According to some leaked box art, the next edition of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon series, due in 2012, will be Kinect enabled – “better with Kinect sensor,” to be precise (Xbox360Achievements.org via That VideoGame Blog). This juicy info confirms some rumor-mongering from last year, that the Kinect functionality would be optional, used for things like hand signals that would translate into game commands.

This seems to me to be an excellent use of the Kinect’s impressive technology to augment the player’s relationship with the controls, a way to sort of combine the precision of buttons and sticks with the added dimension of body movement. There’s no reason the Kinect can’t be used with a game that still requires a player to hold a controller. In fact, I could see that being the future of this technology. For now, I can imagine a seated player using arm signals to command AI allies, or perhaps to avoid the need to speak via headset in multiplayer, something they could design to be audible to nearby human opponents.

In the future, I can see how a game could operate with a player standing and using entire body motions, while still operating buttons, thumbsticks, and triggers in each hand like the Wiimote + Nunchuck or the PlayStation Move stuff. This advancement would seem to me to be a necessary one, since Kinect’s  full abilities – while technologically impressive – are hard to extrapolate into games beyond the minigame compilations currently available.

You haven’t played Portal 2? You need to play Portal 2. The full review of the single player campaign comes later this week, but here’s a preview: without the co-op mode, purely based on the gameplay, writing, voice acting, and graphics of the single player mode, Portal 2 is excellent. Stephen Merchant and JK Simmons steal the show as Wheatley and Cave Johnson, the game is easily twice as long as the first Portal, and it’s even funnier and darker. For that experience alone, the game is worth the $50 it goes for on PC and $60 it goes for on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Well, went for $50/60. Amazon just dropped the price like a rock. If you want Portal 2 on PC, you can grab it for $30. If you want Portal 2 on Xbox 360 or PS3, you can grab it for $35.

It turns out that Mortal Kombat is pretty awesome. It’s also really, really bloody, like all good Mortal Kombat games should be. The newest game in the series has some of the most over-the-top, brutal, violent fatalities yet, and while there are plenty of limb-ripping, chest-punching, head-launching fatalities, there are several that are even more wrecked and horrific.

Here are the top 10 fatalities in the new Mortal Kombat. YouTube user PROPHESiZ3 put together all of the game’s fatalities into individual YouTube videos, the best of which are embedded below. Plus, as a bonus, we’ve included the button combinations of these fatalities. Several of them are the characters’ secondary fatalities, which you ordinarily have to earn by spending money in the Krypt. MZielinski’s Gamefaqs guide takes care of that.

The Mortal Kombat franchise has had almost as bad a run this past decade as Sonic the Hedgehog. The games got increasingly convoluded and complicated, to the point that by Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, the world was ending and nobody seemed to care. Things reached their breaking point in DC Vs. Mortal Kombat, a T-rated abomination that, even if it was a decent fighting game, completely missed the point of the series. NetherRealm Studios/WB Games Chicago/Midway Games had two choices: drop the series or reboot it. Mortal Kombat (no number, no subtitle) is a reboot of the series, and unlike so many other franchise reboots it actually does the job well.

Yes, gamers. The new Mortal Kombat is actually really good.

Every now and then, something comes along that makes even a mega-geek like me clench my fists and snarl “NEERRRRRDDDS!” Atlus’s Catherine is one such item. The game’s announcement made a splash at TGS last year for its weird, erotic trailers and out-of-left-field action/puzzle gameplay. The collective “WTF?” was quickly followed by excitement and then disappointment as Americans saw no planned release for North America. No surprise there, this weirdness is the kind that rarely ventures outside of its native Japan.

Yankees, Canucks…commence salivating like I know you do for anime babes. Atlus has confirmed a U.S. release for Catherine in Summer ’11 (via The Escapist), for PS3 and Xbox 360. Honestly, I applaud Atlus for the potentially-risky move of bringing an unconventional sort of title stateside, and I’m interested to see if it delivers on its mind-trip thriller promise. The U.S. of A. unfortunately has a reputation of being a poor market for goofy/sexy games.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds is a pure nerdgasm. I can’t attest to how much the game will please fighter purists, but to this barely-more-than-a-button-masher, it’s a hoot that’s well worth its retail price, and just about worth the wait. Great, accessible mechanics, a huge and varied roster, and loads of nerdy winks make this game a must-have for any fan of the fighting game genre or the comic book medium. Yes, it’s been a freaking decade since Capcom put out the last Marvel Vs. Capcom game. Yes, the roster has 20 fewer fighters. Now that it’s here, none of that seems to matter. It’s a great game by any measure.

It has all the Capcom fighter basics, but with a few streamlined aspects casual players like me, who aren’t obsessed with keeping the genre “pure” in its decade-old, frame-counting glory, will appreciate. There are four attack buttons, three light/medium/heavy attacks and a special launcher attack, and everything in the game can be done with a combination of those buttons and the standard fighting came stick motions (quarter-circle,  dragon punch, mash buttons). Honestly, for non-veterans, it’s pretty much the same mechanics as Street Fighter 4, Capcom Vs. Tastunoko, and well, basically everything Capcom since the hyper combo was first invented.

Alert citizens in Uddevalla, Sweden notified police that they had seen what looked like a brutal pummeling, as a silhouette in an apartment curtain seemed to punch another silhouette over and over again. Officers burst into the apartment to find five people huddled around Kinect Sports, playing the boxing game (Metro.co.uk via Hot Blooded Gaming). Explanations were in order and no arrests were made.

Motion gaming is a new thing, so I suppose the population hasn’t been desensitized yet to catching sight of someone flailing their body about in weird and violent fashions. But I doubt most passers-by would bat an eye at the sound of screams and gunfire coming from a neighboring apartment, or at least they would hesitate before calling the police, wondering if it was just a movie or TV. Also, Kinect boxing is a pretty benign thing to be caught in the act of doing. Recall any gaming moments that would make the cops bursting through the door even more awful and awkward? I’m trying to think whether or not I would just make things worse by trying to explain to the cops that I was just curious to see what the dwarf prostitutes in Dragon Age would say when I picked them.

I got a call from a buddy of mine, who said I needed to check out the trailer for Dead Island. I hadn’t heard of it yet, but assuming it was a game, I pressed him for details. “Just watch the trailer,” he said. Just watch this thing. Then watch it again. Oh, by the way, there’s a game involved here as well.

Dead Island is going to be a sandbox-style zombie survival game that supports up to four-player co-op. There aren’t many further details, but I’ll give developer Techland props for coming up with a trailer that accomplished what it set out to do: I’ll definitely have my eye on this thing going forward.

Epic and EA are really taking the off-the-walls, over-the-top, crazy-lunatic-bullshit humor of Bulletstorm and running with it. Just a few weeks after being accused by FOX News and a quack TV shrink that its game can cause rapism, EA handed out these trinkets in press bags at a recent preview event. Yes, this is a Bulletstorm nutcracker.

Another CES has come and gone. I wasn’t at Las Vegas this time, and from what it sounds like I didn’t exactly miss much. The Consumer Electronics Show is seldom a big convention for debuting big gaming news, but this year was even less eventful than usual. In fact, the biggest (and, arguably, only) real gaming news coming out of CES comes from Razer, the PC peripheral gaming company that’s dipping its toe into the home console accessory and portable gaming market.

Meet the Switchblade, Razer’s new, upcoming portable gaming system. It’s Atom-powered and looks like a mutant netbook, but with seemingly big, adaptive buttons and a 7-inch color screen, it looks like a sweet little piece of tech. Price? We don’t know. Exact specs? We don’t know. Availability? We don’t know. Still, if Razer can get it in under the 3DS’ price tag and put some marketing strength behind it, it might carve out a nice little niche in the portable gaming market. It probably won’t beat Nintendo, but it’ll give the various GP32x/Wiz/Pandora/whatever variants a run for their money.

There’s also the Razer Hydra, a strange sort of motion controller that uses a magnetic field to orient it, instead of an infrared emitter or a camera. No availability or pricing yet, but Razer hopes to offer a bundle with Portal 2 for under $100.

Razer also announced the Onza Xbox 360 gamepad. Razer tends to make great peripherals, and even though it’s the company’s first gamepad, it’ll probably be pretty nice. It comes out this month for $40 in regular form and $50 in upgraded tournament form.

Besides that, we got some hints from Microsoft that Kinect will eventually come to the PC some day, and the usual PC hardware guys talking about faster and more advanced CPUs and GPUs. That’s about it.