Kotaku's journey around the very best cosplayers in the world continues this week with a look at American costume builder, model and make-up artist Lindze.

A make-up artist by trade, Lindze is an example of quality over quantity: while her portfolio may not be packed to the gills like many other prominent cosplayers, when she does knuckle down on a costume, the results are usually fantastic.

Going beyond the usual use of simple fabrics, Lindze often employs more complicated materials. That Miranda outfit, for example, needed all kinds of custom-printed stuff (all sewn and assembled by Lindze), while the Baroness armour had to be sculpted by a local artist (though again, she made the rest of the costume).

You can see some highlights in the gallery above, while there's more shots on Lindze's official site.

With its original developers shut down and with a story that ends rather conclusively, you wouldn't think Rockstar's LA Noire would be in line for a sequel. But it might be. Maybe.

A Rockstar representative writing on the company's official site has posted "don't count out the possibility of a new game in the L.A. Noire franchise in the future".

"We simply have not decided anything", they continue. "We're all very pleased with how that game turned out and are considering what the future may hold for L.A. Noire as a series. We don't always rush to make sequels, but that does not mean we won't get to them eventually – see Max and Red Dead for evidence of that – we have so many games we want to make and the issue is always one of bandwidth and timing."

Red Dead being the perfect example, what with Redemption and Revolver having common titles, leading ladies and...that's about it.

Asked & Answered: Max Payne 3 and More... [Rockstar]

Well, this is bananas. According to Double Fine's Tim Schafer, the cost of getting a patch up on a modern console (presumably he means the Xbox 360 and/or PS3) is $40,000.

That's not to upload downloadable content. That's just for a patch.

"Those systems as great as they are, they're still closed", Schafer told Hookshot. "You have to jump through a lot of hoops, even for important stuff like patching and supporting your game. Those are things we really want to do, but we can't do it on these systems. I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch – we can't afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, that's where it's at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. That's where people are going."

That and, you know, Kickstarter.

Interview: Schafer's Millions [Hookshot]

The man? That's Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima. The jacket? That's a replica of Ryan Gosling's from the movie Drive. With Hollywood's big night looming, a little Oscar party cosplay, perhaps?

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[Twitter]

Many people already have access to the Xbox 360 demo for Mass Effect 3, so naturally, there are people recording the thing like crazy and uploading videos to YouTube. Here are just a couple of them.

The first clip will get you some character creation and the intro. The second clip will get you the first two missions from the game.

Be warned, as this is actual gameplay content from the final release, there be spoilers ahead.

That amazing place being the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which in these episodes below went all-out and brought in both Sgt. Slaughter and Rowdy Roddy Piper as guest stars.

Aside from their wrestling fame, you may know the Sergeant as a GI Joe character. You should also hopefully know Piper as one of the two men involved in the single greatest movie fight scene of all time.

The real stars of video games aren't the characters. They're awfully fickle, and easy to kill.

But background art? It's forever. Welcome to Background Story, which will run most days as part of our new, expanded Total Recall programming block.

[via noirlac]

If you're the kind of person that believes violence isn't the answer, then I have just the game for you. I hope you're good at trivia questions instead, because otherwise you won't get far in SNK's 1991 quiz-em-up Quiz Daisousa Sen – The Last Count Down. Also, you'll be off my team for the pub quiz.

Click through the gallery above in sequence to continue reading.

There's big trouble in Quiz City, and only two men have the vast resources of pointless trivia knowledge required to save the day. These men are called Neo McDonald and Geo Kentucky (Not that they can spell their own names correctly or anything).

If you have a pop quiz, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, then maybe you can hire... The Quiz Police. I think they're policemen, but as Quiz Daisousa Sen is set in some parallel universe where all interactions take place in the form of a quiz, the requirements for joining the force are somewhat different and training mostly consists of browsing Wikipedia for hours on end.

The gameplay of QD is easy enough to explain: as you've probably figured out, it's a quiz game, an early-nineties video game version of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire machines that litter pubs up and down the country. If you've ever played Quiz & Dragons on the Capcom Classics Collection, it's exactly the same setup as that. You're asked a question, and you have four answers to choose from. Your opponent has a bar with a certain number of segments, and each time you answer correctly, one of the segments lights up. Fully light up the bar and your opponent is defeated, but if you get it wrong, you lose health. There are a few extra complications, such as the occasional power-up with effects such as reducing the amount of options you have to choose from or allowing you to choose the category of questions. A few rounds make you press the answer button as fast as possible, and sometimes you have to reach a total number of points, and you can choose harder questions for more points. That's really all there is to it.

There are two plotlines to choose from at the start of the game, and that's where I ran into a small hitch: the game is only available in Japanese, and I don't speak Japanese. Therefore, I had no idea what the hell was going on, plot wise. However, judging from what I managed to piece together from the images flashing in front of my uncomprehending eyes, I don't think knowing Japanese would lead to these plots making any more sense. Here's a quick rundown of what I managed to decipher.

Plot 1: A girl contacts Neo and Geo, possibly about her missing dog. They find a man in a balaclava (who looks like a terrorist from SNK's The Super Spy) in her house, and then they get arrested. They escape using the power of quizology. They take a plane to Hong Kong, easily getting past airport security despite being escaped felons. There they meet a robot, a ninja, some kind of criminal mastermind and another robot with the face of an old man. Old man robot explodes, they go back to the girl, who is in a graveyard. It all seems like a lot of work for a missing pet, but the girl seems happy enough. The end.

Plot 2: This one makes far more sense. In a word, Zombies. In a few more words, Neo and Geo are kidnapped by a Mafia boss who dangles them over a shark-infested pool. They escape using the power of quizology. Afterwards, they head to another graveyard, completely ignoring the Mafia boss who tried to kill them with a shark. Zombies begin to rise from their graves, and Neo and Geo take refuge in a creepy house. I have a sudden urge to play Resident Evil, but it quickly passes. They leave and head for the police station, which has been overrun with zombies, who are in turn lead by a vampire. They meet a man in the cells who tells them a thing, and then they break into an installation of some sort. After battling various zombies, they reach their final opponent. It is the President of the USA, and he turns into Satan. They out-quiz The Adversary, and things return to normal. The end.

Now, that all sounds like jolly good fun, but that's not why I played through a quiz game in a language I don't understand. No, there's a much better reason, and that reason is cameos by famous people! I say cameos, I mean SNK took their likenesses without asking. Let's have a look at them, shall we?

I noticed that when I chose Plot 2, Michael J. Fox appeared. In case you were still at a loss as to who this person is supposed to be, SNK kindly wrote "Mike" on his jacket. Obviously, once I'd seen Marty McFly here I had to work my way through the game and see who else was lurking within.

The Mafia boss with the shark is everyone's favourite on-screen psychopath, Jack Nicholson. More importantly, he's wearing a white suit with a red-and-black striped shirt and a gold scarf. Not many things could improve The Sopranos, but every mob boss dressing like that most certainly would.

Spooky Exorcist goings-on!

I would say that Norman Bates' house isn't a character, but I guess it's as much a character as anyone else in Psycho. Just look at that pixel work. It's a thing of beauty.

This police woman turns up in both stories. Two theories as to who she's supposed to be: I reckon she's either Lt. Callahan from Police Academy or Brigitte Nielsen.

Zombie Mike Tyson, complete with gappy teeth. The "Unlicensed Mike Tyson Appearances in Videogames" Wikipedia page that I mooted in the Great Boxing Rush Up! article gains another entry. "Appears in Quiz Daisousa Sen. He is impetuous, impregnable, and also a zombie."

Not sure about this one. The hair makes me think of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, but I don't think that's it. He looks familiar, though. If you think you know who it is, then let me know in the comments.

There's so much glass! Bruce Willis appears in his guise as the iconic vest-wearing, terrorist-butchering, wise-cracking John McClane in his days before the curse of baldness took another brave soul away from us.

Great Scott! My no-doubt copyrighted likeness has been stolen and placed in a bizarre Japanese quiz game! I think I might write an elaborate Quiz Daisousa Sen / Back to the Future fanfic to explain how Doc Brown ended up in Quiz City. A slash fanfic. With BDSM elements. Yeah.

I'll just leave this here...

I struggled with this one, until I noticed his name is given as "Terrorist". Then I realised he's probably Colonel Stuart, the villain from Die Hard 2. Sadly, there is no Alan Rickman.

I think this is Jackie Chan. I hope it's Jackie Chan. If I had my way, Jackie Chan would be in every game, except ironically Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu. He's too good for that.

Quiz Daisousa Sen: The Last Count Down, then. Well, it's difficult to say how good the game is due to my insistence on sticking with such a dead language as English and not converting to Glorious Japanese. That said, I like Quiz & Dragons. Quiz Daisousa Sen is almost identical to Quiz & Dragons, plus it contains Zombie Mike Tyson. I'm sure you'll agree, that's a big ol' tick in the "solid design choice" column. I could talk about how the graphics are a good example of SNK's huge, beautiful spritework, and that the music is pretty good too. But again, Zombie John McClane. Zombie John McClane. You can't argue with that.

Greetings, camp Kotaku, and welcome to the evening open thread. Have you had an enjoyable Monday? We sure have. We've debuted a couple of our new programming blocks, and I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. And hey, there's a third one coming up in 30 minutes!

In the meantime, here is a thread in which you can conversate. Assembled from around the internet, are a bunch of links and things from around the internet. A couple of them are for Valentines that you can print out!

• I want to see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - I feel like this kind of absurd thing is becoming a "thing." You know what I mean?
• Downton Abbey Valentine's Day Cards - These are funny. (They do have spoilers.)
• Here are some funny Game of Thrones Valentine's Day cards. - You know, while we're at it.
• "Who is Paul McCartney?" - Of all the dispiriting BuzzFeed tweet collections that ran during the grammys, this is maybe the most dispiriting. I mean, I don't even like The Beatles that much, but still...
• And er, here is Paul Simon singing an amazing song! - At first I thought that post was about Paul Simon. Of whom I am a huge fan.
• Toto's "Africa" - For reasons related to Far Cry 2 (why else?) I have had this goddam amazing song stuck in my head all day. Now you can too!

And that's that. Have good open threading, and enjoy the evening.

Last year, intrepid tinkerers on the PC version of Elder Scrolls V found the game didn't just include the landmass of Skyrim. You could also, with a little work, visit other parts of Tamriel, like Morrowind and Cyrodiil, the settings of Elder Scrolls III & IV respectively.

It was...a little odd. So we asked the developers what was up.

Bethesda's Todd Howard tells us "the story is they are there".

Speaking with Kotaku at DICE last week, Howard says "The reason they are there - and I will not say if we are or are not using them in the future - is when we first built the landmass for Skyrim we knew we were going to have these tall mountains.

And what can you see see? We have views early in the project where you can see into the [neighbouring] province from the other game. We needed to have something [there].

It's not high detail. If you walk there, from a distance it's...yeah, the stuff is there. And the thinking is, maybe we'll use it one day, but our larger worry was, I'm going to climb up on top of a mountain and look that way. What will I be able to see there? We try to cover all those angles as much as we can."

Mostly makes sense, as that's what was expected at the time. But the bit about "maybe we'll use it one day" is a little exciting, no?