards the short, cute, and casual end of the spectrum, we’ve consulted the dark tome of Baphomet to summon forth a demonically delicious sampling of portable RPG gems capable of consuming voluminous amounts of time and possibly a few souls.

Not afraid to geek out in public? We’ve got your back ...

Games are banned in two primary ways. The first is by corporate policy. When a company refuses to sell or distribute an unrated game, it is effectively censoring the game, but they can’t be entirely lampooned for attempting to maintain a positive image. Nintendo has every right to prevent “Sextrobes: Pornigins” from being released on the Wii ...

Women in games are, generally speaking, made to be pleasing to the eye. They're perfectly formed pretty-faced beauties. But game makers haven't always had the necessary tools to create such impossible visions of lovely. Back in the day, coders and artists tried their hardest to make sexy using nothing but a cripplingly limited colour palette and a bunch of hard-edged pixels. Some did an admirable job, others made images that were nothing ...

The booths are closed, the fans have gone home, and now there’s nothing to do but sit and wait for the inevitable blitz of games to arrive this holiday. This was a transitional year for the Tokyo Game Show. Major companies, like EA, were missing, new game announcements were far and few, and show attendance was lower than previous years. Some developers openly talked about the death of the Japanese game industry. Others simply viewed ...

Question: what gaming platform has a userbase that rivals the entire current generation of consoles? If you answered Facebook, well, you're partly right. It may not have been originally designed for games, but the social networking platform has steadily built up a library of titles that are sure to distract you when you should really be getting some work done. The problem is, the games section is filled with so much crap that it can be tough to find a good game ...

The internet is often thought of as a well of information, but that’s a flawed metaphor. It’s much more like a worldwide network of networks, if you follow my logic. And as the internet ages, it’s becoming littered with servers, and those servers are becoming littered with old data. ...