It's not much time to evaluate the feel of a game, now is it?

It is, nevertheless about the length of the game's E3 demo and therefore the amount of Origins that the game's publisher and developer made available to a few dozen games reporters last week. It's also a fairly standard length of content. It could have lasted 30 minutes for some, and even for me may have lasted a shade longer. 20, maybe, if that makes a diference.

I recently decided to start including playtime stats in previews to help readers see how much—or how little—of a game is shown in a preview session. I did this because I believe readers are often puzzled or frustrated by the difference between how a game is described in a preview vs. how it is in a review. The former always involves a lot of listening to promises and relative lack of actual experience with the game. That's not for any scandalous reason. The game is still being made, and so its creators usually don't have a lot of it to show—certainly not a lot that has the polish that they'd like people to experience.

Every new preview of Origins you read today online is based on the same content I played, content that was also played in front of us by the game's developers and was supplemented by a presentation about the game by the creators. All told, I'd say we got an hour's worth of attention with the game.

So, no, this isn't clickbait, this is transparency. This is respecting your and other reader's intelligence by letting them know what actually was previewed so you can see just how much we know and don't know about the game. The only thing out of the norm is that I've decided to start telling readers just how much of a game we see and play when we do a preview.

The excellent, expansive Batman: Arkham City was always going to be a tough act to follow, and Batman: Arkham Origins, this fall's next in the series, does not immediately make a strong case that it will surpass its predecessor.

That may seem like a harsh assessment of a game that was just shown to press this spring and is still five months away from release. I played about 15 minutes of the game last week and listened to the game's creators discuss their plans for this Batman prequel. I'm feeling extra-skeptical about this one.

Arkham Origins' worst current offense may simply be that it feels awfully similar to Arkham City and even its predecessor Arkham Asylum. It's bringing some new stuff—stuff that's hard to judge the potential of.

Arkham City had it easier. Well, in retrospect it did. Rocksteady Studios' surprise 2009 hit Arkham Asylum had treated players to a smooth-yet-deep combat system, gritty graphics and a carnival of great comic book characters. But it confined its action to an island. Rocksteady's Arkham City blew that out across an open section of a city, filling its Gotham with sidequests and intensifying all aspects of the Asylum formula. It featured nearly every major villain from Batman lore and many of the Dark Knight's friends as well.

Arkham Origins, developed by the new WB Games Montreal studio, tries to escape these shadows by gliding into Batman's past. This adventure is set in its own sprawling, open sections of Gotham, they too filled with sidequests. The game occurs on a Christmas Eve, with the villain Black Mask tasking some top assassins to hunt our hero down.

The city is decked with snow and is more colorful than the last game's, but it appears to function in the same way: serving as a playground in which gamers can beat up street thugs, grapple to the tops of buildings, glide down alleys and activate new missions.

In a section of Origins' city that will be shown at E3—and that was shown to some reporters, including me, last week—Batman zips through part of the city, encountering a gang to pummel, a device to hack and a mystery to solve.

The pummeling looks and, as I learned later when I played it, feels familiar. Montreal hasn't changed Rocksteady's system of easily-chained strikes, counters, lunges and gadget attacks, though they've added a stats read-out that shows players what they did well.

The combat is freshened a little by the addition of some new bruiser enemies as well as, as seen later in a rooftop fight, some martial artists who counter many of your moves but whose counters can be countered. The additions add wrinkles but feel minimal.

Later, we see the mysterious figure Anarky railing against the government. He's one of the game's sidequest villains you can track down. He's planted a bomb. If you've read the comics, you'll know that Anarky has an important secret; it's not clear if the game's version of him has the same.

Much of the game's gadgetry is familiar. Gels and batarangs return. So does the hacking device that forces Batman to combine two halves of a word. He uses that to defuse Anarky's bomb. If you played Arkham City, you did it before.

Inside buildings, as before, Batman might come upon a room full of enemies and topped with gargoyles from which he can hunt them or even hang them. It's another series staple and another without any apparent major changes. There is a new gadget that works well in these situations, at least. It's called the remote claw. This gadget is meant to be fired twice rapidly, first at one point to define where a tether will be place and then at another point to define where the tether will end. Tethering an enemy to an explosive barrel snaps the two together and hurts that enemy. Tethering one enemy to another causes them to collide. And tethering two points of a wall creates a tightrope for Batman to walk across.

So what really feels fresh? Not much, but the game's detective work could be the big change. The previous Arkham games made minimal use of clue-finding gameplay. The new game, however, appears to make Batman a busier sleuth. I'd be more confident if the instance of it that we got to play hadn't been presented as an optional side mission.

In the demo I saw and played, making Batman walk to a certain part of the city triggered a sequence involving a helicopter behing shot out of the sky. The investigation that followed built on the sort of CSI Gotham searches for forensic evidence seen in Arkham City's handful of Deadshot missions. But this chopper investigation involved many more clues, some red herrings and, most importantly the ability to both fly through a crime scene and scrub through the events leading up to the crime while searching for clues—sort of like rewinding or fast-forwarding a video (and sort of like Capcom's upcoming Remember Me but with freedom of camera movement).

Scrubbing through the moments right before the crash, you need to look for clues, select them and then see how Batman's understanding of the events right before that plays out. This involves watching the helicopter hit the ground, rewinding enough to see how it began to break apart, following events further back to see how its tail had been knocked around the side of a building, discovering the vantage point of a possible shooter, seeing why that shooter couldn't have felled the helicopter and so on. Each discovered clue is a step toward the truth. Expand on this more—make the investigations varied and complex—and this could be Origins' most valuable addition to the series.

With any preview there tends to be a gap between what is promised and what is shown. In this case, the gap involved the very hero we're controlling.

The new game was presented to reporters, as it is likely to be presented to fans, as a game about a younger, more raw Batman. One cutscene showed a Batman who was willing to hang his enemy from a clock and then drop him. But Batman doesn't kill. Batman kept the guy's fall from being fatal.

Arkham City threw everything in but the Bat-sink. Origins needs more or different ideas.

Is this a new Batman? A different one? The new game's gameplay doesn't even hint at a difference in our hero. This younger Batman seems to be as skilled and ruthless a combatant as his older self. He is as quick and precise with a gadget as he was/will be in Arkham Asylum and City. There's nothing in the gameplay shown so far that screams prequel.

So far, Arkham Origins seems more like WB Games Montreal's proof that they can make a game similar to Arkham City. That alone is not exciting, though, as marketing plans go, perhaps this is the foundational point WB wants to make to ease fans with the familiar before surprising them with the new. Or perhaps, more worryingly, the series is just exhausted. Arkham City threw everything in but the Bat-sink. Origins needs more or different ideas. Something seems to be missing. Hopefully it's just something we haven't been shown yet.

A note about the voice-acting: Reports about Arkham series stalwart Kevin Conroy's involvement or lack thereof have been confusing. Conroy had played Batman in the last two games, but early coverage of the game suggested he was not in Origins. This game's younger Batman will be played by Roger Craig Smith, who played Chris Redfield in recent Resident Evil games, Ezio in Assassin's Creed II/Brotherhood/Revelations, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Mark Hamill won't be the Joker this time. BioShock Infinite's Troy Baker will.

What of Conroy recently saying he's working on a new Arkham game? Either he's talking about a different game or he has a surprise role in this one. A PR rep for the game confirmed the new voice actors for Origins' leads but declined to clarify what Conroy was talking about nor even clarify whether he is in the game at all or not.

This preview is based, in part, on our hands-on time with the game. We played about 15 minutes' worth. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

One small but cool idea that I know is in development would let me, GiantBoyDetective or any other admin on a given site pull someone's article over with some sort of contextualizing note. Like "Hey, check out this piece about such-and-such. It's a little raw but fascinating." This solves that issue that we currently all have that a piece has to be sort-of-perfect to be pulled over. I don't know when that's going live. Sorry.

For now, one thing you can do is just write a blip—no headline, no image—just a sentence mentioning a cool post and linking to it. It takes people away from your site, of course, but it's a way to quickly highlight cool work that you're not comfortable bringing over.

Just my two cents. Viva TAY!

It was recently established that the 2013 gamer is perplexed by some parts of 1994's Super Metroid. The 2013 gamer is having some issues with 1990's Super Mario World, too.

We can see these struggles on the Nintendo Wii U's Miiverse, a community accessible primarily through Nintendo's new console. The Miiverse enables gamers to take screenshots of what they're playing on the Wii U and then ask other system owners for help.

Here are some of the requests for help we saw posted to the Miiverse by people who have played the re-released Super Mario World. In some cases, I'd say their confusion is justified:

Here's the Miiverse's now-infamous requests for Super Metroid assistance. And here's our own take on Super Mario World, a game we finally got around to reviewing.

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

You may love Gran Turismo. I don't play them. Just not my thing. But when I see Gran Turismo 6 running in the corner of a Sony PlayStation event in Santa Monica, I ask the only GT-related questions I can think of.

• Are you guys rendering the bottoms of cars in greater detail? I ask this of the GT6 producer there, apologizing if that's the rudest question ever. Look, all I know is that, as amazing as the tops of cars look in GT games, the underside of some cars in GT5 were not so fancy. Answer: The gentlemanly producer at this event tells me that the GT dev team at Polyphony Digital has been getting their cameras under cars more than ever for this game. He says they don't like making stuff up. They don't want to guess what a car looks like underneath. They want to get it right. Cool! (And, yes, readers, I know, that what the bottoms of cars look like in GT6 is possibly the least-relevant thing to making a Gran Turismo awesome. I'm sure the producer was thinking that too but was too classy to point that out.)

The demo version of the game is the one shown in Europe earlier this week. Just one track. Silverstone. Here's a photo from that event:

• And here's the most casual-fan GT6 question I could have asked: What are you doing with car damage in this one? (You know, because Gran Turismo used to not have it, whereas you can smash cars up in rival series.) Answer: The rather pleasant producer tells me that it'll be similar to GT5. Polyphony isn't about smashing cars up. They like when people see the beauty of beautiful cars. They'd added some car damage effects in the previous game because people asked.

The gap between Gran Turismo 4 and 5 was infamously wide. 2004/5-2010. The gap between 5 and 6, which is coming out at the end of this year, is narrower.

• Why is the gap between GT games narrower this time? Did Polyphony change their process? Answer: The kind producer tells me... yes. Polyphony will release a good game, but they'll also now add a lot more to it post-release instead of adding and adding before release which used to result in delaying and delaying.

Sound good Gran Turismo, fans?

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

So within an encounter there is variety.

But the encounter always started the same way. The guys always approached from behind a bus. That's norma, right? And that's in this game. When you go into certain buildings, certain enemies are waiting in there for you every time. How it plays from there is where the variety comes in.

That said, I'm marveling at this game's graphics and acting, two things that I normally don't think matter much to gameplay. Here, they at least make this experience feel interesting and special. The character performances are really good, and I already care more about these two than I did the folks in the love triangle in the Uncharteds. These characters and their situation is more gripping. There's a strong chance that these performances are good throughout and that the game will be able to tell a memorable tale. Whether that makes for a consistently fun game, let alone one that's worth playing again (if such a metric even matters) is something you and I can't say. And to that extent, I'd say you skepticism is healthy and justified.

... was a year ago, but it was brief, just to prove that it was a real game so I could vote for it for a pre-release E3 game critic's award...

The second time I played the game was last night. And, as you can see above and below, it really does look that damn good.

If you don't know, this is the next game from Naughty Dog, creators of Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Uncharted. This game is survival-action, so to speak. Ellie, the girl above, and Joel, the guy throwing the brick here...

Joel and Elli are a desperate odd couple. He seems a little shady but confident in his ability to survive. A little weary of all this and soft-spoken. It's been 20 years since things got bad. Ellie doesn't know a different world. She's used to this. She's not exactly plucky, but she seems mature beyond her years and a bit foul-mouthed. However they met, these two are trying their best to survive in a world where humans have been infected and turned into monsters of sorts. Cities have been all but abandoned and hope is fleeting.

The game plays a little bit like a classic Resident Evil with ammo and resources perpetually scarce. I played two 10-minute chunks of the game and never had more than six bullets, except in this crazy sequence—the Last of Us's turning of a classic shooter turret sequence on its head...

The thing is, this is no dark, spooky horror game. This is sadness and survival in the most bright and beautiful places, which I think helps make the violence all the uglier.

In The Last of Us' case, that ugliness of violence is a virtue. In the parts of the game I played, in Lincoln and Pittsburgh, even the violence is scarce. I controlled Joel. Ellie is controlled by the computer. Most of the time, we were just walking, sneaking or trying to find supplies. When other humans or the infected show up, it's usually better to hide than to hit them with a quickly-splintering 2x4. You don't really want to fight the infected people or your fellow desperate humans. None of you can survive many encounters, so avoiding combat is the wiser move.

It's better to crouch and listen for the bad guys. Better to stay away.

But you just sometimes can't avoid it. It finds you.

The camera is often really close to the action. The sounds of struggle, of pipes hitting bones, of bullets cracking, of punches to the gut, all resonate as discomfiting smashes and smacks and cracks.

You can get better at fighting. You can craft a molotov cocktail or scavenge some gear to upgrade a gun. Or make a health pack. Probably best to do that...

The thing I can't shake from my memory, though, is just how beautiful the scenery in the game is and just how interesting the two leads are. I champion the interactive elements of games. I don't value voice-acting that much, but the performances in the game are powerful. As I play—as you will play—Joel and Elli converse. Their relationship builds through small talk and through meaningful exchanges.

I was reminded of the ongoing conversations between the Prince of Persia and Farah in the magnificent Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Except, this game isn't a romance. Far from it. It is, however, lovely.

The Last of Us, which has made a better pre-release impression than most other games I've seen this generation, will be out for PlayStation 3 on June 14.

By the way, it also has multiplayer. They're not saying what that's about. And, yes, the game is less than a month away.

This preview included a hands-on session with the game. We played about 30 minutes' worth from two parts of the game. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

The downloadable demos would be nice, too, of course.

Nintendo will make several of their unreleased Wii U games playable at more than 100 Best Buy locations during the week of E3, according to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.

Details are scarce, but it appears to mean that, instead of squeezing into the Los Angeles Convention Center during the week of June 10 to wait on lines to play the next big Wii U games five months before they're released, you can go to a Best Buy in the U.S. or Canada to do the same.

What's better is that all you don't need to be a reporter, a games industry professional or the editor-in-chief of the brand-new, just-happened-to-launch-it-in-time-for-June NintendoIsTheBest.Net in order to get access to a Best Buy. You can just walk in the door. (Note: you probably have to be wearing a shirt.)

This is a pretty cool announcement for regular gamers.

For all of E3's history, gamers have had to depend on reporters and industry folks to tell them whether games shown at E3 were any good. E3 has never let the public in. In recent years, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA and Ubisoft have started to livestream their E3 press conferences, so that gamers could at least see E3's biggest, most exciting games when everyone at the show first did. Nintendo's Best Buy move lets you, the gamer, play the biggest games, at least from Nintendo—and as long as they're putting the A-list content there. Hopefully!

Nintendo's Wii U E3 line-up is set to include the next big 3D Mario game, the next Mario Kart and the next Smash Bros.

No word yet on exactly which games will be at Best Buy, which Best Buy locations are participating and when the kiosks will show up that week. Nintendo will be announcing its line-up on June 11, so this Best Buy expansion of Nintendo's E3 booth will probably start then or shortly thereafter.

Note: In the GIF up top, Fils-Aime is actually merely saying: "But we're excited..." We all know what he's getting at. E3 everywhere, people!

Sonic Lost World

UPDATE: A Sega press release indicates that this is a three-game deal:

“Sonic the Hedgehog has proven incredibly successful on Nintendo platforms and we are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with Nintendo,” said John Cheng, President & COO, SEGA of America. “As we initiate this new exclusive partnership with the next three titles we believe that Wii U™ and Nintendo 3DS™ are ideal platforms to showcase the evolution of the Sonic brand.”

UPDATE 2: A rep for Sega says that the newly-announced Mario and Sonic Olympics game and Lost World account for two of the three games in this deal. Nintendo's third exclusive Sonic game has not yet been announced.

The PlayStation Vita is a good, powerful handheld machine that's run some piss-poor first-person shooters. After rushed, clunky Resistance and Call of Duty shooters, the system will get a Killzone in September. It merely needs to be mediocre to improve Vita FPSing dramatically.

After having played the Vita's Killzone: Mercenary last night at a Sony PlayStation preview event near the beach in Santa Monica, I think it's safe to say the game is at least non-awful. Yay! Put that on the back of the box.

Resistance's problem was bad, boring level design and moronic artificial intelligence.

Call of Duty had barely any content.

Neither looked particularly good.

Taking the last point first, Mercenary's got the looks. See the trailer above for proof. It also controls nicely, allowing for twin-stick and button-based controls but also allowing for taps on the screen as an alternate means for activating some special weapons. Enemies in the game seemed less stupid than the Vita Resistance ones, but I'd need to play for more than five minutes each of competitive deathmatch and single-player to be sure.

I'm not sure how seriously to take the story, which puts the player in the boots of a mercenary who will take jobs from both sides, ISA and Helghast, during the brutal war that has occurred across the PlayStation 3's Killzone 2 and Killzone 3. A developer for the game told me that the game looks at the subjectivity of right and wrong during war-time, what with the player being able to work for either side. I didn't get a sense that this is a game with deep messages. You are, after all, shooting bad guys to earn money to upgrade weapons and, oh, see that bit in the trailer where we stab a guy in the crotch?

In terms of content, there looks to be a lot. Nine missions, estimated to take an hour or so to play through each. Eight-player multiplayer. The virtual money earned in solo or multi-play can be used across both modes for upgrades and unlocks.

If you're into the Killzone lore, here's the official plot summary:

Arran Danner, an ex-UCA soldier turned mercenary, helped deliver a crucial blow to the Helghast in the liberation of Vekta and is hired once again to spearhead the ISA counter-attack against Helghan. A seemingly routine mission to evacuate the Vektan Ambassador and his family from Pyrrhus goes awry, leaving Danner in the middle of a deadly power struggle for the life of the Ambassador’s young son. As the invasion unfolds, it becomes clear that the boy’s fate could change the course of the war and both sides will do whatever it takes to get hold of him, forcing Danner to question whether the price of victory can sometimes be too high, no matter how big the paycheck.

I like a good first-person shooter campaign, but after being burned by Resistance, and appalled by Call of Duty on Vita, I can't help but be heavily skeptical. The developers might deserve more mercy than I'm giving them. This is a different studio: Guerilla Cambridge, formerly Sony Cambridge, dev team behind LittleBigPlanet Vita PSP. For me, it's hard to shake the memory of being done wrong by the genre on a platform that has, increasingly, become a device for playing delightful indie games. Obviously, the machine can specialize in more than one thing. Technically it should be able to get the FPS genre right. Third big try's the charm?

This preview included a hands-on preview of the game. We played about 10 minutes' worth; could have played more if time permitted. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

Less than two years after vowing to deliver on an "unprecedented partnership" with Nintendo, gaming giant EA is quiet on the Wii U front.

"We have no games in development for the Wii U currently," company spokesperson Jeff Brown told Kotaku yesterday. He did not rule out the chances of EA developing for the Wii U again. EA publishes many of gaming's biggest franchises, including Madden, The Sims, and Battlefield.

In June 2011, at the biggest gaming event of the year—E3—Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata closed his presentation of his company's biggest games and then-forthcoming Wii U console by welcoming then-CEO of EA John Riccitiello to the stage. "What Nintendo's new console delivers speaks directly to the players of EA Sports and EA Games. Nintendo's new console will produce brilliant high-definition graphics and new gameplay opportunities. We look forward to seeing great EA content on this new platform." Riccitiello was also enthused about Nintendo's embrace of online gaming.

EA delivered for Wii U early, releasing Wii U versions of Mass Effect 3, Need For Speed Most Wanted, Madden and FIFA for the new console. Each of those games had been released months earlier on rival Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. While they ran well, they were, ultimately, late ports. EA's biggest console game of early 2013, Dead Space 3, skipped the Wii U.

Brown told Kotaku that that early run of EA games on Wii U represented EA delivering on its E3 2011 partnership.

EA supported Nintendo's previous console, the Wii, throughout the machine's lifespan, even launching some Wii-only/Wii-first games such as Steven Spielberg's Boom Blox and the MySims games. But the company, like many other major third-party companies, struggled to find a blockbuster hit for Wii. Rival Ubisoft succeeded with Just Dance, but that was an exception. On Nintendo consoles, traditionally the main company that has thrived is Nintendo as system owners flock to support the likes of the Wii Sports, Super Mario and Zelda games from Nintendo.

The full absence of Wii U games from Nintendo's pipeline seemed increasingly likely as the Wii U remained conspicuously absent from announcements regarding major 2013 EA games such as Battlefield 4 and the new Madden and FIFA. A lack of EA support will prevent Wii U gamers from having access to an NFL game, for which EA holds the exclusive license.

EA's refusal to put its sports games on Sega's Dreamcast system in 1999 is seen as one of the signs of Sega's decline in as a console maker. The Dreamcast was Sega's last box. On the other hand, EA may not be the kingmaker it once was, and it could be argued that Nintendo's own Wii Sports is the most successful and broadly-appealing sports game of the last generation.

While EA has clearly cooled on Wii U, it is ramping up support for many other devices, including the next PlayStation and Xbox, the latter of which will be officially revealed on May 21. "I’ve been with the company long time and we have never been better positioned for the launch of new technology, either mobile or console," Brown said. He said EA has invested deeply in preparing games for the next generation of consoles and expects to launch strong as it did at the start of the PS2 and Xbox era than it did with a weaker game slate at the beginning of the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii generation. Much of that planning can be credited to Riccitiello, who departed from EA earlier this year.

EA isn't alone in not having new games for Wii U. There are no signs of major forthcoming Wii U games from Take Two, with Grand Theft Auto V only promised for PS3 and Xbox 360. The next Call of Duty is also not announced for Wii U (the last one did come out for it). On the other hand, Warner Brothers has the next Batman game and the console-exclusive Scribblenauts Unmasked for Wii U this year. Ubisoft is bringing major Rayman and Assassin's Creed games to Wii U this year along with its ambitious new open-world game Watch Dogs.

As I play an advance copy of the newest version of Nintendo's beloved Animal Crossing games, I've again been pondering the nature of Tom Nook, a character who could teach Bowser and Mother Brain a thing or two about tormenting a Nintendo gamer.

Tom Nook, if you don't know, is one of the recurring characters in this series of games that involve setting up and living in a cute little village. Typically, these games start out with you having to take a loan out from Nook, who is, by the way, a raccoon. You have to have a house in the game. You need the loan to pay for one. So the games start with you being put in debt by this guy. Nook then makes you work for him to pay off the loan and seems to be laughing at you all the way.

In the new game, June's Animal Crossing: New Leaf for Nintendo 3DS, you owe him a little bit of money in the beginning but are actually free of obligations from him quite quickly. Still, the memory of a more aggravating Nook still burns.

I'm not alone in seeing the evil in Tom Nook's soul.

In fact, when I was discussing the game recently with its top three Kyoto-based creators of Japan, we were talking about the idea of there being enemies in the unusually-friendly Animal Crossing series. The game's producer, Katsuya Eguchi, told me that he thinks the bees or scorpions that you occasionally agitate in the game count as enemies.

"Can we all agree that Tom Nook is kind of a bad guy as well?" I asked.

They all laughed.

"No matter how much you work, he just takes all the money from you," Eguchi replied, through a translator.

"I hate that guy," I said, provoking more laughter.

"We think he is very misunderstood," one of the game's two directors, Aya Kyogoku, said. "He’s just passionate about his business. He’s not like a loan shark. He doesn’t add a handling fee or anything like that. He can wait as long as it takes for you to pay back. He’s not as bad as other people might think he is."

That might be true, but Tom Nook will always be Animal Crossing's Ganon to me.

I'll have more from my conversation with the new Animal Crossing's creators in the coming days. Subsequent coverage will be a little more serious. It's just that this Tom Nook guy... he really gets to me.

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo