In today's build-your-own edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Arok Lazarus shares with us how he and his girlfriend spent his first day playing Minecraft on the Xbox 360. What did you do?

Wooh Minecraft on the 360!

Here's what I did my first day on it: My girlfriend and I splitscreened the game for several hours and after doing the tutorial we went to live in the tutorial town for a while. My first night in the bed in a nice pre-built house I was attacked by a creeper! In my house with the door closed! My girlfriend slept in the prison, although we weren't aware it was a prison until I accidentally locked her in. After this little mishap we stockpiled our resources (we had no idea what we were doing so I got a few fish and some more wooden tools) and struck off for new land to call our own.

Settled for a land south of the tutorial town and promptly tunneled a cave to live in temporarily. The next day I scouted for a place to build a house and my girlfriend started gathering more resources. Several creeper attacks over the course of a few days had us rebuilding our cave for a while and ultimately build a secret back entrance so we could escape if there was a creeper at our front door. Now we've managed to mostly level a very tall hill and we are now filling it in with dirt so we can start building our home.

In short, I love this game! I played it once on my laptop but the terrible frame rate made it an unenjoyable experience to say the least. Now however I can see why so many people love this game. I think the nice soundtrack really helps the game a lot too.

Two of gaming's best and most beloved video game studios are no longer squabbling about the word DoTA. The makers of World of Warcraft and the creators of Half-Life jointly announced in a blast to the press today that they have reached "a mutual agreement regarding concerns over names of upcoming products."

Peace in our time!

The agreement: Valve will still be making a game called DOTA 2 and use the DOTA term commercially (translation: on things you can buy). Blizzard will keep using the term non-commercially for Warcraft III and StarCraft II maps.

Blizzard is changing the name of its planned Blizzard DOTA custom game in StarCraft II, which will now be called Blizzard All-Stars. That name, Blizzard's Rob Pardo said, "better reflects the design of our game."

This resolves what was becoming an ugly trademark dispute between two fan-favorite game studios.

The DoTA term, short for "Defense of the Ancients", was a fan-made mod that was made in 2003 for Blizzard's Warcraft III. It involved a specific multiplayer game-type that involved players protecting opposing waves of minions. DoTA games have been surging in popularity thanks to games such as League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. Valve entered the fray in 2010, raising eyebrows with their intent to team up with a top DoTA developer to make a game they'd call DoTA 2. They began pursuing a trademark of the DoTA term. Blizzard objected and recently tried to block the trademark, a few months after announcing that it was making its own official Blizzard DoTA game featuring characters from the companies popular series like World of Warcraft and Diablo.

It was getting awkward. Valve was issuing complaints like this to the U.S. government's trademark office: "Valve seeks to appropriate the more than seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed in the mark DOTA and in its Warcraft III computer game and take for itself a name that has come to signify the product of years of time and energy expended by Blizzard and by fans of Warcraft III."

Now it seems resolved between these two heavyweights.

Blizzard's Pardo: "Both Blizzard and Valve recognize that, at the end of the day, players just want to be able to play the games they're looking forward to, so we're happy to come to an agreement that helps both of us stay focused on that."

Valve's Gabe Newell: "We're pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one. We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities."

League of Legends creators' at Riot Games have previously said that they'd object to Valve trademarking DoTA. Kotaku has reached out to Riot to clarify where they stand on this matter and will update when we hear back.

Do you want to mix some drinks, or turn your neighborhood into a war zone? Anything is possible with the magic of mobile gaming, probably!

It's another eclectic mix of genres and themes this week. There's an augmented reality shooting app; downhill skiing with an added hint of desperation; the obligatory physics puzzler; a game about dismembering a corpse; and the story of a girl that becomes a bartender.

If you told me ten years ago I'd be putting all of those things together in one list, I'd have wondered who you were and what you were doing in my mother's house.

Get out of there and go play some games! Or stay there. She makes a great baked bean casserole.

If you have a suggestion for an app for the iPhone, iPad, Android or Windows Phone 7 that you'd like to see highlighted, let us know.

Turn Your iPhone into a Virtual Military Arsenal

Your living room is the setting of your next first-person shooter. Or maybe its your front yard. Or your office. It's up to you. More »

I Hate You, Ski Safari. Okay, One More Game.

Defiant Development's Ski Safari is one of those annoying-as-hell games that doesn't have much to it other than an infuriating knack for making your finger hit the icon reflexively every time you even so much as glance at your iPhone. More »

This Game Will Tell You a Tale, Make You Laugh and Teach You To Mix Drinks

I love a good story. In fact, I love a good story almost as much as I love a good drink. The two things come together in fine form in the iPhone and iPod Touch game Bar Oasis 1.5, a free sequel of sorts that bridges the gap between Bar Oasis and the pending Bar Oasis 2. More »

You Have To Dismember Yourself To Solve These Puzzles

The best zombie games are those that let you play as the decaying, walking, blood-thirsty corpses rather than against them. More »

This Physics Puzzler is Amazeballs

The idea of rolling a virtual ball around the screen is not new. Nor is the idea of a physics-emulating puzzler. What I'm looking for, when I try a mobile app fitting that description, is execution and charm. Amazeballs provides. More »

If you pledged financial support during Double Fine's now-legendarily successful Kickstarter campaign, you probably already saw this video. But if you didn't, now you get to.

2Player Productions is making a documentary tracking the game's progress, and those who supported the kickstarter. Now, volume 1 is available to the public—you can watch it below. In the video, Double Fine head Tim Schafer and his rogue's gallery of game-makers talk through the inspirations for the project and look back on their Kickstarter.

And hey, if you want to get in on the game and see the documentary chapters as they're released, as well as secure a copy of the game when it's completed, you can give $15 via Pay Pal through the game's page. It's like the Kickstarter than never stops!

Remember how it blew your mind when you found out that the character you'd been jumping and shooting with in the first Metroid was a woman? Well, it turns out she was hiding a lot more than long, flowing locks under that Varia Suit armor.

In a revelation that destroys 73% of the fan-fiction written about her, Nintendo's leading heroine has come out of the closet as a lesbian. In a personal essay written for McSweeney's, Samus talks about how the lonely nature of her bounty hunter work let her keep quiet for years:

I would flit between one relationship and another, hopping inside my gunship and speeding off to the next planet before things got too serious. Then the Mother Brain decided to outlaw same-sex marriage on planet SR-388. Planets Tallon IV, Aether and my birth planet K-2L followed suit. What year are we living in? Earth Year 2009? It's time for the universe to redefine its narrow concept of marriage.

As many times as she's saved the galaxy, Samus wasn't allowed to share a clandestine lover's last moments after a tragic Metroid attack:

I rushed her to the infirmary, where nurses and doctors attempted to freeze the Metroid with an ice beam and fire missiles at it five times. At least that's what they told me. I wasn't allowed to see her. Moments later I was informed she was dead. Can an argument be made against this basic human privilege? I'll never see my partner again-the Metroid guaranteed that-but the hospital was just as guilty.

Remember how, erm, clunky it was when Nintendo and dev studio Team Ninja tried to add depth to Samus Aran's backstory in Metroid: Other M? The controversial characterizations and the stilted dialogue all make a weird sort of sense now. Can you say cover-up, boys and girls?

Could Samus' fictional sexual preference be the reason that she hasn't has the kind of splashy 25th anniversary celebrations that Mario and Link have gotten? No art books or concert tours for poor Samus. Hell, even the Metroid Prime Trilogy has been out-of-print for years. Nintendo should honor this brave soul and give her the hero's recognition she deserves.

METROID'S SAMUS ARAN SPEAKS OUT ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE [McSweeney's]

Some people believe that Japanese role-playing games are meant to be single-player experiences, enjoyed alone in the dim blue light of your living room during marathon binge sessions involving little to no contact with other human beings.

Other people believe that the first group of people are totally boring and that the single-player-only model is as obsolete as VHS tapes or paying for music. And also multi-player games make lots and lots of money.

"So who's right?" you might ask. "The hermits or the money-mongers?"

Good question. I don't know if there's an answer.

On one hand, if you ask the business executives behind gaming's biggest companies, single-player games are on the fast track to extinction. Square Enix Europe CEO Phil Rogers said as much just this week.

"The industry as a whole is realizing that all games, whether they be on console, PC or handheld, need to be social to survive," he told Gamasutra. "There are, of course, many different aspects to online play, but we see social and collaborative play as something that players of all types are increasingly interested in."

Square Enix is, of course, the publisher behind mammoth series Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and one of the biggest players in the world of JRPGs. So when one of the company's top executives says that games can't survive without some sort of social play, it's worth a listen.

Not that Rogers' comments are much of a surprise to JRPG fans, who by now have probably noticed that the industry's most talented designers are focusing on social and mobile projects. The creator of Final Fantasy, who left Square Enix a while back, is now working on a mobile surfing game (that will likely have some sort of social aspect). Other big names that you may or may not have heard of are also working on games in the mobile and social sectors.

Even Dragon Quest, a series that for decades has been the Republican Party of JRPGs, is going all MMORPG for its next release, out this summer in Japan.

This is because social games make lots and lots of money. Loads. More money than your average game maker knows what to do with. (This is generally a good reason for a business to chase a trend.)

So if you're a fan of traditional JRPG experiences, this might all seem nothing short of terrifying. You might hear the word "social" and instantly shudder, your mind filled with dancing Zynga cows and endless pop-ups about sharing things on your news feed. You might envision a world where the only way to play a JRPG is to dish out $15/month for the privilege.

This kind of future is indeed worrying. Even with smaller developers like Falcom and Atlus and tri-Ace pumping out single-player JRPGs on a regular basis, we could see more and more talented designers heading to the social sector in droves.

But social games are making money for a reason. So let's not condemn them. Let's be more creative. Why are multiplayer games so appealing to so many people, even when they're saddled with repetitive, grindy gameplay ("go kill 20 slimes, please")? What is it about interactive entertainment that makes multi-player components so essential?

I think the answer is simple. We enjoy playing games with our friends because, as a general rule, our friends are more interesting than video game characters. This is because our friends are actual human beings. But it's also because video game characters tend to be boring.

Have you played Persona 3? It's a beast of a JRPG, a critically-acclaimed delight that I've been grinding through for the past few weeks. I love it to death. And I think it's just as social as any multiplayer title.

Here's the part where I sound like a mad man. Persona 3 is a social game because it lets you interact with people who feel real. Its cast of characters—genuine, oft-crazy personalities like the goofball Junpei and the sweaty Gourmet King—are Persona would never work as an MMORPG because its inhabitants would be more boring than the characters that have populated the series for years. In other words, Persona 3 is successful because its characters are just as, if not more interesting than human beings.

That takes a lot of skill to pull off, of course. And not all games can do it. In my review for Xenoblade, released last month for Wii, I pointed out that it felt like a single-player MMORPG. I also pointed out that its characters, with the exception of a rogueish Han Solo-type named Dunban, had the personality traits of your average MMORPG player: stuffy and dull. Xenoblade would be the perfect MMORPG because its strengths lie in its world and its environments, not in its characters.

Of course, "make interesting characters" isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to the debate over social gaming. There are other solutions. Why not try out an episodic JRPG, released on a regular schedule that almost feels like television, giving fans cliffhangers and story theories to discuss and debate on a weekly basis? Or what about a single-player JRPG that ships with a hefty multiplayer component, like Final Fantasy VIII's addictive Triple Triad card mini-game or Final Fantasy X's blitzball?

The possibilities here are limitless, and I hope JRPG developers decide to explore them before jumping ship for straight-up MMORPGs or Facebook clickfests. "Social" doesn't need to be a curse word.

Random Encounters is a weekly column dedicated to all things JRPG. It runs every Friday at 3pm ET.

Hello Kotaku and happy Friday.

Let's make this happy Friday even happier with happy nominations from you happy people. I'm sure you'll happily oblige with some outstanding ones.

Since Fahey nominated one early in the week, and since I and many of you seconded the nomination, feast yours eyes on this comment before placing judgment in the comment section below.

Ok, now place judgment. With a link to the comment in question please.

Their main business may be games and related accessories but GameStop also sells refurbished iPods, iPads and iPhones.

Pretty soon, they might just start selling MacBooks, too.

An anonymous GameStop employee sent in a picture of the retail chain's inventory screen that seems to suggest that you might be able to buy Apple's popular laptops through the video game mega-chain.

If the prices on the screen are any indication—and they may just be placeholders—these likely would be refurbished Macbooks, like the iOS devices GameStop sells.

> Of course, this could be just a trial program in a test market, too. Kotaku's reached out to GameStop for comment and will update this story as needed?

No cause for alarm. I just thought you might like to chat.

I'm the editor-in-chief of Kotaku. You're a Kotaku reader.

How are things? How are we doing?

Do you like our programming blocks? Kotaku Melodic? Kotaku East? Any others? Hate any of them? I've been enjoying Owen's Anger Management more than I thought I would. It always makes me laugh. (Which doesn't mean that Off-Kilter makes me angry, mind you.)

Did you read Kate's terrific Mother's Day piece? Did you send your mom a card yet??

I was wondering: aside from "not at all", what would be the ideal way for us to cover cell phone games? What we're doing? Something different?

Oh? You want to know a little about what we're up to these days? Well, we're going to E3 soon. Things will be a bit mad there. I was recently interviewed about the show. They asked me to predict winners and losers. Already. Crazy, no? I think the show will be big. We're sending lots of people. One for every Wii U launch game? We'll see!

I've run previous "From the EIC" notes on Kotaku when there were big changes coming. This time, I just wanted to see how things are going, answer any questions you might have (my middle name is "Andrew", yes), that sort of thing.

Ask away! Feedback ahoy! Etc!

As I prepare to spend Tuesday through eternity putting Diablo III through its paces, SteelSeries sent along a care package of diabolical PC accessories to help make the most of the experience. Red glow abounds!

While other manufacturers release their own non-branded peripherals, SteelSeries, a Blizzard partner for a number of years, has the official accessories for the pointing, clicking, listening and mouse-sliding of Diablo III.

After posing the packages on the same faux-leather recliner that shall serve as my throne on my dark journey into hell's heart, I actually opened them up and played with the contents. I would have just left them there, but the asses in my household are mighty and powerful. You needed to know that.

The Mouse.

This lovely little number is a seven-button laser mouse, adjustable up to 5,000 CPI, more CPI than the normal human can possibly withstand. That many counts per inch means that if you move the mouse just a fraction of an inch, your pointer winds up on the monitor of an accountant in Wyoming. Some gamers thrive on this sort of precision. I prefer mine in the 1,000 range. Still, it's nice to have the option should I developer superpowers.

Superpowers like being able to withstand 10 million clicks. That's one of SteelSeries' big selling points. They say it's three times more than the average mouse. According to my calculations, that's enough to run through the early Diablo III beta test as a Barbarian 1,102 times. So you should probably buy a case of these.

I've used the mouse for several days now and have yet to reach 10 million clicks. I'll keep you all posted. I'm guessing / hoping that on the 10,000,001st click it explodes, taking your hand with it.

With seven easily-programmable buttons, configurable illumination and a relatively modest $69.99 price tag, I see no reason why one shouldn't pick up at least one of these for Diablo III. SteelSeries makes a fine mouse. This one glows red.

The Headset.

Don't tell SteelSeries, but I've actually had this headset since BlizzCon 2011. The company was there, giving them out left and right, and a friend of mine handed it to me. I took it home and used it faithfully until Razer stole me away with the Tiamat 7.1 Surround Sound headset.

Yes it lights up. Yes it has a Diablo III-themed configuration utility that allows players to customize the lighting and equalizer presets. It's got a retractable microphone. It even, if you can believe it, plays sound. Sound, as the back of the box says, with a soundscape specifically designed to enhance the Diablo III experience, though I would be hard-pressed to tell you whether or not that happened.

It does all of these things, and does them well, but the most attractive feature of the headset for me is how damn comfortable it is. It's surprisingly light for such an imposing product, and the extra-large ear cups, designed to minimize outside noise, actually cover my giant-sized ears. They're perfect for long-term wear. I hardly noticed them. I might still be wearing them now, and I would never know.

The SteelSeries Diablo III headset runs $119.99. If you're in the market for a headset for Diablo III, it would be $119.99 well-spent.

The Mousepad.

Horrible. It was like running my mouse over ground glass.

Sorry, always wanted to do that. In reality the Diablo III is a fine cloth-covered mouse surface, large and expansive, festooned with official art and ready to sit underneath your mouse and not make lewd comments when you rub it.

Along with a standard Diablo III logo version, the pads come in Barbarian, Witch Doctor, Monk and Demon Hunter. If you are a Wizard, you're out of luck. Take your $14.99 elsewhere, spellcaster, you're not welcome here.

And that's the lot. As my Wizard (dammit) slips on his robe, picks up his magical stick, and pops on his hat, I'll be splaying these things across the piece of wood that serves as my recliner desk, waiting anxiously for click 10,000,001 to remove me from the PC game reviewing pool in an impressive explosion of fire, flesh, and bone shards.