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Upcoming PS4-exclusive family-oriented action game Knack was the focus of the PS4's (and Mark Cerny's) appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon earlier tonight. There was much rejoicing. A good experience, overall: Fallon and the audience had a great time, and we also got to know that Knack is actually an homage to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. That may or may not have been a joke. Cerny, you crafty person, you. Late Night is currently hosting the Video Games Week, featuring guest appearances from game companies and video-game oriented skits. You can take a look at some of our highlights below.

You can read plenty of books about video games, but there aren't many books all about one individual video game. Which is exactly why Boss Fight books want to step in and fix that. Boss Fight wants to be "the 33 1/3 of video games", bringing together passionate authors to write a whole book about the games that ring their bell. Beginning as a Kickstarter, one which blew past its asking total in 8 hours, their first five books will cover Earthbound, Galaga, ZZT, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Jagged Alliance 2 You'll notice Sid Meier's Colonization is absent from that list because, hey, they didn't ask me. So good luck with that guys. You can get more info on how to order a copy below. Boss Fight Books [Kickstarter]

I’m sure it’s a familiar story. You or your friend gets a Super Nintendo with Street Fighter II. A horde of friends bumrush your house to play. One little bastard always figured out how Blanka’s electricity move didn’t he? And proceeded to dominate everyone before we figured out how to Hadouken. Screw that kid. Ever since that day I’ve had a serious problem with Blanka, and this video just helps reinforce everything that is wrong him. In short, Blanka is a troll. He is also a tool for the trolling of others. He is a monstrous representation of the degradation of humanity. Blanka is the internet. He is you at your worst, he is me. Blanka is the troll in all of us. Today, we are all Blanka. Thanks Alan for sending this in!

This is the real deal. A real LEGO movie. It's out next year. Just when you thought Hollywood would go the inevitable shiny and obvious CG route, they surprise us with this. It looks great! 1980's Space Guy!

As of, oh, right now, there should be a prompt on your PS3 asking you to upgrade to 4.45. Whatever you do, don't accept it. Not yet, anyway. We've started getting reports from some readers that the update is bricking their system, locking their consoles on the boot-up "ribbon" screen, and a thread on Sony's official forums shows the issue is far from isolated. It's obviously not locking up everyone's console, far from it, but there are enough already affected that you won't want to roll the dice. Problem after update to 4.45 [Sony, thanks everyone who sent this in. Sorry about your PS3s :( ]

While I'm impressed by the attention to detail in this re-creation of Star Wars' iconic last ditch torpedo-shot (as displayed at the Brickworld LEGO convention and photographed by Peter Mowry), I'm almost more impressed with how effectively it captures the mess of grey junk that covers the exterior of the Death Star. The full LEGO sculpture, below: (Via Geekologie)

Before we ship Patrick off to the hot streets of Chicago, we get the gang back together to reflect on the events of E3 2013.

This is the real deal. A real LEGO movie. It's out next year. Just when you thought Hollywood would go the inevitable CG route, they surprise us with this. It looks great! 1980's Space Guy!

MIT developed this program which allows users to interface with a 3D character that judges your body language—it's called MACH and it's meant to help you socialize better. Reminds me of project Milo a little bit—can you imagine having games where the characters can read your body language like this?

It's been a full year since we last checked in with Gravity Ghost, developer Erin Robinson's 2D take on gravitation-influenced platforming and Mario Galaxy-like star-collecting. We caught up with Robinson again at E3 2013 to see how the game is shaping up. Short version: It's looking great. Before we shot the video above, I played through several levels as Robinson explained how the game works. She says they're far enough along that they're planning to release it this year. The whole thing has come a long ways since Evan checked out the game, and it now has a soundtrack by FTL composer Ben Prunty. (Sweet!) You can watch Robinson play the game in the video above; she's a lot better at it than I was.

I first watched Chris playing the enjoyable-looking (and hugely popular) Xbox 360 zombie survival game State of Decay, I've wanted to dive in and play it. But I've also wanted to wait for it to come to PC. Good news, then: The game is certainly going to arrive on Steam, though it's still not clear when. As spotted by PCGamesN, one of State of Decay's main makers Jeff Strain had this response for Xbox Wire when asked, "What's next for State of Decay?" We're currently working on a PC version for release on Steam. Fortunately it's been in development alongside the Xbox 360 version since Day 1, so we just need to integrate with the Steam platform and add native support for keyboard and mouse control. We'll also continue to issue Title Updates at a fast pace to refine game balance and fix bugs. (And I gotta say: PC version info sneaking onto an official Xbox news site? Ha.) This comes a week and a half after Undead Labs community director Sanya Weathers told Rock, Paper Shotgun “We are still working on the PC version, and I don’t have a really good estimate for completion. Too much depends on third parties. It isn’t going to be soon by any meaningful use of the word ‘soon’." So, the game is definitely, really and truly coming to PC. Yay! And it sounds like it's going to take a little while. Boo! Between this and the upcoming standalone version of DayZ, PC gamers are gonna have are going to have more than enough zombie games to play. Wait, what am I talking about? There's no such thing as "enough" zombie games. Anyone out there deep into the 360 version? How's it going?

This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. There was a time when the beat-em-up was king, a time when Streets of Rage, Final Fight and Golden Axe were at the top of the heap. Combo Crew on iOS and Android looks to return to those days, offering several unique fighters, lots of combos and plenty of bosses to bruise, clobber and otherwise pummel.

The impressive part is that it does all of that with just two fingers.

Sony's successful, if counter-intuitive next-gen message for the PlayStation 4 at last week's E3 is that things won't change. No disc DRM changes. No new online checks for PS4. You might think Sony doesn't want gaming to change in the PS4 era. Oh, but they do. In fact, if you listen closely, they're veering closer to what Microsoft is envisioning for Xbox One than you may have thought, had you only been focused on the Sony and Microsoft's dueling press conferences. The two are not the same. Only Microsoft is planning to make your games not work if you have lost Internet for 24 hours. And, to be fair, only Microsoft is talking about a 10-member "family" game-sharing plan. Both Microsoft and Sony, however, seem to be ready for console gamers to shift their gaming to digital, to bring console game closer to PC and phone gaming, where the default way to get a game is to download it. In fact, it was Sony people who seemed most eager, in interviews with me, to enable a more download-heavy gaming future. "The things we want to see change," Sony's head of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida told me at E3, when I asked him about Sony's hopes for changes in the next gen, "[is to have] more people embrace the digital side and have more people connect." He wants more people to download Sony's ever-growing line-up of interesting and often independently-made downloadable games. Frankly, the PlayStation store is where Sony is presenting some of the system's more innovative stuff. Yoshida: "The things we want to see change [is to have] more people embrace the digital side and have more people connect." It's not just the artsy games—the Journeys and Unfinished Swans—that Sony is selling online. PlayStation v.p. of hardware marketing, John Koller, told me that the company is also committed to continuing to release its big games for download on the same day they come out in stores on disc. Both the PS4 and the Xbox One have the 500GB harddrives to support a gaming future that involves a console user's radically increased consumption of downloaded games. And one can imagine that the DRM for downloaded games isn't going to be all that flexible on either system, not as flexible as it was in the age of trading or trading in game discs. In fact, Microsoft is at least the one articulating a family-sharing plan for digital games. Neither has been clear if there is a real used-game digital plan (and, yes, that concept may simply not make sense) nor have either outlined any ability to lend a friend a downloaded game. Koller: "The difference between an eight hour download and a 15-minute drive to retail—retail is winning that every time...Solving that with PlayGo... is a big win for the digital side of the business." Some gamers will always prefer to get their games on disc. They like to hold a game in their hands. They like to feel as if they possess it and aren't just getting a license to some bits. As long as games are multiple Gigabytes and online connection speeds aren't fast enough to pipe those files through quickly, then discs will stick around. Safe assumption. Well, sorta safe. Sony's Koller said something to me last week that stuck out. He talked about buying discs at a store as if that was a problem, something that the industry needs to solve. "We're very bullish on digital," Koller told me last week. "One of the things we noticed through the progression of building the PlayStation 4 and now that we've announced it, is that immediacy is a big problem in this industry. Digital is really harmed by that. The difference between an eight hour download and a 15-minute drive to retail—retail is winning that every time. Physical gaming will proliferate as long as that continues. Solving that with PlayGo, which gives you a chunk of the [currently downloading] game you can start playing while the rest is buffered in the background, is a big win for the digital side of the business. I think digital will grow a lot more rapidly as a result of that particular point." Koller: "We need to make things easier for people on an immediacy basis, as an industry. We need to make games more accessible." As a games reporter, I can often just get a disc mailed to me for free; even still, lately, I've opted for paying for a download. It's that much less of a hassle. But I have a choice. I could get the game on disc. More importantly, Sony isn't really going out of its way on PS3 to make downloading a game the better option than getting it on disc. It sounds, from Koller, like they plan to make digital more attractive on PS4. Except, as is the nature of next-gen talk these days, the question then turns to what the DRM on downloads will be. Sony's not talking about digital DRM right now. It's easy to think that Sony would like to shift gaming toward a download model just to cut out game shops and make more profits selling games directly to gamers. It doesn't sound to me, however, that it's close to being that simple. Koller articulated another reason that it's so important for Sony to offer the combination of downloadable games and a PlayGo service that lets you start playing partially-downloaded games almost as soon as the download starts. "There's 220 million Americans who game," he said. "Many of them game on tablets and mobile. When you play a game on tablet or mobile, you may not be playing the deep, rich immersive games you play on console, but you are immediately accessing that content. There's not a lot of lag. So we looked at that. And, as we talked to gamers who were starting to say, 'You know I love console gaming but tablets and mobile are engaging my time,' we realized that as an industry we need to solve that. PlayGo was born of that. We said, 'We need to make it easier for people to get into digital content, so that people don't have to wait around.'" He bottom lined it, talking about PlayGo and Sony's 2014-scheduled Gaikai service that will stream PS3 games to PS4: "We need to make things easier for people on an immediacy basis, as an industry. We need to make games more accessible." Sony wants gaming to be more sudden: You hear about a game and—finger-snap—you're playing it. There's no drive to the store. There's no shrinkwrap to cut. There's no waiting for a progress bar to finish. There's no delay. It happens right away. And, in that scenario, there's no disc in sight. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Photo via Shutterstock.

With the tens of thousands of people that descend on the Los Angeles Convention Center every year for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, it can be easy to miss seeing a few people. But this year was a little different. Cats roamed the showfloor and no one even seemed to notice. Let's look at the evidence, shall we? Ok, actually, I doctored cat heads on these attendees. Shocker, I know. Alex Rubens is a freelance videogame critic based out of Seattle, Washington. He really likes cats. You can talk about cats with him on Twitter at @alexrubens.

Tom Francis' outstanding stealth/hacking/spy-comedy game hasn't just been a critical success. It's selling like hotcakes. In a celebratory post at his workblog, Francis (in his usual low-key manner) shares that the game recouped its development costs in 64 seconds. Not hugely surprising, since as he points out, the entire development cost of the game consisted of a single $30 purchase of Game Maker 8. Francis goes on to share some enjoyable graphs that show just how far the game exceeded his sales expectations, explaining that because of Gunpoint's runaway success, he has quit his job at PC Gamer and decided to make games full-time. More amazingly, I can do it with total creative freedom. There’s really no pressure for my next thing to make a particular amount of money, so I can do whatever I think will be most exciting. It also means I can afford to keep being nice. I didn’t let anyone pay for Gunpoint until I was ready to put a free demo out, so everyone would have a way to make sure it ran OK on their system and that they liked it before giving me any money. This all ties in with the development manifesto Francis posted a while back (a manifesto for which Gunpoint feels like a proof-of-concept), and leaves me hopeful that we'll be seeing many more great games in the future. Or, you know, he could just make Gunpoint II: The Gunpointining. Console-exclusive first-person shooter! Stealth elements! RPG skill-trees! Mo-cap cinematics!

Are you Call of Duty: Black Ops II players ready for four all-new strategy-rich maps and an epic new chapter in the Zombies experience, complete with the debut of the Ray Gun Mark. II? Not yet? Well okay, you've got until July 2 — longer if you play on PC or PlayStation 3.

17-Bit is delivering a version of its strategy game for Steam with a brand-new epilogue campaign, a new unit, six new multiplayer maps, and developers commentary.

Will they? Won't they? Following the reveal of Riley, Call of Duty: Ghost's awesome dog, people couldn't help but wonder about Call of Duty Dog's fate—especially when it would be so easy, if not cliche, to off the dog in an attempt to make an emotional powerplay. When we polled Kotaku readers on it, most of you thought that Riley was dogmeat: Funnily enough, Infinity Ward itself seems more divided on the issue according to Rock Paper, Shotgun: “You know what’s funny about that is, we were all watching the Xbox One reveal event in our theater,” began Infinity Ward’s Tina Palacios. “And after we got the reaction in real-time – we didn’t expect any of this at all, by the way – the studio became divided. Half of them said, ‘OK, the dog absolutely has to die.’ And then the other half – I’m on this half – said, ‘Whoa, no way! People love him.’ It’s a constant debate, but we do have an answer.” Choices will have to be made, of course. The dog will have to live....or die. Who knows! My bet is that Call of Duty Dog will be fine, and instead the emotional powerplay will be something like "And then Call of Duty Dog had to kill you." OK, Seriously, Are They Going To Kill Call Of Duty Dog? [Rock Paper, Shotgun]

Of the announcements Nintendo made at E3, none were as meme-ready as the inclusion of The Villager from Animal Crossing in Smash Bros. With his terrifying, lifeless eyes, the internet got to work saying exactly what we were all thinking. So is it any surprise that the Super Smash Bros. Miiverse community is absolutely packed with depictions of the Villager trying to murder people? Here are just some of the homages to The Villager's murderous side, culled from the Miiverse. Enjoy! (Or be mildly terrified, it's up to you) Hoo boy. That's was pretty dark sided. As a chaser, here’s a drawing of Lil B: To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @papapishu

Last week, Microsoft revealed a new hardware revision for the Xbox 360. This week, we bought one!

Shadowrun Returns is scheduled to release for PC and tablets on July 25, a slight delay from developer Harebrained Schemes' original release window, which in itself was already a delay. Harebrained has also gone ahead and noted some highlights on its site from backers using the game's editing tools, which will ship with the game.

If you've missed checking out Shadowrun Returns, here's 20 minutes of footage.

Vlambeer founders Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman didn't think Ridiculous Fishing would win an Apple Design Award. Sure, it was in the running, but it was a long shot, and they had other places to be during the ceremony at WWDC on June 10 (E3, anyone?). Just in case, they asked Ridiculous Fishing collaborator and indie extraordinaire Zach Gage to go to the show, and he did. In flip flops. And shorts. And Ridiculous Fishing won.

"Holy shit," Ismail laughed during our chat at E3. He was still getting over the fact that Ridiculous Fishing won an Apple Design Award, and that Gage collected it in what's commonly considered summer beach attire.

So far Ridiculous Fishing sales have hit the "hundreds of thousands," Ismail said, and after the Design Award, sales spiked again. Even Elijah Wood got hooked on Ridiculous Fishing - or, as Ismail put it, "The Hobbit played it!"

With all of the hubbub about next-gen at this year's E3, Earth Defense Force 2025 stood out as the product of an entirely different generation, one where wildly idiosyncratic Japanese-developed games both delighted and confused gamers willing to take a risk on untested and out-there concepts.

Technically, it's a complete mess, though I'm sure any fan of Earth Defense Force can tell you the series has never been known for its impeccable graphics or silky smooth action. Despite its rough edges in comparison to the polished Xbox One and PS4 games on display in the very same convention center, EDF 2025 still carries a unique charm.

I skipped a week of Ask Kotaku! I'm the worst ever, I know. Send me questions (email info is in this post) and I'll make it up to you this week with more excellent, top-notch advice. It's like you don't even need to pay that therapist. To contact the author of this post, write to tina@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter at @tinaamini.

Zynga went public over the popularity of a few hit Facebook games, and is now in the process of collapsing into a mush pit. Now the makers of Candy Crush Saga, the jellybean puzzle game gripping the brains of America, are plotting an IPO, the Wall Street Journal reports. First as tragedy, then as farce. There's no denying the maddening appeal of Candy Crush: it's basically the same god damned Bejewled clone we've been playing forever, but King, the team behind Crush, were able to tweak the old formula enough to send their game to the top of the iTunes chart. It's the absolute, diabolically perfect mix of tormenting addiction and genuine fun. But more importantly, they're getting us to put real money into gumdrop powerups—the title is the second most popular free app for iPhones, but the top-grossing app overall. A dollar at a time, candy puzzle addicts are dumping credit card transactions like slot machine-addled Atlantic City junkies. It's a tremendous financial success. So, why not reach for an IPO? Because it's gone so, so wrong before. Basing an entire IPO on the success of one (very big) hit presumes the success of future hits that are just as big, if not bigger—because remember, one day people will stop playing Candy Crush. Just like they stopped playing FarmVille. You'll need Egg Crush, Cupcake Blush Epic, Bubble Gem Marauder, and on, and on. These games are ultra-hits because they latch onto our minute attention spans, and the same brain deficiencies that make them stars will wash them away when the next fun bathroom game comes along. And then what's up for King's shareholders? They'll be joining Zynga's ex-staffers at the bar.

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Though Mad Max has been a project spanning several years, going through several iterations in that time, Avalanche Studios CEO Christofer Sundberg claims it's not the game that was rumored in 2008.

God of War 2 lead Cory Barlog had reportedly gone to Avalanche Studios in 2010 to work on a Mad Max game, tied to a new movie. "I don't know what [Barlog] worked on before he started working with us," Sundberg told Polygon, "but when we worked together he wasn't on Mad Max."

Sundberg said the team has been in production on this Mad Max game for around 18 months, though it's been at Avalanche in some capacity for years now. "The game has gone through a series of iterations. We've been working for it for a couple years."

Mad Max is due in 2014, for PS4, PS3, Xbox One and Xbox 360. We saw the open-world action game game at E3 and caught up with our old hillbilly pal, Chumbucket.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's lead creator of Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong, was recently showing me Pikmin 3, but there was something he'd just said that I had to follow up on. "I have to ask, Mr. Miyamoto, you said you have made a bad game. What was the bad game you made?" To back up a second, I was riffing off this exchange from minutes earlier, as we were talking about how proud he was of Pikmin 3. Me: "Do you feel like you've ever made a bad game?" Him: "Yeah." He'd moved on to talk more about the new Wii U game, but I couldn't let that go... I wondered how he'd reply. He was responding in Japanese, at first, to a translator. I don't speak Japanese, so I had time to ponder. What "bad" game of his might he mention? The underachieving Super Mario Sunshine? It wasn't that bad. The disappointing Yoshi's Story? Was he even involved in that? The iffy Wii Music, which I know he'd been really invested in? Maybe some game I'd never heard of? Maybe he'd just dodge this question? "I wouldn't say that I've ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link," he said. OK. Way more specific and high-profile than I was expecting! For you youngsters out there, he was naming the second ever Zelda game, which was released on a disc on the Famicom Disk System in 1987 in Japan and on a cartridge on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 in North America and Europe. The game was radically different than any other Zelda before or since, as it alternated between a vast overworld viewed from above to towns and dungeons presented from a side-scrolling perspective. This Zelda game had experience points and leveling up. Miyamoto was 34 when the game came out (I was 11). He's 60 now. "When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there," Miyamoto said. "In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper." "So that's a rule of thumb," I asked, "that if you find yourself at that point, you know the idea wasn't successful? Or is that you didn't give yourself enough time?" "I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing," he said. "I'm just curious," I pressed, "what would you have liked that game to have been like?" "So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to." That part of Miyamoto's reply puzzled me, because I hadn't remembered the transitions taking that long. A YouTube video of the original Famicom Disk System version of the game shows, however, that there was a few-second delay going back and forth. "The other thing," he said, "is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort." "I'm sure people would love for you to return to Zelda II with [Zelda lead producer] Mr. Aonuma at some point," I said. For now, Miyamoto's all about the soon-to-be-released Wii U game Pikmin 3. And the Zelda franchise is booked with a fall remake of The Wind Waker, a sequel to the Super Nintendo's A Link to the Past and an eventual brand-new Zelda game for the Wii U. Coming tomorrow: Miyamoto On The Clamor To Make Something New To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Zelda II overworld screenshot via Sharenator.

Sony's flagship Android smartphone finally has a carrier in the United States, and it's coming soon.