At the Diablo III launch in Seoul, the country's most famous cosplayer collective, Spiral Cats, was on hand to help kick of the game's Korean release.

Spiral Cats donned Diablo III outfits and appeared at a stage show for the game. In the world of Korean cosplay, the group is about as big as they come, appearing at launch events like this and even promoting Microsoft's Kinect.

Spiral Cats has been cosplaying for years now. "I think it was all that experience that paid off," Tasha previously told Kotaku. "I believe that we can project our love for the character that we cosplay through our pictures. However, just because we love our characters and work doesn't necessarily result in pictures that everyone can appreciate. You must analyze and understand the character to be able to justify your own interpretation."

Check out the aforementioned Tasha as the Demon Hunter. It was her birthday, too, so happy birthday to her. Happy Diablo III release day to gamers around the world!

왕십리에 디아3 캐릭터가 나타났다! 스파이럴 캣츠의 코스프레 행사 [Inven Thanks, Sid!]

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Hey, I know that server errors are to be expected when an online game launches. That doesn't make it any less annoying that I've been trying (quite diligently!) to log in to Diablo III for the last half-hour to no avail.

I don't even want to play with other people! I just wanted to click some stuff to death before I went to bed, you know?

Most every time I enter my password, I get the above error message. Sometimes, it starts trying to load my heroes, only to time out. One glorious time, I actually got to the character screen. Oh, it was lovely! I named my Monk (yes, you guys convinced me), but then… it timed out. Such sweet disappointment!

(The repeating, epic music isn't helping, Diablo III. It only makes my repeated failures to get the game to load seem more tragic and eventually, hilarious.)

I'm sure I'll get in soon. Actually, I'm not sure! But I'm sure I'll get in… this week. And hey! At least I'm on the west coast, so it's only 12:30 AM.

If it was 3:30 AM for me right now… and the Red Bull was starting to wear off… things would probably start getting ugly.

Update, 4:00 AM EST: Blizzard has posted the following update to Facebook:

Welcome to Diablo III! The fight for Sanctuary has begun.

Please note that due to a high volume of traffic, login and character creation may be slower than normal. If you're unable to login to the game or create characters, please wait and try again. We've temporarily taken our Battle.net websites offline and launched more servers to accomodate for the traffic. We hope to resolve these issues as soon as possible and appreciate your patience.

Guys... I don't know how to tell you this, but the fight for Sanctuary has not quite begun yet.

Update 2, 4:25 AM EST: Welp, I'm chalking this one up to the gods of immensely ambitious launches and calling it a night. It does sound as though folks on my various social media outlets are starting to get in, so things'll probably even out into tomorrow. Godspeed!

Tentacle Bento is the name of a card game currently up on Kickstarter seeking funding. As of posting, it has received twice as much money as it originally said it needed. Which is a bit of a bummer, since it's a game about raping girls with tentacles.

Yeah, you can say this is a fetish, and yeah, you can say it's a cultural thing (even though this is made not by a Japanese outfit but by Westerners), you can even say the act of rape is only being alluded to, but come on. Fact of the matter is, this is clearly intended to be a game about tentacle rape, to appeal to those people who find such things interesting and/or funny.

Who are usually the kind of people who don't understand its place in Japanese popular culture. Which leads us to awkward and uncomfortable situations like this one.

As Brandon says over on Insert Credit, "The style is a cute, lighthearted, pastel-colored look at the wonderful world of forcing your way inside a female against her will. There are, to my mind, a lot of things wrong with this."

No shit.

To each his/her own is a mantra I normally get by on, no matter how messed up the subject matter, but at the very least this game reflects poorly on Kickstarter, who seem to have no problem (provided they even know about it) hosting the project.

People, myself included, give Apple shit all the time about being too loose with what it lets onto a storefront its nominally responsible for. This shouldn't be any different.

Here's a clip of the game's creator showing how Tentacle Bento works. It's creepy as hell. Almost as creepy as the game's official trailer, below.

Tentacle Bento and Kickstarter: When No Regulation is Bad Regulation [insert credit]

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After eleven years, the next entry in the Diablo series is now unlocked, open and ready to go. Or, at least, it should be. If you've got the client installed, have at it! And if you have any problems, comments or excited thoughts, please, leave them below.

UPDATE - And whaddya know, people are having problems logging in. Would it help if I told you to wait until tomorrow morning? No, sorry, didn't think so.

If you think I mean Sonic, get out. And don't come back.

I mean Segata Sanshiro, Sega Saturn ad man and star of easily the greatest video game commercials ever made.

During the height of his popularity in Japan in the late 90s, Takara released this figure based on Sanshiro (played by former Kamen Rider star Hiroshi Fujioka). Standing around 12" tall, it's not the greatest toy you'll ever see, but...OK, no, it is. And yes, I am saying that just so Sanshiro doesn't come around and kick my ass.

Sega Saturn Segata Sanshiro Action Figure & VHS [GameSniped]

There are two kinds of Batman: Arkham City action figures. There are the standard ones, and there are the expensive ones. These are a new line of the standard ones, but before you let that put you off, some of them look pretty great.

DC Direct's third series of Arkham City toys include six figures. Those six are Batman, Ra's Al Ghul, Azrael, The Penguin and two different models of the Joker's thugs.

Each stands around 6-7" tall (Penguin excepted), and they'll be out in September.

Batman: Arkham City Series 3 Figures [TNI]

Here's an English-language trailer for the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, for the Nintendo 3DS. Throwing Disney and Square Enix is still resulting in pretty much exactly what you'd expect it would.

After it was discovered last week that the number of "official" DICE and EA Battlefield 3 servers on console had dropped significantly in the wake of a new rental scheme, the developer has moved to bring a large number of them back.

We were told last week that no servers had gone offline; instead, DICE's own had been rented out to fans, who were customising game styles to their own whims. Sadly, that didn't appeal to the large numbers of people who wanted to play a "normal" game of Battlefield 3, so the developer has brought a ton of them back into the fold.

"You should see DICE-hosted servers up today", EA told VentureBeat. "I do not have the exact percentage or number of servers, but we'll continue to monitor this to make sure all players are having the best possible gameplay experience."

A search on PS3 turned up over 170 servers alone, all across the planet, so yeah, they're back.

EA returns official DICE servers to Battlefield 3 [VentureBeat]

In 2010, Ubisoft released one of the best video game "trailers" I'd ever seen, using fancy effects and real actors to bring Ghost Recon to life.

Now, two years later, they're back, and this one's not only longer, it's better.

I can't imagine the marketing pull this will receive will be worth the time and effort, but damned if this isn't enjoyable enough as a standalone thing, marketing be damned.