E3 Is Being Built, Right Now. Here's What It Looks Like.

Gaming's biggest show doesn't kick off until next week, but expert teams of booth fairies and constructobots are already hard at work building E3's cavernous displays.

If only the real show was this spacious. Or quiet.

You can see an interactive 3D panorama of the floor below; squint and you can already imagine what each booth's secrets reveal (spoilers: PR staff and sweaty control pads).

E3 2013 [360 Panorama, via Wario64]

Kotaku

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: It's been a great long weeken

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: It's been a great long weekend for TAY with tons of well-written provocative pieces. Among them: SloopyDrew calls for revolution against a top-down, overly constricted vision of gaming's future. GiantBoyDetective looks at more fictional video games from the insides of TV shows in his recurring Animation Infiltration feature. A piece about the game mechanic that makes DamonsRhee ragequit and the AniTAY round-up deserve your eyeballs, too. Finally, there's a defense by Cimeas of, get this, Fable III. Interesting timing now that the world knows what was inside Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube.

And you can always go join the voices talking about video games and life in TAY Classic and in the TAY: Open Forum.

Kotaku

Here's What Was Inside Curiosity's Cube

[UPDATE] As was just tweeted by Peter Molyneux, the winner has seen the video above and chosen to share it with the world.

[ORIGINAL POST] After six months, Curiosity's final layer was peeled away today. No one knows yet what was inside the box after all of that clicking. Peter Molyneux tweeted that the winner is in the UK. On May 1 he said the prize will "change that person's life forever."

Kotaku

Here’s What’s Bothering Me About Batman: Arkham Origins

I watched the trailer for the upcoming Batman game that got released earlier this week and immediately had one inescapable thought: You can’t tell it’s a prequel. That’s not a good thing.

Nothing about Batman’s look or affect in the four-minute clip makes it seem like he’s in the early days of his crimefighting career. Overall, it could be just another Batman video game that looks like the last ones. That’s to be expected, of course, as Warner Bros’ marketing folks want it to be viewed as part of the same franchise despite being made by a different studio. But trying to do so misses the best thing a prequel has going for it.

Arkham Origins’ biggest opportunity is to show a Bruce Wayne who’s building this identity called Batman. There’s a lot of raw storytelling ore to found in the Dark Knight’s early days. Hell, there’s a whole subgenre of Bat-mythos concerned with just the first year of Batman’s crusade. But the key to having such endeavors work is to ensure they don’t make the audience scratch their head about the long narrative life story of the character.

Sure, the idea of a video-scrubbing investigation mechanic sounds cool and, based on what Stephen Totilo’s written on it, it could be one of the better additions to the Batman game formula. But, unless it’s presented as Batman learning to be a better detective, it’s just a gameplay gimmick. Same goes for enemies being to able to counter Batman’s strikes. If it’s understood that they can do that because a younger Batman isn’t as skilled a fighter, then, sure, throw the countered counter counters at me. It's the problem with any prequel. How do you make players feel like they're as much of a bad-ass as they were in earlier games, while making the character seem like a novice?

Trickier still, any explanations could themselves break the trance that Warner Bros. Montreal is trying to cast on the player. Now the game could be an extended flashback narrated by an older Batman. You know, the whole “I was young and cocky” bit. However they handle these prequel problems, they’ll need to be careful not to make a more inexperienced Batman seem like bigger bad-ass than the older versions in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. And that needs to be done without making Batman feel wimpier than in those games.

It can be done. Batman: Year One, the Mask of the Phantasm movie and the Venom storyline all deliver a Bruce Wayne who’s far more fallible than the hero he’d later become. You understand why he becomes a loner, an obsessive planner and more emotionally closed-off. In fact, the idea that you as a player are helping Batman evolve—taking him from a rich guy in an armored suit to a fearsome shadow predator—could be the most compelling thing that Arkham Origins brings to the table. The previous Bat-games let you play a Dark Knight at his peak. This one should let you help him get there.

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

Kotaku

Happy Wedding Anniversary, Here's An Epic Gears Of War Family Portrait

For my first wedding anniversary, I went out to dinner. Fancy joint. I thought I'd done a good job.

Nope. Turns out I did a terrible job.

For Xioo's first anniversary, he had artist Edward Chua take an existing Gears of War mural he'd done and alter it so that the piece featured he, his wife...and two dogs.

Amazing.

Had this picture drawn of my wife, our two dogs, and I for our first anniversary [Reddit]

ALL OUT [DeviantArt]

Kotaku

Achievements Are Changing for Xbox One. Here's How.

Achievements are one of the defining elements of the Xbox experience. Naturally, Microsoft will include them in the Xbox One. But they're not going to work like you remembered them, not exactly. There's more to them, now.

The way it worked before was, a developer set up some sort of challenge. If you met it, you heard the iconic achievement unlocked! sound, and your Gamerscore would increase. That's still going to happen with the Xbox One, though you can expect more things to go along with that basic experience.

From a Microsoft press release that mentions achievements on the Xbox One:

Expanded achievements. A new and expanded achievements system captures video of your epic moments, continues to grow a game's achievements over time, and rewards you in new ways, and your Gamerscore carries over from your Xbox 360.

A fact sheet for the One says something similar, albeit in more nebulous terms:

Allows for new achievements powered by the cloud and offers more ways to earn, more frequent updates and the ability to share wins with friends. An expanded achievements system captures videos of gameplay and continues to grow achievements over time, and Gamerscores carry over from Xbox 360.

And finally, from the official website:

Neat. The fact that you can record the events leading up to unlocking achievements using the console's new DVR feature will be incredibly handy for those of us who like uploading walkthroughs on YouTube, I imagine.

I'm still left with some questions, though—how will it know when to start capturing an achievement-in-progress? How does being powered by the cloud give me "more ways to earn" achievements? What does growing an achievement over time look like in practice? How will the achievement-loving community change when the way you earned an achievement is tracked?

Nonetheless, overall, these changes sound exciting. I'd like to see them in practice, although already I look forward to being able to share awesome achievement moments with friends (especially if that means sharing video). That feature makes the whole achievements thing feel like more than just a number, you know?