I endorse this.

Of the announcements Nintendo made at E3, none were as meme-ready as the inclusion of The Villager from Animal Crossing in Smash Bros. With his terrifying, lifeless eyes, the internet got to work saying exactly what we were all thinking.

So is it any surprise that the Super Smash Bros. Miiverse community is absolutely packed with depictions of the Villager trying to murder people? Here are just some of the homages to The Villager's murderous side, culled from the Miiverse. Enjoy! (Or be mildly terrified, it's up to you)

Hoo boy. That's was pretty dark sided. As a chaser, here’s a drawing of Lil B:

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

Related.

Obligatory.

“I played Dark Souls II,” I said to a friend of mine one night at E3 over drinks. He leaned in. His eyes suddenly got wide and he got a little quiet.

“How was it?” He asked.

“It was Dark Souls.” I said.

Immediately a wave of relief rushed over his face, and my friend said to himself, “Oh thank god.” He’s a Dark Souls fan, you see. I’m a Dark Souls fan. Later, another friend of joined us. “He played Dark Souls II — tell him what you told me.” I did, and the exact same conversation repeated itself, with the same cathartic wave of relief that Dark Souls II was a Dark Souls game, thank god.

People that like Dark Souls are weird like that.

It's a kind of unspoken Stockholm syndrome, one borne out of immense, self-inflicted abuse over many, many hours. If you’ve beaten Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls you know in your gut the vast gulf of difference between the statements, “This is trying to be like Dark Souls,” “This is like Dark Souls,” and “This is Dark Souls.” They are fundamentally different statements.

I played Dark Souls II in a Namco Bandai press-only meeting room with a handful of other people. It was a small demo — an E3 build that included two portions of the game (the castle interior shown off in the IGN gameplay reveal and the Mirror Knight boss shown in the E3 trailer). Yes, some of the mechanics of the game have changed — dual-wielding is a priority, multiplayer supports up to four people and class customization has been revamped. But to me, what I got out of this tiny, back room demo wasn’t the sense of what changed or had been added, but rather the sense of what was familiar.

Statues come alive to ruthlessly murder you, exactly like you expect them to. Corridors are cramped and claustrophobic, just like they should be. The Mirror Knight boss battle was a monstrous fusion of the Iron Golem and the Old Monk — A lumbering gargantuan whose shield reflects magic and summons a player to come to his aid (for the sake of the demo, the enemy was AI-controlled). The game is ruthless and everything felt like it was in the right place.

Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls were ultimately games about movement — brutally unforgiving meditations on anticipating how objects and characters interacted with one another. Yes they were hard, but that difficulty was tempered by a kind of cryptic fairness and reliability. When you lost, you were not disappointed with the game, you were disappointed with yourself because you should have known by then to block, dodge or parry. When you died, it was on your own terms, and that’s such a rare sensation in this medium. Without that feeling of reliable movement, Dark Souls simply is not Dark Souls.

Whether or not Dark Souls II lives up to its predecessors obviously has yet to be decided. I cannot say that From Software won’t piss the entire franchise down their leg or that the game won’t be horribly uneven and broken. That’s simply not something you can glean from an awkward demo booked when you’re trying to bust your ass at E3. But what I can say and what I think is ultimately the most important statement, is this:

This is Dark Souls. This is Dark Souls. Thank God, this is Dark Souls.

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

I’ve seen things inside the Oculus Rift you people wouldn’t believe. And, for the most part, it involved the strange LSD-inspired indie game SoundSelf.

In the video above, SoundSelf’s designer Robin Arnott shows you the ins-and-outs of his LSD-trip inspired VR game, which he was showing off at the IndieCade booth at E3.

SoundSelf is not exactly a new project — the project met its Kickstarter goal last March. What has changed is the Oculus Rift integration, a feature that was not originally planned when the game started out.

Having played it in its Oculus form, it's hard to describe the intensity of the experience. Imagine being in a virtual tunnel 3D telescoping fractals that pulsate along with the sound of your own voice, which is then fed back to you as an ever-growing, Bodhisattva hum. It looks absolutely absurd when you see someone doing it, but when you’re inside that headset, it’s absolutely sublime. It's like the virtual reality dream of countless tech nerds, psychonauts and cyberpunks finally made manifest after so many years.

I went into E3 expecting to want an Xbox One or a PS4, but after playing SoundSelf what I really want more than anything is a Rift.

To find out more, go to soundselfgame.com. A big thanks to Tim Hibbs of BigRedBarrel.com for letting me film his slightly silly experience playing SoundSelf.

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

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, the zombie-centric Ninja Gaiden game, is on display at E3 and I can confirm one thing: there is at least one incident of panties raining from the sky.

In the pre-alpha E3 demo, cyborg-ninja protagonist Yaiba throws a zombie into a truck. That zombie then drives said truck into a panty shop (shaped like a pair of woman's legs). The panty shop explodes, and panties come out of it, creating some sort of meteorological anomaly around women's underwear.

So, hey, there's that. It's almost like Team Ninja is involved with this game or something!

You heard the man!

Another day of E3 has begun. The gates have been breached. This is what it looks like to be there, on the front lines as everyone pours in.

It's madness out there guys — pure madness.

JUST SAYIN'

Jason Schreier took a look at The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD today at Nintendo's press event. Here's what the game looks like and plays like on the Wii U.

In the video above, watch Jason Schreier, Kirk Hamilton and Giant Bomb's Patrick Klepek play five minutes of Nintendo's Super Mario 3D World at E3.

Patrick is clearly jazzed about bein' a cat.

Right here. This E3.

This ends now.