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Epic Games president Mike Capps has retired.

Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley has gone to war on Planetside 2 cheaters, calling one he banned live on Twitter a “scumbag”.

In today's Dragonborn DLC (Xbox 360) came a quest only sky-high level 81 Skyrim characters could begin: Ebony Warrior.

When we hear that a videogame is an advertisement we instinctively assume that it's nothing but a cheap ploy to promote an upcoming film, TV show, or album. Esteemed advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy has broken the mould and then some by making an Old Spice ad that not only has the most tenuous connection to its product possible, but the mere fact that it's an actual paid for ad makes it even funnier. It certainly wins the "I can't believe this is actually a real thing" award for 2012.

Pier Solar HD, a spruced up version the gargantuan Sega Mega Drive RPG from back in 2010 (yes, 2010), is confirmed to be heading to Wii U after it reached its highest stretch goal of $200,000 on Kickstarter. Currently the tally rests at $212,369 with 13 hours to go.

YouTube user lampenpam has created an impressive mod that rejigs Team Fortress 2 to take place within a 3D recreation of Ed McMillen's horror roguelike The Binding of Isaac.

Multi-platform projects on Wii U have underwhelmed somewhat. Performance is a real issue on some titles (notably Batman: Arkham City and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2), making them less playable than they were before on other systems, even if the core visuals are mostly a match. We concluded that developers may well need to adjust to the Wii U's architectural quirks in order to take proper advantage of the platform, but remain concerned about the lack of CPU power.

Update: Aaaand it's back! Here is Microsoft's official reply on the matter:

UPDATE: Hitman: Absolution publisher Square Enix has issued a short statement in response to the promotion, apologising for the app's content which it described as "wide of the mark".

PS3-exclusive Far Cry 3 DLC has just been announced. It's co-op themed and known as High Tides. It's due in January.

BioShock 1 is thrown in for free with BioShock Infinite on PlayStation 3 in the US only, 2K Games has confirmed.

A US judge has rejected Motorola's attempt to have the Xbox banned from sale in the US and Germany.

Irrational Games has hired Russian cosplayer/veterinarian Anna “Ormeli“ Moleva as the official face of BioShock Infinite's leading lady, Elizabeth.

The Wii U's three big software exclusives have missed the UK all-formats top 10, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 claims another chart scalp.

The good news is that nothing has gone drastically wrong. Beamdog hasn't broken Baldur's Gate and it hasn't done a clumsy job of crowbarring in the extra features it's added. The vast majority of the changes made to this classic role-player are about clarity and accessibility and are seamlessly integrated. If it were a DVD reissue, the Enhanced Edition would be closer to The Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition than Star Wars: Special Edition.

Vinnie Jones - Wimbledon Football Club's biggest star since John Fashanu - returns to the big screen in the new Company of Heroes movie.

A former LucasArts employee has hit back at claims that Star Wars: Battlefront 3 was scuppered by the publisher after "99 per cent" of the game was complete.

Wii U consoles available early next year will spring to life with the system's hour-long mandatory system update already installed, Nintendo has said.

Yes the Project Eternity Kickstarter ended with record breaking numbers a while ago, but PayPal donations stayed open. Yesterday marked the end-proper of crowd-funding, and the new grand total stands at $4.3 million, Obsidian announced.

Nothing quite beats the thrill of the first day with a console. It's a little like a first date; endless days of anticipation leading into a few hours that combine awkwardness and nervous excitement - and if the stars are aligned it's all full of the promise of years of happiness together.

Following in the footsteps of hits like Rainbow 6 and Delta Force, Shadow Company is the latest of what I'm sure will be a long line of real-time military strategy/action games, now that it is "cool" to play cooperatively.

Early previews of the PC version likened Urban Chaos to Tomb Raider. Not a bit of it - Urban Chaos doesn't tie you down to a linear level structure, but instead offers you several routes to take, from several missions, in order to achieve different goals. There are several training missions for the beginner in combat, fitness and vehicle driving. Each can cater for various skill levels and once completed various missions start to reveal themselves. It doesn't stop there, as within each mission there are a number of different tasks to complete. All sorts of different tasks, like preventing suicides and rendezvousing with known criminals, are available to complete. Due to the non-linear nature of the game, these missions may only appear once and in one mission before becoming inaccessible again. The city isn't just a muted venue either - as a somewhat unpopular city cop you'll face a lot of verbal abuse from the location's criminal occupant. The free-roaming nature of the game isn't all that well complemented by its graphics. The characters and backgrounds look a little edgy and badly defined at times. The animation too is a little jerky and the cop cars a bit clunky, lacking taste. Sonically the game isn't all that impressive either, they fail to complement such a clever game otherwise. The sound effects are surprisingly atmospheric, even if the musical interludes lack proverbial punch. The echoing hoots of the back street gangland and the voice-overs of the central characters are suitably plush, if a little questionable in the latter case. The gameplay is the single factor that keeps Urban Chaos from sinking though. It's involving and imaginative. The city sprawls in all directions before you and it's full of characters to interact with. From the suited businessmen hurrying around to the young men and women going about their daily business, everyone is happy to stop and chat to you, be it about current cases, or just a hunch on your part. And if they annoy you enough, you can nick 'em! Like Grand Theft Auto and Driver, you have free reign over the city and what you do. In contrast with these other similarly themed titles though, the occupants of the city are fully interactive, as is much of the scenery. If you see someone walking down the street, you can walk up to them and have a chat, arrest them and throw them into the brig, beat them up or even gun them down. Your options are endless, but you must beware that if you don't behave yourself you may just find yourself in trouble with your work-mates. Being an evil law-disenforcer isn't what Urban Chaos is all about however. A group of occultists are attempting to aid Nostradamus' predictions of Armageddon for the year 1999 in whatever ways that they can. Havoc reigns supreme and your job is to try and prevent them from achieving their goals. It's a deep and engrossing plot that twists and contorts as you play.

"I thought it was so amazing, cos I'd never played on the Playstation before that," Sasha beams about her first encounter with The Smurfs. But was this just initial over-reaction or does she still feel suitably impressed. "Well it is for the first time, innit?". The Smurfs features two sections, the pre-school sub-games part and the proper single player game. The pre-school section includes several small and overly easy games where you playing as Hefty Smurf have to complete a variety of challenges, such as skiing down a slope to collect food, floating about on air currents to collect food and all sorts of other food-gathering alternatives. The food of course, is for a little baby Smurf that the stork left on your front porch. I'm not making this up. "I liked the river one and I liked how they actually got the game set out, as in they produced the pictures and it seemed like it was really good fun for the little ones to play, the 4 year-olds." But did she think that these little sub-games (which made up about a quarter of the game) were the sorts of things that anyone else would play more than once? "They were okay the first time but they got boring quickly and I wanted to play something else after I had played them. I don't really want to play them again." When she accidentally loaded them up instead of the main single player game she openly cursed… "Arrggh God!" Now that's no way to talk for a 10 year old.

The fighting game formula really hasn't changed much over the last few years. Two fighters square up in a basic arena and once encouraged to do so, pummel the hell out of each other until a horizontal health bar has completely changed from green to red. Once this has happened, the corresponding combatant is KO'ed. Oh, and it's the best of three rounds. The recent innovations to the somewhat stale genre have included "3-dimensional arenas" (which basically means that you can walk around a bit and knock people off the edges of the elevated ones), "moving in and out of the screen" (tapping the up button no longer produces a somewhat pathetic hop, but helps the character dodge an attacker) and "real attacks" (in other words, you don't have the option of throwing fireballs or turning into some sort of enormous penguin to conduct an overly elaborate death move). Soul Calibur includes all of these plus the usual beat-em-up hallmarks, such as "secret characters" (win the single player mode and you'll either get a new character to play with or a new mission for the Mission mode) and the "stupidly unrealistic plot" (an excuse for the violence. You may remember that Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat both did this quite well, inspiring a good Manga adaptation and a good movie respectively). The game also owes a lot of its traits to specific beat-em-ups. While I'm rounding up the usual features, lets give credit where credit's due.

The thing is, for such an understated success, Sonic relies on a very weak storyline. A big fat geezer called Dr. Robotnik spends his time snooping around the world searching for these things called Chaos Emeralds, of which there are seven. These emeralds hold the key to running the entire planet, obviously, and as either the blur of blue, Tails (the little orange Fox with two tails) or a few other characters, it's your job to save it again. Despite this weakness, I didn't feel put off playing the game at all. Differences between Sonic Adventure and its predecessor are numerous and expansive. For example, the game isn't just a long trawl through speedy horizontal levels; while it is still made up of Action fields and Boss fields, new Adventure fields help to take the focus of the game away from the anonymity and towards a more involving plot-line. Sonic Adventure's most immediate progression is the change from a 2D to a 3D setting. If you'd have told me this a year ago, I would have chuckled and muttered something about Mario 64 for animals, but the sceptic in me has been silenced once more. The speed of Sonic's movement doesn't lower the framerate across the board, although in a couple of areas I noticed it on occasion. Audibly, the game is surprisingly good. A blazing rock soundtrack seems a little misplaced at first, but it grows on you. Each character has his own theme tune, heard within the in-game cutscenes. The character voices are annoying, but only because they're so American. After a few days of listening to Sonic's drawl and Tails' rather pathetic squeaking, I suppose it's passable, but I would have been happy to live with a muted hedgehog. The lip sync doesn't do much to help its cause; complacent as it is at times. Speaking of sync, the control system seems like another good place to stop. Control of Sonic and his entourage via the gamepad is simple and effective. I've been increasingly more and more encouraged by the control Sega's 'pad gives me and none more so than by Sonic Adventure. While he flies across ravines and landscapes, I am in total control, never feeling let down by bad sampling or other things I sometimes wondered about in Tomb Raider and the like on the Playstation.

Dreamcast Developer:UbisoftPublisher:Ubisoft There aren't really that many racing games available on the Dreamcast yet. Not that many really good ones, anyway. Thankfully, Monaco Racing Simulation ups the ante a bit, providing genuinely realistic Formula 1 racing. Monaco is unlike the majority of arcade-style racers that frequent the shelves of your local games shop, although it does feature an "Arcade" mode. You can't simply keep your finger on the accelerator and swing into every corner at 200mph. This isn't just Ridge Racer style liberal use of the brake either, you have to really anticipate the turns and learn the circuits to succeed. But realism isn't everything, how does it bear up across the board?

It's 1947, and the Cold War has begun. Soviet agents have been seen sniffing around the ruins of the Tower of Babel. No-one knows what they are doing there. The CIA are most concerned, and want Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones Jnr, to find out just what is going on.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has refused Microsoft's application for the Killer Instinct trademark because it's held by another company.

The research studio/museum/game developer collective LA Game Space has successfully reached its Kickstarter goal of $250,000. The current Tally stands at $261,966 with three days to go before the 7th December deadline.

Darksiders 2 's third DLC, The Demon Lord Belial expansion, is due tomorrow on Xbox Live and PC worldwide, while the PS3 version hits North America on 4th December and Europe the following day. It will cost 800 Microsoft Points or $10. Unless you already have a season pass, then it's included.