Holy crap look out! There's a huge freaking shark roaming the Liberty City Bay. It hasn't attacked anyone yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time, right?

In light of our recent list of the best sharks in video games (and also the one from Banjo Kazooie) comes this mod from JMoorfoot4 that allows players to pilot a massive killer shark around the bay. It seems like a boat mod, so it doesn't have working jaws, but if and when it ever develops the ability to bite... it will merit inclusion on the "best video game sharks" list for next year.

(Via ZZCOOL)

This Wednesday edition of Kotaku's The Moneysaver catches all the offers, promotions and bargains that can't wait until the weekend. The Midweek Moneysaver is brought to you by Dealzon.

Software

• Yesterday's release Darksiders 2: Limited Edition (360, PS3) is $49.99 plus $2.99 shipping from Fry's Electronics. Next best is $59. [Dealzon]

• Guild Wars 2 Digital Edition (PC download) is $48 from Green Man Gaming. Next best is $60. [Dealzon]

• Greed: Black Border (PC download) is Free from Green Man Gaming until 7 am Eastern Thursday. Elsewhere $4.99 and up. [Dealzon]

• Band Hero featuring Taylor Swift - Super Bundle (360, PS3) is $49.99 plus $2.98 shipping from Target. Next best is $129. [Dealzon]

• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition (360) is $29.99, free shipping from NewEgg. Next best is $48. [Dealzon]

• Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition (360, PS3) is $24.99, free shipping from NewEgg. Next best is $30. [Dealzon]

• Gran Turismo 5 XL Edition (PS3) with PlayStation Plus 30-Day Trial is $19.99 from Amazon. Next best is $40. [Dealzon]

• Dead Rising 2: Off the Record (PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $23. [Dealzon]

• Crysis 2 (360, PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $20. [Dealzon]

• Skate 3 (360, PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $20. [Dealzon]

• Tekken Hybrid (PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $19. [Dealzon]

• Dead Space 2 (PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $20. [Dealzon]

• Carnival Island (PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $23. [Dealzon]

• MLB 11: The Show (PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $18. [Dealzon]

• Michael Jackson The Experience (360, Wii) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $19. [Dealzon]

• Rayman Origins (360, PS3, Wii) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $20. [Dealzon]

• Dirt 3 (360, PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $25. [Dealzon]

• Rage (360, PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $18. [Dealzon]

• Singularity (360) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $18. [Dealzon]

• Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (360, PS3) - USED is $9.99, free shipping from GameFly. Next best is $22. [Dealzon]

• Child of Eden (360, PS3) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $18. [Dealzon]

• Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition (3DS) is $9.99 from Best Buy. Next best is $20. [Dealzon]

• Wargame European Escalation (PC Download) is $20 from GamersGate. Next best is $40. [Dealzon]

• F.E.A.R. 3 (PC download) is $12.30 from Green Man Gaming. Next best is $20. [Dealzon]

• Batman: Arkham City (PC) is $9.99, free shipping from NewEgg. Next best is $23. [Dealzon]

• Crysis Maximum Edition (PC download) is $7.49 from Amazon. List price is $30. [Dealzon]

• Gratuitous Space Battles Complete Pack (PC Download) is $7.14 from GamersGate. Next best is $19. [Dealzon]

Hardware

• PS3 Slim 160GB Console is $229.99, free shipping from Best Buy. Next best is $250. [Dealzon]

• PlayStation 2 Console (Refurbished) is $59.95, free shipping from eBay Deals. List price is $100. [Dealzon]

• PlayStation Vita 3G/WiFi (Refurbished) is $199.99, free shipping from eBay Deals. Next best is $300. [Dealzon]

• PS3 Move Battle Rifle is $14.11 from Amazon. Next best is $34. [Dealzon]

• Call of Duty: Black Ops PrecisionAIM Controller for Xbox 360 is $9.99, free shipping from Best Buy. Usually $20. [Dealzon]

• PlayStation Move Shooting Attachment is $4.99, free shipping from Best Buy. Next best is $16. [Dealzon]

• New low on 15.6-inch HP dv6t Quad Edition with Ivy Bridge Core i7-3610QM, GeForce GT 630M, 8GB RAM. Now $729.99 after coupon, free shipping from HP. Cheapest ever by $20 and $70 off the usual price of $800. [Dealzon]

• Toshiba Satellite P755-3DV20 15.6-inch laptop with Core i5-2410M, GeForce GT 540M, Blu-ray is $738.99, free shipping from BeachCamera. Next best is $1,011. [Dealzon]

• Dell XPS 8500 Desktop with Ivy Bridge Quad Core i7-3770, Radeon HD 7570, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD is $799.99, free shipping from Dell. Usually $900. [Dealzon]

• First Alienware X51 coupon for the desktop's base config with Core i3-2120 and GeForce GT 545 1GB. Now $649, free shipping from Dell. Had been $699 since launching in January. [Dealzon]

As always, smart gamers can find values any day of the week, so if you've run across a deal, share it with us in the comments.

Following an attack on Blizzard's Battle.net service last week, the company is today prompting all North American players to update their mobile authenticators, change their security questions and read up on a new FAQ/guide that gives hints on improving their account's protection.

North American Battle.net Account Update [Blizzard]

"Is that a banana-gun in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?"

I like these motion-capture process videos that Sony keeps putting out—they let us see the increasingly involved process of bringing these characters to life, and they we get to check out some of the cutscenes early, too. This one shows a scene from Naughty Dog's upcoming The Last of Us, which, going by the amazing work Naughty Dog did with the Uncharted series (and from what we've seen of the game), should have some high-quality digital performances.

There are two more videos, as well, showing the mo-cap alone, and the final cutscene, which was released back in July:

The Last Of Us: Cinematic Process [PlayStation Blog]

It's the third and final day of reveals for Team Fortress 2's big Mann vs Machine update, and Valve has saved the most important for last.

Well, most important if you're the kind of person who's still playing TF2. Because if you are, you probably enjoy hats.

The robot wars will include a game mode called Mann Up. Completing these maps (which can be linked together to form "tours of duty") gets you rare loot in the forms of attire and accessories for your characters. But to get onto those maps you have to pay.

Think of it as an amusement park ride. You pay $0.99 for a ticket (this isn't part of the metaphor, it's actually what you pay and what you get), and that ticket is used to get on an official Valve Mann Up server. Once there, you're in line to get the rare loot.

Note that this is purely for cosmetic purposes; the Mann vs Machine game modes are free to play on any non-Mann Up server. And those who do pay are only getting superficial items, they won't be getting better perks or more powerful weapons

Still...this is a game whose entire economy is built around hats. Now that there are better and newer hats, making money shouldn't be a problem for Valve.

Mann vs Machine is now out and ready for download.

Mann Up [Valve]

Itchy trigger fingers everywhere are waiting to unleash all-new kinds of carnage when Counterstrike: Global Offensive hits on August 21st. But if your trigger finger is attached to a PS3 owner, there's a good chance that you'll be amongst the first players to get online with Valve's new shooter.

Over on the PlayStation community boards, an alert's gone out that PlayStation Plus Members can have the demo automatically downloaded to their consoles on the night of 08/20, if their settings are set correctly. The demo is a 60-minute trial of the game that players can then purchase in full if they like what they see.

PLUS MEMBERS - CounterStrike Demo Automatically Overnight [PlayStation]

Man, I'm starting to think that Far Cry 3 is more of a "Big Cat Hunter" game than the action game that Ubisoft is describing it as. How else to describe the fact that the best screenshots from the game all feature giant jungle cats doing rad stuff?

Ubi dropped a passel of their trademark "insanely polished and posed screenshots" at Gamescom. Here they are. It's too bad Tina is off this week, she'd love all these cats:

Creating a compelling and enjoyable open world experience is more than just giving the player as much real estate technologically possible to play in. It's a delicate balancing act between character and scale. Somewhere between Grand Theft Auto's size and Yakuza's personality lies Sleeping Dogs.

That's not to say that Grand Theft Auto IV or Yakuza 4 aren't both excellent titles in their own right. The former is one of the finest open world experiences available in gaming; the latter a more intimate experience that oozes character and atmosphere. Some gamers prefer size, others immersion.

But for the gamer that wants the best of both open worlds? Sleeping Dogs is their game.

I would never have expected 2012 to turn out to be such a phenomenal year to be an adventure game fan. And yet, here we are.

This new one is Primordia, brought to us by Wadjet Eye Games. Those are the same folks who brought us 2011's Gemini Rue and this summer's fantastic Resonance.

Primordia posits a post-apocalytpic future where robots have long since become the dominant form of life on Earth. And even robots have to deal with power, greed, and corruption.

It's also pretty. So very, very pretty. The palette of earth-tones and rust-tones create a gorgeous setting that I can't wait to dive into and inevitably get stuck on a puzzle in.

Primordia [Official Site, via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Why sports games have to reinvent their controls annually, I don't know. Puppeteering a guy dribbling or throwing a baseball would seem to be a basically constant thing in a video game compared to a guy hucking a grenade or acrobatically slashing his foe across his torso. Yet the latter two acts have undergone less change on a video game controller in their respective series, going back more than five years.

This was on Kotaku Sunday and it is an excellent point. As a former disgruntled sports game designer, I will try to explain exactly why.

The tipping point was marketing, led by EA: "If it's in the game, it's in the game." From that point on, the focus for both producers and consumers wasn't about making a fun game (although that was still the secondary goal), it was about simulating the real experience.

And so sports games spend every yearly iteration adding more and more to get it closer and closer to the real thing. Awesome, right? Let's take American football as an example. Sometime in that chain of Maddens, they added custom playbooks. Cool. They added audibles. Cool. They added custom packages. Alright, I guess? Now it is getting harder to come up with low-hanging fruit that isn't in the game. What else can we simulate? Maybe the hand-play between a receiver and a defensive back downfield on a pass? Maybe we should simulate the QB's eyes as he looks off receivers? (Don't be ridiculous.)

Football video game players are generally pretty familiar with the real world mechanics of playing football. There are certainly a lot of them to choose from: running, blocking, passing, play selection, time management, coverage schemes, shifts, choosing plays and formations, and so on and so on. How do we fit all of that into the five chunks of working memory that we have?

The short answer is that we can't.

As long as we are trying to simulate a thousand little things, only the people who have deep understanding of not only those thousand little things but how we've chosen to represent them in our game will be able to actually appreciate it. And it will always feel off because each of us will have a different idea about how that should work on-screen. We never had that problem in Tecmo Bowl because we weren't as close to the Uncanny Valley. We had some sprites and two buttons; we imagined the hand-play, we imagined the blocking battles that didn't really exist.

Sports game designers have a panacea that they always fall back on. The problem to them is never that you are asking too much of the player, just that you are asking the player in the wrong way. That's why you see controller redesigns every year. If we just put juke moves on the right stick, then maybe everyone will get it this year!

Call of Duty doesn't have that problem. Call of Duty doesn't have to fulfill the expectations of a firefight, it has to fulfill the expectations of a first-person shooter. It would be moronic for the new Call of Duty to say "Now including wind that changes the trajectory of your bullets!" or "Now including cleaning your gun after battles!" More realistic maybe, but not fulfilling the expectations of the audience. Madden, for instance, isn't simulating Tecmo Bowl. It is simulating the NFL – a real experience. If NBA 2K was simulating NBA Jam, you probably wouldn't see changes to the control scheme every year.

Sports games are stuck marketing to the same, shrinking audience every year. As what's "in the game" increases, the learning curve steepens. Because most of the designers are decades-long experts at playing these games, they don't notice how utterly confounding it is. They scoff at notions of accessibility, pandering to concerns with a never-viewed tutorial or a condescending "beginner" mode that no one in their right mind would choose when playing against their buddies. The full super-hardcore mode is aspirational. Maybe we will never use offensive line shifts, but we like to know that they are there.

When developers do their consumer research, it starts with the loudest forum nerds. "WHY AREN'T THERE MEDICAL REDSHIRTS IN NCAA," they scream as if anyone but them actually gave half a damn. The lack of medical redshirtting is absolutely breaking that one guy's mental model of the simulation. And so designers and producers see this enthusiasm and go "Yeah, that would be pretty easy. I guess that's what people want."

But no one is putting down the game because there isn't a perfect recreation of some byzantine NCAA rule. They are putting the game down because it is offering to fulfill that player's mental model and failing. Playtest feedback never says that. I should know; I've been in a lot of playtest sessions. It's never that lucid. Playtesters will either say or insinuate "I don't get the controls." Because obviously the controls are to blame! They are the interface between the player's desired outcome and the actual outcome!

So what do you think the game makers try to fix next year?

Zack Hiwiller is currently the games design department chair at Full Sail University, and a former games designer, who also writes about games and the industry from his personal blog. He is the author of Practical Tools for Game Design Students. He writes from central Florida.

Republished with permission of the author.