Video game manuals are hardly sexy, which is why nobody ever talks about them. Press like myself tend to be so familiar with control schemes that there’s rarely much to gain from reading those monochrome pages. In-game tutorials and tooltips are usually enough to get you up to speed anyway, so manuals are pretty redundant. However, accessibility is a mainstay of modern gaming culture, and if you want a game that’s more complex than Mario Party, you’ll probably want a little documentation.

If you’re a MMORPG player, have ever known a MMORPG player, or just known anyone who just might spend a little bit too much time playing video games, then The Guild is for you. The award-winning show consists of ten brief webisodes, and chronicles the trials of a MMORPG guild that decides to meet in person to defeat a real life problem. Wackiness ensues.

Siliconera has reported that, to market Mega Man 9, Capcom has released a new energy tank drink. Gussied up in a familiar blue, this beverage will doubtless return you from the brink of death during those interminable boss battles (though medical application after trauma has not yet been tested by the FDA, so battle bosses responsibly). All this for about $1.25; Mega Man should be so lucky.

This isn’t the first time an energy drink has been used to market a game, but it’s probably the most trouble a company has taken to hype their downloadable content. Careful, GameStop, the downloadable content fairy is coming to take all your profits.

Some 20000 gamers have negatively responded to the art direction in the upcoming Diablo III. More than the typical message board complaining, the movement founders have created a series of image mock-ups to communicate what they’d like to see.

While gamers disagreeing with developer design decisions is nothing new (please see the rest of this site –ed), the mock-ups demonstrate that media manipulation tools are common enough in gaming culture to be useful communication tools.