The game that lets you try your own hand at landing the next Mars rover may not be as cool as advertised, but the real event probably will be. And the real event is coming up this weekend, with Curiosity scheduled to land on the Martian surface late Sunday night (or early Monday morning, depending on your time zone).

Xbox 360 owners can stream the high-tension landing live from the "Mars Rover" sections of their console dashboards. NASA TV will be broadcasting the full event, which to the scientists is as much of a nail-biter as anything can be, with
seven minutes of terror" during which Curiosity will descend from orbit to the planet's surface.

Science fiction is awesome, but real space exploration is even better. Here's hoping Curiosity's landing isn't terrifying at all.

Watch the Mars Rover landing on your Xbox 360 [Major Nelson]

The game that lets you try your own hand at landing the next Mars rover may not be as cool as advertised, but the real event probably will be. And the real event is coming up this weekend, with Curiosity scheduled to land on the Martian surface late Sunday night (or early Monday morning, depending on your time zone).

Xbox 360 owners can stream the high-tension landing live from the "Mars Rover" sections of their console dashboards. NASA TV will be broadcasting the full event, which to the scientists is as much of a nail-biter as anything can be, with
seven minutes of terror" during which Curiosity will descend from orbit to the planet's surface.

Science fiction is awesome, but real space exploration is even better. Here's hoping Curiosity's landing isn't terrifying at all.

Watch the Mars Rover landing on your Xbox 360 [Major Nelson]

I know Reef Entertainment announced last year that they'd be making video games based on the Rambo series. I read it here. It registered in my consciousness. Last month, when the company announced the game would be making an appearance at GamesCom in Germany, my mind kind of skipped over it, like it wasn't a real thing. Now we've got screenshots, and not only is Rambo: The Video Game real, it doesn't look half bad.

It's just scenery shots, for now, but damn if they haven't captured the look and feel of the scenery from First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, the gigs that would eventually lead to Sylvester Stallone starring in a video game we reviewed not a half-hour ago.

Now what we need is for the developers to use the Rambo from the animated series in these detailed environments, and we'll have the best PC and console game ever.

The Expendables is all about elite mercenaries, intense action sequences and a lot of meat-headedness. Seems like it could be the perfect fit for a trigger-happy group of friends to virtually tear through an onslaught of enemies, no? The shooting would be rampant and fun. The characters would be amiable, muscular soldier types with a penchant for appropriately cheesy dialogue. Right?

Well, that's the intention anyway. The execution, however, is another story entirely.

The Expendables 2 seems to incorporate all the right things. There are four characters—Barney Ross, Gunner Jensen, Hale Caesar and Yin Yang—to choose from, mirroring the film, each with unique, upgradeable skills. Whether you're a sniper, knifer, or straight shotgun blaster, there's a skillset for you.

The sniper is absolutely useless. It takes way too long to aim for what is too frequently an imprecise shot. The goal here is to be killing enemies as rapidly as possible, not to have your teammates rack up kills while you're down on one knee still lining up the shot. Throwing knives were surprisingly awesome, considering that they're a one-hit kill within close range.

But I picked my favorite weapon combination—a shotgun in one hand and a grenade launcher in the other—and embarked on a public game to go serve some baddies their well-deserved bullets. I wasn't expecting the storyline to pull me in. I guessed the characters' interactions would be chuckle-worthy at best. But I was expecting the shooting to be fun. Ubisoft has been boasting how "over the top" the game would be, just like the movies. Instead of the third-person, top down shooter I was expecting, The Expendables 2 felt more like a less chaotic twin stick shooter.

In The Expendables 2, you move your character with the left joystick and aim with your right joystick. There's no directional guide to where you're shooting. Your only indication is a trial and error whereby you wait to see if your enemies are leaping back dramatically to their deaths when you pull the trigger. You can switch between weapons, pick up heavier fire dropped by enemies on the battlefield, and collect boosters to deal extra damage. Or you can punch a dude in the face, and even finish him off with your character's special, cinematically-emphasized finishing move.

Sometimes the twin stick experience will zoom out for targeting practice on helicopters, ships and trains, while you're seated higher up in a chopper or driving fast in a car. Think the arcade experience of Time Crisis, but without the charm of being in an actual arcade. This is all theoretically fun. You have an assortment of weapons and landscapes. Granted, they're all fairly tightly wound and rarely diverge from the "move right, move forward" directive. But all the basic components for a great, chaotic group shooter seem to be present. So what went wrong?

The problem is, all the spray and pray is just not that fun. While walking through the bland browns and greens and blacks, everything eventually becomes habitual. Ok, there's a moving object. Lemme swing my thumb in that direction, trigger finger still pulling in tightly. Stop to let the gun reload when it decides it's time. Rinse and repeat. The biggest excitement was finding a sequence that led you and your teammates crawling up rooftops and jumping between train cars. "Oh wow, something different!" doesn't really add credit in the grand scheme of the game, though.

The most fun I had was in alternating weapons quickly between reloads, and throwing down frag grenades while running energetically back and forth. This tactic often got me killed, but I managed to push the limits of how many enemies I could take down at once. I basically invented mini challenges for myself, which are kind of replicated in the game's challenge mode (read: timed mode).

Even ignoring the clueless attempt at light-hearted, meatheaded dialogue, it's hard to enjoy the boring pathways set aside for you. You aim at what feels like nothing. It's easy to lose track of what you're doing when your thumbs lean into a habitual push forward. At a point of time I was literally multitasking, consoling a heartbroken friend on the phone while spraying aimlessly into the wild, knowing my bullets would hit a stray soldier or a tank or something. I never felt challenged.

There's just not much to enjoy when you're being led on a monotonous trail to rescue the same elusive hostage. Trite storyline aside, all I know is that it's my mission to kill things that move on screen, and to do so at a more rapid pace than my teammates so that I can gloat by the end of each chapter level. Plus, building up those experience points ensures a heavier clip, better movement and/or increased health depending on how you want to level your characters up.

The Expendables 2 is not a broken game. It doesn't commit any gaming faux pas. You won't yell in anger at a dumb feature. You may fumble with the awkward cover function a bit, and find a few other messes laying about like an annoyingly unpredictable camera focus, but it's nothing your trained hands haven't encountered before. But while The Expendables 2 doesn't provoke me with faulty game design, it also doesn't invoke any excitement in me. After a while I was merely going through the game's paces, pushing forward because I had to and not because I wanted to. At that point, I'd take a crumbling, yet good game over this workable, bland one.

Even with all the ingredients for a complete third-person team shooter recipe, The Expendables 2 is a flat, blah experience. There's nothing that speaks to that over the top excitement you should expect out of a title based on the explosive adventures of a team of 80s icon mercenaries. It's all the same, repetitive motions of shooting aimlessly at everything on the screen.

To call My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic a fan-made game is doing the tremendous effort by the Mane6 development team a great disservice. They've assembled an amazing team of programmers, animators, artists and musicians. They've recruited amateur voice actors. They've shown the game at the EVO 2012 Fighting Championships. What they are doing, really, is making a fully-realized retail-quality fighting game that they can never, ever make money on.

They've even put together a team of QA testers, one of which took their test code and dumped it onto the internet this week. So yeah, no more QA testing program.

According to the game's official website, one of the testers of the unofficial My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic PC fighting game "broke (their) trust and a NDA agreement", zipping up the EVO build of the game and casting it to the internet winds. That build, featuring four of the six main characters from Friendship is Magic — Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Twilight Sparkle and Rarity — is now wandering about the internet for all the digital underworld to see.

Needless to say, Mane6 is very disappointed, and they're taking steps to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

For now, Fighting is Magic will be going on a closed development cycle. No further QA, Alpha, Beta or testing program will be started or maintained until we have the remaining two characters done for the initial build. In addition BSUs will be cancelled, and no major content-related updates to the website will be forthcoming until further notice, while we at Mane6 deal with this situation and discuss changes for the future of the project.

What's the big deal? This is a game they plan on distributing for free eventually anyway, right?

I think that makes it worse, actually. This isn't some corporate-backed game that will eventually be vying for consumer cash. Mane6 doesn't even take donations for all the work they've done, despite an entire planet of bronies that would gladly hand over all of their cash. It's a labor of love, and that sort of thing should be revealed on their own terms. To be betrayed by someone they trusted like this, well, that's not magical at all.

Open Letter [Mane6]

Samurai. Skyrim. Or even ancient Mayan prophecies. Star Wars helmets are fertile ground for artistic reinterpretation. But now, it's all for a cause that's bigger than simply awesome art.

The As You Wish Helmet Project is a charity art endeavor that features over 40 reworked Boba Fett and Clone Trooper helmets to be auctioned off, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to the Make a Wish Foundation.

Some of the helmets were first shown off earlier this summer, such as Volpin Props' fantastic take on Skyrim meets Star Wars.

Check out some of the creations from the likes of Japanese figure maker Kotobukiya, effects house Weta Workshop, artist John Brosio, artist Alex Buechel, and once again Volpin Props.

Find out more at the As You Wish Helmet Project's Facebook page or on website The Dented Helmet—that site also has interviews with the artists that are worth checking out.

The helmets hit the eBay auction block on August 27.

アステカから戦国時代まで！ 様々なテーマの「ボバ・フェット」ヘルメット [Kotaku Japan]

Video games have the ability to take us, well, anywhere. We can visit other planets, we can visit destinations far away, and we can even travel back in time. I'd like to go here.

Here is the Irganai Dam in Dagestan, Russia—the largest derivational hydroelectric power station in the country. Construction on the plant began in 1977, and the station became operational by the mid-1980s.

The surrounding environment is stunning—and the dam is outfitted with tunnels and cranes and surrounded by icy water.

How Beautiful a Hydro Power Plant May Be? [English Russia]

Always nice to see game makers step outside their comfort zone, and bit by bit, Square Enix has been doing just that.

The Tokyo-based game maker, best known for Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, is working on a new car game called Gyrozetter. A new transforming robot car game. It's Unreal Engine powered, there's an upcoming arcade version, and there's also an upcoming 3DS version.

The game's creators say it might be necessary to make an HD version—especially if Square Enix plans on bringing Gyrozetter overseas.

Unreal Engineを使ったスクウェア・エニックスの業務用向け『超速変形ジャイロゼッター』の開発 [GameBusiness via Siliconera]

Yesterday marked the release of Dragon Quest X, the newest title in one of Japan's most phenomenally popular series. But not only is this a new Dragon Quest game, it's also an MMORPG.

You could say that I am a veteran of MMO launches—and countless pre-launch beta test weekends (which, let's face it, are basically the same thing). And these days it's rare to hear of a big-name online game that doesn't have problems during launch.

When The Old Republic launched late last year, it was possible to log in but server queue times went as high as a day. Even worse was the launch of Diablo III (a game that's only part MMO) where players were unable to even access the single player content due to server problems.

So when I heard that Dragon Quest X was going to be an MMORPG—and on an MMORPG-absent system like the Wii no less—I was certain the launch would turn into a complete and utter train wreck. After all, if big-name experienced developers like Blizzard and Bioware are unable to pull off a smooth launch, what chance would there be for the game aiming to be the biggest MMO in Japanese history?

Yet, clearly Square Enix has learned much from its launches of Final Fantasy XI and XIV as this was by far the most hassle-free MMO launch I've ever experienced.

What's interesting about Dragon Quest X is that you don't even make an account and sign in at the start of the game. After the admittedly long install, you are dropped directly into the game's single player campaign where you will stay till about the two-and-a-half hour mark. Once the prologue is complete, you start the process to enter the online portion of the game.

This process is largely simple. Accept some licensing agreements, make/login to a Square Enix account, enter the product code from the game box for your free 20 days, and you're good to go.

As Kotaku readers who were watching our live stream may remember, the only problems I had getting online were of my own doing. (I hadn't logged into the Wii store in so long that I needed to accept the general online agreement again. …I also forgot the user name and password for my Square Enix account).

Even with those problems, it only took 15 minutes and I was in the online part of the game. Was it crowded? Sure. Was the Wii chugging hard to render all those people? Oh yeah. But in my time online so far, I've only disconnected once—and was back online within seconds. In an age where MMO launches are expected to go poorly, it was especially gratifying to have one go so well. So props to Nintendo and Square Enix on a job well done.

Dragon Quest X was released on August 2, 2012 for the Nintendo Wii in Japan. Stay tuned to Kotaku East for our import preview late next week.

Australian free daily The Mx included "Nice Korea" and "Naughty Korea" in its medal count—presumably as some sort of gag?

Online in South Korea, the reaction has been varied.

"This makes it seem like North Korea has done something bad to get medals," wrote one, while another explained, "This is how Australia sees the two countries." Oh. Okay?

"I'm flabbergasted, but there's nothing wrong with 'Nice Korea,'" wrote another. That's right—well, save for the inability to differentiate between "North" and "South" or a basic knowledge of Asia's geography and country names.

Nice Korea sounds...nice. Naughty Korea, on the other hand, sounds like it needs a good spanking or a timeout.

호주서 ‘좋은 한국'은 4위, ‘무례한 북한'은 5위 [Kukinews via ロケットニュース]