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Something sinister awaits you in Our Darker Purpose. Today I finally had a chance to try out the top-down roguelike featuring a creepy orphanage full of secrets. Here's the premise: the kind teachers have disappeared, leaving in their wake a school full of chaos. We're talking Lord of the Flies type deal, only darker thanks to the Tim Burton-esque art direction. You're left no choice but to seek out answers from the administrators—who reside at the top of the orphanage. It's a good set-up for a randomly-generated game in the vein of The Binding of Isaac. In fact, Isaac players might find themselves right at home here: it controls in exactly the same way (WASD for movement, arrows for projectiles) and has the same basic gameplay core. It's easy to pick up. As you go deeper into the orphanage, you'll enter rooms which will lock behind you. The only way to move forward is to kill all the enemies in that room. Problem is, you don't know where the exit is, and the orphanage is a labyrinth that hides many terrors. Former classmates attack you. You hear whispers coming from the desks. And there are a number of supernatural creatures that seem to want you dead. Death is permanent, making the game kind of brutal—and this is that I was playing on easy. Still, as it tends to go with roguelikes, dying only seemed to make me more eager to do better and dive deeper into the orphanage. What sets it apart from Isaac, aside from the premise and art direction, is that it has a number of role-playing elements. These include upgrades: And perks and level-ups; every kill lands you experience points: Isaac is addicting without experience points and having the ability to customize your character as you'd like; I can only imagine how gripping Our Darker Purpose will be. That, and I'm genuinely interested in finding out what happens in Our Darker Purpose. Oh! And you can roll. Fantastic. Already, I'm itching to play more instead of writing these words. At the moment, the game is asking for funding via Kickstarter, which is also where you can find a pre-alpha demo. Today is the last day for the campaign, and they need a few thousand dollars to meet their goal.

A couple days ago, this Dragon Age: Inquisition screenshot surfaced on the BioWare blog. Sure, it's just a high-res still of what we already saw in the big E3 trailer. But it raises some questions nonetheless. Who are these guys? Is that their hair next to their helmets? What's that thing on the table? What's with the eye? Is that your character? Or just some jerk? What's on his head? Or is it a she? I turn it over to you. Using our alternately cool/cluttering (the power is in your hands, people!) image annotation tool, show us what you see in this screenshot.

If you're willing to spend the cash, unlocked versions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One are for sale today in the Google Play Store.

This is not a gaming PC. This is a handcrafted work of art. A work of art and advanced engineering, of course. It's the Aventum II, and you can purchase one right now, though Digital Storm isn't really expecting you to. With base configurations starting at $5,000 and running as high as $9,500, it's more of an appreciation piece than a sales magnet. So let's appreciate. That's a custom-engineered steel case. It's all metal — no plastic was used in the Aventum II's construction. Along with looking good, efficient cooling was the goal here. The system comes with 22 chassis fans and an intelligent control system to regulate each according to need. And then there's those pipes. Those glorious nickle-plated copper cooling pipes. Inspired by high-end automotive cooling systems, each set is crafted by hand, making each system unique. Armed with the cooling power of an army of frost giants, the Aventum II is then packed with high-end components. Overclocked Inter Core i7EE processors, up to three 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan cards — the case features a graphics card-dedicated side intake fan — it's insane. You can head over to the Digital Storm Aventum II page and configure one, if you'd like, but that's likely as far as it will ever go. This is a PC that's above and beyond. We can just admire from afar.

I was recently asked to be more clear with readers about who Kotaku is and isn't for. Let me be clear here about what I believe the mix of content we run on the site already attests. Kotaku is a site for any and all gamers and even people who don't play games but are curious about them. Actually, all absolutes invite exceptions, so let me be clear about who we are not for: intolerant gamers and creeps, gamers who would prefer to insult or attack rather than empathize or argue intelligently. Kotaku is for gamers of any ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Kotaku is a site where I would like gamers of any type to feel welcome. I was recently asked by a one-time contributor to this site to state this clearly. The writer, Samantha Allen, had identified herself as transgender when she wrote for us and, in a moving Open Letter to Games Media, described some of the feedback she received because of that as "brutal." Internet feedback for Allen will tend to be rougher for her than it ever will be for me, because I am more familiar to more readers. But it's not just due to the fact that I write articles every day in front of the millions who read Kotaku every month. It's also because I am straight, white and male. More of you know me or know of me. Yes, you let me have it when you dislike something I write, but your feedback to me has not been brutal. My good fortune should not excuse an acceptance of the status quo. Kotaku can, always, be better. Over the last couple of years it has become increasingly clear to regular readers that we aim to be a broadly inclusive site. This is not a new policy borne of new management but one I can speak most confidently of regarding the time I've spent as the site's Editor in Chief. We are a site that covers new games, that interviews top developers and the biggest of industry bigwigs. We also write about gamers, who I feel have long been under-represented by the industry-centric coverage conducted by most gaming news outlets. We write about the good guys and the bad guys, about hackers and cheaters and cops and crooks. We write about third-rail topics such as drugs and gender, sex and sexuality. In so doing we implicitly ask for an openmindedness among our readership that other, superb but more tightly-focused outlets do not. We open ourselves up to accusations of hypocrisy by readers who see posts of images of visually-alluring male and female cosplayers and posts about gender discrimination as incompatible. For the record, I do not see that incompatibility. We can write about beauty without being gross. It's not difficult. We are a site of multiple voices and opinions, one where the mandate is for each writer, whether writing news or opinion, to be honest about what they think and to be transparent with the truth. We believe video gaming is not a field of wilting flowers and can withstand an outlet that puts what other reporters and critics would consign to Twitter into the mainstream of what is published front and center. Gaming is an amazing medium. It can take it. Those of us who write professionally for Kotaku can see the positive reinforcement of a story done well and the negative blowback of a story that misses the mark. You can see some of this too. For one thing, our traffic stats are present on every article. What you can't see are the emails we get, pro and con. You may not always be aware of the pride we take in our best work and you're not privy to the anguish that comes from some of the worst. Through all of this, we try to maintain a couple of key standards: one is to always write that which is genuinely interesting, that which, to use an example I often make, we'd be willing to mention after work, over a beer to a friend who asked what we did today—without fear of boring said friend. Another standard is to be confident that, if we had to sit down with the person we are writing about and have them quietly read what we wrote about them in front of us—even if the piece was negative to them—we could ask them if they considered it fair and they'd say, "yes." It is the latter standard that we also expect of readers and will more aggressively enforce. We still want readers to feel free to agree or disagree with our articles and say so on the site. We still encourage wit, smart argument and bold opinions. We still welcome debate. We still, as before, will diminish or even block the visibility of comments by those who simply attack Kotaku writers or readers. Today I am also committing to expanding our discussion moderation to push back against any tide of comments that fail the test of being things that we believe you'd say to the face of the people you're commenting about. We imagine that any of our more than five million readers per month might disagree with something on our site, and we are confident that any of those five million can find a way to say so while getting over what is still a low bar. I am asking my team and our readers to do their part to encourage improved discussion. Over the last few months I have already seen a lot of improvement of the discussions below articles thanks to our new(ish) commenting system that prioritizes discussion threads that have contributions that were written or promoted by approved readers and staffers. To maintain and improve that, Kotaku writers will more carefully elevate the best discussions and consign the worst stuff to the unapproved commenting queue. We'll also block the worst commenters from having their replies appear at all. Transgender writers don't need to be told, as Allen was on our site, that "I like my videogames like I like my women. Without a penis.” Cosplayers whose images we feature don't need be told how badly a reader wants to masturbate to their breasts. (There are other ways to comment about how terrific a female—or male—cosplayer looks.) Such comments will disappear; commenters responsible for them will see their commenting privileges reduced. If I'm describing your comments, now's your chance to change things, too. Save that stuff for elsewhere. I ask readers to focus their energies on writing or replying to comments that meet these standards of in-person discourse—standards I believe most of us want. These standards, please understand, aren't designed to showcase groupthink but to provide safe harbor for all sorts of points of views, including those held by a minority of readers. Notes like this can sometimes be written in times of crisis, when an outlet has screwed up or the community has been torn by a contentious issue. There is no crisis today. Kotaku is a healthy, growing site with many great writers and readers. Simply, we try to make a better Kotaku every day and I was asked to be clear about where we stood and what we'd do. Among the things Allen encouraged us to do was take risks with what we write and with whom we support. Risk losing readers, she said. Been there. Taking that risk. Daily. And I appreciate the readers who've stuck with us, who've looked at articles that challenged them and who've tolerated the occasional piece that didn't strike its notes as well as it could have and decided that the mix we present is worth sticking around for. I'd like to use Allen's letter as the impetus for another leveling up of the discussions under our articles. I'd like contributors of all types to find our readership invigorating and challenging but also fair. I'd also like to some day play a new Blast Corps, so I recognize that not everything I want is something we will get. But let's all try to do better and embrace our fellow gamers—white, gay, Muslim, whatever—with the respect we'd like for ourselves. One additional practical note: for readers who have specific thoughts about the direction of Kotaku, you are welcome, as so many of you often do, to email me directly. I read all of your emails and reply to as many of them as I can. We are adding a feedback@kotaku.com email address as well. If you see comments you are concerned about that you think should either get more or less prominence on the site, shoot us a note there. Please include a link. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Top image by the talented Michael Myers.

Pardon the pun, but Captain Oil isn’t one of those mobile games that’s going to set the world on fire. But the more I play it, the more I think about the place where it was made. That almost never happens. Captain Oil was made by a dev studio called Game Cooks, which sends its games out into the world from Beirut, Lebanon, smack dab in the middle of a region better known for intractable ethno-religious conflicts and constant sudden violence. And while the physics-based arcade shooter may not be all that remarkable compared to the Angry Birds and Candy Crush Sagas of the world, it’s worth noting that it comes from part of the world where the practice of game-making is still very much in its infancy. I spoke with the dev studio’s co-founder Lebnan Nader a few months ago when he was in New York City for the Mobile World Conference. Nader knows that Game Cooks’ output needs improvement but paints a portrait of an organization still finding its legs. “In terms of mobile gaming, we were the pioneers not only in Beirut, but in the region. There were already games on the web but we didn’t have anything for mobile. We were the first to launch a mobile game in Arabic in the region,” he told me. “When you want to develop a game, people say, ‘What are you doing? Are you playing your life away?’" “When we first started, it was a little bit hard for us because when you go online, you do not have any reference in gaming in the Middle East,” Nader told me. “We do not have a university that teaches you how to do that. You do not have a lot of conferences that are happening. In that region, you do not know what’s happening outside. It’s almost like you’re in a vacuum.” This means that Captain Oil and another new release called N.E.R.D.S. are the products of a dev studio incrementally learning to apply more style and polish to their efforts. “All of our team is more or less made up of technical developers. They did not develop games before,” Nader said. “We kind of started together and learned together how to develop a game. We learned a little bit more. What is a game? What is an engine? Stuff like that. They had the background. They were excellent coders. But none developed a game before. So we kind of did that together." And while they’re constantly figuring what they’re doing, they’re also seeding the very idea of game development in an area where most people play games made elsewhere. A lack of institutions or experience isn’t the only big difference with regard to the gaming culture in the Middle East. There’s still an attitude that game-making isn’t really a legitimate pursuit. “You’ve got to factor in the social behavior in the Middle East,” Nader relayed to me. “When you want to develop a game, people say, ‘What are you doing? Are you playing your life away?’ In the Middle East, you generally stay with your parents until you get married. You finish your school, go find a job, a nice job. Be a lawyer, be a doctor, be anything you want, but have a steady paycheck.” As you might expect for a crew blazing trails into a new pursuit, there’s been hand-wringing from the people closest to them. “My parents they really supported us because they saw the small success we had with the first game, but they were probably still worried.” “I think people from the US relate to the Middle East as a war zone, as a terrorism zone. They do not see the potential of this area beyond that image.” Parental angst isn’t the only emotional drama the Game Cooks have had to deal with. When they were making their first game, all they wanted was to introduce a goofy endless runner set against a backdrop that reflected where they lived. “We had just started our startup in the middle of Arab Spring. We wanted our first game to have a nice message for people. What better message than peace?,” Nader said. “We just want peace. In the material for all the Facebook ads and stuff that we did, the concept was, ‘We’re not for war, let’s play.’ You get a character who is Middle Eastern and he’s running for peace. He blocks the tanks. He goes and says, “We’re not for war. Let’s play.” Sure, it had some political overtones but only the most innocuous kind. “In our region you have both Muslims and Christians,” Nader continued. “We come from a Christian background. We see stuff a little bit differently maybe than some other people. When we did Run For Peace, we used the peace sign as our logo. I Googled around and made a lot of effort to check that it’s not offensive to the Muslim religion. Before we launched the game, I sent it for testing to a couple of editors I know. And one of them massacred us in his article, saying that, 'They’re using this because this is actually not a peace sign; this is a sign for Christianity. They are putting this in the game because they want Christianity to be more [prominent] in the Middle East. Users, be careful. Do not download Run For Peace. It’s Christian done for Christians. It’s not for us.' We got killed in that article." "You have to make sure it doesn’t offend anyone. On top of that, you always have at least five religious applications in the top ten, especially in Saudi Arabia and countries like that. You cannot compete with that. Don’t even try, because you will not succeed.” The Arab Spring may have changed a lot of governments in the Middle East, but Nader told me that Lebanon, with its relative stability, hasn’t really been affected in that tumult. “But at the same time, Lebanon is a very small country," Nader said. "It has different religions and unfortunately a lot of things happen all the time. There have been a couple of times that we had problems right down the street. It was a place where you had two different religions living there and, in response to something that happened in the north, they started shooting at each other. The army had to come in and separate them.” “You see it all the time in Beirut,” Nader answered when I asked him if troops on the street was a normal sight. "It’s not shocking for us. But that night, we actually heard the gunfire going. I was talking to our PR consultant at the time and I told her, ‘I’m hearing gunfire now.’ This is while we were making Run For Peace and it kind of gave us an extra boost to go finish.” Game Cooks’ titles have been cartoony and whimsical so far, unlike so many games that have sequences set in the region. When the Middle East shows up in first-person shooters like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, it’s usually shown as a foreboding part of the world where radical terrorism can fester. Countries like Pakistan have taken offense to that, moving to ban games that portray them in such a light. “...the things we’re going to make, they definitely will not be something to go into shoot and kill each other.” The average American or European citizen doesn’t hear gunfire that often. They don’t encounter sudden flashpoints of long-running hostilities in their day-to-day lives, so fantasies where one plays the roles of soldier or insurgent might be easier to accept. “I think people from the US relate to the Middle East as a war zone, as a terrorism zone,” Nader offered. “They do not see the potential of this area beyond that image.” But, for Nader and crew, automatic rifle fire is less of a fiction and more of a reality. I asked him if Game Cooks would ever want to make grimmer, more realistic games like CoD or MoH, maybe to tell their side of the story as relates to the violence that’s never that far away. “For us, a game is an escape,” he responded. “You go into it to have fun, to enjoy it, or maybe to crack your head and try to solve a problem. It depends what you want out of a game. But the things we’re going to make, they definitely will not be something to go in to shoot and kill each other.” Nader told me that, in the U.S. and in Europe, there were Middle Eastern people—Arab people, specifically—who were proud of having an Arabic game when Run for Peace came out. “But they acknowledge it because they’re proud, not because the game is good or not,” he laughed. “If you read the reviews in Arabic, you could see people saying, “I’m very proud of you guys. You did an Arabic game. But nobody says it’s a good game.” They’re getting to that, folks. Just give them a little time.

The next indie role-playing game from a studio known for solid indie role-playing games is sci-fi, turn-based, and inspired by some of the all time greats. The next game from Zeboyd Games—best known for indie gems like Cthulhu Saves The World and the last couple of Penny Arcade RPGs—is called Cosmic Star Heroine. It's got the style of Phantasy Star and the recruiting mechanic of Suikoden. In other words, it sounds wonderful. Some details, via Zeboyd: Alyssa L’Salle is one of the galactic government’s top agents and always manages to save the day! But when she accidentally uncovers a dark conspiracy, her own government outs her as a legendary spy and the people’s champion! Sure, now she has hordes of adoring fans but every villainous organization she’s ever crossed in her career knows who she is and is out for her blood! Can she save the day once more while she faces her greatest challenge… Everyone!? Future sci-fi setting2D pixel art visuals (but with various improvements over our previous games including bigger and more animated ally sprites)Created with Unity so that we can cover more platformsNo separate combat screen – combat will occur directly on the same maps that you explore onTurn-based RPG gameplay that takes the best elements from our past games while adding a few new ideas.Enemy groups will no longer just stay in one place on maps but will patrol and chase after the player as appropriateNot a parody but will still have plenty of humorPlayers will be able to customize their own spy headquarters by recruiting more agents (think the Suikoden series)Will be trying to get Hyperduck (who worked with us on our last game) again for the music (they’ve already agreed that they’d like to do it but we haven’t signed anything yet)We will be doing a kickstarter for the game later this year to help raise funds for development costs but we’ll have more details on that later. I'm totally down for this. Sounds neat, don't you think?

I can't think of a Marvel Comics character more immediately polarizing than Deadpool. You either love him for his highly sarcastic, psychotic, fourth-wall-breaking antics, or you can't stand him for the very same reasons. That isn't to suggest there isn't room for nuance with the character. Though at times he's been presented as little more than a attention deficient 12-year-old boy in an adult murderer's body, there have been cases where the character has been presented as a bit more than a simple collection of crass one-liners and hit-or-miss slapstick gags.

Deadpool's problem isn't that it fails to capture the character's essence. It certainly does that. Maybe too well...

High Moon Studios' Deadpool is not one of those cases. This is the puerile Deadpool we've seen time and time again, a motor-mouthed maniac who acts like he might explode if he stopped talking for even a second. Plunked down in his very own third-person action game, Deadpool acts as a sort-of-parody of third-person action games, with its hero regularly commenting on various video game tropes, his displeasure with High Moon's script, and even you, the player, when you aren't performing to his expectations. There's nothing inherently wrong with this concept, and handled with a bit more care and craft, Deadpool could have been an enjoyably ludicrous romp. Instead, Deadpool's various technical problems, coupled with a script that can't get out of its own way, sour what little enjoyment there is to be had.

Deadpool opens with so much fourth-wall breaking dialogue that you'll be forgiven if you're utterly exhausted with it before it even hits the 30-minute mark. Deadpool explains that he has been given his own video game, and he's pretty excited about this. He talks about this a lot, because that's what Deadpool does. Nolan North, who has voiced the character in other Marvel games, goes for a kind of scenery-devouring mania throughout the game as he voices Deadpool, the dual voices in his head, and even Nolan North as himself. It's a performance that will delight those who adore Deadpool for his most addled dialogue and flagrant sexual jokes, and completely alienate anyone who isn't totally on board with having an ADHD-fueled psycho constantly screaming half-funny lines whether they belong there or not. It's a terrific performance of a nearly intolerable character.

Understand, I don't hate Deadpool as a character. There have been multiple comic storylines I've quite enjoyed his presence in. But the versions of Deadpool I tend to enjoy are the ones that dial back his absurdity a notch or two from the shrieking nonsense this game so gleefully wraps itself in. Which isn't to say there aren't funny bits in Deadpool, but none of them really hit until later in the game, when the story relaxes into a bit more of a traditional progression and lets the level designs do the gag work, rather than making North beg for laughs by screaming the words "chimichanga" and "*crag*" strictly for their presumed hilariousness. An early bit featuring X-Force leader Cable, and an extended sequence featuring Deadpool's on-again/off-again love interest Death are of particular note, though these moments of goofy inspiration seem almost alien compared with the rampant idiocy and braindead gameplay throughout the rest of the game.

There are moments of inspired violence in Deadpool, but most of the combat just revolves around button-mashing and dull shooting against constant waves of dumb bad guys.

I think I might have been able to stomach some of the lousier comedy moments a bit more if Deadpool played better. Unfortunately, this game is all over the place. Unsurprisingly, Deadpool's primary mechanic involves wanton murder--he is an assassin, after all. You'll start out with his trusty swords and a pair of pistols, and over time you'll be able to upgrade those weapons, as well as add more stuff (shotguns, sais, giant hammers, and so on). Yet while there is some variety to the weaponry you're given, the core fighting mechanics are hopelessly dull. Most battles are just protracted arena fights, with scads of enemies blindly running at you in place of any kind of thoughtful challenge.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the occasional brainless kill-'em-up, but Deadpool's clunky controls do it no favors. Basic combat is fine, if a bit unwieldy when trying to fight off groups of larger, more attack-heavy enemies. The camera tends to box you in if you're anywhere other than the most open space the game is capable of giving you, meaning you'll find yourself trying to dodge and teleport around just in the hopes of staying out of a bad guy's way, usually only to find yourself getting blasted from another enemy somewhere entirely off-screen. The platforming sequences are markedly worse, marred by a woefully imprecise jump that results in a lot of missed ledges, and the occasional bout of getting stuck in the scenery.

There's probably a totally decent Deadpool game to be made eventually. But this Deadpool game? This ain't it.

That last bit happened to me a couple of times, and each time I had to reset to the last checkpoint. That's not even the most obvious technical issue the game suffers from, either. Certain boss fights refused to trigger; various enemies would often stand perfectly still, frozen in some half-animated pose while I pumped bullets into them sans resistance; at least two cutscenes simply cut off part of the way through without any button pressing on my part; and dialogue has a terrible tendency to cut itself off. That last part is especially bad during gameplay, where story dialogue and in-action one-liners will essentially overlap and obliterate whatever element of comic timing there may have been.

Combine those problems with the game's generally chuggy, unattractive visuals, generic-as-hell soundtrack, painfully obnoxious late-game difficulty spike, and breezily short campaign (I beat most of it in a single afternoon), and you've got yourself a game that really doesn't offer much to anyone, outside of the most dedicated fans of the Merc with the Mouth. While I can usually get behind forgiving some problems in the face of quality fan service, Deadpool's fan service is highly specific to those who want the character taken to the most hyperactive extremes imaginable. Maybe that particular subset of fans will be able to look past the game's issues more easily, but anyone else will likely find Deadpool intensely grating and largely frustrating in equal measure.

Look to later in the summer for the iOS timed-exclusive, as PvZ2 won't make its original July release date.

Contra: Evolution gets updated to address some of its problems and the Spooklings are attacking in today's ASU.

Different publisher, same developer. 2K Sports picked up the WWE franchise from THQ during the bankrupted publisher's firesale back in Japan. The game revealed its cover art on Monday night, dropping this trailer later. The Rock is WWE 2K14's cover star. He was announced for the cover one day before he lost to John Cena at WrestleMania XXIX (and was injured, legitimately, requiring surgery). Monday Night Raw unveiled the cover art two nights ago, which you may see in the trailer above. WWE 2K14 comes out a little earlier than its traditional release window, this time on Oct. 29, for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Which way is the beach? Amazon is carrying the Turtle Beach Ear Force XP300 Wireless Gaming Headset for $100. That's about $30 less than anywhere else and $70 off MSRP. What's so great about these cans? They have a long-lasting rechargeable battery, they're not gaudy, and most importantly, they work with the PS3, 360, PC, Mac, and even your phone. That compatibility, along with this price, makes the XP300 an easy recommendation. [Amazon] Black Ops-branded version also available. Come back at 2:15ET for today's (big) Moneysaver. Keep up with Shane Roberts on Kinja and Twitter. Check out Dealzmodo for more great tech deals, and Deals.Kinja.com for even more discounts. This is a Moneysaver One-Shot, a post focusing on a single deal, sale, or category. Join us every weekday at 2:15pm ET for the full Moneysaver roundup, brought to you by the Commerce Team. We're here to bring Kotaku readers the best gaming deals available, and to be clear, we also make money if you buy. We want your feedback.

The best friend duo made up of JonTron and Egoraptor just got a little less grumpy. The YouTube group, Game Grumps, announced yesterday that they'd be breaking up. Sort of. JonTron is leaving to focus on his own work while Danny—a writer/comedian/singer from NinjaSexParty—replaces him on the show. NinjaSexParty, if you're wondering, is a self-described comedy band composed of actor/writer/singer Danny and his friend Brian who mans the keyboards. Their most recent episode posted two weeks ago features JonTron and was directed by Egoraptor. It perhaps could have served as an early hint towards the impending changes. The Game Grumps channel simultaneously announced a new show after the break-up, called Steam Train, where Danny and Ross (an animator known as RubberRoss on YouTube) will play modern and old school PC games together, mimicking the dynamic of the Game Grumps duo, new and old. Fans have since been storming the Game Grumps YouTube channel, as well as the individual videos on the channel, to express their disappointment in seeing JonTron go. A few consider the new Steam Train show's announcement to be a shameless ploy to hop on the popularity of Game Grumps. Here's the top comment on the YouTube announcement of Steam Train, as of this writing: Seriously, not hating on these two, Jon, or anyone involved with Game Grumps, but seriously, this is *crag*ing offending... Stripping the channel from what it was all about, just using a channel with lots of subs from previous work, just what the hell were you thinking? I wish Jon all the luck in the world with JonTron, and I'm fine with Arin wanting a new partner to continue the show... BUT THIS? STEAM TRAIN? Biggest disappointment I've encountered on a Youtube Channel... Though the upset is mostly aimed towards JonTron's departure, a portion of the fans seem to have already made up their minds to not give new host Danny a chance, proclaiming that he can't live up to JonTron's chemistry with Egoraptor. People, saying "Give it a chance" doesn't mean anything. There have been two episodes with the new people, and people aren't liking them. Danny's transition was too sudden, Arin feels forced, and the third one is just annoying. Game Grumps is Arin and Jon. Replacing Abbot with a guy named Tony wouldn't make it New Abbot and Costello. It would make it Tony and Costello. Though arguably just another Let's Play YouTube series, Game Grumps always had a deeper appeal to fans who were familiar with it. The duo truly worked well together, balancing the grumpiness of Egoraptor with the not-so-grumpiness of JonTron. They played old school games and sometimes newer ones, but always managed to bounce their personalities and humor off of one another. They were two best friends sitting down to play video games together. And people loved that. Shifting the players but not the overall best-friend setting is partially what fans online are concerned about. Others are more open to letting the shock of change settle rather than letting it affect their opinion towards Danny. Here's the current top comment on Danny's debut episode for Game Grumps: Danny got potential steam train doesn't Some echoed the disappointment with the way in which both the new Game Grump host and new Steam Train show were announced: So, I just want to say that I think Danny is great and all, but replacing Jon out of the blue like that was the worst, and the show will never be the same. I'm going to stay subbed for now (This may change), but as a loyal fan I just want to say that I'm very disappointed in the way this went down.Sorry guys, I'm out. Been here since day one but this is nuts. I find it really hard to believe Jon genuinely just left to focus on JonTron with no warning, without physically appearing in videos with you and with so little active communication after the event. Even if that is the truth, this wasn't the way to break it to loyal fans. The communication surrounding this whole... thing has been a mess. Good luck with the future of 'Game Grumps'. There's a thread on Reddit that's filled with mostly hurt-sounding comments at the news of the new composition of the show. Not all of the reaction online has been completely negative, though. Some fans have taken to creating threads to commemorate some of the show's best moments between JonTron and Egoraptor. (Here's my favorite moment, recreated in Source Filmmaker by a fan.) Others have created their own odes in the form of videos, like this one: Here's the last Game Grumps episode to feature JonTron and Egoraptor: Here's the first episode to feature Danny: I've reached out to JonTron, Egoraptor and Danny to get their opinions on the responses they'ved received online, and I'll update this post should they respond. To contact the author of this post, write to tina@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter at @tinaamini.

“The first interesting event is five minutes 46 seconds in. Someone says the word 'bastard' so straightaway the game has gone to a 12 certificate in my mind.” In the wake of Australia’s ban of Saints Row IV, The Guardian looks at how games get their ratings in Great Britain.

Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker. In the early 80s, the then-20-something programmer had a job at a company called General Instruments Corporation, where he worked alongside a gruff Air Force pilot-turned-businessman named John "Wild Bill" Stealey. Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down. One year, as Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari’s Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you’d steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade’s leaderboard. Not bad. Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points. “I was really torqued,” Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. “Sid, how did you do that?” “Well,” Meier said. “While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.” A great video game, Sid Meier likes to say, is a series of interesting decisions: a set of situations in which the player is constantly confronted with meaningful choices. It’s an ethos that has served him well: the majority of Meier’s games are critically and commercially acclaimed. A 2009 Develop survey asked some 9,000 game makers their “ultimate development hero”—Meier came in fifth. (First was Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.) Meier’s games are all full of interesting decisions, and they’re always totally different. There’s the open-world pirate adventure game; the real-time strategy game set during the Battle of Gettysburg; the simulation game about railroad management. Meier’s most recent release, Ace Patrol, is a top-down strategy game in which you maneuver fighter pilots to take down targets across the battlefields of World War I. And then there’s Civilization. In a world full of eight-figure budgets and ambitious video game cinematics, the 20-year-old Civilization’s scope is impressive even today. Some games put players in charge of people, cities, or armies; Civilization put them in charge of world history. You’d pick a nation—Americans, Romans, English, and so forth—and guide them from 4000 BC to the modern age, year by year. Every turn, you could move your people across a 2D map of the world, build settlements and cities, engage in diplomacy with rival countries, research new technology, irrigate land, and wage war. This formula has spawned five main games, several spinoffs (including the North America-focused Colonization and the sci-fi epic Alpha Centauri), and tons of expansion packs. It’s also made “Sid Meier” a gaming household name: the official title for Civilization is not Civilization; it is Sid Meier's Civilization. The title implies ownership, arrogance, cockiness. It would be easy to conclude, then, that the father of PC strategy games is a man with an ego—the type of man who would put his name on every game he makes. But Meier is amiable and soft-spoken, a friendly man who colleagues call brilliant, unassuming, and humble. "In the [13] years and all the people I've worked with at Firaxis," said fellow designer and close confidant Jake Solomon, "there has never been anyone who's had a personality issue with Sid, 'cause it's not possible. He's such a wonderful person." Last month, I met the legendary designer in a chilly meeting room in Manhattan’s Union Square. Meier was genial and energetic, with a warm smile and a dark grey cardigan. He was accompanied, as always, by his wife, Susan, who occasionally chimed in to help him remember important facts, or moments he’s forgotten. We talked about his games, his history, his triumphs and regrets. A devout Christian, Meier loves music and plays organ for his church in Baltimore, Maryland, where he and Susan live. His job title at Firaxis, the studio he helped found, is “Director of Creative Development,” which essentially means he can do whatever he wants. Sometimes that means working on his own games; other times it means offering his considerable design acumen to other people at the company and helping out on projects like XCOM, the sci-fi strategy game helmed by Solomon. “You can always drop in—his door's always wide open,” said Solomon. “Anybody can stop in and talk to him about anything... he's incredibly welcoming. He spends a lot of his time working. If you come in on the weekend, there's a fair chance that Sid's car's in the parking lot, and he's in the office working on his latest idea.” Solomon: "If you come in on the weekend, there's a fair chance that Sid's car's in the parking lot, and he's in the office working on his latest idea." I asked Meier, who is 59, if he ever thinks about retirement. “I kinda feel like I am retired,” he said, laughing. “I'm doing what I wanna do—I've been retired for a long time. I still love making games, so I've really never thought of that.” That’s good news for video game fans: Meier has a knack for making strategy games that are fiendishly addictive and consistently delightful. He’s fascinated by history, and he is particularly good at turning events that would seem quaint, dull, or old-fashioned to your average game player—like the battle of Gettysburg or a World War I air skirmish—into accessible interactive entertainment. “He just is brilliant,” said Solomon. “He has a gift that I certainly don't have. It's very rare to find someone who is able to look at the world in such a way that you could give him a topic for a game and I guarantee you in a weekend he could come up with a prototype centered around that theme that would make you go, ‘Oh man, that’s pretty fun.’ Sid just has a very insightful way of looking at the world. He can find the fun in almost anything.” “He just thinks differently from us,” said Brian Reynolds, a longtime collaborator who designed Civilization II. “It’s an ineffable thing. His smartness doesn’t come off as, ‘I'm smarter than you, haha.’ You just have this really interesting conversation and it starts to dawn on you how much smarter he is.” “I gave him a [Civil War] book for Christmas one year,” said Stealey. “And at New Years he gave it back to me. I said ‘Sid, didn't you like the book?’ He said, ‘I've memorized it already.’” After whupping Stealey at Red Baron, the young Meier told his co-worker that Atari’s flight sim was okay, but he could make an even better one. Stealey took the bait: “if you could, I could sell it.” Meier lived up to his end of the bargain, and a few months later, he brought Stealey a build for a combat flight sim called Hellcat Ace. So Stealey went out and sold it. This was the beginning of a partnership that would last for the next decade: As Meier designed and programmed, Stealey would go out and pitch his games to local hobby stores. After a year of sales—$200,000 worth, Stealey claims—Stealey quit his job at General Instruments to work full-time at the company they were now calling MicroProse. A year and a half later, Meier did too. Over the next few years, MicroProse made and marketed a number of flight simulators and arcade action games for Atari consoles: games like the World War II flyer Spitfire Ace, the rudimentary platformer Floyd of the Jungle, and the helicopter sidescroller Chopper Rescue. Like many of the earliest video game companies, MicroProse felt like an upstart gang of rebels more than a professional operation. “We put [the games] in baggies,” Meier said. “Bill would drive around to stores and sell them. It was very bootstrap round-up work process. That's the way things were.” “I would call computer stores and ask to buy Hellcat Ace,” Stealey told me. “And when they didn't have it, I would yell and scream at them, ‘What kind of computer store are you?’ and hang up. I would do that three times in three weeks, each time pretending to be a different person. And the fourth week I'd call and say, ‘Hello, this is John Stealey. I'm a representative with MicroProse, with this game called Hellcat Ace.’ They'd say, ‘Hey, hey, hey, everyone's been calling about that, can you help us get that game?’” In 1983, a video game crash caused by market saturation crippled companies like Atari and Magnavox, but MicroProse still found success releasing a steady trickle of high-quality games designed by Meier: mostly flight sims, because that’s what the two were interested in making. A few years later, as the company continued to grow—”It took three years to get to $3 million,” said Stealey—someone suggested that they make a game about pirates. Meier liked the idea, and he recalls one particularly important conversation with Stealey: “Bill said, ‘When’s my next flight simulator coming out?’ And I said, ‘I’m not doing a flight simulator; I’m doing a pirates game.’ He said, ‘Well that’s crazy, ‘cause people want your next flight simulator... Wait a minute. Put your name on it. Maybe if they liked your flight simulator games, they’ll recognize the name and buy this crazy pirates thing.’” Stealey has a different take: “We were at dinner at a Software Publishers Association meeting, and [actor] Robin Williams was there. And he kept us in stitches for two hours. And he turns to me and says ‘Bill, you should put Sid's name on a couple of these boxes, and promote him as the star.’ And that's how Sid's name got on Pirates, and Civilization.” Wherever it came from, the idea stuck. In 1987, MicroProse released Sid Meier’s Pirates!, an open-world exploration game in which players took on the role of glamorous swashbucklers who scour the world for treasure, stave off mutinous crews, and try to earn as much money as possible. “We had created this graphic tool that allowed us to bring up pictures quickly,” Meier said. “Memory was limited. Everything was limited, so you had to be very efficient, but we found an efficient way to kind of pop up these pictures. We were able to kind of illustrate each scene in the story. That gave it a little bit of this adventure book story kind of quality that I think worked well.” It worked extremely well: Pirates! won a number of awards from industry shows and magazines, and influenced a great deal of future games, including Will Wright’s SimCity, which would then go on to influence Meier’s Civilization. Meier recalls early Game Developers Conferences in San Jose, California, where he’d get together with Wright, M.U.L.E. designer Danielle Bunten, conference founder Chris Crawford, and about 50-100 other early game creators. “We would have fun and basically tell each other how much we like each other's games,” Meier told me. “There wasn't really any collaboration, because we just all wanted to make our own games. It was too much fun to let anybody else.” It was the first generation of video game designers. And it felt like they were at the precipice of something big. “We were trying to develop an industry,” Meier said. If you play more than one of Meier’s games, you will notice certain common characteristics: there is never any blood, for one. Although Meier likes to cover violent historical periods, he does not like to show violence: battles in Civilization, for example, are represented abstractly, with two army tiles colliding until one disappears. Meier’s games are also known for giving their players all sorts of options: instead of telling a focused, linear story, Meier prefers to create situations in which the player can create his or her own narrative. It could be the story of America wiping out every other nation and creating a global empire, or it could be the story of the most friendly pirate in the Caribbean. It’s totally up to the player. “I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want,” Meier said. “And then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know.” Meier: “I prefer games where the player can lead the game in the direction that they want, and then they kind of end up with that unique story that only they can know.” No game epitomized this principle more than Civilization, which Meier and his team started developing after Pirates! and their next game, a business sim called Railroad Tycoon. in which players could built and manage their own railroad companies. "[SimCity] planted the seed in our mind about this kind of building, and that games don't have to be about blowing things up—they can be about creating," Meier said. "And so we kind of took some of the ideas from Railroad Tycoon, and some of the ideas from SimCity, and said you know what's a bigger topic that we can tackle? And we ended up with the idea of Civilization." Today, it takes two or three years and a team of at least 100 to make your average blockbuster video game. Civilization, Meier told me, was made by a team of 8-10 people in under a year. “Ultimately we had 640 kilobytes [of memory] in the computer,” Meier said. “When that was full, we were done. We couldn’t put any more code in there. So development time was a little less in those days.” Today, Civilization is known as one of the premier turn-based strategy series, but funny enough, one of the game’s first iterations was actually set in real-time, like StarCraft or Age of Empires. The unreleased prototype just didn't pass muster with Meier. “It was more like SimCity, where you'd kind of say, I wanna have a village over here and a farm over here and maybe I want to have some things happening over here, and then you could kind of stand back and watch your people gradually do things,” Meier said. “But it was a much more passive kind of process. There was more watching than doing. It was just not happening.” So they switched gears. They gave more control to the player and changed up the pacing: now, instead of waiting for the world to change, players could change the world. Time wouldn’t progress until players made their decisions. Brian Reynolds, who at the time had just started working at MicroProse, remembers early builds of Civilization keeping him and his co-workers up all night. “It started to kind of go ‘viral’ within the company—not that anybody knew that term back then,” Reynolds said. “It was one of those things that suddenly everybody was kind of playing it. There'd be a new version every few days. I would go in and just be this random 22-year-old guy stopping by and saying, ‘Here's some ideas!’ [Sid] was very tolerant, patient of all my ideas for Civilization.” “It was a very fun development,” said Meier, who was in his late 30s at the time. He remembers scaling down a lot—the game’s map was originally going to be twice the size, and there were two different types of tech trees—and he recalls lots and lots of play-testing alongside assistant director Bruce Shelley. “Testing was a bit of a challenge because it took so long to play the game,” Meier said. “And we didn’t really have much in the way of testers, so I was one of the main—a lot of my time was spent playing and then fixing and changing.” Civilization came out in late 1991. It took a few months for buzz to build—there was no Internet just yet—but as people started to discover the game, it spread like the Romans. Meier's masterpiece won various awards, ranking #1 on a list of “150 Best Games Of All Time” compiled by the magazine Computer Gaming World. And it sold 800,000 copies, according to Reynolds. When Meier finished the game that would make his career, he was eager to make something bigger. Better. More ambitious. But he also knew that would be ridiculously difficult—“I said if I continually get in this mode of trying to top the last game or do something bigger or more epic, I'm gonna drive myself crazy,” Meier said. So he decided to scale back. He gave Reynolds the steering wheel for the U.S.-focused Colonization and the Civ sequel, then went off to do his own thing: a music application called CPU Bach that allowed players to create their own music compositions. (It never really took off.) Meanwhile, MicroProse was facing corporate restructuring as Stealey attempted to balance the company’s budget. In 1993, Stealey sold MicroProse to a company called Spectrum Holobyte. A year later, he left. “It was a great run. We should've done better. We had great people,” Stealey said. “I think all our people are still very proud of their MicroProse days. We had a family atmosphere. We had cash bonuses for everybody. I think it went very well for a long time.” Sick of the layoffs and corporate politics, Meier—along with Reynolds and fellow designer Jeff Briggs—decided to leave MicroProse and start a new company. They called it Firaxis Games. Sid Meier doesn’t like thinking about business, and he clammed up a bit when I asked him about MicroProse’s new ownership. “Sid didn't want to be involved in that at all,” Stealey told me later. “No business—not at all.” “Sid is happiest in his office writing code,” Solomon said. Perhaps that was what made the idea of Firaxis so exciting for Meier: there they were independent, totally free to make creative decisions without worrying about meddling corporate parents. By then, Meier already had a reputation in the booming video game industry, and the company was quickly able to strike a deal with Electronic Arts for their next couple of games: Alpha Centauri, a Civilization spinoff set on an alien planet, and Gettysburg, a real-time strategy game set during the eponymous Civil War battle. “Ah, Firaxis,” Meier said. “The convicts are running the asylum. It was great fun.” For a while the company stayed small and nimble, making games with a team of 10-15 people, but over the past decade and a half, it’s grown closer to 120. In late 2005, Firaxis was acquired by Take-Two Interactive—the publishing company behind Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto) and 2K (NBA 2K). Meier: "Ah, Firaxis. The convicts are running the asylum. It was great fun." “Everyone here is really nice,” said Solomon, who joined Firaxis in 2000. “We really value nice guys and gals. We don’t really put up with personality conflicts here, and that comes from Sid. That is 100% because our studio grew out of Sid Meier, and his personality has a huge impact on how the studio is run, how people interact with each other. His vision is sort of our company vision.” Over the past decade or so, Firaxis has gone on to make a whole bunch of Civilization sequels and spinoffs, including the console-driven Civilization Revolution and a remake of Colonization. Last year’s reimagining of the sci-fi strategy game XCOM (directed by Solomon) earned tons of critical acclaim, winning Kotaku’s 2012 Game of the Year. And now, with Ace Patrol, the ghoulish Haunted Hollow and an iOS port of XCOM, the studio seems to be diversifying a bit more. Ahab had Moby Dick. Sid Meier has dinosaurs. For the past decade-and-a-half, Meier has unsuccessfully tried to spear a tyrannosaurus rex. He’s always wanted to make a game about the Jurassic and Crustacean periods—”Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs” does have a nice ring to it—but he just couldn’t figure out how to make it fun. The theme worked, but he never found the right gameplay foundation: what would the dinosaurs do? Just fight one another? What’s the progression? “I did three different prototypes,” Meier said. “One was real-time, one was turn-based, and one was a card game. And they were all kind of fun but just not fun fun.” “How can you tell?” I asked. “I play the game,” he said, sounding very much like one of his legendary counterparts, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. “That's how I develop it, by playing the game, tweaking it and changing it. If other people play it, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I ask, ‘But you’re still not playing it?’ If they say, ‘No, I put it away’ then I know it’s a problem. If they’re still not playing it, then it’s not as fun as it needs to be.” Meier’s wife, Susan, chimed in. Susan has been with Firaxis since the beginning, first as the head of human resources, and now as "Master of Miscellaneous," as she likes to call herself. “One of the reasons you knew you had something was that people at work were playing it long and often,” she said. “Even when they didn’t have to,” Meier said, laughing. “That’s a good sign.” Meier: "If other people play it, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I ask, ‘But you’re still not playing it?’ If they say, ‘No, I put it away’ then I know it’s a problem. If they’re still not playing it, then it’s not as fun as it needs to be." But he just couldn’t nail down the dinosaurs. Solomon, meeting with Meier for the first time while interviewing for a job at Firaxis, recalls sitting down with the designer and playing one of his dinosaur prototypes. “He fired it up and he let me play,” Solomon said. “I think he basically just looked at this as an opportunity to get feedback from somebody. I played the game and we talked about the game... and all he was interested in was, what do I think of the game? Did I have fun? What would I change? And it wasn’t an interview in the sense of—well, I suppose he might have been using it to gauge my personality—but really, it was an interview in the sense of, I played an awesome little prototype of Sid Meier.” Solomon couldn't make the game great, though. Meier likes to talk about the "valley of despair"—the moment in which a game designer, crushed by the weight of failed ideas and discarded prototypes, just feels like giving up. ("Sid's famous for saying a game is a series of interesting decisions," Solomon told me. "On Civ Rev one time he cracked and said, 'Playing games is a series of interesting decisions, but making games is a series of heartbreaking disappointments.'") Sometimes, they get out of the valley. Other times it can be smothering. Not long after Solomon joined the company, Meier told everyone that he was finished. He couldn’t make the dinosaur game work. “So he goes home, and we don’t see him for two weeks,” Solomon said. “Then he brings everybody into a little room and he’s like ‘Okay, I’ve got the next game.’ And so he puts it up on the screen, and it’s SimGolf.” It wasn’t a video or a bunch of words about SimGolf: it was a working prototype that Meier had just built. Players could design and build rudimentary golf courses, just like they eventually could in the final product. “At that time, [then-EA exec] Bing Gordon came out and went into Sid’s office, sat down, played the game for maybe an hour or two, came out and said ‘Yep, we’ll be able to sell that!’” Solomon told me. “Anyone who saw it saw that it was pretty awesome." That prototype-centric mentality is how Meier has always made games, and it may be one of the explanations for his success: he doesn’t believe in design documents, or long, written descriptions of how a video game will work. While many game makers put ideas and concepts on paper before taking them to a machine, Meier’s approach is all hands-on. “Sid’s never had to write a design document, because instead of debating with you about some new feature he wants to implement, he’ll just go home and at night he’ll implement it,” Solomon said. “And then tomorrow when he comes in he’ll say, ‘Okay, now play this new feature.’ And you’ll play, and then you can have a real conversation about the game, instead of looking at some design document.” Meier is known for these types of rules and mantras, which he likes to share with other game designers as often as possible. “‘Find the fun’—that’s Sid’s phrase,” said Reynolds. “Essentially, you have to make something in order to have any chance of finding the fun. Fun wasn't going to be found on a piece of paper, at least fun in terms of a video game.” To hear Reynolds describe Meier’s process calls to mind the old joke: “How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Get a block of marble and remove anything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” How do you make a good game? Get a game and remove all the parts that aren’t fun. “He told me a phrase I use all the time,” said Solomon. “Feedback is fact. That's the way you have to look at feedback, as if it's a fact. You've worked on this massive system or this game, and they come in your office and they go, ‘I played it, and I was bored.’ The worst thing you could do as a designer is start to defend your design or argue with that person. What you do is accept what that person told you as a fact. They said they were bored, so guess what? Your game bored that person. And you need to figure out why that is.” There are other rules, too. Reynolds recalled one that stuck with him: if you are making a video game, and you’re having trouble with a number—say, the number of damage points a unit can do—either double it or cut it in half. “He didn’t have any patience for, ‘Let’s try increasing it by 10%. Let’s try another 10%,’" Reynolds said. “Turns out that's a pretty good rule of thumb to start with for a game designer, because the typical thing is to be really careful and try to inch up a little bit, and then you have to change it seven times to get it right. If you double it, you'll immediately feel whether making it stronger was even a good idea.” Meier: "I guess the next question is, 'What would you do to try to make the game less fun?'" The process works. Meier's games are undoubtedly excellent, to the point where gamers often tell stories about them: “I started playing Civilization at 8pm and then suddenly it was four in the morning” is a common one. The word “addictive” is often thrown around—always with positive connotations, yes, but addiction can be a dangerous thing. So I was curious, during a chat with Meier. Does he ever worry that his games could have a harmful effect on peoples' lives? “The responses we get on the forums, and interacting with players, and talking to people... our impression is that it's a positive experience. It's a way of using your leisure time that might otherwise be spent watching television or whatever. It's a leisure time choice. So our reaction from players has been positive in terms of the time they spent, what they thought they got out of it, how they exercise their brains, and learn things about the world. “I guess the next question is, 'What would you do to try to make the game less fun?' It's funny—in some of the very early PC game designs, we used to have this 'boss key,' which you'd—you'd kinda hit a special key, and a spreadsheet would pop up on the screen so you could pretend you were doing your job. So I guess it's been a consideration going back even 10 or 20 years. Games are just fun. “It's up, with any form of entertainment, it's up to the player or parents to decide what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. Our goal is to make the games as fun as we can make them. I think that seems to be what most people are looking for.” Civilization doesn’t have slaves, and some have criticized the game for that glaring historical omission. It’s a common trend in Meier’s works: although they cover history, they tend to omit the nastier parts. That's just how Sid Meier makes games. It's been that way from Civilization to SimGolf to any of the games he's worked on in the two decades since. “There's a conflict between an emotionally-charged topic and kinda giving the player this freedom of choice that really makes the game good,” he said. “One of the things we really try to avoid in our games is this kind of—’this choice would be the right thing to do, but this choice is gonna help me win the game’—put the players in those kind of moral dilemmas. That's not what our games are about. We want you to feel good about yourself when you finish the game.” A feel-good, addictive experience with tons of interesting choices: that has become the definition of a "Sid Meier" game. Maybe that's why they put his name on the box. There's certainly value to video games that tell focused, morally-challenging stories—last year's Spec Ops: The Line (published by 2K, the label behind Firaxis's games) was lauded for just that reason—but Meier doesn't want to make games like that. He wants to make the type of games that he wants to play. Yet... to this day, Meier has yet to create a game as memorable or as significant as Civilization. After SimGolf was a remake of Pirates!, and then Meier designed the fourth Railroad Tycoon game, Railroads! Next was the console-friendly Civilization Revolutions, a Facebook game called CivWorld that shut down earlier this year, and Ace Patrol. All of these games, while generally good, have not stuck with people the way his magnum opus has. And although Meier told me he has no regrets—"Except that I didn't think of Tetris."—I imagine he must sometimes feel like Civilization is lording over him, daring him to make something with as much of an impact. “When we made Civilization, it was not with the idea that this was gonna be the greatest game that we're gonna be remembered by,” Meier said. “It was the best game to make at the time and we thought it was a lot of fun. Each game we make, we kinda go into it with that idea: this is gonna be the best game we can make on that topic. Some of them resonate stronger with game players; maybe some not as much. I don't have a formula for making a super-memorable game. It's just that we keep making the best games that we can.”

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: GranArcanum kicks off a feature about Gaming Confessions, sharing that he’s never played an Animal Crossing game. In the midst of sweltering summer heat, Zarnyx writes about her hatred of video games’ ice levels. And, Odin updates Ani-Club with recaps of episodes 13-15 of Ouran High School Host Club. And you can always go join the voices talking about video games and life in TAY Classic and in the TAY: Open Forum.

Maybe you went to E3. Maybe you reveled in all the console reveals, hands-on time with next-gen games and fancy open-bar parties. Maybe you thought you had a great time. Sorry, but Conan O’Brien clearly had a better time at E3 than any of its thousands of attendees. Whether it’s rendering verdicts on which console is better, falling in love with various heroines or a creepy-funny chat with voice-of-Mario Charles Martinet, there’s just too much funny here. And, as a bonus, O'Brien got to ask Shigeru Miyamoto a burning question about his most famous creation. Great stuff all around. Hey, ESA, make sure, Conan comes back next year, okay?

Kerbal Space Program is a space exploration sandbox game—think Minecraft in space. Most folks assemble spacecraft and try to launch them without killing their occupants. Others, as seen here, build orbiting basketball goals and go for extra-vehicular dunktivity. The first half of this video is someone lobbing what looks like Telstar 1 at the hoop—the bricks can be particularly brutal when the thing is traveling at thousands of meters per second and the simulator uses, like, real actual space physics. Second half is where it's at. Someone builds a Dominique Wilkins Dunk Rocket and fires that thing at the goal, with predictable results. Might want to go for a finger roll next time, guys. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Made by artist and designer Tobias Wüstefeld for the We Love 8 Bit show in Austria this month, these two pieces are...animal skulls. Turned into floating Super Mario Bros. levels. Right. It should be macabre as hell, but really, you barely notice the fact they're the skulls of dead animals. Maybe. Just think of them as incredibly detailed clouds! [via it 8-bit]

If there was any doubt how globally pervasive King's Facebook and mobile puzzler Candy Crush Saga has grown, one need only look to this Malaysian suburb, where it's being used as the name for what might be the most disappointing restaurant ever. Thanks for sharing, K!

Deadpool is a hilarious comic book, and the video game based on the character lives up to that reputation, delivering a crazy amount of one-liners. The JRPG references in this particular screenshot crack me up. What are the funniest Deadpool lines you've seen so far?

There's a cool Portal-with-magnets game here, but Brad's too busy lamenting his mere two arms.

You've heard it before: Person wakes up in a bathtub of ice, only to find a kidney has been harvested. It's an urban legend that, according to Snopes, has been around since 1991. Now in South Korea, there's a somewhat similar story that involves taxicabs. And it's taking the internet by storm. Numerous websites and news programs have been reporting about an urban legend that has passengers getting drugged in taxis and then waking up minus a kidney. The rumor is spreading through social networking sites. Within the last week this screenshot has made its way through KakaoTalk, a South Korean social networking platform, and Facebook. Via Kotaku tipster Sang, here's an English translation of the conversation: Don't take taxis around city hall. Someone my friend knows had to go into surgery yesterday because his kidney was taken. Gasp. He got on a taxi while drunk. His kidney? Gasp;;;;;;;;;;; Someone put a needle in his neck. He lost consciousness and was defenseless. When he came to, he was bleeding from his stomach and abandoned in a farm field. He was taken to a hospital and they told him one of his kidneys was missing. There are other variations on this story, such as phony taxis with anesthetic on the door handles that cause passengers to fall asleep, making them easy prey. South Korea's CNBC affiliate reports that a screenshot of the above KakaoTalk conversation racked up more than seventy thousand likes on Facebook. Apparently, the post's title referred to the city of Gwangju, and police are concerned that this is damaging the city's reputation. Oh, it's also probably not so hot for the taxi business, either. As with most urban legends in any country, there are those who know the rumors are bunk. Then, there are those who believe them. According to Joins MSN (also via Sang), one 45 year-old man got a text from his wife while he was drunk in the back of a taxi. She warned him about organ harvesting, and the man jumped from the moving taxi, breaking his arm. "Urban legends are rampant as the summer comes around, and this is just a fad," a police spokesperson said, adding that people should not believe stories about organ harvesting and taxi cabs. The police have looked into these incidents, turning up nothing. And in the past, they have actually arrested individuals who have started groundless rumors. Online in South Korea, people are of course making the inevitable comparison between this latest urban legend and Park Chan-wook's 2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which centers on the black market organ trade. According to Joins MSN, the "taxi driver kidney thief" urban legend really seems to have gained steam last fall. This isn't new, however. Online in South Korea, there have been organ-harvesting hoaxes for the past few years. And like most urban legends, they typically start with "This guy/gal my friend knows had it happen to him/her." They don't exactly deal in the world of facts and rational thought, but that's perhaps the point. The summer traditionally has been when ghost stories are told in South Korea—to chill you to the bone, so to speak. That's also why horror movies have traditionally been released in the summer—not the fall, like in some countries. This latest horror story isn't being told around a campfire. It's spreading through Korean cyberspace. '장기적출 괴담' 잊을 만하면 극성부리는 까닭 [Hankooki] SNS서 ‘장기 적출’ 괴담 확산…경찰 “사실무근” [KBS] 콩팥 괴담 "택시탄 후 쓰러졌는데…" 온라인서 공포 확산 [SBS CNBC] 잊을만 하면 떠도는 '콩팥 괴담'…이번에는 광주 [Joins MSN Thanks, Sang!] Photo: Andrew Park | Shutterstock To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft. Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

The creators of Metropolitan Mayhem, an urban-themed level pack for Duke Nukem 3D, uploaded a brand-spanking new trailer for their mod, which came out in... March 2012. Odd timing. Still, there's "an hour's worth of oldskool entertainment" to be had, so if you've got Duke 3D and like the way this looks, dig in! New Trailer Released For Duke Nukem 3D's Metropolitan Mayhem Mod [DSOGaming]

Remember how 4chan voted Kim Jung-un as Time's Person of the Year? Well, something kind of like that might have happened in Japan—but minus Time and the communist dictator. As part of its 15th anniversary, Japanese game maker Level-5, best known for the Professor Layton series, held a poll for fans to pick their favorite Level-5 game character, with the top ten most popular ones slated to get brand new desktop wallpaper. So, you'd think Layton would easily be in the top two or three, right? Wrong. The most popular choice with over 46,000 votes was the airplane from Level-5's Areo Porter. Number two was Ranmaru Kirino, the pink haired and ponytailed feminine male character from soccer series Inazuma Eleven. Minor characters rounded out the top ten and got more votes than Level-5's most famous creations. For example, Professor Layton came in at 13th place. Mamoru Endou, the main Inazuma Eleven protagonist, came in at 11th place. By comparison, the porter (the porter!) from Aero Porter came in at 9th place. What's going on? Well, what do you think is going on? Smart money says internet lulz. Earlier this month, Level-5 honcho Akihiro Hino tweeted that the popularly contest had been compromised somehow and a character from Time Travelers got a huge bump in the voting. Hino also said he wanted the poll trickery to stop. It's difficult to tell if all this drew more attention to the voting and actually encouraged others to places legitimate votes for the airplane, too. The poll officially closed yesterday, with some online in Japan proud of the result. Everything according to keikaku, right? レベルファイブの人気投票　予想外すぎるあのキャラが逃げ切る結果に [IT Media] To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft. Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

Boy, do I love donuts! Who doesn't? Weirdos, that's who. And some of the best donuts are from Mister Donut. But did you know that the donut chain's Thai branch has donuts that look like delicious sushi? Maybe you did. Mister Donut of Thailand's "sushido" donuts aren't exactly brand new (they've been offered for some time), but a Japanese Twitter user recently discovered them. And thus, this photo (below) is spreading like wildfire in Japan. As you can see, there are sweet donut versions of ebi, tamago, maguro, salmon, with sugary frosting replacing raw fish. Uploaded yesterday, the pic has been retweeted over five thousand times, with people in Japan amazed and delighted by the lovely looking sushi donuts. Many people are commenting not only how "cute" the donuts look, but also how they resemble actual sushi. Others are hoping that these sushi themed donuts will be released in Japan. Yum, yum, yum. This is too wonderful and truly delightful. タイのミスドがやりよった！ [@Chaiyo106] Photos: Alexandra The Cat To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft. Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

You know, you might think it's easy cosplaying as a wookie, but it's not. All that hair, it's tough getting it to look right. So hats off to mcm1015 here, who has done one hell of a job. Ignoring the easy Chewbacca route, instead we get Snoova, a mercenary created for the Shadows of the Empire game/book/comic from the 90s. So, hats back on, then back off again, because Shadows of the Empire cosplay is awesome. Snoova [flickr, via neatorama]

Turns out GoD Factory: Wingmen, that interesting MOBA/space shooter we showed you a few months back has a Kickstarter. Check it out, this game probably needs to be made.

Middleware company Havok, which you might remember from the splash screens of many hundreds of video games, has released a free development suite for budding mobile developers. Dubbed "Project Anarchy," the toolkit includes Havok's Vision Engine, Animation Studio, Physics and AI tools, as well as licenses to freely publish on Android, iOS and Tizen, with a provisional license to develop for (but not publish on) Windows.

Licenses for development on other platforms, as well as fancier tools and support directly from Havok, are available for those who upgrade to Project Anarchy Pro, which has an expandable feature set. For the rest of us, Project Anarchy includes tutorials and sample projects to learn the ropes, in addition to low-level C++ access and Lua scripting/debugging for those already familiar.