Slate’s Michael Thomsen ruminates over Dark Souls and whether it’s worth the 100 hours it takes to complete. “You can accomplish a lot in 100 hours….
…You could read War and Peace, for instance, then follow it up with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a few starter courses in a new language. You could watch Melancholia 40 times and still have time to squeeze in a screening of Shoah. You could also drive from Los Angeles to New York and back again, or complete 20 weeks of training and then run a marathon. Or, if you preferred, you could also play through the video game Dark Souls from start to finish.”

Bonus: An interview with the game’s maker, Hidetaka Miyazaki.

So you want to know what the best things in the gaming world were in 2011? Gamasutra has a roundup of everything

Best game? A.V. Club, Rock Paper Shotgun, Giant Bomb, PC Gamer, The Guardian,
NPR, PC Magazine (with list for each platform), G4TV, Metacritic
, GamesRadar

Best Indie Games? IndieDB

Best Free/Browser Games? A.V. Club, PC Gamer

Best Video Game Soundtracks? See previously

What if every video game was narrated like Bastion, the fun isometric platformer with its great old-timey dynamic voice over?

Introducing the Humble Voxatron Bundle, featuring the Robotron 2084-meets-Minecraft voxel shooter Voxatron.

From the people that brought you the Humble Indie Bundles 1-3, the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, and the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, the proceeds again go towards a split of your choosing between Voxatron maker Lexaloffle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Child’s Play charity, and the Humble site itself.