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Doug here is most certainly not Ryan Gosling. But add a hoodie and some sunglasses and most people wouldn't be able to tell—as shown by this video by MojoInTheMorning. Granted, Gosling was filming something in that city at the time, and that probably predisposed some folk to seeking Ryan Gosling out. Still—I can't help but wonder if Doug will go out trying to play off that he's Ryan Gosling in the future. Wouldn't you? Even Hideo Kojima loves Ryan Gosling. Feel free to talk about Ryan Gosling, impersonations, or just about anything else here in this open thread or over in our spiffy Talk Amongst Yourselves. Have a good weekend! Lyin' Gosling *NOT* Ryan Gosling Detroit Prank [MojoInTheMorning]

Yaiba means "the blade of a sword," Keiji Inafune explains in this developer diary for Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. It is, somehow, the subtler component of the protagonist's full name: Yaiba Kamikaze.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is being developed primarily by Spark Unlimited, the Los Angeles-based studio also responsible for Lost Planet 3. In the video, Inafune says the studio is "exactly what we wanted" because they were able to bring a unique perspective to the ninja, unifying Western and Eastern visions on the classic archetype. "To appeal to both, it made sense for us to work together."

Inafune then goes into an astute metaphor about how game development is like building a house - at least, we think it's astute. We've never built a house before.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 is now available on Steam, and is coming soon on Xbox Live Indie Games "as soon as the proper sacrifices are completed." The asking price on both platforms is $5, though you can snag it for $4.49 on Steam for the next week.

If you haven't followed the Penny Arcade games, they've had a rather unusual development path. The first two were developed by Hothead Games. The third, initially canceled, was resurrected by Zeboyd games, creators of Cthulhu Saves the World. The same team is behind Rain-Slick 4 and, if the last game was any indication fans should be in for a treat.

Monday marks the beginning of Apple's 2013 Worldwide Developer Conference, where the tech giant is expected to reveal some of the enhancements coming to the next iteration of iOS. What if one of those enhancements is support for external gamepads for its iDevices? Indeed, what if Apple, on the eve of the biggest game industry event of the year, revealed its own game controller? Sources suggest it's not as crazy as it sounds. We've been hearing rumors of an Apple-developed game controller for the iPhone and iPad for as long as the devices have had games, but the company has traditionally been quick to shoot them down. Steve Jobs believed in the design of the iPhone and its offshoots, and a core feature of that design is the touchscreen. Creating an additional accessory to control the action might suggest the touchscreen wasn't adequately handling its function. Jobs would have never allowed that. Under Jobs, Apple would never create an external gamepad. Then again, under Jobs the iPhone screen would never have changed its size and shape, and the iPad Mini wouldn't have happened. Apple hasn't been too keen on the idea of letting a third party handle controller duties either. While a handful of such devices exist — the iCade or SteelSeries Free, for instance — they are forced to work through trickery, reporting to iOS as a Bluetooth keyboard. The strict policy has crippled accessory vendors hoping to bring controllers to iOS devices. Android devices, on the other hand, have support for Bluetooth controllers built-in, and a wide variety of devices to choose from. The problem Android is experiencing — one of the main reasons controller support isn't more widespread across the platform — is that there is no unifying standard across devices. Apple has a unifying standard. It has millions of devices on the market that are either identical or so closely related that implementing a controller standard would be as simple as applying an update to an operating system and releasing a device. In one fell swoop, Apple could solve an issue that its core competition in the mobile market — one that's eating more and more market share every day — might never get quite right. And, on the day before the official start of E3 2014 — a day when video games are on everyone's mind — they could upstage everybody. Apple's a big fan of that sort of thing. The timing isn't just right from a hardware standpoint. Look at the games that have come to iOS recently or are coming in the near future. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The recently-announced Deus Ex: the Fall. These are games screaming for controller support. Imagine running an AV cable from your iPad to your television or hooking up to Apple TV through AirPlay and playing a brand-new installment of the Deus Ex franchise. Rumblings of an Apple-crafted game pad have been growing stronger over the past few months, particularly after suggestions that Apple held secret meetings during GDC 2013 to discuss exactly that. And while the company responsible for the Bladepad third-party iPhone controller have claimed responsibility for starting that particular rumor, sources we've spoken to in iOS development strongly suggest there's an element of truth there, and that Monday is the day Apple's gamepad will be revealed. I can definitely see it happening. Or perhaps Apple will finally put apps on Apple TV, and there'll be a dedicated controller for that device, transforming it into a Ouya-like game console (can you imagine?). I'm convinced that a dedicated iOS game controller isn't a matter of if, but rather of when — and Monday would be the perfect day for it. To contact the author of this post, write to fahey@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @bunnyspatial.

You could try to make sense of the latest Killer is Dead trailer, but we wouldn't recommend it.

Luke Schneider of RadianGames makes great mobile games but they haven’t been available on Android. Until now. Schneider’s bringing his excellent Tetris-alike Slydristo Google Play, with other games like the very good Bombcats and Inferno+ to follow. He’ll be bringing some of the RadianGames catalog to Ouya, too.

It's a first for Ask Kotaku! I thought my column was getting a little unwieldy, what with how long it was getting, and figured it might be fun to do a video-formatted one for this week. But the gist is the same: you ask me questions, and I give you advice. We've got some life dilemmas following. I've hyperlinked each timestamp to indicate which question appears where, but it'll take you off this page each time, so it might be easier to scrub through. Up to you! Otherwise, enjoy! Here's the timestamped rundown of what I answered this week: 0:08 Getting my wife to play games with me 1:03 Putting on weight without sacrificing eating healthily or exercising 1:39 When it's time to cut the four-year-old off of games for the day 2:21 Getting comfortable meeting people in the real world when you spend so much time online 3:36 How to dress at the Zelda Symphony 4:03 Being adventurous 5:18 Recovering from losing your job, girlfriend and friends 6:16 Considering asking your girlfriend to move in with you to save her from an alcoholic mother, but while your relationships teeters at the edge 7:20 Banning on Kotaku, and starting pun threads 8:20 Networking at E3 9:29 My outro Don't forget to email me questions for next week's segment. To contact the author of this post, write to tina@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter at @tinaamini.

Big ults! Big walls! Big plays! Big everything!

I... never asked for this.

And here I thought people were joking when they said we're slowly turning everything into a game. Nope. Gamification has a new target, and it's female masturbation. Now, masturbation on the whole has a stigma. Hairy palms, what have you. But some would say it's especially bad with women given societal pressures to maintain purity. Purity, although an outdated and useless concept, is often seen as incompatible with a sexual woman. The stats from the graph above, taken from the Gamification website—which show that women aren't so into masturbating—are used as evidence that there's a problem with female masturbation. (Here's some more statistics, if you're curious.) Edit: the X axis on the graph above is as follows: not in the past year, less than 1x a month, once a month, more than 1x a month, less than 1x a week, more than 1x a week, almost daily, daily. Enter HappyPlayTime, a mobile game that hopes to "rebrand the entire concept of female masturbation through education and light-hearted games." It has what is probably the cutest vagina mascot ever—yes, I know that sounds absurd, but it does. Friendly, neighborhood vagina. Jesus christ, you'd think this was a joke. But it's not. They're completely serious about tackling the issue. From the game's website: Sexuality is one of the most basic instincts of human beings. Being comfortable with your own sexual pleasure is a prerequisite to both being able to healthily accept pleasure from others, and pleasing others. How can you exchange pleasure with someone else if you don't understand what your own body likes? That's why masturbation, and learning how to masturbate is such a fundamental life lesson. Unfortunately for many women, there has been a cultural stigma that blocks access to self-stimulation. HAPPYPLAYTIME is here to eliminate this barrier as much as possible. By talking openly and lightheartedly about female masturbation, we are taking the first step to becoming truly sexually liberated. Although the developers claim the lighthearted tone is intentional—they hope that by presenting female masturbation through something kind of comical, that they're doing their part to erase some of the taboo around discussing female masturbation. If people laugh at female sexuality, then the taboo is magically gone? Err. I guess it's a step above "denigration." And cmon. Look at this, which showcases some of the gameplay—what I assume to be segments of the game that teach you how to masturbate. I don't know. But beyond this, the stigma around female sexuality on the whole is tricky. What can be seen as "normal" amounts of masturbation? As compared to men? To quote game developer Merritt Kopas, the game runs with "the assumption that if women aren't doing the same things as men or as frequently as them, that there's something wrong with them." Lillian, a friend of mine, makes another astute observation: "Sex and masturbation are already gamified. Competitive. Who can be the best at sex who can find the most g sposts. It's not helpful." Couldn't "gals, you can do better!" be seen as shaming, too? Here's game developer Anna Anthropy chiming on on the game: there’s this unfortunate idea of “sex positivity” i encounter all the time that essentially just shames people for not having enough sex and pressures them into doing it more. making masturbation into a universal competition is going to achieve only that: people are going to get pressured into using their bodies in the ways that are arbitrarily defined as normative. Another thing: not all women have vaginas. This fact makes the game exclusionary. Still, it's obvious that the game is well-meaning and there are some issues worth trying to solve here. Schools do a shitty job of teaching anatomy and talking about women's sexuality is difficult. I'm just not sure this specific game is the best approach for that stuff. That, and...I'm not sure about you, but gamification is just about the last thing I associate with "sexy."

There was a PlayStation Mini a lot of people loved called OMG-Z. Well, a new version of that game is coming to Vita, and it's called OMG HD Zombies.

This is much more than a lame mobile spin-off. Square Enix is taking this pocket Deus Ex very, very seriously.

Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty is a one part match-three puzzles, one part silly pirate role-playing game, and maybe a quarter part musical extravaganza. It's the sort of ridiculous combination that has Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert written all over it, which is fortunate, as he's one of the guys that made it. Working together with Deathspank co-conspirator Clayton "Voodoo Vince" Kauzlaric (pretty sure no one calls him that), Gilbert has taken a genre amalgam that's been dear to my heart since Puzzle Quest and injected a heavy dose of humor and a penchant for breaking into song. It's almost the perfect game. While it might outwardly seem like Gilbert and Kauzlaric are sailing familiar waters, all is not what it seems in Scurvy Scallywags. Instead of a real pirate adventure, it's a musical play about a real pirate adventure, that just so happens to see you — the production's star — battling skeletons, golems, scorpions and other nasties via a procession of match-three puzzles. See the swords? Those are matched to grant you power, which you'll need to amass in larger numbers than those menacing-looking skeletons in order to defeat them in battle. The gold is gold. You'll need that to buy power-ups unlocked as you progress, which will aid you in avoiding those menacing-looking skeletons while whittling down their attack numbers. The torches, coconuts and statues might seem unimportant, but matching them advances the timer on those helpful special abilities, and also allows you to manipulate the board in order to move those encroaching enemies out of your path. Depending on the direction you move to clear a group of items, the board fills in the same direction. So in the screen above, if you swap yourself with the torch to the right, you'll slide back three spots when the row disappears. Manipulating your foes is the key to surviving long enough to take them out. Oh, and the candy? that's a quest item. Between stages your stage manager will present you with collecting items that randomly appear on the playing field — drawing out battles long enough to collect them as they appear is another sound strategy. And that's what sets this game apart from many other attempts at combining the puzzle and role-playing genres. Where other games leave much of the matching to chance, the positioning element — that you and your enemies are using this match-three puzzle like a chess board — makes the gameplay more deliberate and strategic. While not puzzling your way from place-to-place you'll be building play-enhancing ships out of materials won from roulette-style treasure chests that drop from enemies. You'll be managing your ever-growing list of special skills. You'll be collecting pieces of stat-enhancing equipment to make your pirate the most proficient in all the theater. Or you might be creating a new character, because once you lose all of your hearts, you're dead. You can spend an ever-increasing amount of gold to save yourself several times, but eventually the gold is going to run out, and then you've got to start over as a new character at level one, with all of your great powers but none of the responsibility. A high level character is a status symbol in Scurvy Scallywags, and while you can purchase more gold from the in-game store, the option is so unobtrusive that I just had to open the game again to make sure it was in there. The goal of the game is to collect powerful and wonderfully-voiced shanty verses in order to put on the best show possible for the virtual audience. If it's half as perfect as Gilbert & Kauzlaric's production of Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty, I doubt they'll have anything to worry about. Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage To Discover The Ultimate Sea Shanty Genre: Puzzle AdventureDeveloper: Beep GamesPlatform: iOSPrice: $.99 (sale price, regular price $1.99) Get Scurvy Scallywags on iTunes

E3 is next week, and while it's easy to get distracted by the dubsteppy shooters and flashy next-gen engines, the important news, of course, revolves around JRPGs. Yep, my favorite part of the show every year is getting to wander the floor and find hidden Japanese gems (and/or accidentally convince Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime to leak that Fire Emblem: Awakening is coming to North America). Last year we saw lovely games like Ni no Kuni, The Last Story, and the overpriced but underrated Final Fantasy Dimensions. As for this year... who knows? So as we head into the weekend, waiting patiently for Monday to begin, let's go through some of the biggest E3 questions and storylines. What's up with next-gen Final Fantasy? In February, when Sony announced the PlayStation 4, Square Enix's Final Fantasy brand director Shinji Hashimoto came on stage and meekly promised that yes, they're working on a next-gen game in the biggest RPG series on the planet, but they've got nothing to show until E3. Four months later, we're finally here. It's likely we'll see some of the new Final Fantasy during Sony's big press conference on Monday night, and hear even more about it on Tuesday morning when Square holds their Final Fantasy Q&A. Logically, it's safe to think we'll see something of Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the tantalizing action-RPG that nobody outside of Square's mako reactors has seen in years. Last we heard, it had been overhauled entirely and turned into Final Fantasy XV. Let's see if that's really what happened. The most important question is: will it feel like Final Fantasy? Could Square Enix take this opportunity to blow us away with a game that ditches the melodrama and returns to the series' trademark charm and humor? Final Fantasy has been struggling for quite some time now, and this year's E3 could very well be Square Enix's last attempt to convince fans that they want to return to form. Speaking of which... Can Lightning Returns help redeem the series? Regular column readers know that I was disappointed by the first two Final Fantasy XIII games. I'm not the only one. So it's a little disconcerting that 2014's Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is going to take us back to that world of terrible dialogue and unpronounceable proper nouns. That said, I'm cautiously optimistic about what I've seen from Lightning Returns thus far, and I plan to play it next week with an open mind. Hopefully Lightning is a bit less whiny this year. Will Vita strut its stuff? Yesterday on Twitter, Sony's Shahid Kamal Ahmad asked fans what JRPGs they'd like to see on Vita. Not bad, Ahmad. The Vita is already a powerhouse JRPG machine thanks to Persona 4 Golden and a massive catalog of PlayStation and PSP games—a new JRPG or two at this year's E3 might not make for the system-sellers that Sony needs so sorely, but they'd be lovely for those of us hunting for new adventures on the Vita's gorgeous screen. Right now we know there are new Ys and Atelier RPGs coming, but I'm hoping for more surprises at Sony's conference on Monday night. Has Xbox given up on us entirely? Microsoft has promised more Japanese support for their new console, but the Xbox 360 never quite made waves in Japan, despite JRPG exclusives like Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon. Will we see any JRPGs on the Xbox One? At least Namco Bandai's got our backs. Tales of Xillia will be on the show floor, and out in the West this August. That's one to watch. Where did Dragon Quest go? Japan gets all the good stuff. Both Dragon Quest X and the 3DS remake of Dragon Quest VII were released out East last year, but we haven't heard a peep from either Nintendo or Square Enix about either game. Perhaps an appearance at E3 is in order. I wouldn't be shocked to see a Nintendo-published DQVII announced for release in late 2014. Look forward to the little surprises. For me, one of the best parts of E3 every year is finding under-the-radar JRPGs and getting them on peoples' radars. I've already sectioned off some time to walk around the show floor and see if I can find any hidden Japanese gems, so keep an eye out here all throughout next week for regular JRPG coverage from your favorite JRPG columnist. Please be excited. Random Encounters is a weekly column dedicated to all things JRPG. It runs every Friday at 3pm ET. You can reach the author at jason@kotaku.com or follow him on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

Gangstar Vegas goes live and SpongeBob SquarePants gets mashed up with SimCity.

It mostly looks like Dead Island with parkour, but, hell, that's enough!

We designed the new 8-4 Play so that game publishers can enable you and up to 10 family members to hear about facts, rumors, and wild speculation on E3, including games like Dark Souls 2, MGS5, Destiny, Killer is Dead, Smash Bros., the new 3D Mario, Zelda, The Last Guardian, Xbone policies and much, much more.

The burgeoning Android micro-console market's increasingly crowded Thunderdome has found itself another theoretical contestant: Mad Catz, which today announced its intentions to unveil "Project M.O.J.O" during next week's E3 proceedings.

Beyond the fact that Project M.O.J.O has been "designed to interact seamlessly" with Mad Catz's Gamesmart line of peripherals, nothing else is known about the product with regards to its technical specifications, pricing structure or even what its real name is - we're assuming "Project M.O.J.O" won't be going on the box.

Surely, the answers to all (or most) of these questions will be revealed sometime next week, at which point we'll see how Project M.O.J.O stacks up against the Ouya, Gamestick and Gamepop.

A little bit of The Binding of Isaac, a lil' bit of Diablo, and a whole lotta "this is why you can't leave children alone," Our Darker Purpose has the player work their way up a dangerous orphanage in the hopes of figuring out why the adults have disappeared. Seems sinister. Here's the Kickstarter.

Superheroes don't start out super. It's a hoary trope that's a key part of every adventurer's origin story. Superheroes don't have to be penciled onto the printed page, either. In the right hands, words alone can make the powers and responsibilities of a gifted protector come to life in a mind of a reader. League of Somebodies is a new novel that does just that, starting off with a trial by fire that's abusive, stomach-churning and darkly funny. Read the first chapter and see for yourself. In the opening chunk of the debut novel from Samuel Sattin—who's contributed to Kotaku before here and here—Lenard Sikophsky's dad puts him mortal danger and berates him while the kid runs for his life. It's all part of a bizarre plan to make Lenard into a superhero. League of Somebodies is a meaty read concerned with the heavy weight of legacies and what it takes for a man to be super and for a metahuman to be a mortal. If there was an alternate reality where comics god Jack Kirby taught a postgrad "religion and superfamilies" lecture, this would be Sam Sattin's final paper. He'd get an A-, mind you, with grades taken off for impertinence and sarcasm. Still, for all its loopy science-fiction logic, it's really a tale of what generations of men do or don't pass on to each other and how to make a break with the existential places that spawned us. Go on and see for yourself. Samuel Sattin is the author of the chaos-inspired superhero epic, LEAGUE OF SOMEBODIES, described by Mat Johnson as "So rich with originality it's actually radioactive." A featured up-and-coming author by in San Francisco Magazine's 2013 'Writers on Writers' Issue, his work can be found in Salon Magazine, The Good Men Project, io9, and, of course, Kotaku. He is a Contributing Editor at The Weeklings, and lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, beagle, and tuxedo cat. You can visit him here: www.samuelsattin.net.

I’ve lived in New York City my entire life and I’ve never lost anything terribly significant in the city’s underground subways. A scarf or a hat, maybe. Never lost a phone but I understand why that would suck. But losing an entire Xbox 360 console? That would be the worst. And, as you can see in the picture above, it’s happened to at least two unfortunate people. The two Xbox 360 units in the photo come from a public auction being held by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, the body responsible for the mass transit of NYC. I can understand losing handhelds like a 3DS or PSP on the train. They’re small and can fall from bags or pockets if you’re not careful. I’m hard pressed to understand how you’d leave behind those Microsoft consoles or a Wii and all those accessories. I’ve found that the heavier and more annoying something is to carry in the subways, the more likely I am to remember it. Apparently, that rule doesn’t apply to everyone. But, hey, look: a Game Boy Pocket! I don’t really see those during my daily commute. No sign of a PlayStation Vita, though. Are people not buying them or are they just not losing them? Those unlucky souls who lost these gaming items are in luck, though, because they’ll be able to buy them back from the MTA. Today’s the last day of that auction so they’ll need to hurry. This Is Your Last Chance To Nab The MTA's Old Crap [Gothamist via Twitter]

Note to self: don't have pictures of Kiefer Sutherland hanging just above you. They might try to kill you.

This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Ron Gilbert's Beep Games has a new game out on iOS called Scurvy Scallywags (subtitle: In the Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty), and it's a match-three puzzle game with light RPG elements and plenty of pirate humor. It's only 99 cents in the App Store right now, and that's probably all of the inspiration you need to go and download it, right matey?

Oh all right, ye lousy landlubbers, I can put an X on yer treasure maps for ye. Scallywags is a bit of pirate-infused joy. It's a simple game with mechanics that don't always light the cannon fuse, but it's got enough charm, depth, and solid fun to justify the very cheap cost of admission.

Plus, there are real sea shanties included.

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Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: DanimalCart think that this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo is one to be excited about. PyramidHeadCrab keeps on asking about favorite things in various categories; this time, he wants to know your most beloved video game console. And GiantBoyDetective regales readers with a rundown of obscure NES game Sky Skipper. And you can always go join the voices talking about video games and life in TAY Classic and in the TAY: Open Forum.

Last night, the Washington Post and Guardian dropped concurrent bombshell reports. Their subject was PRISM, a covert collaboration between the NSA, FBI, and nearly every tech company you rely on daily. PRISM has allowed the government unprecedented access to your personal information for at least the last six years. But what is it, exactly? PRISM is a secret government program... As much as PRISM might sound like a comic book antagonist of S.H.I.E.L.D., it's the codename for a very real US government program. According to leaked documents, it went into effect in 2007, and has only gained momentum since. Its stated purpose is to monitor potentially valuable foreign communications that might pass through US servers, but it appears that in practice its scope was far greater. ...that gives the NSA unprecedented access to the servers of major tech companies... Microsoft. Yahoo. Google. Facebook. PalTalk. AOL. Skype. YouTube. Apple. If you've interacted with any of those companies in the last six years, that information is vulnerable under PRISM. But how? The initial reports from last night suggested that the process works as follows: The companies mentioned above (and who knows how many others) receive a directive from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. They hand over access to their servers—and the tremendous wealth of data and communiques that passes through them every day—to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which in turn relays it to the NSA. And that's when things get interesting. ...so that the agency can spy on unwitting US citizens... It seems impossible that the NSA, an agency which by law is only allowed to monitor foreign communications, has so much access to domestic information. And yet! There are, as you might expect, filters in place to help handle the fire hose of data that comes through daily, the trillions of bits and bytes that make up our online identities and lives. Something to ensure that only the bad guys are being tracked and not honest, everyday citizens. Actually, there's one filter, and it's ridiculous: an NSA analyst has to have "51 percent" confidence that a subject is "foreign." After that, it's carte blanche. That's it. That's the only filter. And it's an ineffective one, at that; the PowerPoint slides published by the post acknowledge that domestic citizens get caught in the web, but that it's "nothing to worry about." ...with terrifying granularity... It's something to worry about. What's most troubling about PRISM isn't that it collects data. It's the type of data it collects. According to the Washington Post report, that includes: …audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs… [Skype] can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone, and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms. Did you get all that? Similar depth of access applies to Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest. Just to be clear: this covers practically anything you've ever done online, up to and including Google searches as you type them. ...which is both different from and more aggressive than the Verizon scandal... The news of PRISM broke soon after a separate report, about the NSA's having access to Verizon customer—and, according to an NBC report, everyone else's—phone logs. Surprisingly enough, this is a totally different program! And PRISM makes the Verizon thing look like an ACLU company picnic by comparison. When the NSA monitors phone records, it reportedly only collects the metadata therein. That includes to and from whom the calls were made, where the calls came from, and other generalized info. Importantly, as far as we know, the actually content of the calls was off-limits. By contrast, PRISM apparently allows full access not just to the fact that an email or chat was sent, but also the contents of those emails and chats. According to the Washington Post's source, they can "literally watch you as you type." They could be doing it right now. ...and has the full (but contested) cooperation of tech giants... PRISM's first corporate partner was allegedly Microsoft, which according to the Post and Guardian signed on back in 2007. Other companies slowly joined, with Apple being the most recent enlistee. Twitter, it seems, has not complied. But why would all of these companies agree to this? Mostly because they have no choice. Failure to hand over server data leaves them subject to a government lawsuit, which can be expensive and incredibly harmful in less quantifiable ways. Besides, they receive compensation for their services; they're not doing this out of charity. There is incentive to play ball. Here's where things get a little complicated, though. Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have all given full-throated denials of any involvement whatsoever. Most of them aren't just PR syntactical trickery, either; they are unequivocal. ...and which is, shockingly enough, totally legal. What's most horrifying about PRISM might be that there's nothing technically illegal about it. The government has had this authority for years, and there's no sign that it's going to be revoked any time soon. A little bit of history might be helpful for context. Back in 2007, mounting public pressure forced the Bush administration to abandon the warrantless surveillance program it had initiated in 2001. Well, abandon might be too strong a word. What the administration actually did was to find it a new home. The Protect America Act of 2007 made it possible for targets to be electronically surveilled without a warrant if they were "reasonably believed" to be foreign. That's where that 51% comes in. It was followed by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which immunized companies from legal harm for collaborating handing information over to the government. And that's the one-two punch that gives PRISM full legal standing. All of which is to say that PRISM is an awful violation of rights, but it's one that's not going to disappear any time soon. The government is so far completely unapologetic. And why wouldn't they be? It's easy enough to follow the letter of the law when you're the one writing it. Powerpoint slides via Washington Post

Game critic Cara Ellison and artist Elizabeth Simins have collaborated on a trio of strips that they're calling "New Strong Female Games Journalists." We're happy to debut them for you today. Ellison and Simins are here to make us think and to make us chuckle about anything game-related, really. But for starters, they've got this set on what is obviously the least controversial topic they could possibly think of. Enjoy: Follow Ellison's writing on her blog Hard Consonant. She's on Twitter, too, @carachan1. You can find more of Simins' art, much of it about video games (like Xenoblade!), at Cargo Collective. She's on Twitter @elizsimins.

In a new trailer released this morning, you can get a glimpse at a free-running scenario in the newly-announced Dying Light, the next game from the makers of Dead Island. Stephen called it Mirror's Edge with the undead. And as you can see in the trailer above, that description feels pretty accurate. We already knew there will be an abundance of melee weapons, but this trailer confirms it. Somewhere in the middle there you'll notice an electrified strike against an undead creature, probably the same weapon Stephen saw in his time spent with the game a few weeks ago. Oh, and if that song sounds familiar, it's probably because it's basically a less-awesome version of that one in Assassin's Creed Revelations' reveal trailer: It is, after all, from the same artist. Dying Light will come out for the PS4, Xbox One, PC, PS3 and 360 in 2014.

Here's a longer look at Deus Ex: The Fall, the recently announced mobile game set in the world of cyber espionage hacking networks this summer.