In 1994, some Iraqi students decided to develop a video game for the Amiga. It was never released on that system, thanks to economic sanctions and the demise of Commodore, but now, in 2010, it's out on the iPhone!

An unlikely story, we know, but the original development team - now scattered across the US, Canada and Australia - decided to get back together (over the internet, at least), polish the game up, and release it on the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It's called Babylonian Twins - The Quest for Peace in Ancient Iraq, and is a platformer with some puzzles thrown in that must be completed by switching between two characters.

Like Blizzard's Lost Vikings, then. Only, about as far removed from vikings as you can get. Babylonian Twins is $3 on the iPod/iPhone, and $5 on the iPad. You've paid a lot more for games that were a lot easier to make than that.

Babylonian Twins - The Quest for Peace in Ancient Iraq [iTunes, via FingerGaming]

Whether it's Doom or Super Mario Bros., video game movies have a bad rep. It's a mostly deserved rep. But Hollywood super producer Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Pirates of the Carribean) doesn't think it's so cut and dried.

"It depends on who's involved with it and the approach they took," Bruckheimer told website website Gamasutra. Bruckheimer, one of Hollywood's most successful producers ever, has had a knack for churning out blockbusters. With the Pirates of the Carribean films, he was able to turn a Disney ride into a feature film franchise.

"We used the same skill, as far as storytellers, [for Prince of Persia] that we used on Pirates of the Caribbean on Prince of Persia," says Bruckheimer. The producer had never played Prince of Persia until the game was pitched to him. Six years passed, and voila! There's a movie.

"It always depends on story and character," says Bruckheimer. "With that, if you can create that, then you've got it. That's what it's about. We're storytellers. That's all we do. The more interesting the story and the characters, and the better the themes, chances are you're going to have a better movie, if you surround yourself with talented people."

Don't blame the movie or video game mediums themselves for failed adaptations. Blame the people who made the films.

Interview: Jerry Bruckheimer on Game Development, Prince of Persia, Why Movie Games Fail [Gamasutra]

Splinter Cell: Conviction, out this week, is pretty good. It's also been a long time coming, having been originally due for release in 2007. Why the delay?

There was way more to it than hero Sam Fisher getting a new haircut. Like, the entire game needed to be re-tooled, its direction and mechanics changed.

"I joined the team in January of 2008 and at the beginning the goal was to fix the things that weren't happening. Ubisoft had identified that there were some major issues with the game", Ubisoft Montreal's Max Beland told Edge.

"We did a lot of playtesting, a lot of consumer research, we talked to a lot of gamers and there were a lot of themes that were coming back all the time: stealth is punitive, stealth is slow. It was funny, because when you watch the movies they're not that. James Bond and Jason Bourne run fast, they don't make noise, they kill one, two, three or four guys super quickly and silently with a sound suppressor, so it's a lot more dynamic. So we needed to do something with that."

"We need to make the ten people who are attracted to Splinter Cell and stealth happy, we can't just make two happy because they want to hide in the shadows and look at the control paths for a minute and then steady the camera placement. I think it's a good and fun type of stealth gameplay but it's hardcore."

That stuff about control paths and camera placement? As someone normally bored to death by the arbitrary way games deal with stealth (Batman & Mini Ninjas excepted), I love it. Where was he five years ago?

'Ubisoft Felt Splinter Cell Was Too Hardcore' [Edge]

X-Com, the classic 90's turn-based strategy game pitting mankind against alien invaders, is set to make a comeback as a first-person shooter, courtesy of the 2K studios behind BioShock 2.

The game, which is actually called XCOM, is in development for the Xbox 360 and PC at 2K Australia and 2K Marin, and makes substantial changes to the original series, combining research and planning elements not with overhead, turn-based strategy sections, but with first-person shooter action.

"With BioShock 2, the team at 2K Marin proved themselves as masters of first-person, suspenseful storytelling, and with XCOM they will re-imagine and expand the rich lore of this revered franchise," said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. "Players will explore the world of XCOM from an immersive new perspective and experience firsthand the fear and tension of this gripping narrative ride."

It's funny, for years, people kept repeating the same rumour, that 2K Boston and Ken Levine would be making a new X-Com game. Don't think anyone expected it to come from 2K's other BioShock studio. Actually, I don't know if anyone honestly expected this at all.

Want to know how fast the new Fist of the North Star game loads? On PS3? Xbox 360? How about the Xbox 360 version with the game installed to the hard drive and downloadable content installed? Then watch this video.

Some enterprising enthusiast of Tecmo Koei's recently released Fist of the North Star (aka Hokuo Musou) put the game to its paces—at least in terms of how quickly it loads to gameplay—in six different ways. That includes the game running off a DVD, off a Blu-ray disc, off hard drive installations and with the fan service-filled downloadable content installed. The clear winner? The PlayStation 3 version that's installed to the system's hard drive.

The loser, as it were, well, we'll let the video do the talking.

It's been a day (mostly) without a Crecente, a day without a Good. Don't let it be a day without you joining us for some off topic conversation. Join Kotaku Off Topic. You too, lurkers.

I've been doing a bit of lurking of my own, lately, keeping an eye on a lot of things, like message boards, Facebook, the people I follow on Twitter. I don't seem to have the time to keep up with contributing to those things, not with everything else going on (aka work). But I have found the time to start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer again, one episode a night, a seemingly more common trend of revisiting old things instead of seeking out new ones.

Here are some new things. Bring your own newness to the comments below.

• Joss Whedon directing the Avengers movie? - Not the first time we've heard it, but we're hearing it again.
• Gawker finds making it harder for comments to be seen leads to more (and better) comments - I just unstarred some jackass!
• Consumer Reports Says Lexus GX 460 Is Unsafe - Toyota's having a rough year.
• Twitter Stupid Fight - "Choose two celebrity Twitterers. See whose fans are dumber."

Will "Cyrus" Powers is the winner of the PlayStation Network's first reality show, a contest called The Tester. His prize? A job, testing video games for Sony Computer Entertainment, which Powers will start on April 19.

Powers and ten other hopefuls were the stars of The Tester, an eight episode series that ended its first season on the PlayStation Network this past week. That show, produced by reality show vets 51 Minds Entertainment, also responsible for programming like "The Surreal Life" and "Flavor of Love", was filmed six months ago, but Powers won't be able to take his position at Sony until next week.

He'll be leaving his job—"'Career' is a really loose fitting word," Powers says—in Raleigh, North Carolina where he was waiting tables and bar tending to work in San Diego, spending a good portion of his $5,000 starting bonus on the cross-country move.

Powers calls his time on the Tester "a really fun experience" and "a congregation of people that are like minded and super competitive."

"I wouldn't say it was the most fun Id never want to do again," Powers told Kotaku. "Looking back on it, you're going through some challenges that seem ludicrous at the time, but in retrospect, it makes sense when you see the whole piece of work."

That said, Powers says he understand some of the vocal misgivings gamers and experienced QA testers had about the show, in which players compete for a chance to win what's often considered an unglamorous entry level position full of hard work.

"I read everything that's out there," he says. "You've got to think about it from my perspective. I'm living on the East Coast, where sure there are some game studios around me — there's Epic, Insomniac, and Red Storm — but most of those places aren't hiring a QA department that my degree in Japanese is fitting for. In order to have a job in the industry that I have a passion for, I have to go on the other side of the country, which is not only expensive, but hard to get a job when I'm not actually located in that area."

Powers says he hopes to turn his entry level position and his Japanese language skills into a career.

"Although it was a lot of hoops to jump through, it's really a lot better than the alternative of me spending all of my own money to move out there and hoping that I can get a job with one of the major companies out there," he says. "This solves all those problems by giving me a job and paying for my relocation."

What about other criticisms? Is this really the ideal way to find video game testers—making them play paintball and LARP? Brent Gocke, release manager of first party QA for Sony Computer Entertainment and The Tester panelist, seems to think so.

"I think people started out a little skeptical—'Why aren't they testing games?'—but most people have seemed to enjoyed it," Gocke told Kotaku. "When you bring people in you do interviews, you look at their personalities to see who would be the best fit to bring on board.

"And Will was the best one to bring on board."

Gocke believes that "everyone [in the QA department] was pretty excited about the show," going far enough to say that "A lot of people were pretty jealous—would you have rather gone through a reality show instead of an interview?"

"I think the one benefit to Will is they're going to actually know him already." Gocke says. "He will have to come in humble, with obviously a lot to learn, but he knows his stuff when it comes to the gaming industry."

With the first season of The Tester wrapped, we had to ask the inevitable—will there be another season of The Tester? Gocke and Powers don't know, saying that we should defer to the executive producers of the show who may make that decision. If it does continue, however, Gocke seems pretty satisfied with the show as a more interesting way to interview candidates.

"From my perspective, I'd like to see it a little bit longer," Gocke said. "This was the first time we did this, but hovering around 30 minutes would be great. To be honest I thought it went really well, but maybe we'll switch up the challenges. I don't know if I would make many changes."

For future Tester hopefuls, Powers offers this advice.

"Just make sure to be yourself in the competition," he says. "I treated the whole experience as a vacation that I was enjoying. The better I performed, the longer the vacation lasted, and before I knew it I'd come out the victor. So, if there are future contestants, I would just tell them, relax... and enjoy the ride!"

Samsung viral ad for their 3D TVs, full of silly 3D versions of classic paintings. Imagine if 3D TVs could be half as superfluous for video games. Via Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford's Twitter feed.

Square Enix may be bringing its lovely looking Final Fantasy spin-off stateside, with the company trademarking The 4 Heroes Of Light, a still unofficially announced video game from the RPG publisher.

More than likely, that's the Western name (or part of the name) of Hikari no 4 Senshi: Final Fantasy Gaiden—a role-playing game that features classic Final Fantasy-style turn-based gameplay and a job-like "Crown System"—released on the Nintendo DS in Japan this past October. It's a game we're looking forward to, given that we named it among the best video game costume and character design from 2009. The character design work from Akihiko Yoshida, who contributed to Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII, among others, might be worth keeping this one on your list of future Nintendo DS purchases.

Square Enix has not yet announced a localized version of Hikari no 4 Senshi: Final Fantasy Gaiden, but there's not much the company won't export these days.

The 4 Heroes Of Light [USPTO via Siliconera]

RoboCop director Paul Verhoeven is having a go at the video game movie business, working on an "Indiana Jones-ish" but also "Hitchcockian" video game set in the year 1914. Could it be anything other than Jordan Mechner's The Last Express?

The MTV Movies blog first broke the news that the man behind RoboCop, Starship Troopers, and Basic Instinct was working on a video game adaptation earlier today, leading multiple websites to speculate about which property Verhoeven is taking on, based on the description given.

"I am working on a movie now that is... situated in 1914. Basically, Indiana Jones-ish you could say, but also Hitchcockian," he explained in a recent interview with MTV's Josh Horowitz. "We are scripting it. It's an idea that exists already... from another medium, and so we are making it now into a film narrative." Which medium, Josh asked. "A game, a video game."

AS MTV Multiplayer points out, there aren't a lot of games based in the pre-World War I 1900's, but one immediately springs to mind - or at least it sprung to the mind of SlashFilm's Peter Sciretta.

That game is The Last Express, a 1997 action-adventure game for the PC, created by Jordan Mechner of Prince of Persia fame. The game was notable for its use of rotoscoping. Actors were filmed in costume, and then frames of animation were made into black and white line images, which were then colored by hand.

The game is also notable for being played out in real-time, skipping ahead only when the game's protagonist is asleep or knocked unconscious.

The title centers around American doctor Robert Cath, who boards the Orient Express to escape troubles with the law, only to find himself embroiled in a plot rife with intrigue, treachery, romance, and murder. With a colorful cast of characters and an intriguing plot, it makes for perfect movie material.

Aside from the setting and tone similarities, two other factors lead us to think that this project is indeed The Last Express.

First, there's the big budget Prince of Persia movie coming out next month, which means Jordan Mechner is a big deal in Hollywood right now.

Second is a further quote from Verhoeven's interview with MTV: "The writer of the video game has asked me to keep [the identity of the game] secret until he has a script."

That means it's an Indiana Jones-ish, Hitchcockian video game movie set in 1914, with a writer influential enough to have his requests honored by Hollywood big wigs. Sure sounds like Mechner to me.

We'll leave this one labeled rumor for now, but all signs point to another Jordan Mechner classic heading to the big screen.

To learn more about The Last Express, check out Jordan Mechner's page on the game.

EXCLUSIVE: Paul Verhoeven Pushes Play On Video Game Adaptation Set In 1914 [MTV Movie Blog via MTV Multiplayer]