What made Techno Soldier so angry? Was it an unfortunate round of Call of Duty? Did someone call his mother nasty names? Is he cosplaying the angriest bird?

The mainstream media might tell you that violent video games cause this kind of behavoir, but I believe I've discovered the true culprit: green and black backdrops.

I'll go ahead and say it: green and black backdrops (or black and green, in Europe) are the biggest threat to the innocence of our planet's youth. It's a controversial stance, and an unpopular one at that. Within an hour this article's comments will be filled with angry reactions from the pro-bleeners. I'm fine with that, as long as the discussion is kept civil. That having been said, I've a feeling the banhammer will get a workout today.

Where's the proof, you ask?

Here is a scientifically-taken photo of Techno Soldier before the application of a green and black backdrop.

He's holding a machine gun, yes, but he has not fired, despite the fact that his monitor is broken, someone tossed random video game and computer equipment on the floor, and he looks to possess the world's saddest teddy bear.

Now let's apply a green and black backdrop.

What more proof do you need?

Photo credit: (C) Andrey Armyagov / Stockfresh.

The founders of Penny Arcade pulled a fast one on one of their most notorious foes this weekend, hitting Paul "Ocean Marketing" Christoforo with a prank they say has been in the works for the past three weeks.

Christoforo, who set off an Internet firestorm several months ago when he sent a series of inflammatory e-mails to address a customer complaint, was apparently caught this weekend pretending he was at Penny Arcade's PAX East, a convention he was banned from. On Sunday, he tweeted photos from the show floor as if he was there. But he never took those photos. Penny Arcade co-founders Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins texted them to him.

On Twitter, Christoforo has admitted he did not take the photos but maintains he was at the convention.

As in previous incidents with Christoforo, there's a bit of a back-and-forth to this one.

There hadn't been much public animosity between Christoforo and the Penny Arcade crew since the incident in December, but the feud resurfaced in the days leading up to PAX East last week. Christoforo engaged with Penny Arcade business manager Robert Khoo on Twitter, at one point threatening to "fucking re arrange [Khoo's] teeth."

Christoforo also used racially-charged insults to describe Khoo, who is Asian American.

On Friday and Saturday, Christoforo went on to tweet that he was at PAX East, meeting with clients and walking around the show floor. In response to questions about how he got into the show, he told Twitter users that he was "in disguise."

Perhaps to prove that Christoforo had not actually made it to the show, Penny Arcade's team pranked the marketer by texting him four photographs from the show floor. Christoforo took the bait, tweeting out the photographs on Sunday and saying he was there.

Krahulik then pulled off the lampshade, linking to a Twitter account called @paulyoudummy and telling readers to check the timestamps to show that Penny Arcade had prepared all four photographs before Christoforo ever tweeted them.

"I can tell you that there was a carefully crafted plot over the course of three weeks that led up to the moment," Khoo told Kotaku in an e-mail, adding that Krahulik will write more about the prank on Penny Arcade's website in the near future.

"He accidentally tweeted with his location turned on while he was supposedly already at the show, which displayed his hometown," Khoo added. We have not verified this tweet, but it may have since been deleted. Khoo says he is "99% sure" Christoforo was not at PAX East.

Christoforo later admitted that he did not take those photographs, although he still says he was at PAX East on Friday and Saturday. He has also posted several other show-floor pictures on his Twitter account, some of which, as Twitter users have pointed out, appear to have been shot on multiple cameras. (Christoforo addressed this by saying he indeed took the pictures with different cameras.)

We've reached out to Christoforo to find out more details about this bizarre story, but he has not yet responded. We'll update if we hear more from the infamous marketer.

Update 1: Christoforo tells us he really was at PAX:

"No pics of me in them but I was there. Gabe and them tried to pull a prank on me Sunday but i was never there on Sunday I was trolling twitter they put some pics up and I was texted the same pics I don't know if it was from them or someone I had inside on Sunday but I did not go on Sunday but wanted to mess around," he said in an e-mail.

We've asked for a few more details on just how he got into the convention. We'll keep updating as we hear more.

Update 2: We asked Christoforo how he got into PAX East. Here's what he said:

"I just had on a hat glasses and hoodie the Altier in Assassins Creed. The Badge wasn't in my name and I can't give the individuals name on that. I was also rocking a full beard as well and have lost 25 lbs since spikes interview." [sic]

It certainly looks like there's going to be a Wasteland 2 game. The crowdfunding efforts by inXile Extertainment have way exceeded the announced goals, to the point where Chris Avellone and Obsidian Entertainment will be joining to flesh out the team building the eagerly-awaited RPG.

And now inXile CEO Brian Fargo has revealed the first glimpse of concept art in a recent update post. A grim tableau of Desert Rangers done by digital artist Andrée Wallin sets the visual tone for inXile's next game. If you've donated to the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter, this image gets you all tingly.

Jack Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor and the tech visionary who founded the company that created the legendary Commodore 64 computer, died on Sunday at the age of 83, Forbes reports. We'll have more on Tramiel's great legacy later.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 looked like it was dead in the water for a while, with reports that dev studio GSC Game World was going out of business. But then the Kiev-based collective resurfaced on Facebook this year and indicated that work was underway for the sequel to their acclaimed shooter. That was way back in January, though, and it's been relatively quiet since. Should fans be worried?

Not at all! The studio's official Twitter spat out a link to a video showing animation that's been built for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. All the shambling and shooting seen in the clip is the work of former GSC employee Sergey Zhukov and in a follow-up Tweet, GSC indicates that the "work done remains." So, keep on believing, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans, your post-nuclear apocalyptic shooting dreams are still alive.

[Thanks, tipster James]

If you went to the PAX East convention in Boston, this past weekend, you would have thought that Mass Effect was the biggest video game on the planet. Mass Effect cosplayers were everywhere, and so many of them were amazing.

For starters, there was the guy who shows up as the Krogan warrior Grunt. I shot a video of him. Go ahead and watch him do his thing in the video above. Cool, huh?

I found Grunt at the PAX East BioWare lounge on Saturday, where Mass Effect super-fans of all tastes showed up. (You'll see some Dragon Age devotees in the background, too.)

Click the images to expand them.

I found a Samara Liara T'Soni there.

Here's a Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, who didn't want to be photographed without her gun. (I love the feet!)

Thane Krios was a total badass. And see who that is in the background?

UPDATE: I just found an extra shot... here's Dr. Chakwas.

I had met this extraordinary Mordin Solus a day earlier at a BioWare panel. Stunning work.

Mordin was a few feet away from a female Commander Shepard, who was flanked by Dragon Age cosplayers.

There were so many great cosplayers at the BioWare panel, I thought it would be cool to get at least half of them in one big shot.

Before PAX East, I'd seen lots of Commander Shepards before. The aliens were new to me, a wonderful sight one and all.

I guess I should have expected PAX East to be a Mass Effect cosplay extravaganza considering who I met on day one, as soon as I walked through the door, the face model for Mass Effect's Samara and Morinth:

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The Official Model for Mass Effect's Samara, Dressed Up As Samara

Today at PAX East, Stephen Totilo ran into a familiar face-Rana McAnear, the actress who provides the official model for Mass Effect's Asari Justicar Samara and her unhinged sex-killer daughter Morinth. More »

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So, Street Fighter x Tekken came out and met with widespread acclaim. Good for Capcom. Now it's Namco Bandai's turn to produce a fighting game crossover that follows up on an idea that once looked impossible. When might the Tekken company's answer be coming out? The guy who made SFxT has no idea.

"Honestly, I haven't seen a single thing about it!" said Capcom's Yoshinori Ono about Tekken x Street Fighter, in an interview with The Guardian. "[ Namco's Katsuhiro ] Harada is notoriously slow at making games, so it might be 2018 before that comes out!," Ono continued. It's clear that he was joking about the supposed release date but the recently hospitalized dev lead on SFxT was serious about other topics in the interview. About SFxT's controversial gem system, he says:

With the gem system, we wanted to add a layer of personalisation that had never been seen before in fighting games," says Ono. "No longer should customisation be purely cosmetic; it should be about fusing your own play style into characters, and that's what we've managed to do with the gem system.

"No gem is more powerful than another, and it is all about finding out what works for you as a player and you personally. New players to the genre can utilise Assist gems in order to cover their weaknesses, while more experienced players can utilise Boost gems to increase the parameters of their characters.

When asked about where he see the fighting genre possibly heading in the future, Ono answers:

… we want more and more people to become interested in fighting games so that we can grow the genre. It would be nice if we could create a means of giving new players an easy way to get acquainted with the existing fighting game community. If we can include more social features in the future titles that could help grow the communities. That would be ideal.

In case you're wondering, this interview happened before Ono's recent hospitalization. Hopefully, the producer's recuperating and waiting on Harada and crew to craft respond with their own playable mash-up.

Street Fighter and me: Yoshinori Ono on the future of the fighting game [The Guardian]

MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic has been churning along pretty well since its launch late in December of last year. Developer BioWare is now preparing to release update 1.2 for the game, which will add a rather significant amount of content.

One of the features arriving in SW:TOR with the 1.2 update is the Novare Coast warzone, a team-based PvP area. During PAX East this weekend, I had a chance to try the new warzone for myself.

I hadn't played The Old Republic since the beta, where I had a go at being a smuggler. Finding myself dropped into a 7 vs 7 capture-the-flag style PvP battle was a bit of a shocking way to become reacquainted with it. I don't always like PvP gameplay and I don't adore the Star Wars universe as much as I did a decade ago, so I was prepared to force myself through the warzone gameplay. Happily, I found it to be well done and I enjoyed myself tremendously.

The first round I played was, well, embarrassing. My entire team was slaughtered repeatedly and barely held on to any of the three bases for more than thirty seconds at a time. But in the second round, we all began to get a feel for the experience, and though we still lost, at least we lost with dignity, and I walked away with some strong impressions.

In the new warzone, there are three turret bases for which Republic and Imperial forces vie to control. Whoever controls two out of three when time is up wins — straightforward, and compelling. What I enjoyed most was how the layout of the terrain and the placement of the bases heavily encouraged the use of strategic, tactical thinking. While you could run your guys straight into their guys (the tactic that got us slaughtered repeatedly in the first round), the hills and architecture provide a great deal of opportunity for flanking and creative maneuvers. The gameplay is as chaotic as anyone might expect of a zone that has more than a dozen blaster- and lightsaber-armed players in it but, importantly, it never becomes too frenetic to follow.

In addition to the warzone, the other big part of the game update is a detailed Legacy system. The legacy system lets players map out and codify the complex web of relationships that can develop when players create characters in an RPG. It also creates small bonuses from those relationships — families, after all, teach each other things — and encourages players to move through the story with multiple characters.

Update 1.2 will also add full UI customization, a new Flashpoint (raid zone), and the massive slew of bug fixes and tiny tweaks that always come with any large MMO update. Massively reports that the update will be released this week; when I visited The Old Republic's booth, the only guaranteed time I was told was "this month." Either way, players should be able to dive into the new content soon.

In the video game War of the Roses you're a medieval mauler. You're a person with sword, mace, or bow-and-arrow. You might be on a horse. You might have a lance.

You're one of many warriors in a multiplayer game that will play like Battlefield or even a Modern Warfare, but with much older, sharper weapons.

War of the Roses is from Fat Shark, a Swedish studio located in the same country as the makers of Battlefield. One of its top developers—the man telling us all about War of the Roses in the video I shot at PAX East and am showing you here—was a producer on some of the Battlefields. The influence is clear and nothing to be ashamed about. War of the Roses sure looks cool and has some hardcore parrying and forging systems to both set it apart and to make it a fitting entry in publisher Paradox Interactive's line of unabashedly more complex games for computers.

Watch our video preview of the game above, and then look for the game on PC and Mac in late summer. Who needs guns and tanks?

In a weird, oxymoron twist of a story, two loving Angry Birds characters come together to celebrate Easter.

I never knew you could use peeps for anything other than blowing them up in the microwave, but they clearly have some cinematic value to YouTube user mike chan.

I kind of don't know what the hell is going on in this video, but I decided that the pretty colors and visuals still needed a story. So basically what happens is that the two angry birds devour the chocolate bunny in a ritualistic ceremony, hence the peep worshipers, which offsets the entire balance of the universe (because science) and causes a stylish Angry Birds meteor to come crashing into the fictional Easter Island. Or something.