Here's the thing about Monaco: If you're not an expert, you're going to have a lot of trouble understanding what the hell is going on in the above video. The stylistic, minimalist HUD and graphics are not exactly friendly to newcomers. That's a bit of an issue when you're playing the game, and even more of an issue when you're watching four zany minutes of goofballs attempting to master its complexities. Monaco is the closest thing to Ocean's Eleven in game form. You select from a crack team of master thieves, each with their own special abilities, and use their skills to steal valuables from banks, embassies and yachts all over the globe. The game utilizes a top-down camera and fog of war, only letting you see what's in your direct line of sight. Hopefully that gives you some frame of...

Yes, a new Gears of War release is upon us. But Gears of War: Judgment is not your usual Gears sequel. This time around, Epic's working with Bulletstorm-developer, People Can Fly. and they're focusing on the be-goggled Baird and his travails shortly after the first Locust invasion. This is not my first Gears of War rodeo. I've played through all of the games thus far. But, unlike the other games in the series, I knew extremely little about this release before playing. Which made jumping into the action a little tricky at first. But, in no time, I was stomping giant centipedes with ease. Finding their eggs, though. That was an entirely different story. Click here for more episodes of Today I Played Click here for Polygon's review of Gears of War: Judgment

EA's had a rough go over the following years, shuttering a number of studios, nurturing a more austere slate of games. Mirror's Edge never got a sequel. The Dead Space franchise gradually exchanged its slow, quiet horror for loud guns and explosive set pieces. Coming into this game, the franchises' trajectory seemed, to an outsider, shrewdly calculated. You can imagine a board room in which an executive says, "Gamers like co-op and train sequences and epic boss battles, so let's do more of that." After playing Dead Space 3, I wonder if maybe I've read the series all wrong. That this was the natural path for the story. It's the Star Wars model (or the Campbell model) of sci-fi, in which the know-nothing hero becomes a destroyer of superhumans. It's tempting to build narratives around...

Ever since the original Demon's Souls, friends of mine have been singing the praises of From Software's insanely difficult RPG series. And yet, every time I played Demon's Souls or Dark Souls, it made me feel miserable. I'd pick it up at a press event, play for 10 minutes and come away wondering whether my friends had bad taste or a masochistic side I was just never aware of. It felt slow, awkward and intentionally obtuse. The controls and HUD made no sense and the lack of direction often left me scratching my head. So, after 10 minutes, I'd put the controller down and walk away with a feeling of superiority, knowing that this was a bad series that I wanted no part of. And yet, vocal love for the franchise persisted. So much so that one of the banner trailers at this past VGA awards...