A major report on British developers from IndustryGamers has thown up a surprising piece of information: that Brink developers Splash Damage are probably working on a new Marvel game.

The report says that the studio is working on an "unannounced project for a major entertainment brand", which is "based on one of the biggest American pop culture brands of the last 50 years".

When it then says this major entertainment brand is "a company widely believed to have given up on the console publishing business", it becomes pretty clear it's talking about Disney, which recently purchased Marvel comics.

The game in question has "online multiplayer technology" and is running on "an even more polished Brink engine".

So, yeah, sounds a lot like Brink with Marvel characters. Maybe for the upcoming Avengers movie.

Anyone interested? Guess it depends on how much you like Marvel!

United Front: 7 UK Studios To Keep An Eye On [IndustryGamers]

Based in the UK, Georgi "Calader" Simeonov works at Splash Damage, meaning he had a hand in the lovely "nothing but blue skies" art design of multiplayer shooter Brink.

So we'll be showing you some of that, but also some of his other stuff on titles like Sony's MMO Star Wars Galaxies, along with something we'll be covering a lot more in the weeks to come: Dungeons & Dragons art.

You'll find many video game artists have also done work at some stage in their careers for a company like Wizards of the Coast, or if not that kind of fantasy slant, then for stuff like Magic: The Gathering.

If you like the Brink stuff, we've run a gallery of some other concept art from the game earlier in the year, which may have fallen flat with players, but at least it looked great!

And if you like Georgi's stuff, you should check out his personal site.

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on the "expand" icon on the main image above and select "open in new tab".

Starting today, Steam is celebrating id and Bethesda's Quakecon with deals on their games. Sales will change daily from now until August 8th. Today's deals include discounted games, free-to-play Brink, and in-game specials for TF2.

Quakecon 2011 Steam Sale [Steam]

The battle for The Ark spills over into the underwater Labs facility and Founders' Tower on August 3, when the free Agents of Change downloadable content is released for Bethesda's Brink.

Consisting of a pair of fresh maps, a bunch new clothing and weapon attachments, and a level cap boost to 24, Agents of Change is Bethesda and developer Splash Damage's way of saying sorry about Brink thank you to the players that have flocked to the game on Steam, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3. Mind you the thank you only lasts for two weeks, after which a price tag shall be affixed, so download it early if you wish to bask in the gratitude.

Snag Brink for $20 as the Deal of the Day or sit on the edge of your seat waiting for the lightning deals to pop up in today's all video game Amazon Gold Box deals day. Thanks, Alfred!

The developers at Splash Damage and Bethesda have confirmed that the first DLC for Brink will be free, as promised. Well, free for two weeks. Titled "Agents of Change," the add-on is set to release in early July. [Bethesda Blog]

Bethesda announced this morning that a group of hackers have grabbed data from some of their users, including "e-mail addresses and/or passwords." If you frequent Bethesda's sites, like their forums or the Brink statistics site, change your password. [BethBlog]

Brink closes its checkered launch week with news of free DLC and promises it's fixing the crippling lag in its multiplayer.

With an update now live, Brink developer Splash Damage is introducing a configuration change for Xbox 360 users (which will also be available for the PS3 when PlayStation Network comes back) that limits Campaign matchmaking to eight human players (default is up to 16). The config change will also be available in most Freeplay modes.

Those who haven't had lag problems can find the 8 vs. 8 setup in something called the "Big Teams" configuration in Freeplay, and also via custom settings in Private matches.

As a token of appreciation for those who've offered feedback on Brink and stuck by it through this first week, the game's first DLC extension will be free. Splash Damage says it's planned for a June release and will offer "additional maps and new content for players."

Brink: Updates Now Live & Free DLC [Bethesda Blog]

They're sick of waiting. And now some are crossing over to the other side.

According to a report in EDGE Magazine, retailers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe are claiming a dramatic increase in the number of customers trading-in PS3 units—either for cash, or, in many instances, toward the purchase of an Xbox 360.

One source in Belgium told the magazine that "just ten days into the month and already we have an increase of 200 per cent in PS3s coming into the store compared to all of March. Normally we sell them really fast, but not this time. We've only sold 30 to 40 per cent of our inventory right now."

Another retailer speaking to the magazine classified those gamers most put-off by the PSN outage—and thus most willing to defect to the competition—as those involved in the "the hardcore online shooter crowd." Unsurprisingly, there are corresponding reports of mass trade-ins of PS3 copies of titles like Call Of Duty: Black Ops and FIFA Soccer 11, as well as cancellations of pre-orders for Brink—all which rely upon their online component as elements of crucial interest.

These customers might represent only a very extreme (and easily perturbed) portion of Sony's consumer base. But that oughtn't be grounds for assurance—these customers could also be the hardest for the company to win back.

PSN Outage Begins To Hit Retail [EDGE]

Video games let us be heroes. They let us don the cape, wave the flag, put on the badge, hoist the blue lightsaber or simply face the fires of dragons to save the princess.

They could let us be anyone, though. Terrorists, for example. They could let us be them.

If you take your video games as fun machines, you wouldn't much like the idea that a video game can let you role play a terrorist. You'd be happy being an Angry Bird or Batman or the person controlling dropping Tetris blocks simply because that's fun. Terrorism? Not fun.

But if you're interested in video games as role-playing devices, as time machines or actors' scripts, then you, like me, may have been eager to be a terrorist in the new game Brink. Unfortunately, though, it's all a cheat.

Brink is a multiplayer-focused first-person shooter with a strand of narrative justifying a series of skirmishes that pit two factions against each other. One faction is Security, the police force on a floating city called The Ark. The other is the Resistance, dubbed "terrorists" by the Security forces. The game is futuristic. Most of civilization on Earth has supposedly been wiped out, wrecked by, among other things, the melting of the polar ice caps. The Security does the bidding of the Ark's head honchos, The Founders, to keep The Ark safe. The Resistance, made of scrappy refugees from the outside world who fled to the Ark resist being treated like unwelcome dregs.

(Spoiler warning: I'll be discussing late-game missions from Brink.)

As grievances go, The Resistance's objections seemed reasonable. They didn't want to be rationed water and only be given the worst jobs. They didn't want to be consigned to shantytowns. They were, understandably, ready to get off The Ark to find real freedom. Perhaps these problems excused armed rebellion, though terrorism felt like a stretch, as, you know, it tends to.

The Security forces in the game refer to the Resistance as terrorists and—wouldn't you know it?—early in the game we discover that the Resistance is building a dirty bomb. Later in the game, they are aiming a surface-to-air missile at the tallest building in The Ark, a sort of mash-up of Hamas and Al Qaeda tactics all in one. These guys are terrorists? By mid-game, playing as the Security, and learning their side of the story mission by mission, I bought it.

Brink lets you play as both sides. The game lets you see either side of the story. This is one of the things games can do well. Take the Halo series, for example. In Halo 2, you can flip-flop from fighting as the heroic Master Chief or see moments of the war he's waged from the other side, in the boots of one of the supposedly malevolent Covenant. To be specific, what games can do well is actually let you play both sides. Whether you actually feel for both sides is another story. For example, in last year's Medal of Honor game, which was set in the ongoing war in Afghanistan, you could compete online as Western forces or as members of an "opposing force." Until the 11th hour, that opposing force was going to be called "the Taliban," but outrage from veterans' families compelled a change. That outrage and that change implied that playing as the Taliban would have felt meaningfully...anti-American and presumably pro-all-the-things-the-Taliban-supports. But that's not how it works in games. (It's no surprise that a recent video game version of the U.S. raid on Osama Bin Laden's hide-out recast the conflict as a balanced gunfight bereft of ideology.)

There is seldom any sense of ideology baked into the roles people play in multiplayer games. Distasteful as it may seem to play as the Nazis in a competitive World War II game, for example, few if any multiplayer games define the Nazi side by anything other than the class of tanks they command, the cut of their uniform and the shape of their guns. While games often let players wear the boots of either side of a conflict, they've seldom made the wearing of those boots uncomfortable.

Brink had a chance to be different. According to the storyline in the game's Security missions, those Resistance guys really are terrorists. Dirty bombs? Tower attacks? To hell with them. But... I could play as them. The game offers eight missions for the Security side and eight for Resistance. I was eager to hop into those other boots and learn just how they justified their actions.

Oddly, the Resistance doesn't justify their actions. Brink's mission structure is the product of smart recycling, so even though it supposedly has 16 missions across both campaigns, it really only has eight, each one played from opposite sides. After a few missions of the Resistance campaign, I reached that dirty bomb mission. Surprise! The Resistance doesn't talk about building a dirty bomb. They talk about crafting a vaccine. To be clear, the mission that infolds after those different narrative set-ups is exactly the same. Played from either side, the action involves a gunfight in a shantytown, one side escorting a robot through gunfire while the other tries to stop them, some intel being stolen (or not). I thought Brink's creators were sending a message here about the manifold understandings of a conflict. I thought I was being asked to accept both the Security take on the mission and the Resistance one as equal, valid and simultaneously canonical. The Security people had been misinformed, perhaps; The Resistance's aspiration to terrorism wasn't real, just misunderstood benevolence.

I was reading Brink wrong. In the Resistance version of the game's events, the so-called terrorists never fire a missile at a tower. They just try to get off the Ark. This confused me, until I realized that four of the game's missions, the last two in each campaign, are "what-if" missions. In one of the Resistance side's "what-if" missions, we actually do get the missile strike. That mission's summary: "What if [Resistance leader] Chen's extreme rhetoric inspired his followers to extreme actions?" That, I realized, is Brink's real message. The sides aren't equal. The terrorists are terrorists, in the reality of the Security's world. The Resistance do horrid things. And they are not me.

When I'm not the Resistance they are terrorists. When I am the Resistance, they are not. It's not a matter of interpretation. It's not a symptom of subjectivity. It's not an apology that deems one man's terrorist as another man's freedom fighter. It is, instead, a warping of the game's virtual reality. For whatever reason, the game's creators don't want me to be uncomfortable. They don't want me to wrestle with the opposing side's views. They have instead created an enemy faction I can simply hate, and then, when the roles reverse, they cleanly endorse a revised ideology and let me be that enemy guilt-free. There's no tough choice here. It's just checkers. I was no terrorist in Brink because the game never gave me a chance to be.