It’s my personal game of the year, surpassing even Portal 2. You can purchase the full version on Freebird Games’ website for about $15.

★★★★★

Except for shot blocking, which is slightly overpowered, NHL 12 is a smooth experience online.

To commemorate the game’s 10th anniversary, Rockstar Games is proud to present this limited edition action figure of lead character Claude, an ex-con out for revenge in a city filled with mobsters, street gangs and cops on the take.

The protagonist’s name has been hinted at, but not confirmed, until now. (via Giant Bomb)

★★★★☆

Their recruiting is equally enigmatic. Colleagues of mine far more talented than I mentioned how they had sent in resumes, but never heard back … Internal documents include long target lists, where Valve employees add names of the best and brightest innovators in the industry, and if/when they will be available.

★★★☆☆

The company came under fire after telling its employees to open copies of Deus Ex and remove coupons for competing digital distribution service OnLive, which were included in the game’s packaging.

That’s some disgusting behaviour; to open another company’s product and remove a part of it before sale. But the game’s publisher’s response is even more disgusting:

Square Enix issued a statement Wednesday supporting GameStop’s decision.

“As part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s boxed offering on PC, Square Enix included a third-party coupon,” the gamemaker said. “GameStop was not made aware of this inclusion and Square Enix respects the right of GameStop to have final say over the contents of products it sells and to adjust them where they see fit in accordance with their policies.”

Don’t utter a bad word about GameStop, because without them, you can kiss goodbye to retail sales in the United States.

Sony has revealed that Vita development kits will cost just €1900 plus VAT, making the upcoming portable a viable proposition to smaller studios.

I really want the Vita to succeed, as it has many things going for it: attractive hardware, especially the addition of a second analogue stick; a competitive price point, helping it to compete with Apple’s and Nintendo’s offerings; and a cheap devkit with which to entice indie developers.

So what we do on the consoles, where we have this tight control, is we say, OK, you’re going 60FPS, it’s v-syncing, there are no tear lines. But if you miss by a tiny little bit, we’ll let it tear at the top of the screen and we adjust the resolutions dynamically to let it catch back up.

It’s a really novel idea, and one that id managed to convince vendors to implement:

We were able to convince all of the vendors to go ahead and implement that extension on Windows, so we’re now able to do that at 60FPS as long as you’ve got the horsepower. But if you get a hiccup, where it slows down a little bit, it reverts to tearing, which is exactly what we want for gameplay reasons.

You just have to love how id always strives to push graphical boundaries as far as possible.

The helmer, who most recently scored with Relativity’s “Limitless,” a Virgin Produced pic that starred Bradley Cooper, is in negotiations to shepherd the action adventure after David O. Russell recently left the project due to creative differences.

I haven’t seen Limitless, but I have watched The Illusionist, which I thought was fantastic.

We all play games for different reasons. Maybe it’s escapism for one person, exploration of a new medium for another. For Jake, it’s something else. It realizes a need. Throughout our conversation, Jake dropped the term “in real life” many times, underscoring the personal disconnect he feels between his ability to interact socially in a virtual environment through games and “in real life.”

“We listened carefully to all the feedback we received from the previous game and added in a gamer’s wish list of must-play features, such as multiplayer, outdoor environments, improved track sharing, and many more which we are not quite revealing yet.”

★★★★☆

★★★★★