Our younger readers won't have lived through it, but the 1980s were in in many ways a bleak time, the spectre of nuclear holocaust hanging over the world for much of the decade.

For such a dominant political topic, however, few games chose to address the subject head-on. Ground Zero was one of the few.

A text adventure game for the Sinclair Spectrum, Ground Zero was the seventh and last in Arctic Computing's Adventure G series of games, all of which shipped on cassette tapes.

Built using a commercially-available adventure game creation suite, Ground Zero tasked the player with making adequate preparations to survive an impending nuclear attack on Britain. Beginning shortly before the missiles are launched, you could either attempt to build a shelter in your backyard (as instructed by authorities) or, for more elaborate solutions, you could heat outside and try and bluff your way into a government fallout shelter.

The game is time-limited, so you only have so long to get things done before the missiles fall and it's determined if you survived or not.

Most games of this type, given their rudimentary control schemes, relied on a bit of humour to get you by, an acknowledgement of the absurdity of playing a game using nothing but text commands. Ground Zero kept this to an absolute minimum, instead trying to be as blunt, realistic and at times political as it could.

Beginning in your living room, a TV set commands you to build a shelter using household objects. So you maybe play the game for the first time doing this, and...when the missiles rain down, you're killed. It wasn't up to the job. Thus begins a protracted series of playthroughs, each used as an experiment in determining just what you can gather, and who you can talk to, to make sure you're still breathing once the first bombs go off.

Perhaps it's primitive design, perhaps it's a statement, but it's tough going. Only a very limited set of circumstances can take place which enable you to survive, juggling the right amount of stuff in your inventory with the right amount of movement. I like to think this is a statement on how difficult it would have been to actually survive a nuclear attack; in the real world you would have only got one shot, so having to play through twenty times until you cracked it showed how few people could actually survive such a scenario.

Especially when you consider - and this is where the game finally indulges in a bit of humour - that the only real way to "finish" the game is to impersonate either the Queen or one of her sons at a government fallout shelter.

Do that and you're greeted with the "congratulations" screen, but it's hardly cause for celebration. While you'll live another day, you're greeted with a dead world, "fires still burning in the distance" while you can "hear nothing but the wind". It's Fallout without the humour, and Fallout without the humour is very depressing indeed.

The game was just part of the ultra-realistic, no-holds-barred anti-nuclear commentary found in Britain in the 1980's, and has many similarities with 1984 mockumentary Threads, which may be the most depressing film I have ever seen (and paints a far bleaker picture than its American counterpart, 1983's The Day After).

If you feel like your week has been a little too happy, and you need something to bum you out, you can grab a copy of the Spectrum version of the game (it was also released on the Commodore 64) here.

Adventure G: Ground Zero [World of Spectrum]

Adventure of the Week: Adventure G - Ground Zero (1984) [Gaming After 40]

Video games regulators in South Korea say MMO publishers there have obstructed an investigation into "jackpot items," predicated on the idea that players risking in-game currency for random-item payoffs is in fact a form of gambling.

While publishers have cooperated so far as to provide the virtual items' names and virtual costs involved, they haven't coughed up the payout percentages to the government. For those who live in U.S. states with gaming commissions, this is somewhat like the audited figure that's intended to give slot machine parlors a modicum of transparency. Instead it ends up providing humorous double-entendre billboards like "Loosest slots in Central City."

Back in Korea, publishers say such payout info is proprietary and a business secret. Government officials think the MMO publishers are hiding something.

South Korean Game Rating Board Targets Jackpot Items in MMO's [Game Politics]

You may not be familiar with the name "John Patrick Lowrie." You probably are familiar with the name "Sniper," whom Lowrie voices in Team Fortress 2. He's just published the novel Dancing With Eternity and, well, his friends are giving it some kind reviews on Amazon.

Heavy gave it five of five stars:

Even if cannot read, you will like. Book is heavy so I throw at spy. He will never ever walk again.

Scout gave it the lowest review, four of five.

It was a good book, don't get me wrong. I don't normally read y'know, because I'm busy busting heads and capping points, but when I found out my friend Sniper wrote a book, I had to get it. I give it 4 stars. Would have been 5 if it had come with a hat.

Says Pyro:

Mra mreananna menrannen mrrnin mroonh. Mah mranahhana mrorm mre maranahananranmnh mron mrnmrhn mrnmrnre.

Mranaro mrit mroons mrrrah.

Mrumanhanna muranna mrunahhmphna mrump. Mrumnamahanna.

What more needs be said? Order below.

Dancing With Eternity [John Patrick Lowrie (Amazon) via The Escapist.]

How very unlike Valve. In a post on the game's official blog, DotA 2 developers say that while they had planned to keep testing the game for another year or so in a very private beta, they now want to "get it out there as fast as we can".

"Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we'd release Dota 2 to the world", the post says. "But the feedback we're seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it, even though there's still a ton of heroes yet to be implemented. We've also seen that the folks who are already in the beta are chomping at the bit to show everyone else some of the fun games they've had. So we decided our original plan was dumb."

So there's been a change.

"Welcome to the new plan: We're going to take the current version of Dota 2, which has The International set of heroes, and get it out there as fast as we can."

That means a more public beta is on the fast track. You'll still need to sign up for an invite, but the number of people invited is going to ramp up.

As an added bonus, those in the beta are now no longer forbidden from taking screenshots and videos, so expect to see a lot more of that stuff in the weeks to come.

I Said Good Day Sir! [Dota 2]

I'm now 24 hours into Dark Souls, the successor to 2009's brilliant and challenging role-playing game Demon's Souls. I have, of course, died many times in my struggle to become un-undead. I have killed a half-dozen of its major demons, explored deeply its open world, but have just barely begun to scratch its hard surface.

You've likely heard again and again that Dark Souls, like its predecessor, is an unforgiving, uniquely challenging game. It requires patience, trial and error, experimentation and—unless played observantly and very carefully—many deaths. Its rules are sometimes obtuse, often esoteric. Rather than try to drill into you just how punishing Dark Souls can often be, let's explore why it's a more difficult game than Demon's Souls. And I'll try to help explain some of Dark Souls arcane systems—Humanity, Bonfires and Hollowing—along the way.

Your first minutes in Dark Souls, after choosing a starting character class and selecting your character's "gift" from a moderately helpful selection of items will be spent in an asylum that serves as the game's tutorial. After learning the basics of combat, which are precisely Demon's Souls save for a few new lunging attacks, you'll face the the massive Asylum Demon. He's the ultimate test of your novice combat abilities, easier to defeat than his Demon's Souls counterpart Vanguard, but still an immense challenge. He recently laid waste to my Kotaku colleagues at Tokyo Game Show an impressive nine times in a row, but I managed to dispatch him on a second attempt.

From there, players are escorted by a very large, seemingly friendly raven into Dark Souls' huge open world. They'll see their first Bonfire, a brief moment of respite and comfort, as beautifully morose music plays. At fires, players can rest, regaining their health, refilling their life-restoring Estus Flask and more. It's at these fires that players can also level up their character's abilities and regain their human forms. Later, they'll be able to repair and upgrade their weapons and armor, access the Bottomless Box and stoke the flames of their Bonfires.

While they may look like checkpoints of a sort, a place to regain one's strength and spend souls leveling up, it can be argued that Bonfires serve to make Dark Souls even more difficult. Visiting one of these camps resets the world, respawning its enemies. Players must consider whether the replenishment of one's health and the investment of whatever souls they're carrying is worth reviving everything they've just defeated.

A player's first Bonfire serves as something of a hub. Nearby are pathways to Dark Souls various threats. Below you, a graveyard and the Catacombs, both stalked by skeletal warriors who attack in pairs and offer no souls as reward when defeated. Directly beneath the camp, a cobblestone stairway to the New Londo Ruins. In this sunken city, your fellow undead have gone mad, apparently one of the consequences of suffering as a living dead. The Ruins are haunted by specters, cruel enemies who walk through walls and can attack the player from walkways above and below. Up above the camp, the Undead Burg, a fortified city that's perhaps the safest choice for new players.

The main camp is where Dark Souls' still human survivors gather. Clerics, sorcerers, smiths and tradesman wait nearby in this solace. Players will "collect" them as the game progresses, freeing them from captivity, much like the support characters of Demon's Souls. Like that game, it's difficult to know who trust, as the cracks in their sanity often show through verbal exchanges.

Players will be told by the first friendly face they meet that two bell towers must be visited, the first in the medieval town called Undead Burg. What lies in wait for them are brutally challenging enemies, from undead soldiers that attack in groups to the low-ranking (but still massive) demons that serve as mid-level bosses to the giant Belfry Gargoyles.

Like Demon's Souls, getting from point A (your main bonfire) to point B (bell tower) is viciously hard. Tread carefully, for the strength of your enemies do not align with your character's. A massive wyvern will have no qualms about burning you to a crisp as you head toward the church. Heavily armored knights wielding swords the size of your body will happily run you through for a one-hit kill. Expect to be poisoned, crushed, stabbed and set ablaze time and again.

Fortunately, Dark Souls' world is thick with shortcuts and secret passages, making successive runs through the Undead Burg slightly easier. With patience and perseverance comes progress.

Eventually, they'll make it to the Belfry Gargoyles, who attack in a pair in a fashion similar to Demon's Souls' Maneaters. Yes, From Software is throwing the equivalent of one of the most difficult encounters in its last game at players very early on. Players in human form will have the option to summon the friendly phantom version of a non-player character, sun worshiper Solaire of Astora, to the fight if they choose to do so.

It's a hard battle, but less so when fought carefully and with a friend. It's one of the rare moments when Dark Souls feels like it's doing players something resembling a favor.

Players likely won't feel that way after coming to grips with many of Dark Souls other gameplay components. The concept of Humanity, for example, is one of From Software's new challenges. Players start with zero Humanity, with an emaciated corpse-like body to reaffirm that status. Players can boost it by consuming black sprites known as, well, Humanity and Twin Humanities. Doing so will boost their attack, defense and resistances to afflictions like curses. If undead, or Hollowed, players can then cash in that Humanity to "reverse hollowing" and regain their human forms. Should they die while in living form or with some Humanity intact, they'll be able to reclaim it (along with whatever souls they dropped) by touching the bloodstain left at the scene of their previous death.

Humanity is also spent at Bonfires to "kindle" them, making the flames more powerful, boosting the count of your Estus Flask and, sometimes, boosting the flasks of other players online.

On Humanity, the Dark Souls manual, largely uninformative though it may be for a game of this scope, warns of Vagrants. These are born when players drop certain items or a large Humanity count upon death. Vagrants are sent to invade other players worlds.

Dark Souls is more challenging for another reason alluded to earlier. Some enemies simply do not drop souls, the currency used to level up or buy goods and services, upon death. The formidable skeletons and specters players can choose to face early on drop little to nothing of value. Players looking to farm souls and grind to a more powerful character will find themselves starving for souls.

There were moments in my first 24 hours that I thought From Software too cruel. I once found myself cursed by some beasts dwelling in The Depths beneath the Undead Burg, an affliction that not only killed my character instantly, but halved its maximum hit points. Then I was cursed again, stacking the damage. I fought for four hours at one-quarter of my health, desperately seeking a cure. Surely, I thought, there must be some mistake. How could they do this to me?

What's more, enemies now relentlessly pursue the player, seeing them from far away and never giving up chase.

There are, however, moments of forgiveness. Shortcuts and friendly blacksmiths who upgrade armor and weapon with the material Titanite; the option to forge and mend weapons without needing to visiting one of those smiths; the ability to sacrifice some humanity to boost a Bonfire, giving the player a stronger Estus Flask.

Despite the cruelty and harshness thrown at the player, Dark Souls is still wonderful to play. Hand-to-hand combat is smart, broad and deep. There is a much larger array of weaponry, suits of armor and mysterious items. It is still fascinating to peel away its layers, to discover how its many components weave together, for gone are concepts from the previous game that governed World Tendency, Character Tendency and the variance between body and soul forms.

Dark Souls is also a much more beautiful game to take in than its predecessor. Its environments are at times brightly colored and lush, at other dark, dank and revolting. Beautiful and fascinating though it may be, the first 24 hours have been horrific and adrenaline-fueled. I've suffered a lack of sleep from playing, in part due to the late night invigoration of fighting huge demons and dragons.

There's still much to do. Far beyond the Belfry Gargoyles, I'm still only a fraction of my way through this world. Intensely difficult though it may be, I'm ecstatic to further plumb its bleak and unforgiving depths, without the help of a Wiki or strategy guide. In fact, I think I'll get started on my 25th hour of hell right now. So far, it's been heaven.

Stay tuned for further impressions over the coming weeks, including a look at the Xbox 360 release of Dark Souls.

The Harsher, DeadlierDark Souls is also a More Beautiful Horror Adventure

There's no mistaking it. Dark Souls is as much a Demon's Souls sequel as we're ever going to get, at least any time soon. It's the more beautiful Demon's Souls. More »

A Dark Souls Prison Break, Straight Out of Gamescom

The people showcasing From Software's role-playing game Dark Souls—which you've likely heard is something of a challenge—were prone to frequent deaths during a brand-new demonstration of the game. More »

Over at the Irrational Games' Blog, the BioShock Infinite developer has posted concept art and documents from an old, abandoned game called Dungeon Duel. The game had made it all the way to development back in 2002, based off of a pitch that described it as a "fast-paced RTS strategy with the addictiveness of card game trading in a unique fantasy setting–a true RTS game built specifically with consoles and their controllers in mind."

The post includes a collection of concept art and screen mockups, and even the game's entire concept document as a PDF. Had it been made, Dungeon Duel would have included unlockable "expansion packs," randomly generated dungeons, good and evil campaign modes, and multiplayer modes like Duel, Capture the Flag, "Dungeon Ball," "King Killer," and Last Man Standing.

BioShock: Infinite creative director Ken Levine would have been assuming that same role in Dungeon Duel, along with current Irrational Games art director Nate Wells, lead artist Shawn Robertson, and concept artist Robb Waters.

Time is limited and resources are finite, and so all game development studios can only make a certain number of games. But it's fun to read about Dungeon Duel and wonder what could have been. And who knows? Given that we've seen some textures from another unfinished Irrational game in Bioshock: Infinite already, maybe a late-game scene will feature Elizabeth and Booker engaging in some good ol' card-trading. Stranger things have happened.

From the Vault: Dungeon Duel [Irrational Games Blog]

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was one of the unexpected surprises of 2010—a wonderfully colorful, well-told story full of enjoyable Uncharted-esque gameplay and some some remarkably well-done digital performances. Its story wasn't perfect, but those opening chapters (and that finale!) stick with me even today, as do its two mismatched protagonists.

So I was bummed to hear that developer Ninja Theory will not be making a sequel. But when I thought about it, I realized that I wasn't bummed because I actually want another Enslaved game—goodness knows, we have enough sequels flooding the market already—but because of what the decision says about the game's sales. Namely, that they weren't good enough for Ninja Theory to make another game. Not that many people bought Enslaved, and so not that many people played it, and that is a shame.

Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades is quoted as saying "Enslaved should have done better. Right now we should have been doing a sequel and perfecting that sequel and doing what franchises do, which is get better over time."

We'll never know whether Enslaved really would have gotten better over time. But as I mentioned in my review of Gears of War 3, franchise iteration helps game designers iron out the kinks in their design and mechanics, but it can often prove anathema to the storytelling, filmic qualities of games.

Does Enslaved really need an additional chapter? Would we really have gotten more out of watching Monkey and Trip travel across another series of post-apocalyptic wastelands, meet another couple of scavengers, explore their complicated relationship further? I'm not so sure. Enslaved stands pretty well on its own.

Furthermore, without spoiling anything, I found it refreshing that Enslaved had an actual ending. It raised all sorts of questions, and it was anything but some weak cliffhanger leading into a presumed sequel.

All that's not to say that I wouldn't have immediately played an Enslaved sequel, should Ninja Theory have made one. But now that Enslaved is off the table, the studio is free to work on other projects, and Enslaved is still a worthy, complete work.

And hey, if you haven't played Enslaved yet (and based on its sales numbers, you probably haven't), you still can. It's available for incredibly cheap, and its colorful art, story and characters might provide a nice break from the dark destruction of so many of this fall's upcoming releases.

Ninja Theory Confirms No Work on Enslaved 2 [CVG]

In Oregon, when I trade my games in, I'm required to certify there is no lien against them, like the IRS wants my copy of NCAA Football 11. It's one of the many fun-filled ways in which local ordinances regulate the sale of used games. Madison, Wisc., is scheming up another.

A proposed ordinance would have retailers collect personal information from those who sell used items—games, among them. Doesn't sound intrusive? Well, a goddamn photo of you will be taken. And entered into a police database. This is where all of you who bitch about the ACLU suddenly find it to be your best friend, because they are hot on the case.

Like many such ordinances, this one is aimed at actual miscreants—thieves, burglars, drug addicts, etc.—who don't give a crap about the civil liberties it violates and will probably connive a way around it anyway.

Civil liberties advocates note that the law doesn't prohibit local police from building a suspect profile out of information from its used games/movies database. Further, nothing prohibits the cops from sharing it with federal or state law enforcement.

The proposal passed a city council committee on Wednesday. It has yet to go to a vote of the full board.

Crime and Courts: Proposed resale shop ordinance raises Big Brother concerns [Source via Game Politics]

We already know that the soundtrack for Batman: Arkham City looks promising. It'll feature original tracks from a ton of bands, including Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Boxer Rebellion, Serj Tankian, and The Raveonettes. All of the groups seem to have put a lot of work into providing quality cuts.

The track from the Danish electro duo The Raveonettes is now streaming online. Titled "Oh, Stranger," it's a suitably dark, gothic bit of electro, a dramatic build to a pusling beat, all layered guitars and stadium-sized reverb. Dare I say that it sounds a little bit... Batman-y? The Arkham City video montages practically direct and edit themselves.

Give it a listen for yourself:

The Arkham City soundtrack goes on sale on October 4th, two weeks before the game comes out on October 18th.

Via Spinner.

Photo by Alba Mayoral Escudero

Traditionally releasing the first or second Tuesday of August, Madden NFL 12 this year moved to the end of the month, Aug. 30. EA Sports insisted the schedule change was not because of this year's NFL lockout, but because it provided a more natural alignment of the game's launch to the league's opening week in September. Well, that's not actually the case, according to Madden's director of marketing.

"We launched the last day of August because of the lockout, instead of the second week," Anthony Stevenson told Industry Gamers. "In years past, we would spend so much money in the beginning of August. The TV ads are talking to the mass fans, but they're not fully engaged in early August. So it made so much more sense to move the launch closer to the football season launch when fans were engaged."

[Update 8:29 p.m.] An EA Sports representative told Kotaku that Stevenson was misquoted by Industry Gamers. Kotaku's original post follows.

What's more, this year was the most expensive marketing campaign in Madden history, Stevenson said.

"We did decide to spend even more this year than we ever have before, because of the NFL lockout," he told Industry Gamers. "A large part of the increase in our spending was our partners stepping up and helping out. Madden is typically in the top 2 [best-selling games of the year]; we contended it would be top 10 if not top 5, even if there was no season. They [our retail partners] rely on Madden to be a big seller for them, so they would go with it."

The later release date and augmented marketing seemed to be worth it. Madden NFL 12's early sales clocked in 10 percent higher this year than they were after the same time last year, despite the weakest reviews for the series in the past five years.

Madden NFL 12 Post-Mortem [Industry Gamers]