Remember the first half-hour of Darksiders? It largely involved hitting things. That's the kind of guy War was, after all: a hulking brute with massive hands and a gigantic sword. When the apocalypse was triggered a touch too early for his liking, he took to the streets - New York, I think - and started smacking around avenging angels, all of whom looked a bit like Transformers. He looked a bit like a Transformer too: squat, thick-limbed, and covered in complicated armour.

The first half hour of Darksiders 2 is a little different. It largely involves scampering over things, up things, around things and across things. Then hitting things. You're Death this time, right? Fellow horseman and friend/brother of War. When War takes the blame for the apocalypse being triggered a touch too early for his liking, you race off on your own journey to prove his innocence. A parallel timeline, but a slightly different adventure.

Death's a lot - well - thinner than War. He's ditched much of the horseman armour during the first few sequences of the game for starters, because Vigil's introducing a new loot system that sees you collecting boots, chest plates, gloves from the enemies you destroy. Kicking things off, then, he looks a bit like an extreme sports star, or Tarzan out of the Disney movie: lean and sinewy and quick.

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Revitalised retailer GAME has launched a new online price checker tool for you to total up your trade-in games.

The chain is also currently offering 25 per cent extra credit on trade-ins until the end of May.

GAME's price checker forces you to enter in the barcode of the product you want to trade in, then fill in a CAPTCHA form.

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Doctor Who fans are used to making the best of a bad situation. Even before the long dark days when the show was off the air, relegated to the cupboard of cheesy pop culture ephemera, even when he was crammed into a terrible TV movie for American audiences, even when he looked like Colin Baker, we kept the faith.

Through cheap special effects, hammy acting, clunky scripts and ramshackle production, we excused it all, because underneath was something brilliant: a story about a mercurial, incurably curious, pacifist eccentric with all of time and space at his fingertips. Even at its worst, Doctor Who always offered the broadest canvas possible, a rainbow of narrative colour and a twinkle-eyed madman for a brush.

It's perhaps this daunting universe of possibilities that has kept Gallifrey's wayward son from finding a satisfactory home in gaming. Games skew towards protagonists who favour direct action, those who lead with the fist and the gun rather than intellect and wit, which means that to truly capture the spirit of Doctor Who, a game would have to break out of the comfortable paradigms that have served TV and movie spin-offs so faithfully all these years.

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According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the filing (via Trademarkia) for Remember Me was made on 22nd May 2012, and relates to computer game software.

A trademark for Remember Me was also filed in Europe, with OHIM, on 25th May.

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Just Cause developer Avalanche is working with Square Enix on an open world game, it's revealed.

Square Enix published the first two Just Cause games. Is this evidence that is will publish a third?

In an email sent to Eurogamer today to advertise a recruitment event at The Crowne Plaza Baltimore North Hotel on Wednesday 30th May, the Swedish developer said it was ramping up development on multiple current and next-gen console projects due out in 2013 and 2014.

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The actor who plays the IT Crowd's Douglas Reynholm is doing a voice for Worms Revolution, Team17 has announced.

Matt Berry played corporate boss Douglas Reynholmin in the IT Crowd and has also appeared in The Mighty Boosh and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. In Worms Revolution he plays Don Keystone, a wildlife documentary maker and unseen narrator.

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Borderlands 2 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be at Rezzed, Eurogamer's PC and Indie games show.

Gearbox FPS Borderlands 2 will be playable for the first time in the UK, while Firaxis strategy game XCOM will see a 15-minute demo narrated by one of the developers.

Rezzed takes place on Friday 6th July and Saturday 7th July at the Brighton Centre. Tickets are on sale now at www.rezzed.com, priced £12 for one day or £20 for both.

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The Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter is funded.

Stainless' $400,000 goal was met yesterday with 10 days to go. At the time of writing, $421,532 had been raised off the back of 10,833 backers.

"We MADE IT!" read an update on the Carmageddon Kickstarter page. "Thanks to ALL OF YOU for the support and backing so far! As you'll see, I don't have the power of speech or typing completely down at the moment (some would say, most of the time...) as I'm STUNNED at the speed it's happened this weekend!

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Sci-fi shooter Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier has shot to the top of the UK all-format charts, beating Max Payne 3, last week's number one.

In a busy week for new releases Capcom RPG behemoth Dragon's Dogma slotted in in third place, ahead of Codemasters' latest racer DiRT Showdown in fourth.

Mario Tennis Open on 3DS managed an 11th place entry, while Doctor Who tie-in The Eternity Clock materialised in 34th from retail sales alone (digital downloads are not counted).

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Zone of the Enders creator Hideo Kojima has revealed he will take a supporting role on the recently-teased ZOE sequel, code-named "Enders Project".

Kojima will serve as a producer on the project due to his ongoing work on the under-wraps "Project Ogre".

"Since I am currently in beta on Project Ogre, I became the producer for the Ender's Project," Kojima wrote on Twitter (via gematsu. "From the start of the plan, it was clear I was just support. In reality, the game design, script, production, level design, etc. were all supervised by other staff. Even when I tried to force myself into things, I didn't have any success."

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There won't - "barring some sort of miracle" - be any new patches released for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, developer Big Huge Games has announced.

Lead designer Ian S. Frazier said a PC patch was in development, and would have added new difficulty modes, camera features and fixed bugs.

"But before we finished," Frazier wrote on the Kingdoms of Amalur forum, "the company collapsed."

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Battlefield Premium will cost £35/$60, according to a new report.

A Battlefield Premium listing on Coolshop.co.uk (spotted by MP1st) carries a 29th June release date and a £34.96 price.

Its description: "BF3 Premium Service is 1 code in a box to give the consumers early access to the BF3 DLC expansion packs - Back to Karkand (already released), Close Quarters (releasing June), Armoured Kill (releasing Sept) and End Game (releasing December)."

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Sonic Team has given barmy Sega 2D platformer Hell Yeah! its blessing - and a few words of advice for tiny French developer Arkedo Studios.

During development Sonic Team chief Takashi Iizuka gave feedback to Arkedo boss Camille Guermonprez and, crucially, the thumbs up.

"Sega said, would you like to have a meeting with the Sonic Team? Hell yeah! F**k, why not? Let's do that. We saw the two main guys of Sonic Team, they played the game and then we asked, what makes it a very bad Gaijin game? What sucks?

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While NVIDIA's new Kepler architecture takes possession of the performance crown in the desktop arena, the outlook is somewhat different in laptop territory. Here, AMD currently rules supreme with its Radeon HD 7970M mobile graphics core - a piece of technology important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's powerful enough to handle some of the most advanced DirectX 11 titles at high frame-rates and extreme resolutions. Secondly, the size of the silicon and the power it requires potentially makes the 7970M a viable contender for a next-gen console graphics solution.

First up, let's talk about the laptop hosting this formidable kit. Supplied by Alienware, the new R4 revision of the M17x features a chassis that is superficially identical to the one used for the R3 model we reviewed a couple of months ago. It's a solid foundation which evidently didn't need much tweaking in terms of finish; the backlit keyboard, 17-inch LCD, and wide spread of connections (including optical out from a new Sound Blaster Recon3Di sound card) embed cleanly into a sturdy, rubberised matte exterior, with glossy flourishes for the two front speakers and its palm rest. For a laptop set in this higher price bracket, it looks the part in its own stylised way, and is reassuringly resilient to downward pressure during gameplay.

But, of course, it's under the bonnet that we see the more radical changes. To begin with, the existing 32nm Sandy Bridge Intel CPU has been ousted in favour of an 22nm Ivy Bridge equivalent, offering a small but useful bump in performance, improved battery life (particularly at full load, not so much at idle) and a far superior Intel HD4000 integrated GPU. This stands in as an energy-efficient graphics output for general use, such as web browsing or watching video, though the Switchable Graphics controls ensure you won't be using it for actual gaming so long as the 7970M is active.

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Aveline. If there's something special that I took away Dragon Age 2, something I really want to share with others or hold up as an example of what made the game worthwhile, it's Aveline. The travelling companion turned colleague turned captain of the guard was one of the very best examples of a strong, decent, uncompromised and well-rounded female character in gaming in a long, long time. I'm glad I adventured alongside her, I cared very much about what she had to say and her support meant a lot to me. That's pretty impressive for a collection of polygons and voice samples.

She also reflected the game at its very best: its strongest writing, its finest characterisation, its most engaging stories. The problem I have now is that I want an Aveline in every RPG I play. I'm not going to get one. In this respect, I've been spoiled.

I'm also glad she stuck with me right to the end, because otherwise I might not have made it. She was by my side as we stepped into another identikit dungeon, as we once more entered the caves under Sundermount, even as our city burned about us a second time and in a fashion that was suspiciously similar to it's previous conflagration. She, along with many of my other companions, kept me going when I thought I might falter, and not only did they save my neck many times, they also saved Dragon Age 2.

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It's eight weeks since we last featured a boxed home console release as game of the week, and we've only had five of them so far this year. The thin ice that the traditional games business finds itself on has been a regular topic in this column for a while, but it's hard not to return to it in the week that Kingdoms of Amalur was judged a failure for "only" selling 1.2 million copies, and that the founder of a young UK studio told me that everyone thought he was "insanse" for wanting to set up a business making console games.

And frankly, as I glance through my schedule for E3 in a little over a week's time, I don't see anything that's going to turn things around (unless Sony or Microsoft has a genuine surprise planned). Nor do I see it in this week's new releases - even though most of them are worth a go.

It's such an unexciting selection that Tom and I debated awarding game of the week to the unputdownable (but rather old) New Star Soccer instead, on the technicality that it was patched with Turkish language support this week. The outright best game that any of us has played this week was probably the Arma 2 mod Day Z - but it's only in alpha and probably worth waiting out a while before diving in.

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The gaming world was a much simpler place back in 2009 when cloud-based gameplay streaming couldn't possibly work - at least not to anywhere near the degree of the claims being made at the time. And yet, despite falling short of the local experience and indeed the scant quoted metrics on performance, OnLive could be played. It was sub-optimal in many ways, but it was playable. It delivered a viable first-gen end product which was ripe for improvement, and just three years later we are seeing workable solutions being introduced that could change everything.

At the recent GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA set out to do exactly that with the unveiling of its new GeForce GRID, an important innovation that potentially solves a lot of problems, both client and server side. Up until now, it's believed that cloud gaming has been achieved by connecting the user to a single PC inside the datacentre with its own discrete GPU. This is hardly power-efficient and it's also very expensive - however, it was also necessary, because graphics cores could not be virtualised across several users in the same way that CPUs have been for some time now. GRID is perhaps the turning point, offering full GPU virtualisation with a power budget of 75W per user. This means that servers can be smaller, cheaper, easier to cool and use less energy.

GRID also targets the quality of the client-side experience, too, in that NVIDIA believes it has made key in-roads in tackling latency, the single biggest barrier to cloud gaming's success. So confident is the company of its technology that it has even committed to actual detailed metrics. So let's have a quick look at the gameplay streaming world as viewed by NVIDIA.

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Apologies in advance for this: as Saturday Soapboxes go, it's going to be chirpy and probably quite inane. That makes some kind of sense, at least. The conversation it was based on was chirpy and inane too. That's my bag, I guess.

A few days ago, a friend of mine challenged me to think of something genuinely positive about the current gaming scene. He'd been listing all of the woes for the last few minutes: studio closures, brain drains, cloning, delayed next-gen consoles, triple-B games vanishing, traditional handhelds in trouble...

I'm not going to pretend what I came up with can match any of that. Truth be told, there are hundreds of thousands of things I feel genuinely positive about, anyway. There's the theoretically easy route to market, the range of platforms for developers to aim for, the endless possibilities of cheap middleware and - oh yeah! - the sheer amount of good games that are coming out. Something else - something far more basic - popped into my head, though, and then it wouldn't go away. Over the last few years, games have rediscovered colour.

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Given the sorry state that relatively modest single-player offering Skyrim launched in last year, many gamers are justifiably concerned over what sort bugs might cripple Zenimax's considerably more ambitious Elder Scrolls MMO when it launches next year.

When asked by Edge how he intends to ensure the game is stable when it goes live, director Matt Firor admitted that there are all manner of hurdles to overcome above and beyond what Bethesda was faced with during Skyrim's creation, such as account creation, servers and latency issues.

"The critical difference with MMOGs, though, is that you have a long beta test where you build up to thousands and thousands of players, and you tackle those problems as you run into them there," he added.

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Rockstar has revealed details of exactly what high-end PC owners can expect from Max Payne 3 when it arrives on desktops next month.

Speaking in an interview with PC World, lead PC designer Kevin Hoare revealed that the developer had paid special attention to ensuring those with high-spec hardware had plenty to "sink their teeth into".

"We've worked hard to make sure the game will run smoothly on a wide range of PC builds," he explained.

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Planned Kingdoms of Amalur MMO Project Copernicus is - or was, should 38 Studios close for good - shaping up to be something truly special, according to the game's author R. A. Salvatore.

Speaking in response to a post on Daily Kos, the veteran fantasy writer revealed that the game was much nearer to completion than many have speculated and was shaping up beautifully.

"This game is much further along than is being reported - I wish I could show you some if it - and the environments, the animations and the game-play would blow you away," he explained.

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It had been due out in Europe on 8th June and in the US on 5th June.

Publisher Namco Bandai is yet to comment on the delay. We've checked in.

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Two possibilities: Either you're excited about Day Z, or you haven't heard of it.

This is an Arma II: Combined Ops modification that's only in alpha at the moment, and with the current crush of users smothering the master server, you probably shouldn't try playing it for at least a month. All the same, you should know about it, because it's probably the best zombie video game ever made.

Using Chernarus, the soldier simulator's 225 km2 of believable Eastern Europe, each 50-player Day Z server simply tasks you with surviving in a vast, zombie-strewn landscape of settlements, valleys, beaches, castles and petrol stations. That's the game. Zombies wander the world's towns and villages, but it's only there that you'll find food, water, bandages, and maybe even assault rifles, night-vision goggles, a map, a compass or a dozen other things.

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Zone of the Enders creator Hideo Kojima has revealed artwork from a proposed sequel to the action series.

Kojima teased the as-yet untitled Enders Project at a Japanese event for the series' upcoming Zone of the Enders HD Collection.

The new Enders Project is still in an "experimental" phase, 4Gamer reported, with Kojima looking into the feasibility of making the game using the developer's Fox engine.

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"XCOM is the game that teaches you the meaning of 'acceptable losses'," Firaxis' Peter Murray says to me. As he demos an early build of Enemy Unknown to journalists, and as we talk about the 18-year-old game that inspires this re-imagining, something becomes obvious: He wants me to experience failure. He wants us all to. That's a little worrying.

But for Murray, the possibility of loss is part of what defines the XCOM experience. This could be the loss of a mission, the loss of a valuable and experienced soldier, the loss of an expensive base or even the loss of the game. Success, when it comes, should be paid for in blood, measured in bodycounts. Murray looks on as the assembled journalists play through a scripted tutorial mission that kills three of their four soldiers. He then demos additional footage that features the original game's deadly Chrysalids tearing an unprepared and outmanoeuvred squad to pieces. XCOM, he tells us, will not be pulling its punches.

Much of this challenge will be presented by the game's new approach to small squad tactics. After what Murray describes as a "eureka moment", lead designer Jake Solomon introduced "a completely new approach to combat, based on a move/action paradigm". The currency of time units favoured by older XCOM games has been binned in favour of a more streamlined system that represents the simple and yet critical choices a soldier makes in the heat of battle: moving and firing; sprinting forward; hunkering down to provide covering fire; reloading; assisting a squad-mate.

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Modern day MMO The Secret World has been delayed by two weeks, developer Funcom has announced.

It launches on 3rd July. It had been due out 19th June. Funcom said the delay was due to "market reasons". "The new launch date places The Secret World in a more positive launch window which will benefit the launch of the game," the Norwegian company added.

Because of the delay, the Early Access period begins on 29th June.

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The original Carmageddon PC game and Splat Pack expansion are heading to GOG.com, developer Stainless Games has announced.

They'll arrive in the "near future".

Better still, they'll be given for free to anybody who pledges $25 or above to the Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter.

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Minecraft has now surpassed nine million sales across all versions of the game.

Minecraft's PC, Android, iOS and Xbox Live Arcade editions have collectively sold 9.2 million copies, Mojang's business developer Daniel Kaplan wrote on Twitter.

Sales of the creative cube-based sandbox today hit six million for the PC version alone, creator Markus "Notch" Persson revealed.

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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning apparently needed to sell "in the 3 million range just to break even" - an astronomical ask of a new IP of its status.

The words came from Lincoln Chafee, governor of Rhode Island (the state that provided the loan 38 Studios was founded upon, and now can't pay back), during a press conference last night (reported by Kotaku). That's what "experts" had told Chafee.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning managed to sell 1.22 million copies in 90 days. 38 Studios boss Curt Schilling revealed the total on Twitter, adding that the game had "outperformed [publisher] EA's expectations".

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You'll be able to nab it from iTunes, Steam and at IndieGameTheMovie.com, where you can also pre-order the Blu-ray and DVD.

The film follows the development of Super Meat Boy, details the protracted development and legal troubles surrounding Fez and offers personal interviews with creators.

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Hot on the heels of Vigil revealing that the Wii U version of Darksiders 2 will look "at least as good as" the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, Gearbox Software has gone one step further, and insisted the Wii U version of Aliens: Colonial Marines will be the best-looking version.

Echoing Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford's comments made earlier this month, senior producer Brian Burleson described the Wii U is a "powerful, powerful machine".

Publishers and developers working with Wii U are under orders from Nintendo not to divulge information on the console, with technical specifications a closely guarded secret.

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Last month THQ delayed promising action game Darksiders 2 to August 2012 - a decision that disappointed some eager fans.

Developer Vigil insisted the extra time would make for a much better game. Now, it's explained how exactly.

"To be honest, it's a lot of things that aren't totally apparent," associate producer Jay Fitzloff told Eurogamer. "It's final detail."

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EA has strapped up its FIFA Euro 2012 DLC and sent it back onto the pitch following complaints of screen freezing.

As announced on the game's official forum earlier today, an update is now rolling out across all platforms.

Here's the full list of fixes:

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Mounted combat is the headline addition in Skyrim update 1.6, due out on PC and consoles soon.

As detailed on the Bethesda Blog, the patch will allow both ranged and melee combat on horseback.

Update 1.6 also brings with it a number of bug fixes and stability tweaks. PC users can try it out now in Steam beta, though a final release date has not yet been set.

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Embattled Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios is in its death throes, according to a Polygon report.

All of staff have apparently been laid off today, so say sources close to the Rhode Island-based outfit.

A separate Kotaku piece claims subsidiary Big Huge Games has also closed its doors. The Maryland studio, which co-developed EA-published RPG Amalur, was bought by former pro-baseballer Curt Schilling's 38 Studios outfit back in 2009.

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A new Mass Effect 3 DLC pack, titled Rebellion, is available to download free of charge next week, BioWare has announced.

The pack, which includes a batch of new multiplayer content, is available from 29th May on PC and Xbox 360, and 30th May on PlayStation 3.

First and foremost, there are two new maps. Firebase Jade overlooks a jungle reservoir surrounded by huge waterfalls, while Firebase Goddess is a circular stage set in the middle a Thessian metropolis.

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Browser-based strategy MMO Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances has exited beta and is now formally open for business, publisher EA has announced.

You'll pick from one of two factions - the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) or the Nod - and then set about managing your resources, building an army, fostering alliances and generally throwing your weight around.

It's free-to-play and works cross-platform. A cloud save feature will be available to make it accessible across both web browsers and mobile devices.

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Blizzard has confirmed a client side patch for Diablo 3 will be released next week.

In doing so it announced a further delay to the real money auction house beyond the end of May target release. It's also still looking into those nasty missing achievements some players have suffered.

"Since the game's launch, we've applied a number of hotfixes to address gameplay issues, made tweaks to improve our service stability, and performed occasional server maintenance when necessary to ensure that in the long term, players have the best gameplay experience possible," community manager Nethaera wrote on Battle.net.

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The studio responsible for porting Minecraft to Xbox Live Arcade has offered a little more detail on which features from the PC game are to be patched over.

Speaking in an interview with OXM, 4J Studio's Paddy Burns revealed that update 1.7.3 will be the next addition, bringing with it the piston feature that lets you heave rows of blocks around.

That's a relatively small patch compared to the game-changing 1.8.1 'adventure' update that is also in the works.

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Stainless Games' digital version of cult card game Magic the Gathering is one of the most popular titles on Xbox Live. This summer will see the developer pump out the series third incarnation, Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013.

It's the second title in just two years of what could now be an annual franchise. But it wasn't always supposed to be that way.

"What we wanted to do originally was, as we're living in the modern digital download era, make a game and just carry on releasing DLC for it, and go on forever," Ben Gunstone, the game's production director, told Eurogamer. "That proved in the real-world to be very difficult, within the constraints of Xbox, mainly."

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The number of players who have reported a Diablo 3 account hack is "extremely small", Blizzard has insisted.

Battle.net is awash with reports of account being hijacked and then stripped of gold and items. Earlier this week Blizzard insisted these hacks were being caused using "traditional" means. Today, it went into more detail on the issue, and insisted Battle.net and the Diablo 3 servers remain secure.

"Over the past couple of days, players have expressed concerns over the possibility of Battle.net account compromises," community manager Nethaera wrote on Battle.net.

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As bona fide stop-the-press moments go, the events of 1st March 2010 stack up impressively. With Modern Warfare 2 smashing sales records across the globe and cementing the Call of Duty brand's claim to 'biggest gaming franchise ever' status, Activision announced out of the blue that its creators, Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella, had been relieved of their posts with immediate effect.

What on earth could have prompted the publisher to get rid of the two men responsible for its steamrolling multi-billion dollar FPS cash cow? Next Tuesday, after more than two years of legal pre-amble, the relevant parties will gather in a Los Angeles court room to establish exactly that, decide who did wrong by who, and at what cost.

With a billion dollars in damages potentially at stake, not to mention the reputations of some of the biggest players in the video game industry, it promises high drama, Machiavellian corporate intrigue and, surely, a whole lot of name-calling.

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Aliens: Colonial Marines is a "massive" project and hundreds are working on it, developer Gearbox has said.

The studio has at least three high-profile first-person shooters in development: Aliens, Borderlands 2 and Brothers in Arms: Furious 4, but senior producer Brian Burleson insisted Colonial Marines is getting the attention it deserves.

"It's been pretty massive," he said. "We have hundreds of people working on this game."

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Screenshots of what appears to be Project Copernicus, the MMO being made by troubled Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developer 38 Studios, have leaked online.

They depict three stylised, cartoon scenes, showcasing three of the game's races: the human-like Almain, the dwarf-like Dverga and the ogre-like Jottun.

Broadly, Copernicus resembles World of Warcraft.

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"I think caves are just interesting," says Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

"They're kind of this source of beauty on one level and I think there's a prehistoric part of our brain that triggers them as a place of safety. They were our homes for hundreds and thousands of years. There's something intrinsic about a cave that I think everybody likes on some level."

"Do you like exploring caves in real life?" I ask.

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Brütal Legend and Costume Quest developer Double Fine has unveiled The Cave, a new adventure game from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Sega will publish the downloadable title on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in early 2013.

In Cave, you assemble a team of adventurers, explore a subterranean amusement park and encounter inter-continental ballistic missiles. "Rappelling", "spelunking" and dark rocky caverns also feature.

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Ubisoft will park a double-decker Rocksmith Tour bus at most of the world's major music festivals this summer.

In the United Kingdom, those festivals will be Isle of Wight (22nd to 24th June) Reading Festival (24th to 26th August) and Bestival (6th to 9th September).

The tour bus will also chug along to Gamescom on 17th to 19th August.

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"Is it a downloadable game?" If I had a pound for every time I'd been asked that while playing Dirt Showdown then I would have, well, £3. Still, that's three times that the first instinct of one of the people walking past our games room was to inquire about this new racing game's origins, which suggests not everyone has gotten their head around Codemasters' latest brand extension, or that it raises some doubt at first sight.

It's not a downloadable game though; it's a boxed release that happens to draw its name and some of its inspiration from Codies' increasingly gnarly rally game series, itself an offshoot of the superb Colin McRae games. It's also, along with Ridge Racer Unbounded, proof that the arcade racing genre isn't just surviving following the closures of studios like Bizarre Creations and Black Rock, but delivering some of its best work.

But whereas Ridge Racer Unbounded was a subtle trick - a rollercoaster of destruction, balancing on the knife edge of a thrilling handling model that almost didn't work - Dirt Showdown's success is much more familiar: brilliant racing disciplines, accessible handling, gorgeous presentation and tremendous variety.

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Struggling Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios has been faced with further setbacks, including the departure of several execs.

Studio boss Jennifer MacLean publically revealed her departure via her LinkedIn profile. Her tenure ended back in March. Fellow exec John Blakely has also jumped ship; he quit the developer last month, Joystiq reported.

38 Studios has also failed to find much-needed new financial backing. Last week it was revealed that the company had been unable to pay staff wages. The company's health insurance has also now run out.

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The second Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event is being held back until ArenaNet deploys "a lot of additional hardware in our datacenters".

The developer announced the news on Facebook, quashing hopes of a beta this Memorial Day weekend.

"Our Beta Weekend Event 1 was super successful," wrote community manager Martin Kerstein, "we exceeded our expectations.

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Capcom is aiming to shorten development times for major titles from between three and four years to just two and a half years in an effort to stay competitive and maximise revenue from its key IPs, according to company CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto.

Speaking in a note to investors earlier this week, as reported by GameSpot, Tsujimoto explained that the strategy will likely raise costs but will lead to greater profits in the long run.

"Speeding up development will probably raise the cost. But creating quality content will be vital to Capcom's ability to survive by overcoming intense global competition," he said.

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The first ever official Total War modding tool, The Editor, has been released for Shogun 2 and standalone expansion Fall of the Samurai.

TEd (as it's being affectionately shortened) is free and lets any Tom, Dick or Bushido make their own multiplayer and custom VS AI maps.

Updating your Total War Shogun 2 or Fall of the Samurai games via Steam will unlock TEd. To install TEd, go to the Steam 'Library', select 'All games', 'Tools' and then install 'Total War: Shogun 2 - TEd'.

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Seems like, in 2012, the bigger the game launch, the more furious the message-board outcry that surrounds it. We've had the uprising over the Mass Effect 3 ending, and now it's all about Diablo 3 and Error 37gate. Meanwhile, Rockstar, previously the champions of popular outrage, barely raised a heckle with Max Payne 3; gratuitous violence is so nineties.

Anyway, a game as big and contentious and, let's face it, interesting as Diablo 3 offers plenty to talk about - so on this week's podcast Oli Welsh, who reviewed the game for Eurogamer, and Chris Donlan, who reviewed it for [REDACTED], join Tom Champion to get stuck in.

Of course, there's plenty of debate about the game's permanent internet connection requirement and Blizzard's botched launch, and Oli reveals how he changed his mind about it over the course of the last week, and discusses the difficultly of factoring these kinds of issues into reviews.

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Will you help fund The Thief, a short film inspired by The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim?

British enthusiast Chris Woods needs $1100 to fund his project. So far, he's got $431. He's using the crowd-funding site indiegogo to raise the amount, and not Kickstarter.

The Thief spins a tale of a peace treaty gone "awry", and a plot to pinch the Draconian Madstone. This all revolves around the ever-entertaining Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood.

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Stop!

I mean it. Turn off the radio. Let that bowl of food you're eating fall to the floor. You can clean it up later. Because there's a good chance you're playing Diablo 3 incorrectly.

Hardcore Mode, unlocked after you hit level 10, has one simple rule. If your Hardcore character dies, they're gone, leaving you to walk away from the computer in the kind of trance that sees your flatmates saying "What's wrong?" or "You're standing on the cat."

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From Dust, one of last year's best downloadable games, is now playable in the Google Chrome browser.

It uses the same Native Client technology that got Bastion and Mini Ninjas up and running in Google Chrome.

By way of celebration, Ubisoft has lowered the price of From Dust to £7.99 for the first week. After that, £11.59. From Dust costs £11.99 on Steam.

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The PC demo of sandy shooter Spec Ops: The Line launches on 12th June, 2K Games has announced.

The company confirmed the PC version uses Steamworks, and released the minimum and recommended specs.

They are as follows:

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Ever wondered what would happen if Capcom and Valve got together to do a fantasy Street Fighter x Portal crossover fighting game?

It probably wouldn't look anything like the video below, from talented mash up artist The Pixel Kingdom (as seen on the Capcom Europe blog).

Give Street Fighter characters a Portal gun for use in the Super Street Fighter 2 engine, though, and it probably would look like the video below. See Fei Long mess with Dhalsim's elongated arms, Guile get the better of the bonus stage car, and Chun Li bamboozle Ryu - with surprisingly gruesome results.

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Diablo 3 is the fastest-selling PC game ever, and enjoyed the biggest PC game launch in history, Blizzard has announced.

The game sold over 3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours on sale. That eye-watering number does not include the 1.2 million players who received Diablo 3 as part of the World of Warcraft Annual Pass promotion. In total, over 4.7 million were playing the action RPG day one, making it the biggest PC game launch in history.

Now we're a week in, over 6.3 million are playing. This figure does not include players in Korean Internet game rooms, where Diablo 3 is the top-played game, Blizzard said. In these game rooms, Diablo 3 has a 39 per cent share as of 22nd May.

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A full-scale, "all bells and whistles", triple-A Carmageddon game is the "ultimate goal" of series creator Stainless Games.

Whether that ever gets made depends upon the Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter project. Should it reach its funding target of $400,000 - and it looks like it comfortably will - and should the game be successful, then yes, Carmageddon could return in a very big way.

"That is absolutely what our sort of ultimate goal is - that we will be in a position to be able to get under way a real 'all bells and whistles' job," Stainless Games co-founder Neil Barnden shared with Eurogamer.

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Ubisoft has revealed the Far Cry 3: Insane Edition with a new trailer.

It comes with all the digital content for the game, including Monkey Business (an exclusive one hour single-player mission) and extra single-player and multiplayer content (three packs: the Hunter Pack, Predator Pack and Warrior Pack, and the two bonus missions that come with the already announced Lost Expeditions single-player content).

On top of that you get an essential island survival guide, exclusive survival kit packaging and the insane Vaas Wahine bobblehead.

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Blizzard has nerfed Diablo 3's monk class as part of its first round of hotfixes.

Specifically, Blizzard is "in the process of removing" the on-use benefits of the Monk's Mantra of Healing rune, Boon of Protection. The hotfix change is:

"Amount of damage absorbed is now capped at the amount of healing provided by Mantra of Healing in the first 3 seconds after activation."

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This article contains plot spoilers and is best read once you've finished Max Payne 3.

It was a strange day when Rockstar's take on Max Payne emerged as a fat bald dude with a bad temper. I remember blowing air into my cheeks and making a worried parp noise. No one likes change.

I grew in faith, sure, but this remained a far cry from the slick hero who once jumped sideways through Brooklyn in a familiar leather jacket and bad tie combo. As it turned out, however, Fat Max™ managed to fill those initial doubts full of bullets the second he entered the room.

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It had been due for release in the current fiscal year. No reason was offered for the hold up. Traditional strategy effort XCOM: Enemy Unknown is still due for release in October.

The publisher's report also offered a few Max Payne 3 updates. The PC version of Rockstar's recent sequel is available from 1st June, with a beefy DLC schedule following after that:

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An undisclosed number of Star Wars: The Old Republic developers have been made redundant in a bout of restructuring at BioWare Austin, the developer has confirmed.

A post on the MMO's official forum from studio chiefs Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka announced the news, but didn't offer a concrete reason for the lay-offs.

"Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people's lives this way is always very hard, but we're ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect," they wrote.

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Developed by ACONY Games, it drops you into the titular reality TV show where you'll be fighting it out to the death for fame and glory.

However, simply dispatching a foe won't bring you much reward - you'll need to do so in style too. To that end, there's a complex array of customization options to allow players to create unique looks for their characters.

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New Ubisoft god game Babel Rising launches on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade on 13th June, the publisher has announced.

It then gets an iOS and Android release on 14th June, followed by PC on 27th June. A Windows Phone 7 version will follow some time thereafter. No price tag for any platform has been confirmed.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 releases are compatible with Move and Kinect as applicable.

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Too Human developer Silicon Knights will only be eligible for $1 in damages if it wins its ongoing court case with Unreal Engine creator Epic Games.

As reported by Polygon, a North Carolina judge made the last minute ruling shortly before the trial commenced earlier this month.

Should Silicon Knights win, it will be able to appeal how the damages sum was determined, or decide to seek another recourse.

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Like it or not, Modern Warfare exerts a powerful gravitational pull on the games within its orbit - and, while the titles under the Tom Clancy brand may have started out as tactical simulations, they're not immune to the inexorable tug of Activision's super-dense star.

A couple of handheld spin-offs aside, the last time Ghost Recon saw the light of day was in 2007's Advanced Warfighter 2, and much has changed since then. All three Modern Warfare games have raised the blockbuster stakes where military bombast is concerned, while two Gears of War sequels have solidified and defined the template for third-person cover-based shooters. The fact Future Soldier takes more than a few cues from these commercial juggernauts is as inevitable as it is disappointing.

This influence manifests across both gameplay and storyline, with the narrative now following the obligatory quartet of wise-cracking soldiers - including such genre staples as Gruff Black Captain and Sarcastic Redneck - as they criss-cross the globe on the trail of yet more stolen nukes. Even as the action hops restlessly from South America to Africa, from Pakistan to the Arctic Circle, it spins a predictable tale, familiar from too many other shooters, culminating in the pursuit of rogue Russian hardliners with their eye on worldwide chaos.

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