The greatest thing about LEGO's presence at ay big exhibition is seeing fans young and old fooling around with bricks with gigantic smiles on their faces. The second greatest thing? Giant LEGO Hulk, Darth Maul, Hobbits and grey wizards.

I live vicariously through these awesome creations; they are the domain of master LEGO builders. I am a kit builder. Give me instructions, and I can put a thing together. I am no Baron Von Brunk. Not outside of my dreams, at least.

So I savor these intricate marketing materials. I imagine myself crafting them, painstakingly placing each tiny piece, 12,000 page instruction manual by my side.

Another day, another hack of a large online community, this time PC graphics specialists NVIDIA. The company's forums were hacked last week, with culprits making off with usernames, email addresses, public information in their profiles and "hashed passwords with random salt value".

NVIDIA has closed its forums down while it investigates, and is urging registered members to change their passwords on other sites (if they shared a password).

Notice [NVIDIA]

Canadian man Jordan Osborne is lucky to be alive after an argument over World of Warcraft left him with a stab wound in the chest.

The worst part is that Osborne (pictured) wasn't even really involved; he overheard his neighbours arguing on Wednesday, and when he went to investigate, found they were upset over something that had happened in Blizzard's MMO.

"I was telling him, there is no need for you to be freaking out about World of Warcraft. It's just a game," Osborne said. After his neighbour, Justin Williams, replied with "It's not just a game, it's my life", Osborne was "grabbed [by the] throat, punched ...in the face and stabbed...in the chest".

Charming! Williams has been charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon, while Osborne has quite the scar (and story) to show off at parties.

Man stabbed over World of Warcraft argument [Ottawa Sun]

This is the cover to the Japanese edition of the official guide to SNES classic Super Metroid. I can see what they're trying to do with the idea, maybe, but in execution it just looks weird. Like a Nintendo console getting on in years, re-released in a transparent colour scheme.

[via VGJunk]

While other video game companies are happy to celebrate 10th, 15th or even 20th anniversaries, Nintendo is over 100 years old.

Founded in 1889, the company has enjoyed a rich video gaming tradition dating back to the 1970s, releasing some of the most successful gaming consoles and franchises of all time.

Which is great for them, but it's not why we're here. Today, we're here to look back at some of Nintendo's lesser-known, but way more interesting accomplishments (and failures, and dirty secrets).

Below, you'll find a collection of some of the more bizarre aspects of Nintendo's history, some of them during the company's video gaming years, others from earlier in their history when they made playing cards, bad LEGO clones and ran love hotels.

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The Nintendo They've Tried to Forget: Gambling, Gangsters, and Love Hotels - Nintendo, the world's family-friendly video game maker, formed under less virtuous auspices. Before Nintendo made video games, they made playing cards for gangsters and ran their own love hotel, which some assert their own president frequented-during work. Saucy!

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The Arcade Machine That Made (And Nearly Broke) Nintendo - The amazing story of Nintendo's 1970's "Light Gun Parlours", which nearly sunk the company, and which were only saved by some first-night heroics from a future executive who managed to rig the games when their computer systems failed.

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Nintendo's First Arcade Games Were, Well, Pretty Sucky - Great things often have small beginnings, and Nintendo is no different. Before Donkey Kong & Mario, the company needed to cut its teeth and learn the ropes, which it did by releasing some fairly awful and unoriginal arcade games.

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This Is the Coolest Stuff Nintendo Has Ever Made - In the early 1970's, Nintendo released a line of LEGO rip-offs, which were so blatant the Danish toy giants would take them to court. The sets featured licensed characters like Kamen Rider, and while basic by today's standard, had some of the coolest box art the world has ever seen.

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How Pokémon Was Born From Bug Collecting and Asperger's Syndrome - Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri didn't just wake up one day and think "oh, yes, let's do fighting monsters". He needed inspiration to come up with one of the greatest pop culture phenomenons of our time. And he got it from two places: his childhood love of collecting insects, and his Asperger's Syndrome.

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The Father of the Game Boy Was Not Killed By Yakuza - There's long been a bizarre rumour that Gunpei Yokoi, the creator of the Game Boy, was murdered by the Yakuza, given the odd and premature circumstances surrounding his untimely death back in 1997. Brian Ashcraft breaks down why these rumours are a total bust.

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When Nintendo Wanted to Bring Gambling Into American Homes - It's all but forgotten now, but in the early 1990s, at the height of Nintendomania in the United States, the company's American operations quietly floated the idea of using the NES as an online gateway to gambling. Free consoles were handed out and a unique modem was engineered before a combination of political pressure and inadequate tech scuppered the concept.

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When Pokémon Got a Little Too Nazi Germany - Pokémon animated episodes and trading cards have had to be either edited or recalled not once, not twice, but thrice because they contained references to Nazi Germany. Or, at least, were accused of referencing Nazi Germany.

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In 1983, Donkey Kong Nearly Died - He's one of Nintendo's most successful characters, and the company's springboard to success before Mario even had his own game, but in 1983 a court case Universal sued Nintendo over the giant ape. Rather than accept losses which would have crippled the company's fledgling American operations, Nintendo of America president Howard Lincoln decided to fight the media giant.

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Nintendo's War On Blood, Nazis, Religion And Puppy Dogs - Removing blood from a game about blood, shaving Hitler's moustache...there was a time in the early 1990s when Nintendo seemed more concerned with acting as a moral policeman than as a games publisher. While its heart was in the right place, the way Mortal Kombat and Wolfenstein were treated on the Super Nintendo will not go down as some of the company's finest moments.

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Iron Chef's Secret Ingredient Was…Pokémon! - Beloved Japanese cooking show Iron Chef, which continues to find new fans across the world via repeats, ceased filming in 1999, leaving host Takeshi Kaga in need of a new gig. He found one straight away. Voicing Pokémon characters.

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Nintendo's First Console Is One You've Never Played - Years before the Famicom and NES were released, Nintendo's first foray into the world of home video games - in the late 1970s - weren't quite as successful. More colourful, perhaps, and with more steering wheels than we'd be accustomed to, but while reasonably popular in Japan, were never seen outside of Nintendo's home territory.

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Well, then. I should say they aren't "making" the movie yet—they're Kickstarting it. But after a couple days on Kickstarter, the project is more than halfway funded… and I have just a sneaking suspicion that it'll hit its goal.

The video on the Kickstarter page tells the whole story of the film Anomalisa, throwing back to Harmon's great-looking (though kinda uneven, if you ask me) stop-motion Christmas special episode of Community. The video also gives a sense of Harmon's maaaaybe kinda pissed-offedness after his rocky ouster from Community after the end of the last season (though hey, at least he's probably beaten Prototype 2 by now!) They also mention that if they raise more money, that they might do a project with Louis C.K. and TV Funhouse's Rob Smeigel, which… well okay, I'm interested in all of this!

Is this the kind of project you would fund? Do you love The Nightmare Before Christmas as much as I do? Can you even imagine what a headache it must be to make a movie using stop motion miniatures?

Feel free to discuss that Feel free to discuss that, or whatever else, here or over in the Talk Amongst Yourselves forum. Have good chatting, see you on Friday.

In the latest Transformers video game, you'll get to control Autobots and Decepticons battling it out as their home planet dies all around them. The new multiplayer modes coming to Fall of Cybertron are pretty intense.

The first mode I sampled from Fall of Cybertron's multiplayer was a co-op objective-based mode where I played as a Scientist class character. Scientists are essentially engineers and are able to transform in jets, making them the only class that can fly. They can also drop sentry turrets in robot form and can tag enemies across the map for their partners to target. But they've also got the lowest health of any of the game's four multiplayer classes. There's a two-tiered with shield/life health system in FoC, which lets you regenerate from certain amounts of damage before getting dealt a fatal blow.

Low health aside, playing as a Scientist felt slightly godlike. I was able to soar above the firefights in plane form and rain down weapons fire from high above my enemies. The world design in FoC is appropriately burnt-out and bleak and really drives home that you're fighting in a war on a planet that's getting torn apart. I took some of the other classes out for quick turns; here's a quick rundown of their attributes and skills:

Infiltrator
• essentially a Spy/Assassin class
• Fastest on foot, turns into a sports car
• can turn invisible and wield sniper rifles

Titan
• biggest, slowest character class
• specialize in defense and drawing aggression from enemies
• transforms into tank; wield heavy weapons like riot shell launchers
• can do a whirling melee attack that turns him into a tornado of pain
• also has an attack that spits out a corrosive goo onto a crowd of enemies

Destroyer
• transforms into truck
• has a hover slam special attack that's like a suplex
• attacks tend to have a lot of splash damage, making them ideal to handle large groups
• can also deploy a barrier force field that block enemy fire while still letting shoot allies out.

I also played a bit of Escalation, the newest iteration of the Horde Mode-style co-op offering that first showed up in War for Cybertron. Escalation's a bit different than its predecessor. You need more teamwork to survive the continuous waves of enemies and different players can play the same type of Transformer but will wind up with different abilities depending on how they spend the points earned during battle.

Each player can carry a heavy weapon and a primary weapon which can be brought at spawn points with in-game credits. There will also be armory areas that will be locked off where you'll need to spend credits to open up access. Once inside, better weapons can also be accessed. The cost to open such an area will be more than one player can earn in a wave, so a team will need to communicate to make sure everyone contributes to opening these spots up.

There will also be weapons upgrade stations where you can tweak elements of a weapon so that it can carry more ammo, for example. These stations will also let you call in special attacks so if a team saves up enough credits, they can have an orbiting gunship target enemies with devastating airstrikes.

Fall for Cybertron definitely feels like a step up from the experience delivered by dev studio High Moon in their last Transformers game. The upcoming title feels like it's offering players more of a chance to craft an individual style in the midst of heated online chaos. We'll get to see how it works out when Fall of Cybertron comes out in August.

Before I came to the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con I had two one-year-old boys. Now I have ideas. So many ideas.

Thank you, young Voltron, for making my sons' future lives a nightmare of cardboard, parental incompetence and shame.

Revealed today during the Transformers product panel at Comic-Con 2012, the terrible lizard of Transformers fame jumps from High Moon video game onto my computer desk, eventually.

You know I love Grimlock. High Moon knows I love Grimlock. Hasbro knows i love Grimlock and, as it turns out, they know you love Grimlock too. So you owe it to Grimlock to take him home once the next round of Fall of Cybertron toys hit store shelves in March 2013. He's only $19.99, which seems incredibly cheap for the king.

This version of our favorite dinosaur robot is quite the sexy beast, combining the best of old school Transformer design with some of the more advanced animal mimicking techniques that rose out of the Beast Wars era.

I love him. Fine, I will marry him. See if I won't.

When Nintendo's upcoming 3DS XL was first revealed to the public a few weeks ago, most gamers had one question: Where the hell is the second analog stick?

It only seemed natural that the 3DS's successor would ship with a right thumb-stick to accompany the left one. After all, a dual-joystick setup is typically the best way to control both a character's movement and a moving camera. And Nintendo released a stand-alone 3DS accessory called the Circle Pad Pro to accommodate controls like that. Most gamers assumed it would be an integral part of the system's next iteration.

But the 3DS XL didn't deliver, and in an interesting interview with The Independent published today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata explained why:

(Spelling and grammar have been corrected.)

When we looked at the design of the 3DS XL, we had to look at various factors. One was battery life. One was the overall size of the unit. And we had to make some trade-offs. The choice, if we were going to include the second analog stick, was to reduce the size of the batteries or make the unit much bigger.



What we wanted to do was have a bigger screen in comparison with the overall size of the system, so we had various discussions and had to make trade-offs, and this is the outcome.



Attaching a second analog stick is possible, but it would have made the system even bigger, and, though it perhaps puts a burden on people that really want that second stick, it's a call we had to make and these people will have to live with it.



This [the lack of a second stick] isn't my main focus when I look at the 3DS XL, it's one point we had to cover, but for me personally I'm quite happy with the product we're able to offer.


Interestingly enough, Iwata also downplayed the importance of the system's 3D, mirroring an editorial I published on Kotaku last week:

So, now we've created the 3DS and 3DS XL and also have some games out there that are really using that 3D effect that we can see, from my point of view, that it's an important element. But as human beings, this kind of surprise effect wears off quickly, and just having this 3D stereoscopic effect isn't going to keep people excited.



But I think it's an important element. It makes graphics more impactful. It proves a sense of immersion that 2D doesn't have. So I would say generally that 3D is better than 2D. It's nice to have good graphics but not necessarily on their own, so I don't think we'll present [3D graphics] as one of the key features of our consoles but will probably stick with 3D as one of the minor elements of our consoles in the future.


Good to hear!

Satoru Iwata on Wii U: 'I think it will become increasingly difficult from now on to compete over graphics' [The Independent]