Even by Humble Bundle standards, the Humble Bundle V contains some fantastic-ass games. Lookit that! Wow. They're all so great, in fact, that I'd be surprised if you haven't played pretty much all of them.

But still: Pay whatever you want for the terrifying and amazing Amnesia: Dark Descent, the hilarious and wildly creative Psychonauts, the dark and clever Limbo, and the lovely and incredibly soundtracked Sworcery, with freakin' Bastion thrown in as a bonus if you beat the average bid.

If you don't own even two of those games, this is a bargain… this is like, a great games all-star jam or something. The trailer above does a pretty good job of summing it up.

Perhaps best of all, all of the games come with their soundtracks, each of which is fantastic and two of which made last year's Best Game Music of 2011.

So: You probably have these games. Heck, you may play them regularly. But on the off chance that you don't, here's your chance go catch 'em all.

The Humble Indie Bundle V [Official Page]

When the bears of Perfect Island neglect to invite Naughty Bear to their island resort vacation, amazing advertising ensues. Oh, and a new Naughty Bear game coming to Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network this fall. But man, that advertising.

Seriously, browse through our coverage of the original Naughty Bear and you'll find some amazing, often nightmare-inducing videos touting a game that was, ultimately okay. Now we've got Naughty Bear Panic in Paradise coming from 505 Games and Behaviour Interactive, and I couldn't be more excited for the ads the game will spawn.

Teddy bears, as it turns out, are pretty stupid. After Naughty Bear killed everything that moved because he wasn't invited to a birthday party, they don't invite him to their fantastic holiday on Paradise Island. So Naughty Bear makes a list. He's checking it twice, trying to find out who to bludgeon and slice. You can't use that bit, 505 Games. You can, however, use N.B. Fluff 'n Snuff.

I'm positively tingling with excitement over marketing. There's something wrong with me.

For the fourth year in a row, we're comparing E3 hype to gaming reality. On Tuesday, we looked at Sony. Yesterday, we investigated Nintendo. Today, we wrap up with a look at Microsoft's E3 2011 promises.

Last year, Microsoft may as well have called their press presentation the Kinect Hour. While the Xbox 360 itself is aging and rumors about its inevitable successor continue to circulate, Microsoft featured no new hardware announcements last year (and looks unlikely to do so this year either).

Instead, Microsoft sang the praises of the Kinect and all the ways in which its motion tracking and voice recognition capabilities work with both their games and with streaming media and other entertainment. So between motion sensing and a few big game announcements, how have the last twelve months of reality stacked up against Microsoft's promises?

Let's take a look.

Game Promises

The Game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
The Promise: Available November 8.
The Verdict: Promise kept. In rather spectacular, record-breaking fashion.

The Game: Dance Central 2
The Promise: All Dance Central songs can be imported into Dance Central 2, new features (simultaneous multiplayer dancing, voice control, a campaign mode) and more than 100 total songs available at launch.
The Verdict: Promises kept. Owners of the original game were indeed able to import their songs into the new game when it launched in October.

The Game: Fable: The Journey
The Promise: A new Fable game, featuring full Kinect support, due in 2012.
The Verdict: Pending. 2012 has six months left to go, and no more specific time-frame was given. The latest public update we've had were some screenshots in March.

The Game: EA Sports lineup
The Promise: "Four EA Sports titles will feature Kinect support in 2012." Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Madden, FIFA, and "one more that we'll announce later."
The Verdict: Mixed. The Kinect support is rolling in on the 2013 editions of the sports franchises, and didn't hit last fall's 2012 releases (which came out in 2011). Tiger Woods 13 had Kinect support, FIFA 13 is promised to but FIFA 12 didn't; Madden 13, like FIFA, promises Kinect support in Madden 13 but missed it in Madden 12. And that fourth game? We still don't know what it is.

The Game: Forza Motorsport 4
The Promise: Racing game to feature Kinect integration, all sorts of multiplayer features, monthly expansions, and a Top Gear tie-in. Release date October 11, 2011.
The Verdict: Promises kept. The game launched on October 11 and was well-received. They have indeed continued to add monthly DLC as promised.

The Game: Gears of War 3
The Promise: Very little was actually said on stage, as Cliff Bleszinski and Ice-T instead picked up controllers and played through a demo. Bleszinski reiterated that Gears is an Xbox exclusive, and Ice-T promised that he and his band were going to make a song about Horde mode.
The Verdict: Promise kept. There is indeed a song, and Gears of War 3 launched last September.

The Game: Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
The Promise: Kinect support for a weapon modification system called "Gunsmith," in which players use gesture and voice commands to create "over twenty million unique weapons."
The Verdict: Promise kept. The console version of Future Soldier was released last week, with the promised gunsmithery included for Xbox.

The Game: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
The Promise: A fully HD remastered version of the original Halo, with its multiplayer functionality enhanced for modern Xbox Live, to be released on November 15, 2011.
The Verdict: Promises kept. The game launched in November with the promised features included, though not all features were well-received.

The Game: Halo 4
The Promise: Surprise! A new Halo trilogy is landing for the Xbox, beginning with Halo 4 in Holiday 2012.
The Verdict: Pending. Holiday 2012 is still five or six months off, but Microsoft did narrow the target down to November 6 and seems to be on track to hit it.

The Game: Kinect Disneyland Adventures
The Promise: An interactive, family-friendly romp through a faithfully re-created virtual Disneyland. Available holiday 2011.
The Verdict: Promises kept. The game released on November 15 and, to the surprise of many, didn't suck.

The Game: Kinect Sports Season Two
The Promise: Adding new gestures and new sports, including skiing and tennis; available "this holiday."
The Verdict: Promise kept. The game came out in October, with the promised sports added.

The Game: Kinect Star Wars
The Promise: You get to be a Jedi! Relive the adventures of six Star Wars films in a full-body, Kinect-dependent way. No release date given.
The Verdict: Promises kept. More or less. The game came out in April, but was terrible. It did give the world an excellent *.gif of Lando Calrissian's dancing, though.

The Game: Mass Effect 3
The Promise: Full Kinect voice support, in combat and in conversation.
The Verdict: Promise kept. The game, released in March, does indeed have the Kinect features included.

The Game: Minecraft
The Promise: To be released "this year" and "this winter," meaning late 2011, with Kinect support. For consoles, an Xbox exclusive.
The Verdict: Mixed. Minecraft did launch on Xbox Live with a number of console-specific features, but missed both Kinect support and 2011 entirely, landing instead only a few weeks ago, with Kinect updates yet to come.

The Game: Ryse
The Promise: A Kinect-focused combat-heavy game set in ancient Rome.
The Verdict: Completely unknown. There was no release date promised, so no promise can be officially broken, but the title has been virtually unheard of in the past year. Rumors circulated at the end of 2011 that Ryse was slipping to the next console generation, but more recently developer Crytek has insisted that the game is on track.

The Game: Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster
The Promise: An interactive storybook adventure that young children (Sesame Street's pre-school audience) and their parents could play together, using Kinect motion tracking and voice recognition. Due fall 2011.
The Verdict: Promises kept. The game came out in October and was apparently as adorable as promised.

The Game: Tomb Raider
The Promise: Developer Crystal Dynamics showed a live demo of their Lara Croft origin story and announced a fall, 2012 launch.
The Promise: Mixed. The game is still in progress, so content promises are pending, but its release date was kicked to Q1 2013 (along with what feels like half of the holiday 2012 line-up) recently. We're expected to see more about it at this year's E3.

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Xbox Feature Promises

The Feature: Bing for Xbox Live
The Promise: Xbox dashboard to add Bing search, supported by Kinect, so that you can tell your living room, "Xbox Bing [something]," and it'll give you all the games, movies, music, and so on it can find related to that topic.
The Verdict: Promise kept. The feature is there. Although in my experience, Bing isn't quite as good at picking up your voice as you might like it to be. ("Zombies" and "cupcakes" are not the same thing.)

The Feature: Content and Entertainment Partnerships
The Promise: Microsoft really, really wants your Xbox to be about the only thing you ever use your TV for. They promised to increase the number of partnerships for media delivery by a factor of ten, to add "live television," and to work with YouTube in the US, Canal+ in France, Foxtel in Australia, and Sky in the UK.
The Verdict: Promises kept. Streaming video through the Xbox has continued to increase through the past 12 months.

The Feature: Kinect support for the Xbox dashboard and Xbox Live
The Promise: Sit in a chair and talk to your television in order to start games, find features, and so on.
The Verdict: Promise kept. Though as with Bing, in practice the Kinect doesn't always like all voices equally.

The Feature: Kinect Fun Labs
The Promise: "Available today," Kinect Fun Labs is a playground for all manner of Kinect features that may or may not have any actual applications in games or apps as of yet, like finger-tracking or people-scanning.
The Verdict: Promise kept. Fun Labs was indeed added to Xbox Live on the day it was announced, and features like the facial scanning appear to be making their way into games now.

The Feature: UFC on Xbox Live
The Promise: Ultimate Fighting Championship pay-per-view matches streaming in HD, along with fight archives and online features like fighter statistics, match prediction, and so on. Due holiday 2011.
The Verdict: Promise kept. UFC on Xbox Live launched in December.

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So on the whole, not a bad showing for Microsoft. But when you don't announce very much—and last year at E3, they didn't—it's not as hard to keep to your word. An absolutely huge percentage of Microsoft's stage time last year was spent on Kinect features, Kinect games, and Kinect upgrades for Xbox software or existing franchises. The Halo 4 announcement dropped in at the very end, after they thanked everyone for coming.

This year, we know we can look forward to a new Gears of War. What other big announcements are coming? We'll find out next week.

They won't call it Gears of War 4 and they don't call it Gears of War Karting, so what in the world is the name of the new Gears of War?

The people at Game Informer magazine know, but they're not saying until Microsoft announces the game at Monday's Xbox 360 E3 briefing (which you'll be able to watch live on Kotaku starting at 9:30am PT, 12:30 eastern).

The game will be featured on the cover of the next issue of Game Informer (July), but they're blacking a lot of it out online for now. Tim Turi of Game Informer apologizes about not being able to reveal more: "We figure this news and a glimpse of the shrouded Gears of War cover are least some consolation, as the image raises some interesting questions: Who is in chains, and where?"

Top folks from Gears of War development studio Epic Games have already Tweeted their enthusiasm about the new Gears, including the head of People Can Fly, the Epic-owned studio that—hmmm—hasn't released a new game since early 2011's wonderful but not-so-great-selling Bulletstorm.

GI promises tons of coverage of the game online this June. Start your guessing and, take note, they're saying this is for the Xbox 360, not the next console.

August Cover Revealed: The Next Gears Of War [Game Informer]

I love thunderstorms. They're oddly relaxing. I love fireflies, too, and anyone who also grew up in a backyard full of them might understand why.

I also love games that are beautiful, and Light the Night is one such game. Playing as a firefly (or lightning bug), you zip through dark skies—by moving your finger on the touch interface up or down—that occasionally light up with the strike of lightning. For once, lightning is actually your friend.

As you're navigating the night, you need to be cognizant of the flowers that poof on collision. One too many hits will steal the light away from you, eventually killing your poor, adventurous firefly protagonist. Lightning, however, can actually resuscitate you. So not only is it peaceful, intermittent cracks of thunder and bursts of bright color, but it's also your savior.

Light fills your meter when you swipe your firefly towards the direction of soft balls of light called lumens. Collect enough and you can spend them on upgrades. These vary from cosmetic ones—who can resist the pastry cat design that looks deceptively like Nyan Cat, or the panda firefly skin!?—to more useful ones like double lumens points, longer boosts, and 25% more dandelion encounters.

Dandelions, those typically pesky, allergy symptom-inducing weeds, act as bonus or power-up items in the game. It's only appropriate that light replenishment, boosts, and a protective barrier are lifelines thrown to you by a plant that's known for blowing wishes on it.

It bears repeating that Light the Night is a beautiful looking game. But the music is just as noteworthy. While lots of mobile games seem to have music as a supplementary experience, I can definitely see myself trying to find a download of this one to use for my work playlist.

But the best part? It's free for a limited promotion. Go grab it!

Light the Night [Free, iTunes]

It's no secret that it's fun to get in trouble in Rockstar's open world Grand Theft Auto series.

Even this machinima director couldn't resist the urge to get his hands dirty in the midst of filming. Which is fortunate for us, because now we get to see massive explosions and cars flying through the air.

Grand Theft AWESOME [YouTube via Reddit]

Watch This: Launching Off Of Exploding Cars And Other GTA: IV Shenanigans

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Play This: Glide Through The Beautiful, Thundering Skies Of A Firefly's Adventure

Available for preorder exclusively at Ubiworkshop.com, the Ubiworkshop Edition of Assassin's Creed III bundles the game with the second edition of the coveted Assassin's Creed Encyclopedia and a new graphic novel for a smidge under a hundred bucks.

In a way, you're just trading one Assassin's Creed III collectible for two, seeing as our American $100 bill features the face of a character from the game. I would have preferred a $99 special edition that bundled the game with one of those, but the books are incredibly nice.

The Encyclopedia, previously available as a standalone item in the U.S. and part of a European GameStop special edition, compiles everything you need to know about the lengthy history of conflict between the Assassins and Templars into one handy volume, now updated to include more recent information.

The Assassin's Creed Subject 4 graphic novel contains the entire Daniel Cross/Nikolaï Orelov narrative arc, compiling both The Fall and the as-yet-unreleased The Chain comic book series.

It's not a bad bundle for $100, especially considering Ubiworkshop is offering free shipping worldwide. The price only lasts until July 4, however, after which it jumps to the completely unreasonable $109.99.

Last year the people making the TV show and video game that are both called Defiance performed a distracting magic trick.

In an enclosed booth at the massive E3 gaming show they connected an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 to each other via a network connection and let players on the rival machines play alongside each other in the same video game world.

That feat was the gaming equivalent of letting citizens of China and America vote in the same election and turns out to have just as much a chance of happening, considering that Microsoft and Sony won't play nice together.

The trick was a distraction from the extraordinary feat that the Defiance people do have a chance of accomplishing: creating a massively multiplayer online game whose players affect a weekly sci-fi TV show that in turn affects the game—a sci-fi sci-fi concept, as it were.

There is, however, some real trouble with this fantastic idea, so 10 months out from launch we've got a dream I see with my eyes and have now played. And I have doubts I can't shake from my head.

***

Defiance the game and the TV show are two parts of a larger fiction. They involve the aftermath of an alien civilization's collision with Earth 35 years from now and what happens when they, their plants and animals crash into our world and our lives. The TV show will take place in St. Louis; the video game in San Francisco. The TV show, which is created by people who've had a hand in Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Desperate Housewives, will air on SyFy. The game, a massively multiplayer third-person shooter, will be playable on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (which, adding another stretch of ambition to this, will make the game only about the third active MMO on all of the PS3 and essentially the first on the 360). The show and the game are both scheduled to debut in April, 2013.

Any ordinary huckster can try to sell you the boast that their game connects to a TV show, maybe because it has the same writers or fills in the gaps between seasons. Fewer fast-talkers have tried to say their TV show connects to games, because those impossible dreamers are busy exploring the concept of whether they can make profitable movies that tie into games. TV shows that touch games? It barely comes up.

The Defiance folks say they can make this work. They have facts on their side to show that they're making a show and game that do have meaningful connections. But their facts blur with their hype; their dreams collide with common sense.

Let's start with what they probably can deliver and see how cool it sounds: At an event in Santa Monica' the game and show's creators described a mission in the game that would involve two characters who, at mission's end would leave the game. They would next appear on the show. "They do that whole transition from video game character to live actor," Defiance game designer Nick Beliaeff told me.

Sure, but that sounds really basic, I told him.

"I think as a crossover that's nice and adds to the immersion, but we're also talking about deeper stuff," he said. "We're talking about introducing, later in the arc of the first season [of the TV show], a mysterious illness that is sweeping the land. The storyline will be introduced in the show and then, within the game, the players have missions to try and find the cure. Later in that episode arc, we'll actually name the player character name that brought the cure to life."

That example sounded cooler, but it also was hard to believe. An actor will actually say the player-character's name in the show? "Yes," Beliaeff replied. "We're four years into this project and so the maturation of coordination we have at this point is incredible. The key thing is it is so carefully planned to a T so that we can take care of all the contingencies and can execute at a really high level."

Beliaeff thankfully acknowledges why this is so hard to believe. The game and show might not launch until April 2013, but the shooting of the premiere episode is already complete. That's a big challenge! The episodes that would involve this plague scene would be shot well before any missions in the game involving the plague were introduced. All true, but, Beliaeff said, careful planning lets the show creators drop in a shot that names the player. He posed his way through the possible scene, showing how the right cutaway shot, dropped into the otherwise-completed show, could produce the desired effect.

"We're trying to have one overt act every week going from the game to the show or from the show to the game or both," Beliaeff said. "Every time there is an episode there is going to be something. Sometimes it's going to be a really big thing like we're moving characters from one medium to the other—and it's going to go both ways—or it's smaller and more subtle things like an introduction to the storyline." Another example: "the show will introduce the idea that the Hellbugs are going crazy… and at the same time the hellbugs are going crazy in the game."

The TV show Defiance will move at its own pace, and it's not clear how swiftly that will be. The game is a persistent world, steadily advancing forward with new quests. It's ultimately a "third-person shooter before it's an MMO," Beliaeff told me, saying all the right things about how gameplay comes first. "If having a controller in your hand-or playing with a mouse and keyboard-isn't compelling, we've wasted a lot of people's time."

Who wants to believe? Who thinks that this can actually work?

The connections between TV show and game need to be meaningful for this to be as cool as it sounds, and the hype can't prove to be all there is. Beliaeff speaks well about the project, but at Defiance's presentation in Santa Monica, he was accompanied by his bosses at game company Trion Worlds and their partners at SyFy. These folks don't talk about the nitty-gritty of how a show that's done shooting before a game launches can meaningfully adapt to an MMO that is being played and tweaked and patched live day after day, throughout the spring of 2013. They instead, to quote Trion boss Lars Butler, promise "possibly one of the biggest media events of 2013," something that is "hyper-exciting", a "live world and an epic television show."

Just deliver something that works, I think we'd all reply. We can imagine a TV show and a game that affect each other. The question is whether in April of 2013 we'll actually get to experience such a thing.

This is your last chance to talk about video games in Kotaku's official forum this month. Will there be a next month? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

TAYpic craftsman Shadoroch sends May to its Doom with this hellish creation. Goodbye, May TAYpic. We loved you so much.

And with a new month dawning (possibly), it's time for a new base TAYpic to keep our Photoshopping friends happy. Submit your favorite piece of classical art to our #TAYpics thread and who knows? Maybe your selection will provide inspiration for the artists of tomorrow or something!