Get ready to change your Facebook relationship with Beyond Good and Evil 2 to “It’s Complicated.” In an interview at the Montpellier in Game conference, developer and creator Michel Ancel said that he’s keeping the development team small to avoid sucking the soul from the game. This of course means that the project’s rumored demise [...]

Say you’re one of the six people left on Earth who are playing World of Warcraft for the first time. The actual gameplay is a little grindy but eerily compelling, so you push through the starting area and decide to PUG Deadmines. You trot through Westfall wheat, dismantle harvesters, and you’re generally minding your own business when you suddenly keel over dead. Annoyed that you must have lost track of your health at a critical moment, you make a quick corpsesprint back to your body. You flop down to munch on Westfall stew and POW! You’re dead again. This time, when you resurrect you see that someone said “kek” in your chat log. Wikipedia tells you what it means and you curse rogues for the first time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was also the last?

There was a bunch of fancy hardware on display at this year’s E3. Sony continued aping the Wii with the Playstation Move. Microsoft debuted the motion-capturing Kinect, and Nintendo hopped on the theatrical 3D bandwagon with the 3DS. However, none of this hardware means anything without good software to back it up. Having already hit up the portable and downloadable titles, we’ll close this E3 summary week with console and PC games. Keep in mind that this includes Kirby: Epic Yarn, but somebody already covered that elsewhere. Everything else is here.

Today brings the promised survey of E3 downloadable titles. Before we get started, it bears mentioning that Castlevania: Harmony of Despair falls under this banner. However, because It already had the run of the site’s front page last Friday, today it gets this paltry link. Take that, you self-centered but probably still awesome digital product. Pickings were actually pretty slim for interesting downloadable titles, but what was there was awesome.

E3 has an explosive information problem. Thoughtless journalists hit your RSS reader with headlines like so much shrapnel. By the end you’re lucky if you’ve only lost an eye. Fortunately, the brave staff of Pixelsocks.com has thrown themselves on that deadly overextended metaphor, and today you reap the benefits. So here’s everything worth knowing from E3; read it so that our sacrifice was not in vain.

The real reason E3 is so exciting this year is because developers are taking old franchises in new directions. Wednesday we hit up Kirby, and today is Castlevania: . Why yes that is a ultiplayer take on the Symphony of the Night formula. Konami has been working up to this for years–recall that bizarre race [...]

It’s the Christmas that comes in June! In advance of the Monday E3 roundup, here’s a delectable trailer for your consumption: Nintendo came out swinging this year, abandoning franchise conventions and mixing things up. Nowhere is this more immediately visible than Kirby Epic Yarn. The Wii installation in the hoary old series (18 years! I’m…really [...]

Are you passively suicidal, but just don’t know how to take that single step to go pro? Dejobaan Games has found a way to literally do just that. Share their Reckless Disregard for Gravity by stepping off future superstructures without the inconvenience of permanent death. Wrap that up with the highest tier comedy writing, and this game will delight casual and hardcore gamers alike. So throw yourself off something tall. It’s fun!

Twisted Pixel revealed the last two genres yesterday for their latest game, Comic Jumper. Unemployed hero Captain Smiley and chest-mounted sidekick, Star, will first jump into the silver age of comics: Captain Smiley and foul-mouthed Star face the ire of the Comics Obscenity Commission (C.O.C.), who constantly attempt to censor Captain Smiley and his chest-mounted [...]

I have one big regret about my Rocketbirds Revolution! interview. It was the perfect chance to unpack a pervasive problem with a thoughtful and interested developer. I blew it because I was low on time and didn’t realize he’d be so interested in the issue. This article makes amends for that failure: today I explain a usability problem called interference.