The latest installment of Ubisoft's open-world FPS series comes into focus in this new trailer, where we see that it's never a good idea to get blackout drunk on an uncharted island. You'll watch regular guy Jason Brody—bro is even part of his name!—just trying to get away from civilization for a few relaxing days with his girlfriend. They got further away than they ever bargained, it seems. Far Cry 3 will hit PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 on September 7th of this year in Europe and September 4 in the U.S.

Ubisoft won't even wait a full year to release the next Assassin's Creed, because the next one, Assassin's Creed III, will be out on October 13 30. The company announced that today during a call with investors, bumping the AC series up from its traditional November release.

Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot says the game will be "the biggest launch in Ubisoft history." He said the game has been in development for three years.

Details are scant about the new game, but Ubisoft has promised that it will star a new protagonist, giving Ezio de Auditore, hero of Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and Assassin's Creed: Revelations a rest.

You can watch the end of Revelations for some hints about where ACIII might take us. Or you can just read the theories...that lead us to some likely era, everyone's favorite being the American Revolution.

NOTE: We originally said the date would be October 13. But we now believe we misheard the French-accented words "October 30th". Our apologies.

This morning's Watch This, Play This features a little of everything. In fact, you could probably break multi-tasking records and watch the videos simultaneously even while playing our new Gaming App of the Day. But probably not.

WATCH: One of our favorite web series, Awesome series, just posted an update with a new cartoon in which Link struggles through quite a few emotions.

WATCH: This chiptunes remix of Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" may even be better than the original.

WATCH: Tomonobu Itagaki at D.I.C.E. 2012 explains what it means to talk about games.

PLAY: Beat Sneak Bandit is our favorite gaming app of the day. Hopefully you have some rhythm.

Music steals time. Think about it: whether you're making it or listening to it, you're devoting ticks of the watch (mental energy away from some other pursuit.) But, what you get back, hopefully, is enjoyment. Beat Sneak Bandit

Like developer Simogo's last iOS outing Bumpy Road, BSB's cute. But it's far more clever. You play as the titular character who's trying to steal back all the stolen clocks from the city of Pulsebury from the mansion of evil Duke Clockface. The Bandit makes his way into the mansion where you'll need to make him walk. He can only amble on the beat, though, and can only turn when facing a wall. Add in sliding platforms, blinking spotlights and patrolling guards and paying attention to the music enough to keep hold of the beat gets much harder.

The goal of each board is to collect the big clocks secreted away in the mansion and you'll need to pocket smaller timepieces to unlock special bonus rooms in the Shadow Mansion levels.

The difficulty comes in two tiers in BSB. Firstly, you'll need to get into the habit of the controls, which might be difficult even if you're used to similar titles like Elite Beat Agents or Parappa the Rappa. Your own twitchiness and sense of rhythm might help or hinder your acclimation.

However, BSB demands not only that you listen to the beat but that you figure out how parts of a song—all represented by elements in a level—work together musically. So, the trap doors slide in and out in time with a trill and that trill interpolates between the rhythms of a guard's turns.

The other twist to difficulty comes from the combination of elements that you'll face. A guard behind a door underneath a spotlight might force you to double-time your steps, which is incredibly nerve-wracking.

Each level's a rhythmic puzzle and getting a chunk of it wrong means that you won't be able to reach every clock. BSB forces you to find your own patience, like all good stealth games. In Splinter Cell titles, Rocksteady Studios' Batman games, Metal Gear Solid and others, the player's own jumpy reflexes can be their worst enemy.

Difficulty aside, Beat Sneak Bandit finds that perfect intersection of fun and challenge. For every groan of frustration I bellowed while playing, I never wanted to quit. There's groove infused into every pixel of BSB. Everything in the background moves in time with the musical tracks. That syncopation winds up reminding me of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons where Bugs Bunny's every tip-toe footstep got accompanied by murmuring oboe notes. Those Bugs toons wound up being classic and I think Beat Sneak Bandit will steal its way into iOS gamers' hearts, too.

Beat Sneak Bandit [Simogo]

Tomonobu Itagaki, the mind behind Dead or Alive and two of the recent Ninja Gaiden games, went through a few rough patches during his long career as a game designer.

The former Tecmo employee delivered a heartfelt speech at this year's Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit, which you can see above thanks to GameSpot's recording.

How Bruce Willis Saved Tomonobu Itagaki - D.I.C.E. 2012 [GameSpot]

Soulful songstress Lana Del Rey made a splash last year with her single "Video Games", a song that repeated the term 'video games' several times, causing many gamers to fall instantly in love despite the games in question being used as an example of how routine her once passionate relationship had become. The video was lovely, but it lacked a certain something: Actual video games.

Chiptune artist Leeni has crafted a gorgeous cover of "Video Games" that not only sounds much better than the original tune, its video contains real honest-to-goodness video game footage. Let's watch!

Leeni compiled the music video for her version of "Video Games" using clips she felt mimicked the feel of the original music video. I think she did a fabulous job, even if she was forced to use Barbie game cut scenes.

I've been following chiptune for a while now and this is the first time I've heard of Leeni, which isn't surprising considering the sheer amount of artists out there. After listening to some of the other tracks on her website, I'm quite sure I will never forget her.

If you'd like to hear more from Leeni (you should), her latest EP, Headphones On Your Heart, is currently on sale at Bandcamp, with 100 percent of the proceeds going towards The Jed Foundation's Love is Louder campaign and other suicide prevention programs.

Great music for a good cause? Sure beats playing video games and ignoring Lana Del Rey.

Stuff to play, stuff to see, here comes Watch This, Play This. Confused? Read this.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was a wonderful game on the PC and a fine game on the Xbox 360. On the PlayStation 3, however, it had issues for some players. Lag issues. Horrible, game-killing lag issues. Issues that made some Sony console owners shout that the game shouldn't be Game of the Year.

What went wrong? And why have the game's developers at Bethesda struggled to fix it?

At the DICE Summit in Las Vegas last week, Bethesda's chief game designer, Todd Howard, explained:

"We did a ton more testing this time around, so the game is definitely our most solid release regardless of platform," Howard told me, building on what we had discussed prior to the game's release regarding the extra steps Bethesda was taking to squash the bugs common to the team's open-ended games.

"The way our dynamic stuff and our scripting works, it's obvious it gets in situations where it taxes the PS3. And we felt we had a lot of it under control. But for certain users it literally depends on how they play the game, varied over a hundred hours and literally what spells they use. Did they go in this building? [And so on.]"

One popular theory was that the lag on PS3 was due to a gamer's large save files.

"No it's not," Howard said. "That's the common misconception. It's literally the things you've done in what order and what's running. Some of the things are literally what spells do you have hot-keyed? Because, as you switch to them, they handle memory differently."

Howard said his developers knew that the PS3 was going to run into a "bad memory situation" and tried to tweak their code to prevent it from happening. He believes only "a small percentage" of gamers would run into this issues, but it was enough for Bethesda to want to fix things post-release.

"The 1.2 patch [released in November] took care of a lot of it," he said.

Problem solved? Gamers all relieved and in the clear? Not after that 1.2 patch. "There were clearly people that weren't," he said. "We didn't know why. So they sent us their saved games." Gamers submitted save files throughout December and Bethesda pored over them, trying to find the situations that screwed up the PlayStation 3's memory usage.

On the day Howard and I spoke, patch 1.4 was coming out, and Howard was hopeful that the work done using those save files would straighten the game out for more PS3 users. But he was also realistic about securing all the memory problems. The new patch, he told me, "takes care of those we have seen that are bad. So we're very confident a lot more people are going to be in a very good situation, but we're not … " He paused.

"Now that we've been through this, we're not naïve enough to say, 'We have seen everything,' because we have to assume we haven't. There are still going to be some people who have to come back to us and say, 'Ok, my situation is this.' [Our response is:] 'OK, send us your saved game.' We literally need to look at what you have running. We tried doing it through e-mail. We need to open the saved game comes up and look at it. Wr've got one guy who has seven dragons on the other side of the world, and a siege about to happen in this city and another 20 quests running. And, ok, this is what the game is trying to do and it's having a hard time running that."

They're working on it PS3, gamers. They thought they had it licked. Expect things to improve, one step at a time.

With early start Vita bundle buyers picking up their systems this morning in the U.S., commenter bassguygt is curious to know how they'll be picking up games, and frankly so are we.

I'm wondering how many Vita early adopters are choosing to buy their games in retail vs. digital PSN download format. I know that there are pros and cons of each. I've been leaning toward digital for convenience, but if I go digital, I'll go "all in" and get either the 16 or 32 gig card, which will cost me several tens of dollars I could otherwise spend on games for the Vita (and heck, money doesn't grow on trees, right?).

Going digital is more convenient (no going to a store, no changing game cards), it promotes the movement towards 100% digital distribution for video games (which I think is a plus), and it gives you the opportunity to carry a good portion/all of your Vita games library with you without having to have a separate carry case for game cards.

On the negative side, you have to buy a very expensive memory card (realistically 16GB or 32GB if you want to carry several games with you), and the ~10% discount for digital download games won't come close to recovering the cost of the memory card unless you buy a great number of games.

Retail games are often cheaper due to the seemingly more frequent sales of retailers such as Amazon, and you "actually own" them (which is a whole different debate; I'll just leave it at that). But you still need to buy a memory card (albeit a smaller one) and you have to carry all the various game cards around with you (which I really dislike if you haven't picked up on that already).

There are probably other pros and cons of each I'm not thinking of...but I'd like to know how many of those who are definitely buying a Vita near launch are going to:

a) Go 100% digital for game purchases
b) Go 100% retail
c) Some combination of retail/digital.

(Editor's Note: Hey look, a poll!)

New game designer Hannah Wyman won a trip to New York, got a grant for her school, educated kids, and met the President of the United States. And she managed it all around her dance lessons and her homework, because she's eleven years old.

We may keep seeing the same old arguments over whether games are destroying childrens' minds, but Hannah's story highlights the other half of the discussion. She took the grand prize in Microsoft's first Kodu Cup, a competition that challenged American kids ages 9-17 to create a game using Microsoft's kid-friendly Kodu development tool.

Her 2011 victory coincided nicely with the Obama administration's push for enhancing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States. As a result, she was invited to the White House science fair and was one of 30 students able to demonstrate her project directly to the president.

Her game, Toxic, has an environmental theme. The bubbly blue little avatar travels around its city zapping pollution and collecting coins and apples, and gaining points for planting trees and convincing NPCs to do the same. While the look and the mechanics are all very simple, the gameplay video shows that they work well and manage to be both entertaining and informative.

Hannah may or may not grow up to work in game design, and indeed her future is wide open and far off. But her story can remind us that games really are for everyone, and inspiration is everywhere.

Thanks for the tip, Nick!

11-Year-Old Girl Programs Game, Puts All To Shame [The Jace Hall Show]

11 Year-Old Kodu Cup Winner Honored at White House [Kodu Game Lab Community]