As I’ve mentioned a few times my PS3 is a relatively recent acquisition, and so I missed on some otherwise must-have exclusives during their launch windows. In honor of the release of Beyond: Two Souls this week, I decided to skip it for now and instead fire up its spiritual predecessor, Heavy Rain.

I thought I might not have much to say about Heavy Rain, but it had me at “Press Start,” and not actually in a good way.

Hi, Tappers: just a public service announcement. Myself and my friends are trying to make games better. In order to make games better, we want some information about how you play games.

Easy, right? If you have a minute of time today – or this week, or whenever! – there’s a couple of quick surveys I hope that you will check out.

Closure isn’t a half bad time if you want to experience a uniquely difficult yet easily playable puzzle platformer. But if you have Dark Souls, don’t bother reading further; just go play that. ‘How are they related’ you ask? Hah, well for that you will have to read on to find out!*

I was so excited when the message about the final chapter of Cognition: an Erica Reed Thriller, dropped into my inbox, that I let out a little squeal of joy. In public. People looked at me.

That should be your warning that I’ve become remarkably invested in this adventure game series.

My mind is in twain. Part of me wants to say “Well, we saw that coming.” Another part of me wants to say “Holy mudcrabs!”

Valve has been teasing three big announcements for a while now, and they’re all expected this week. The first? SteamOS, which is (almost) exactly what it sounds like. And the whole earth trembled.

Escape Goat was a puzzle platformer released in 2011 for Windows and XBox Live Arcade.

It’s quite possible you missed the original Escape Goat. That’s fine now though, for two reasons: one, because there’s currently a web-playable version of Escape Goat that you can try out for free, and, two, because the upcoming Escape Goat 2 is more or less a high-resolution re-imagining of the original Escape Goat game.

Stop the presses! Aaron Alexis played video games, including “violent” ones. Indeed, the man who killed a dozen people at the U.S. Navy Yard on Monday was in fact a male under the age of sixty. And while the UK Daily Mirror is hardly what I’d call a “source,” I’ve heard this same coverage on NPR – coverage focusing on the Alexian love of video games rather than the voices in his head, voices so bad he called the police and switched hotels to dodge them; rather than the diagnosed PTSD brought on by participating in the 9/11 cleanup; rather than the history of arrests for gun crimes; rather than the flood of reports indicating that Alexis had numerous social problems and that many “close” to him feared the man well before the attack.

Deep in the Tap-Repeatedly missile silo headquarters, it has come to our attention that kids these days use something called “social media” to communicate. Apparently “The Faces Book” is the most popular of all the social medias, and we are determined to be among the first to use it.

Tap-Repeatedly is a website, it has no face. It is made of electrons. Still, some form of Face is now in this Book, and you can… you can visit? Look at? The Face is available here. It is still under construction and stuff, but early adopters like us are always on the bleeding edge. Bear with the dust and what have you.

Once you’re at our Face you have the option to Thumb us, apparently a compliment among the youth, and leave pithy messages on our “wall,” which is like graffiti but less damaging to property. I guess. It’s digital? I’m not sure what that means.

If video games were Roman defeats, Rome II: Total War would be Manzikert, which was a pretty bad showing for the Romans, one with a high cost. But the long-term effects of that battle are complex and far-reaching, over-analyzed and often over-weighted. Some historians go so far as to describe Manzikert as the event that kneecapped the Roman Empire, which is ironic because the part of it you know about was long gone by 1071 and the other part would totter on for another four hundred years. Me, I don’t buy it. Manzikert was bad, but post-Manzikert misgovernance did more damage than the battle itself. Byzantium could have recovered, it just failed to. Similarly Total War: Rome II has ample opportunity to recover from the scattershot problems of initial release and turn itself into a genuinely remarkable game. If Creative Assembly bungles that opportunity, then Rome II, like Manzikert, will be remembered as the beginning of the end.

Recently I reported on a game called Everlove, a romance game targeted at women. I’ve played the game now and, now that it’s been released on a few different platforms I’m weighing in with my thoughts. Check it after the jump.