There's a girl who's been on my mind, all the time.

Her name's not Sussudio, though; it's Yukiko. Yukiko Shepard: The first human SPECTRE, hero of the Citadel, presumed dead but miraculously returned to life by the pro-humanity Cerberus organization, killer of a dead ringer for that giant Terminator-looking boss from Contra III. She'll be making her last stand in just a few months, and I'm eager to see how it turns out.

Some things that leap out at me during a recent demonstration of Hitman: Absolution where series protagonist Agent 47 has to find someone hidden inside a Chicago orphanage before an extremely unsavory band of hired thugs (at some point, I see one looting the corpse of a nun) do the same:

• Agent 47 has "Instinct" -- meaning he can toggle a vision mode that lets him temporarily see through walls and illuminate a track on the floor that indicates where enemies patrol.
• At one point, Agent 47 witnesses some baddies interrogating a captive security guard. He can simply sneak by and progress with his mission. Or, he can intervene and take out the cluster of baddies in the area. Rescuing the guard in this fashion reveals the location of a hidden shotgun.
• Agent 47 can duck behind cover; recall that Hitman: Blood Money came out before cover systems became A Thing.
• Thanks to the previous point, Agent 47 can now survive a sustained firefight.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is, to my thinking, one of the finest games ever created. I'm hardly alone in this opinion, so the announcement that the game would be converted to Nintendo 3DS seemed like an amazing coup for the system. How times have changed. Since then, Sony has announced its own new portable system; Konami has announced its intention to port the game to Vita; and Snake Eater 3D demoed at E3 2011 and broke our hearts with its poor quality.

As we near the final release of the game -- pushed back from a tentative fall 2011 release to the middle of next month -- Konami has published a playable demo on the Japanese eShop. This new demo covers much of the same territory as the E3 playable build, yet it goes a long way to soothe our concerns over the conversion's quality. Why no U.S. counterpart yet? Probably because one of the biggest new additions, support for the Circle Pad Pro peripheral, isn't especially practical; the add-on launched in Japan in December but won't be out here until next month.

If there's one Capcom series that needs a shot in the arm (and doesn't have the words "Mega Man" in the title), it's Resident Evil. Despite overcrowding the survival horror genre with a barrage of titles for almost every platform back in the day, Resident Evil 4 signaled a serious revival of ideas and genuine scares. Yet, somehow, those same ideas appear misplaced in Resident Evil 5, the next big sequel which chose to focus primarily on cooperative play and daytime survival horror.

Either by carefully choreographing two separate adventures into a cohesive whole � la Resident Evil 2, or changing the rules of over-the-shoulder style terrors entirely with RE4, Capcom always finds a way to keep you on edge in a Resident Evil installment. In fact, some of the scariest scenarios of the series happen when you're alone, and to that effect the latest demo for Resident Evil Revelations -- available on the 3DS eShop in Japan only -- starts out on just the right note.

For all the success and mass-appeal that Monster Hunter has in Japan, the series never seems to catch on in the West -- but it should. Capcom's four-player cooperative action RPG series isn't as brutal, opaque, or as dark as From Software's Demon's Souls, but it's still equally as rewarding: demanding the same painstaking levels of observation and skill to topple massive monsters -- only to later turn them into weapons or accessories that match your trendy hunter's hat.

I've spent over 11 hours with an import copy of Monster Hunter 3G for the Nintendo 3DS and have only begun to scratch the surface; but I'm happy to report that the transition to 3DS looks admirable -- with advanced lighting systems and better controls in place. The Japan-only title includes enough improvements and gameplay to tide over fans until Monster Hunter 4, the next true sequel of the popular action RPG series that's bound for 3DS. The only downside of this portable installment is that you'll have to play through a majority of Tri again -- or at least you will in offline mode -- and even if you've spent considerable hours with the Wii version, there's no solution in place to help import your save file onto a 3DS.

Remember Katamari Damacy? Remember how it caught our attention and earned our affection by being like nothing else we'd ever played? Remember how original and fresh it felt? Me, I'm having a tough time recalling. I've just spent five or six hours with Touch My Katamari for PS Vita, and suddenly those days of invention and newness feel like another lifetime.

Don't get me wrong; I still like Katamari Damacy a lot. The fundamental concept of rolling around cluttered homes and cities, agglomerating everything in sight into a massive ball of stuff to satisfy the whims of a callous cosmic monarch, is still fun. My complaint isn't with the concept at all; it's with the way Namco has done practically nothing to expand on that premise since the game's first sequel, almost seven years ago.

This is not a review of Uncharted: Golden Abyss, though it could well be. The Japanese version of the game, which shipped with the PS Vita at launch, offers full English-language support, including dialogue, menus, and even Trophies. But this isn't a review, because -- despite having had the game in-hand for a week now -- it hasn't quite gelled with me enough for me to finish it off.

To Golden Abyss' credit, my failure to have completed it yet has a good deal to do with its length. Currently I'm about a quarter of the way through the adventure, if chapter count is anything to go by, but I'm guessing I've sunk at least four hours into the game. Given the production values on display here, that's a rather generous amount of content. See, if nothing else, Golden Abyss is an amazing-looking game.

Alan Wake's labyrinthine plot and teasing dialogue that answered simple questions with even weirder questions tended to do two things: intrigued or outright alienated players. In that regard, let me lay down the basic story premise for the upcoming stand-alone and downloadable (think inFamous: Festival of Blood) Alan Wake's American Nightmare, so that you can determine which kind of player you are: Barry Wheeler (now a manger for the band The Old Gods of Asgard) falls asleep in his hotel room one evening, and on the television is a re-run of the in-game show inspired by Twilight Zone, Night Springs -- an episode written by Alan Wake and featuring, well, Alan Wake as he explores the remote Arizonan town of the same name. So it's very possible that this stand-alone downloadable title (longer than an Episode from the original game, but shorter than the actual game) is a tv show in an alternate reality that forked from the main game's universe due to the events of said main game. Still with me?

Remedy Entertainment CEO Matias Myllyrinne and head of franchise development Oskari H�kkinen both describe American Nightmare as a pulp action-adventure -- more in the vein of Quentin Tarantino than Stephen King. Using the television show narrative device (down to featuring that show's internal narrator as the main voice you hear as opposed to how Alan used to narrate his adventures in the core game), the developers use this to shift from making a slower-paced psychological thriller into a faster-paced shooter.

Take an animation studio beloved the world over, and pair them up with what just might be Japan's fastest growing game maker and publisher -- it sounds perfect. Level-5 (Professor Layton, Dragon Quest IX) teamed up with Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) to create two RPGs (same name, but different platforms) that feature Pokemon like monster catching mechanics. It's called Ni no Kuni and it sounds like an amazing game. Last year's Ni no Kuni: The Another World failed to set the world on fire after its release in Japan despite its impressive pedigree. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a part follow-up, part remake for the PS3, and it sounds amazing, but the reality doesn't quite live up to expectations.

If Ni no Kuni seems so amazing on paper, why am I so bored when I actually sit down to play the game? I've put around four hours into the Japanese version, and despite an amazing art style, wonderful voice acting, and the game featuring a charming cast of characters that really would be at home in a film by Hayao Miyazaki (Ghibli's most famed director), the moment to moment gameplay of the game is dreadfully dull.

Developers take a big risk implementing unconventional ideas in video games. History has shown that consumers are not exactly welcoming to anything too different from the norm. However, it's not the risks that Gotham City Imposters takes that makes me doubt its future success, but rather the risks it doesn't.

As you might guess, Gotham City Imposters takes place in Gotham City. Deciding that Batman shouldn't have all the fun, a group of aspiring super heroes and villains have sprung up. These newcomers, however, are not exactly what you'd call prime vigilante or criminal material. They wear ridiculous masks that look like a three-year-old's Halloween costume; some get around on roller skates; and all wield a deadly assortment of makeshift weapons. Underneath the humorous window dressing GCI is a pure multiplayer shooter and nothing more. This is actually quite refreshing -- it's nice to see a developer as talented as Monolith tackle a smaller, and more focused game. GCI lets you customize your character with a variety of outlandish outfits, gadgets, and weapons. My Batman wannabe was an obese nerd on roller skates with a cheap looking cowl, undersized T-shirt, assault rifle, and frag grenades. Meanwhile the get-up and kit sported by the rival "Jokerz" team was just as ridiculous.

It?s very likely that you overlooked Tales of the Abyss when it was launched in the U.S. back in 2006. The RPG had to compete with no less than Square Enix?s heavily anticipated Final Fantasy XII. Despite developing an affectionate niche, it failed to achieve mainstream success.

It?s therefore fortunate that Namco Bandai decided to revisit Tales of the Abyss on Nintendo?s young handheld; fortunate because it will give Abyss a second chance to impress players in the U.S. -- it was definitely well-received in Japan, where it even spawned an anime series and several manga spin-offs.

Back in TGS 2011, Team Ninja confirmed the existence of Dead or Alive 5 through a one-minute teaser trailer, and it marked the first real sequel since the departure of former Team Ninja general manager Tobunobu Itagaki back in 2008. In said teaser, series brawlers Hayate and Ryu Hayabusa fight on the roof of a construction site in downtown Tokyo -- trading the kind of lightning-quick combos the series is best known for. While everything in the trailer at this point looks painfully familiar, it all changes the second Hayate kicks Hayabusa into a reactor. The resulting explosion hurls the black-clad ninja through the air, and knocks loose a crane that then sets a group of construction beams spinning wildly around the environment -- knocking over columns and other set pieces encircling the two combatants. The trailer closes on a dramatic cliffhanger, as Hayabusa desperately grabs the edge of the stage after almost being knocked off the rooftop.

While this manufactured drama felt a little ridiculous -- especially for a series like Dead or Alive where people shrug off being bounced into explosive surfaces like a pinball regularly -- I remained eager to see more. Yesterday I spent an hour playing a pre-alpha build of this Itagaki-less Dead or Alive game and I can tell you two definite things: First, that DOA5 feels as fast, fluid, and combo-driven as any other title in the series, and manages to add new simple mechanics that aren't immediately overpowering. And second, that the dynamic environment of the construction site makes arenas in the new DOA feel both chaotic and alive at the same time. Both the combat and environments lend themselves well to what developer Team Ninja calls "fighting entertainment," a concept that apparently emphasizes transforming fighting games into more of a spectacle while keeping player-driven actions simple.

By a completely bizarre coincidence (I actually do have enough faith to believe that this is the case; that Team Ninja did not brazenly lift this), Ninja Gaiden 3 takes place in the same place as Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. That is, both games have setpiece moments taking place within the Rub'al Khali desert. Both heroes -- Ryu Hayabusa and Nathan Drake respectively -- find themselves walking into a seemingly abandoned desert village. The village, in both cases, turns out to host a bunch of bad dudes intent on taking out our heroes.

That's not the only weird Western coincidence I notice in my recent demo of NG3. As Ryu enters the village, he puts his hand up to his ear, and walks slowly as he exchanges dialogue and story exposition with another character. It's jarring that something like Ninja Gaiden, with an emphasis on fast, precise, and brutal combat, has a moment that feels drippingly slow.

Describing a new game entirely in terms of other games is unfair to the game, to its creators, and to readers alike. In the case of something like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, though, it would be unfair not to discuss it in terms of other games. It openly borrows ideas and draws inspiration from several popular franchises, and after spending four hours with the game I'm having a hard time pinning down exactly what sets Reckoning apart from its source material. It's Elder Scrolls meets Fable meets God of War combat bearing World of Warcraft's aesthetics, and there's no pretending otherwise.

That being said, Reckoning doesn't look to be a bad game by any means. Still, after playing through a key story event, freely roaming the area surrounding that skirmish, and jumping back and forth across the world map to dabble in different towns, dungeons, and environs, I find myself very ambivalent about this collaboration. Reckoning has quite the pedigree -- acclaimed fantasy author R.A. Salvatore, comics big shot Todd McFarlane, and former Elder Scrolls designer Ken Rolston have all played roles in its development -- but its individual components don't blend quite as smoothly as I'd like.

I've found myself unfazed by the zombie mania of the past few years. Yes, Dead Nation and Left 4 Dead are fine games in their own right; but as videogame villains go, I feel like the living dead might be played out. I don't want to fight anymore space zombies, pirate zombies, or garden zombies.

But robots are a different matter. True, they've been around since the dawn of the medium, but I'm not sure anyone has given much thought into what makes them a compelling villain. Robots are scary because they're strong, inhuman, and most importantly, relentless. And unlike zombies, they're also incredibly durable.