This is SunFlowers, a casual game that will be out for PlayStation Vita this fall. A casual super cute game that will be out for PlayStation Vita this fall.

Sure, it looks like the type of title suited more for your phone or tablet than dedicated gaming hardware, but it also looks creative and fun.

Here's how lead designer Dr. Lakav describes SunFlowers:

You control the Sun, and you have the power to grow beautiful flowers on the ground. To do this, you shoot rays of sunlight through passing clouds, which turns the sunlight into water, which in turn causes the plants to grow. But if a sun ray touches a seed or a flower, it starts to burn. Thankfully, a drop of water will clear that burn right up.

When a flower reaches maturity, two new seeds pop out on both sides of it. If one new seed drops on an empty space it will be planted. If there's already another flower the seed will bounce on it until it reaches a clear slot (and that's how you make Combos!).

Every flower grown during a game goes directly in your virtual garden, where you can watch your collection and even offer them to your friends or a "near" player. See if you can collect all the flowers!

No word on a price yet, but that'll be interesting to watch. Will people be willing to pay more than $1 for a game like this?

SunFlowers Beaming to PS Vita This Fall [PlayStation Blog]

Did I ever tell you about how terrified I was of moles when I was a kid? Oh man, I was. I really was. I think I saw a mole once above ground, and according to my parents I spent the day shouting "Mole! Mole!" and running and hiding. Burrowing little MF-er scared the pants off of me.

I don't really feel that way about moles anymore. And what lingering animosity I may feel has been erased by Super Mole Escape for iPad and iPhone. In the game, you play as a mole who has escaped from prison by—what else?—digging. Except you don't actually control the digging—the player moves from the top of the screen to the bottom, and your mole digs ever-downward as you tilt the device to keep him on the finest, fastest dirt.

So, it's something like Jetpack Joyride, except that instead of going from left to right, you're falling from top to bottom. The game winds up feeling something like bowling—there are diamonds that you can pick up, and packages that contain power-ups, all of which help you go faster and dodge hazards. And you better not get slowed down too much, or the cops will catch up to you.

I had a total blast playing Super Mole Escape, far more fun than I thought I would—something about the pace of the game makes it always exciting, and every close encounter with the cops feels close. The downhill momentum is well-designed and feels good, and the inclusion of a multiplayer mode (you can race alongside another mole via an internet connection!) feels like icing on the cake.

Seriously. Fun game. It's a buck. Check it out. You'll never look at moles the same way again.

Super Mole Escape [App Store, $0.99]

We'll have tennis and dirt-biking in Grand Theft Auto V, but can we not also have a dragon that breathes fire while someone (the dragon?) does the Skyrim Fus-Roh-Dah shout?

Yes, we can, thanks to the ever-wonderful mod community that keeps on tweaking the PC version of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. Follow YouTube GTA mod masters Taltigolt and Indirivacua for more of this kind of thing.

Grand Theft Auto IV - Dragon (MOD) HD [YouTube]

Few video game companies' PC release practices are as reviled as Ubisoft's. From titles that require always-on internet connections to security-compromising DRM, attempts by the Assassin's Creed publisher to stop people from illegally obtaining or running their games on PC have met with strong criticism. Their responses haven't always helped.

However, Ubi CEO Yves Guillemot says that most people playing the company's games on PC don't pay for them. In an interview over on Games Industry International, Guillemot explains how the desire to circumvent piracy is shaping their development on PC:

"We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it. The advantage of F2P is that we can get revenue from countries where we couldn't previously - places where our products were played but not bought. Now with F2P we gain revenue, which helps brands last longer."

"It's a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. On PC it's only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content."

Of course, not every publisher shares Ubi's views on piracy. Paradox Interactive—publisher of War of the Roses—have been vocal before about their opposition to DRM. This morning, Paradox producer Shams Jorjani tweeted his take on Guillemot's comments:

Ubisoft's newest PC strategy is to launch their own uPlay client, which would be a storefront/launcher combination like EA's Origin. It's too soon to say if uPlay will change how many people pirate Ubisoft titles. But it's fair bet that uPlay will be the distribution pipeline through which Ubi tries to make money off their free-to-play games on PC.

Guillemot: As many PC players pay for F2P as boxed product [Games Industry International]

These new screenshots for Grand Theft Auto V, which Rockstar will release at some point to be announced on some consoles to be announced, are absolutely stunning.

Parachuting (pictured below) isn't new to the series; The Ballad of Gay Tony downloadable content added it to Grand Theft Auto IV. [And San Andreas had it too, as our readers have pointed out.]

Tennis, on the other hand, seems like a totally new addition for Grand Theft Auto V. Maybe a throwback to Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis?

What's most interesting about these shots is that they appear to focus on natural environments. It's a nice contrast to the urban Grand Theft Auto IV.

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Leisure [Rockstar]

After news broke yesterday that Nintendo Power seems all but doomed as a print publication and may be finished outright, I reached out to the biggest fan of Nintendo Power that I know of: Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski.

Yes, before he led the creation of Gears of War, worked on Unreal Tournament and became one of the world's top video game designers, Cliff Bleszinski was a kid who loved Nintendo and suffered the razzing of his schoolmates because of it. He was the kind of person who read Nintendo Power and, today, he is the kind of person who is able to provide us the ideal eulogy for a cherished part of many of our childhoods...

Take it away, Cliff:

"The Nintendo Fun Club, and later Nintendo Power, were incredibly important periodicals for me growing up in suburban New England. Remember, I grew up in an era pre-internet, so any data one could acquire about games came from only a handful of sources—the back of the box, or from a network of friends. The latter were often unreliable in the fact that they'd make up urban legends, such as the one about the negative worlds in Super Mario Brothers in which Mario allegedly got to go skiing. (I once, in middle school, had a friend try to convince me that there was a sequel out to the amazing game Herzog Zwei, when he had somehow misunderstood that the "2" was actually what "Zwei" meant in German. There was no Herzog Zwei 2. Closest thing is that sweet game AirMech that's coming out.)

"I digress. Nintendo Power wasn't just my glimpse into what was coming next, it felt like my portal to the outside world. It poured fuel on the fire of my burning love of video games by showing me previews of upcoming titles and how tantalizing they looked. I'll never forget seeing the giant bosses in Mega Man 2 laid out on those spreads; in fact, when I think back I can still smell the ink of the pages.

"The magazine also gave me my first taste of video game infamy with having my name in the Fun Club and later in the first issue of Nintendo Power—I sometimes wonder if this was what led to my eagerness to engage the press and gamers on such a regular basis.

"Most importantly, I learned the power of hype. Let's be honest, Nintendo Power was a propaganda device for the big N. But when you had a willing young boy in middle school who ate Nintendo Cereal, covered his walls with Nintendo logos, and was called "Nintendo Boy" on the bus it was a monthly shot in the arm that I would check the mailbox for daily. The magazine had a great run, and it will be missed, as will its enthusiasm, especially in a digital age that can sometimes be quick to damn before praising."

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Share your memories of Nintendo Power below.

I have never played Dishonored. The entirety of my exposure to it has been articles posted on Kotaku. I it places an emphasis on stealth, which I generally avoid. I also know that, should I play it, I will be treated to magnificent sights such as this one, and that's more than enough to get me to creep silently across a rooftop. Creepy masks not your cup of tea? Don't worry, there's more.

Create a setting unique enough and I will gladly cross genre lines normally forbidden by my personal creed in order to experience it. For instance, I do not play many sports titles, but set Madden inside a microscopic universe where dimensionally-challenged humans are forced to play football to entertain a race of sentient nanomachines and I'm there.

Dishonored is set in an industrial English city around the beginning of the 20th century, where magic and technology collide. It's a place where the masquerade balls haven't quite gotten to the scantily-clad nurse/cat/devil/dental assistant stage, when the costumes had creepy class. That completely cancels out any misgivings I have about being sneaky.

I'm so in.

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Jaywalking is a big problem in China. One news station decided to use Frogger (or rather, a Frogger clone) and some Mario music to show that jaywalking is not the best idea!

In the new clip, you can see folks walk across several lanes of traffic Edmonton Rd. in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. Scary stuff.

As website Beijing Cream points out, the journalist at the end of the news clip says, "Life isn't as simple as video games. When you pass in the game, you can level up. If you fail, you can try again. But as for people's lives, they only have one." Noted!

Chinese News Show Uses Frogger And Mario To Illustrate The Perils Of Jaywalking [Beijing Cream]

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Get your mind out of the gutter! Just because one pig is flashing a pig boob and another pig seems to be...that doesn't mean you are looking at sculpted stone porking.

Located in Zhengzhou, this Chinese statue is making many blush. According to ShanghaiIst, some are even calling it "vulgar" and dubbing the piece "hooligan pigs".

The urban management authority told the press, however, that the sculpture shows a young pig giving his mother pig a back massage, depicting filial piety.

The controversial statue is part of a 21 piece series of cartoon sculptures aimed at children and created to impart values, such as filial piety, perseverance, and love.

This is the second statue in China this month to raise eyebrows online. Recently, an enormous celestial maiden statue in Xinjiang province drew internet ire and was eventually taken down.

Don't be surprised if this swine sculpture is either altered or removed entirely.

Mating pigs on landmark square in Zhengzhou? #SculptureFAIL [ShangahaiIst]

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Remember when Blu-ray first came out? And Sony was trumpeting it (and the PS3) as the paramount of HD clarity? Well, yes, Blu-ray still looks fantastic. Thing is, this LG TV just looks fantasticer.

Today, LG unveiled a new LCD-TV in South Korea. According to The Wall Street Journal, it's 84-inches across and boasts a resolution of 8.2 million pixels.

Priced at $22,000, the television can render better clarity than DVD or even Blu-ray. This isn't HD, but rather, ultra HD!

LG thinks it's possible to make a 96-incher, but for the time being, it will be content with this 84-inch model. Surely, LG can make do with that!

LG Turns On Super-Big TV With Lots Of Little Pixels [Korea Real Time]

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