My girlfriend and I are sitting on our recliner couch in that curious together-but-apart configuration that has become our weekday mainstay. She is furiously trying to prepare a lesson for the class she’s supposed to teach the next morning, while I am browsing the internet and updating my GameFly queue. As the TV drones on in the background, a flash of recognition tears my eyeballs away from the computer.

“God of War III is out next Tuesday”, I mutter, lost in a fugue of geekish intensity. It’s hardly a revelation, but there’s a feeling of being blindsided that’s hard to process, as though the game were silently dropping out of nowhere. My girlfriend pauses to give me a pitiful look, the kind only given to very stupid dogs or very ugly cats.

“I could always buy it for you”, she teasingly replies.

“That’s a great idea,” I say, “I mean, it worked out so well the last time.”

Forced death is something I've had an aversion to ever since the game Nocturne, in which you were forced into a hallway full of doors in which only one door didn't lead to instant death. Given the buggy nature of the game and the long load times, that hallway was not a fun experience. Instead it was more like an hour of desk-pounding frustration as I screamed at my computer screen every 5 seconds.

I've come around since then, as I've seen a few examples of death as a useful mechanic. Certainly Braid's rewinding of time helped me see the instructive value of the occasional death. There've been plenty of FPS games where the camera shows me who killed me, letting me know what I'm up against. There's also Starcraft 2, which what little I've gotten to play of the beta has me addicted to their replay feature.

Maru is different though. Maru, from Jesse Venbrux, is a 2D platformer where you jump between different platforms, moving toward a goal and avoiding spikes, except the gravity is towards the platform, not down--very similar to how Super Mario Galaxy works, but in 2D.

What stood out to me about the game though was how it handles death. You collect extra men as floaty little orbs that look just like your character's head. However when you die, you turn into a floaty little white orb of light. When you get back to where you died, you can pick that up. You then run into platforms that need those light orbs before you can proceed.

Death in a game can certainly be a learning experience, but having be required to pass? You get a little ball of light when you die that you have to collect and spend later. It's similar to how The Nexus works in Demon's Souls. In Demon's Souls, when you die you can attack demons for more souls in order to become more powerful. Except here, it's required to progress.

Why You Should Check This Out: Besides the forced suicide, it's an interesting platformer that has some really great physics. There's only 7 levels, though sometimes you may need to go through a level multiple times. The art and music are both pretty good for an indie platformer and certainly not generic. The multicolored platforms and weird, bugeyed protagonist give the art a different feel than most other games. While they're requiring you to die to complete the game, it doesn't feel too forced or onerous. Instead, it's a refreshing way to use death in a platformer as more than just a way to burn up extra lives.

People have been asking us for years when we’d be getting shirts and other cool stuff out the door so they can represent their love for our awesome community. The time has finally come to unveil the new store and we’re excited to have both the original Gamers With Jobs t-shirt along with the first winner from our design contest back in … wow, that’s a long time ago.

One of our absolute favorites was one of many designs submitted by community member Fredrik Skarstedt (Fredrik_S). He had a bunch of awesome ideas but his Friend Me Up graphic design was particularly inspired. We’re very pleased to offer a regular t-shirt in multiple colors and babydoll versions for the ladies!

This is only the beginning. Over the next few months we plan to release new stuff based on what you guys want and some of our other winning designs. Big thanks to Cleveland Printwear for making our awesome swag!

*note* We have folks outside the US and Canada covered too, check out the international order form on the site.

I have an insane theory about the airline industry — I think they genuinely want me to stop flying on their airplanes.

I think that when major air-carriers tuck into their silk sheets at night, they dream of a hyper-efficient fleet filled with steely-eyed business class flyers with practiced methods of travel and corporate expense accounts. Never again would they be burdened with a bunch of pesky amateur flyers with screaming kids and an over-inflated sense of entitlement just because the family managed to scrounge up a few hundred dollars to fly to Omaha.

Were I to write to Delta airlines and tell them of how I chose to spend three days driving across the country with my two boys rather than endure ten hours under their thumb, would the response be a curt but genuine, “Thank you?”

Sometimes it very much seems like certain companies are entirely comfortable with the idea of just annoying a certain segment of consumers away. You know, companies like Ubisoft.

This week the crew looks back on Valve's latest Portal 2 marketing (or was it?!) scheme and how it fits in with the industry at large. Cory also sits down with Collin Moore, the community manager for Irrational Games! If you want to submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563.

I’ve been staring at this screenshot from the original Everquest for what feels like hours. The graphics are dated, of course, since the game has been out for a decade, but that’s not what has me so transfixed. This screenshot is like looking through a wormhole into my past and seeing a younger, less hairy me slumped in his dingy computer chair and trying to retrieve his corpse before sunup.

It was a time when I was still single and jobless. Aside from phoning it in on some computer classes, I didn’t have a whole lot going on in my life. I was 18 years old, living in the big city in a house full of crazy people, and my only real concerns were leveling-up my Wizard and whether I was going to eat Subway or McDonald's for lunch. It was an existence devoid of any lasting meaning or direction.

It sucked, but it was awesome.

Final Fantasy XIII arrives tomorrow, and I am ambivalent.

It's not a case of console envy. I don't mind that my machine of choice won't be able to render individual reflections on Cactuar needles, or whatever. I'm sure I'll be able to endure these supposed visual abominations without therapy.

It's not the silly protagonist names either. Lightning, Snow, B.A. Baracus: these are the characters I’ve learned to expect and embrace since first exchanging promise rings with the Final Fantasy franchise in middle school.

It’s not the characters. It’s their voices I can’t stand.

My first inclination was to remove the PC release of Assassin's Creed 2 entirely from The Week Ahead -- to essentially have it stricken from the record. So full is my distaste for the new set of pointless flaming hoops that the misanthropes over at Ubisoft's have erected for us felonious PC users to jump through. But, to deny you the opportunity to not buy Assassin's Creed 2, to attempt to take the decision making process from you, is no better. So, below and here you will find mention of the game's release.

Please do not buy it. And, for the love of God, don't pirate it either.

Besides, there are better things to talk of this week. Even though my weekend saw what is likely the final Red Ring of Death for my launch 360, I find myself rolling with the whole thing pretty well. After all, I'm finally settling into Heavy Rain and Final Fantasy XIII on a PlayStation system just seems right. And, that is my pick for Game of the Week.

Also of note is the expansion to Dawn of War II titled Chaos Rising. DoW2 was one of those games that I always intended to go back and play more of. The right way to describe my time with that game is to say that I dabbled, and this may be the perfect excuse to go back and flesh out my experience.

Find the full list of this week's releases and a few choice upcoming titles below with links to our affiliate partner Amazon.com.

Being told that you will love something makes it exponentially harder to actually love that thing. This is a fact, as unimpeachable and immutable as the fact that cake is better than pie. Again, these are facts, and they are not up for debate.

It is for this reason that I have to this point held fast on not playing Heavy Rain. It's not willful stubbornness, or at least not any kind of bullheadedness that I have the faculties to control. It's just that as each person, a long line in seemingly endless succession, informed me of how very much I would love the game, I felt the barriers go up like watching the opening credits of Get Smart in reverse. No, I wanted to say, I will not, and it's your damn fault!

Maybe it's that the bar becomes so high as accolades become an avalanche of expectation, and that feeling of uncertainty which so deliciously fosters a sense of surprise is lost under the overwhelming perceptions of those who advocate for the game. Maybe it's just that I'm kind of a contrarian dink. Either way, as I wandered toward the checkout counter yesterday with Heavy Rain in hand, I had a sinking feeling of money poorly spent.

It's not fair. Not in the least. But, as I plugged the game disc into the long dormant drive, waited the predictable eternity for the PS3 to update using what I assume is a dial-up connection and an abacus, and plunged into the exciting world of getting dressed, I had to actively fight not to pick out any tiny flaw as though I were collecting evidence for a grand jury indictment.

"Is this really the voice acting I'm going to be subjected to the whole game?" I thought. "At least if something bad happens to these kids I won't have to listen to them talk." Had there been a QTE that allows you to shrug in apathy, I would have Generation X'd that whole intro.

I stress: This is a terrible way to approach a game, and I have no one but myself to blame.

I bring this all up so I can get to this paragraph, however, and it is hopefully my one opportunity for redemption. Following the first big emotional gut-punch of the game, a moment I watched with a kind of detached fascination but little investment, I finally hit the first action moment of the game, and for a second there I got it. It made sense what the game was capable of, and why everyone's been going on about it.

That was a good moment. I will try to build from that.

Flotilla is the latest game from Brendon Chung, the creator of Gravity Bone. It's a simultaneous-turn-based strategy game set in space, where you take your handful of ships and fight tactical battles against things like tattoed chicken space pirates or crocodiles suffering from space madness, and win the occasional “best karaoke singer in the universe” award. There are several of you I know right now who are already downloading the demo.

For the rest of you, let me explain what I mean by simultaneous-turn-based. The gameplay lets you issue orders every 30 seconds and then lets you watch the results play out in real-time. Your comptuer opponent is doing the same, only changing his orders every 30 seconds. It's as if Homeworld only involved 2 ships and only let you set orders 30 seconds at a time. You usually handle only a few ships and are constantly trying to maneuver behind or beneath your enemy's armor, because hits to those weak points do massive amounts of damage. Since you can arbitrarily rotate your ship in any direction in space, this is trickier than you might imagine.

To add variety to the game, there's also some rogue-like elements. The universe is randomly generated with good and negative encounters on each planet. You start your adventure at the “Tutorial” system, which then allows you to fly off into adventures unknown. Each time you accomplish something, it adds a chapter to the story about your character. When you finally die, you click “Start Adventure” again and start the next adventure. I'm not sure what happens when you win instead of dying—primarily because I seem to really be pretty terrible at this game; I usually die 2-3 planets in.

There's also a co-op mode with an attached Xbox 360 gamepad. (At some point in the future, this game will also be coming to Xbox 360 Indie Games as well.) There's a skirmish mode against human opponents or bots that I haven't tried out yet either—the game just came out this week, so I haven't roped anybody else into multiplayer yet. (Hint, hint, goodjers!)

Each encounter (if you're successful) also rewards you with ship upgrades, which allow you to customize your fleet with improvements like increased firing speed or heavier rear and back armor. The randomized universe with ship customization gives endless opportunities to replay a new game every time.

The art style is whimsical and frequently hilarious—it never fails to put a smile on my face when I head to a random planet and end up staring down cats piloting a spaceship. The planets and ships in combat are fairly simple and abstract, but pretty—this is from the creator of Gravity Bone after all. The music gives a very 2001 vibe, with classical style and an emphasis of the grace and beauty of space combat. A turn-based game with classical music and beautiful scenery, what more could you want out of the art and music?

Why You Should Check This Out: Flotilla is an addictive simultaneous-turn-based spaceship-battle strategy game with a quirky sense of humor and some great art. The battles become pitched and intense, while still maintaining that turn-based sensibility. Ships frozen in air just before a missile barrage can leave you far more tense than any real-time clickfest. Combined with a randomized universe and rogue-like elements, the game is an endless universe of exhilarating, varied space battles.