Arkham Knight wastes little time establishing a big-bad, putting Bat-boots on the ground, and settling into its new gimmick, the Batmobile. And with how highly emphasized said -mobile is in the game's opening missions, I soon began to wonder ... where have the Arkham series' stealth, sneak-em-up moments gone? To go through the game's introductory sequences with nary a ventilation shaft or ceiling gargoyle is almost unheard of. What's with the lack of subtlety, Rocksteady?

It took a little bit longer for the answer to become clear. The Batmobile isn't just an ancillary automotive feature: It is the star of this show. Not just a means of combating enemy tanks and chasing thugs' cars through the streets, the Batmobile is also a legitimate means of locomotion (easily rivaling cape-flight, in terms of both speed and awesomeness) as well as a platform for gadget-based puzzle-solving. Just a few moments ago, I was using a powered winch to deform the landscape, jumping off ramps and climbing up walls to reach an objective.

I still anxiously await the moment I'll be able to sneak around a building and stealthily take down thugs from the shadows. But the Batmobile features quickly, and definitively, establish themselves as more than an also-ran; they are fully-fledged game mechanics, fun, satisfying, and substantial. There's got to be at least one vehicular boss-fight waiting in here, and I'm absolutely stoked for it.

Progress: 4%

Particulars is almost immediately reminiscent of Transcripted, in its effort to bring together laboratory science, a personal story, and traditional gameplay. The vibe is different, though -- Transcripted having a dramatically-tense narrative, and arcadey action, at the cost of resorting to pseudoscience to make it all work.

In contrast, Particulars (from what I played) tells a much mellower tale, and makes an effort to rely mechanically on - as well as educate the player in - real particle physics. That's pretty cool.

What isn't as cool is that the gameplay is incredibly shallow and unrewarding. Transcripted, aside from having little to do with science, managed to balance several engaging puzzle and action mechanics on the screen at once. Particulars is disappointingly simple in comparison, revolving almost completely around particle charges (attraction and repulsion) and compatibility (mutual annihilation). And the fidgety nature of the particles' movements frustrated me in the same way that World of Goo and other "physics" games tend to.

I lost interest in Particulars before even finishing the demo. Not because of the low-key storytelling, which I actually felt showed some intrigue after finishing a few levels; but because of the tedious, uninteresting game in the middle of it.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.

I've been watching No Man's Sky's red-tinted spacefaring trailers for a year and a half, and this one is the first that actually tantalizes me with substantive content.

Exploration is cool and all, but flying around and looking at stuff is an incomplete design. Show me more tense action, and more in the way of goals and objectives, and I might be able to think of No Man's Sky as more than just a pretty, infinitely-generated boredomscape.

This preview really threatens to bring back the incredible feeling of using Star Fox 64's awesome vehicles and upgrades for the first time.

I'd given up all hope of another Four Swords. Really. I didn't believe it would happen again.

As for three swords, hey -- I'll settle for it.

The last Transformers game I played failed to impress me. It was okay, I guess. Actually, now that I'm looking back, I very specifically said that I preferred Vanquish's brand of high-octane robotic action.

So if the guys who made Vanquish want to make a crazy fighting transforming robot game of their own, then, yeah. I could get pretty interested in that.

And when did Halo start having Republic Commando-style team-coordination tactics? Maybe I've missed more of this series than I thought.

During the first couple minutes of this crazy footage, all I could think about was how frustrating playing as Nathan Drake usually is, i.e., that the guy playing the shootout couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Of course, when your core gameplay is suboptimal to control and poorly balanced, the natural thing to do is add whole-new mechanics like driving a truck through a hilly village. I shudder to think of the probable instantaneous mission-failures when hitting a pedestrian, or when not presciently making the correct turn down a blind dirt alley.

But it's all moot anyway. I'm buying and playing this for the Sully-Drake banter. Naughty Dog could replace the gameplay sequences with a bunch of God of War quick-time events and I'd still suffer through it.

As surprising as it was to see anything about The Last Guardian, let alone that it still resembles what was shown six years ago, let further alone that there's a formal release date (which, you know, I'll still reserve some doubt for); what astonishes me the most about this trailer is that, between the weird visual effects and visibly-awkward controls, it legitimately looks like the same kind of game that Ueda-san was making in 2001.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas failed to tickle my fancy -- maybe because I'd played Skyrim first, and was spoiled by character animations that didn't look completely fucking retarded. But this world-building, personal-customization, electrical-wiring stuff? Now they've got me interested.