Halloween is on its way, and while ghosts and ghouls may have been the undead horrors of decades past, here in 2012 it's all about the zombies and their ilk.

What better way to get in the mood for spooky doom than with this weirdly lovely, thoroughly instructive image from Left 4 Dead 2? See zombie, apply flamethrower. Now that's useful advice for the ages.

Click the image to expand to its full hi-res gory glory.

Open Up [Dead End Thrills]

I've written before about how RPGs parallel football in many ways, and how the ebb and flow of an NFL game mirrors traditional turn-based combat.

So it was vindicating to see this great 1UP interview with Hiroyuki Ito, a veteran game designer and one of the engineers behind many of Square's Final Fantasy games, all the way back through the original. Speaking with Jeremy Parish, Ito said his designs for Final Fantasy's battle system were inspired by—believe it or not—NFL football.

1UP: You say you're a jack-of-all-trades, but what trade did you practice with Final Fantasy?

HI: I dealt mostly with the battle system.

1UP: So did you create the battle system, or work on balancing it...?

HI: I actually created the battle system, yes.

1UP: What was your inspiration for that?

HI: Basically, there's no one inspiration that I got that battle system from. It was just a logical process, where I thought, "How can I create an efficient battle system for a role-playing game?" That's the answer that I came to. At the root of it all, though, there's a basic kind of system that comes from professional sports...

1UP: Any particular sport that you had in mind?

HI: Yeah, the NFL. Football is probably the closest thing.

1UP: I guess I can see that, with the parties lining up on either side and taking turns...

HI: Yeah. A lot of it has to do with how in the NFL, the plays are pre-planned. Each side has a strategy. That's kind of the idea.

Go read the whole thing: it's a great interview! And Ito seems like a really interesting guy—I'd love to hear his thoughts on Tim Tebow.

Ah, the video game console. It is the machine you use when you plop down on a couch and want to play a video game. It's been that way for decades.

Console will always be the machine for gaming in the living room, right?

Maybe not. Consider the tablet...

In a study of 33 people (that's more than 30!), Google's Research division determined that people (at least 33 of them) love nothing more than to use their tablet to check e-mail or play video games. And they love using their tablet most... on the couch.

The study tracked the tablet usage of these 33 people for two weeks, across more than 700 uses of their tablets. The test subjects were located in New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee, apparently to account for differences in urban, suburban and rural usage.

Hey, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft... good thing this is only a study of 33 people! Nothing to worry about at all. Don't worry about Steam Big Picture either. Nope. No worry needed.

Understanding Tablet Use: A Multi-Method Exploration [Google Research PDF, via Tech Crunch and Twitter]

This exploding Pikachu is not actually the creepiest of photographer Alan Sailer's explosions series. (That would be the doll head.) But it's still plenty off-putting.

Sailer is a photographer who specializes in high-speed images—in particular, high speed images of things being shot or blowing up. As he describes it, the destruction of an innocent Pokémon was merely an explosion of opportunity:

I ran into a garage sale that had this nice big hard plastic Pikachu.

Perfect target.

They wanted 2$, but when I told them I was going to blow it up for a picture, the kid who owned it said alright for one buck.

I filled it with red gelatine, crossed my fingers and fantastic, it turned out great.

The red gelatin is, really, the best and worst part. Poor Pikachu.

Achoo Pikachu [Flickr, via Incredible Things]

Long before there was a Final Fantasy or an Ultima, role-playing was strictly something a group of friends did around a dining room table cluttered with pieces of paper, rulebooks and dice. Knights of the Pen and Paper captures that experience beautifully.

Countless games have boasted bringing the pen-and-paper role-playing experience to video games over the years. The Neverwinter Nights series came pretty close, allowing a player to craft a custom adventure and then let players run through it, but it wasn't quite the same as sitting at the head of the table, peering over your dungeon master screen at a group of eager players. Setting the mood with props, purchasing the proper snacks for an evening of play acting and dice rolling — these are lost in video games, or they were.

In Behold Studios' Knights of the Pen and Paper (available now on Google Play, coming soon to iOS), you can spend money on expensive themed furniture to bolster the mood and by extension the stats of your adventuring party. You can order them a pizza. You can listen to them complain that there aren't enough attractive wenches in your campaign.

These familiar trappings wrap themselves lovingly around a standard turn-based role-playing game. You dictate your players' actions (though I suppose you could let friends choose what skills to level up and what actions to use on baddies) as they take on random encounters and epic quests alike. They gain experience and you earn cash, which can be used on more powerful equipment, adding additional party members to your table, or snacks.

Aside from a few crashes on my Transformer Prime tablet, the game has been an absolute joy to play, taking me back to the days when most of my gaming was done with one hand in a bag of dice and the other in a bag a chips.

Knights of the Pen and Paper - $1.99 [Google Play]

Long before there was a Final Fantasy or an Ultima, role-playing was strictly something a group of friends did around a dining room table cluttered with pieces of paper, rulebooks and dice. Knights of the Pen and Paper captures that experience beautifully.

Countless games have boasted bringing the pen-and-paper role-playing experience to video games over the years. The Neverwinter Nights series came pretty close, allowing a player to craft a custom adventure and then let players run through it, but it wasn't quite the same as sitting at the head of the table, peering over your dungeon master screen at a group of eager players. Setting the mood with props, purchasing the proper snacks for an evening of play acting and dice rolling — these are lost in video games, or they were.

In Behold Studios' Knights of the Pen and Paper (available now on Google Play, coming soon to iOS), you can spend money on expensive themed furniture to bolster the mood and by extension the stats of your adventuring party. You can order them a pizza. You can listen to them complain that there aren't enough attractive wenches in your campaign.

These familiar trappings wrap themselves lovingly around a standard turn-based role-playing game. You dictate your players' actions (though I suppose you could let friends choose what skills to level up and what actions to use on baddies) as they take on random encounters and epic quests alike. They gain experience and you earn cash, which can be used on more powerful equipment, adding additional party members to your table, or snacks.

Aside from a few crashes on my Transformer Prime tablet, the game has been an absolute joy to play, taking me back to the days when most of my gaming was done with one hand in a bag of dice and the other in a bag a chips.

Knights of the Pen and Paper - $1.99 [Google Play]

When was the last time you heard of an American with the name Benedict? Almost never happens, right? That's because that word is associated with a man who betrayed colonial forces in the Revolutionary War, earning Benedict Arnold a level of scorn and infamy that's practically eternal. Well, in the PS3 exclusive missions for Assassin's Creed III, it sure looks like you might get to kill him.

The video above shows off highlights of the Benedict Arnold missions—which will be available with George Washington asking Connor to root out Arnold's turncoat activities as he prepares to surrender the fort at West Point to the British. Now, in real life, Arnold became a British soldier and died in London. Assassin's Creed games have a way of letting you kill historical figures. It'll be interesting to see Arnold meets his end in ACIII at players' hands or in a fashion that hews closer to how he actually died.

Assassin's Creed III: Expose Benedict Arnold Exclusively on PS3 [PlayStation Blog]

Digital Storm isn't just a boutique PC shop — it's a group of engineers striving to innovate in the PC space. Now those engineers have unleashed the Bolt, a 14 inch tall, 3.6 inches wide marvel of space economy and power, with one rather noisy downside.

This is not an all-in-one PC box, with components custom-made to fit into a tiny space. The Bolt has enough room inside its cramped quarters for a full-sized graphics card, three hard drives (two SSD drives and one mechanical), and a copper-pipe cooling system capable of keeping an Intel i7 3770K CPU overclocked at 4.6 GHz frosty. It's got a special 500W power supply, which can handle a fair amount of today's higher-end video cards.

It's everything a PC gamer needs, wrapped up in a sleek and sexy black package with a bright red stand.

"Gaming PCs have always been housed in massive towers, but we've seen that more and more consumers are moving towards smaller and more efficient machines," said Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm's Director of Product Development via today's official announcement. "We wanted to develop a slim affordable gaming PC that could play the latest titles, while still being a powerful desktop PC that kept future upgradability in mind."

The Bolt is indeed upgradeable, and it's also rather affordable, considering the premium consumers are used to paying for power in a small place. The system starts at $999 and runs all the way up to $1949, not pocket change but not outrageous.

The unit I tested was the fourth level machine, loaded with a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti and fitted with a Gigabyte GA-Z77N-WIFI, making it incredibly convenient for folks looking for a living room PC.

Note that even next to Razer's mini Tournament Edition BlackWidow keyboard the system still looks pretty tiny. It's a strikingly small system, though rather heavy — it'll fit in a backpack, but you wouldn't want to carry it.

As for power...

Metro 2033's benchmark gave the system a bit of a workout at 1920x1080, still within playable parameters, but I prefer over 60's, which the Bolt delivered in both Arkham City and Shogun 2.

At 720p (for those of you looking at running Steam's big screen mode on an older television, perhaps) the Bolt kicks all of the asses.

There is a downside to all of this power in such a tiny space, and that problem is noise. The unit I've been testing sounds like my wife is blow-drying her hair in the next room whenever mildly strenuous games are in play. There's not a lot of room for insulation in the cramped case, so when those fans blow they blow hard. I've not had any heat problems, so at least they are getting the job done. It's just sad to think that such a pretty piece of hardware might be hidden away to dampen the noise.

Update: Digital Storm informs me that there is a new Gold Plus version of the 500W power supply that came with my review unit that is significantly less noisy.

Noise aside, the Digital Storm Bolt is a tiny marvel, a 3.6 inch wide gaming PC with plenty of power and upgradability. For PC gamers with plenty of space it might be nothing more than a striking curiosity, but for those with limited electronic real estate it could be exactly what they were waiting for.

Rod Humble makes video games. He knows a lot of people who wish they could, and he's made it his job to help them.

"Just about everybody I know who isn't in the games business or programming business comes to me with a game idea or a website, and the truth of the matter is, quite often, they can't make it," he recently told me during a phone interview.

"There's this big barrier. They look at something like C++ [programming] code and, frankly, it looks like a big equation. It just looks like gibberish.

"The more we can make tools that are just fun to use—all of a sudden you are making something you wanted—you can focus on the creativity than mastering this arcane set of symbols. We can hopefully bring more people into that fold of ‘hey, you made something!'"

So this is what Rod Humble is staking his professional future on: helping people make digital stuff. Two weeks ago, the company Humble became CEO of about two years ago, Linden Lab, released Patterns, a virtual 3D world designed to let people piece together shapes and build things in it.

In the near future, his company will put out a program for iPad called Creatorverse, which will let people use shapes and physics to create basic 3D systems and, yes, games, then share them for anyone else to download and play. Think of making a game that lets you fling shapes into other shapes—your own "Slightly Mad Avians", he offers as an example, if you get what he means.

Creatorverse, which will be out later this year, is Humble's five-year-old daughter's favorite app: "She drags in a lot of circles with beautiful colors—that matters a lot. Then, because we've got the tilt factor in, she hits play and they bounce around …She also likes it when you can make hundreds and hundreds of squares and watch them collapse."

There's more. Humble's Linden Lab are working on a website that lets people create rooms out of their personal images and videos, connects them to other people's rooms and lets people share the space. They also bought something called LittleTextPeople, created by interactive fiction writer Emily Short and AI programmer Richard Evans that will become—get this—"a platform that lets you make real interactive drama" by giving you "the ability to create characters within a story" and then, thanks to the AI, see that "those characters will have emergent properties as you play through the story." This last one is really ambitious. Humble admits they are "tilting at windmills."

"People like a kind of creativity that is within their grasp," says Humble, explaining this quartet of new digital canvases he and his teams are making. But he qualifies it: "They don't necessarily want it to become a lifestyle."

Most of us, Rod Humble realizes, are not Rod Humble. He's a constant creator, a long-time game developer who became an executive somehow without abandoning the act of creating games. As a corporate developer, he made games for Sony Online Entertainment and then EA, rose high in the executive ranks at EA, oversaw, not surprisingly, a tool designed called Sims Carnival that was designed to help regular people make games, then went to Linden Lab to be CEO. All the while he was making indie games on the side. He's made an art game about marriage. He coded another game on a weekend. He just put out a short game called Perfect Distance, which he says "is about a soldier who basically comes to terms with the fact that he doesn't feel he has any free will." And he's got another one, STAVKA-OKH, about "how it feels to be a high-ranking general working for a lunatic, Stalin or Hitler." (Humble never said that everything we'd want to create is cheerful).

It makes perfect sense that Humble would wind up at Linden Lab, the company best known for the virtual world Second Life. It's as successful a canvas for the communal creation of a virtual world as there's been. It's been a viable digital canvas for about a decade now has been populated by users who make their own buildings and vehicles, who design contraptions, contort physics, stage elaborate events, form societies, and pioneer the art of inhabiting elaborate second skins that express inner or otherwise impossible creativity and desires.

Humble became CEO at Linden Lab almost two years ago. The release of Patterns is the first product of his tenure there. It's a $10 download for now. It's very early on, but buying now ensures people—"founders"—will get the updates and eventually the finished thing. It's the Minecraft model.

"The initial founder-offering isn't even half-baked," Humble says. "It's a bunch of ingredients, sort of scattered around on the floor." For now users will be able to tinker in a pre-arranged private space and can add and subtract shapes from the space to travel through it. It borrows some ideas from old bridge-building games, giving players finite resources and challenging them to go from here to there. Eventually, players will be able to visit each other user's worlds and see how those worlds, all bound by specific rules of physics and stocked with the same amount of resources, vary. "One of the pipedreams," Humble says, "is that I go to your little world and, let's say you've shaped it into a ball with other balls floating around it all, with their own gravitational pull. You come to my world and I've crafted this flatland with a house on it, with the edge of the flatland sagging down from the pull of gravity." The program, which is only a game if you make it into one, will be a universe of player-created worlds, he hopes.

Humble stumbles a bit when he tries to describe what Linen Lab creates. They're not making games. At one moment, he calls them "products", then catches himself. "Oh, that makes it sound like shoes!" He settles on "shared creative platforms and creative spaces," which doesn't sound as exciting a pitch as someone saying they want you to play their next cool video game, except, once he gets going describing these spaces, it's easy to get excited about making something in them. His team's goal is to make it easy for the rest of us to make something, well to make something virtual.

"I think there's a simple level of creativity that everybody likes," he says.

"There's a reason all of our moms might save our early kid paintings, and I've certainly still got some poetry I wrote as an angst-ridden teenager," he says. "When you make something, kind of it matters and you want to keep it with you. And I think the more we as a company can make tools that allow you to have the feeling of ownership of, hey, I actually made something really cool. I think that's tremendously rewarding."

What do you want to make?

Since 2011, all of EA's games released on PC have been tied to Origin. PC gamers who wanted to play Battlefield 3 or Mass Effect 3 logged in through the orange-hued Steam competitor, and now it seems that Wii U owners will do the same.

As IGN reports, recent changes to the EA privacy policy indicate that a login to the service will be required for Wii U games. Specifically, one section reads, "If you sign up to play EA games through a Nintendo Wii U console, your Nintendo account information will be provided to EA so that we can establish an Origin Account for you. You need an Origin Account to play EA's titles online."

Owners of PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of games like Mass Effect 3, and users of mobile apps and games like the Mass Effect 3 Datapad or The Simpsons: Tapped Out, already associate an Origin ID with their EA console games in order to play online.

Three games from EA are already confirmed to be released in the Wii U's initial "launch window:" Mass Effect 3, Madden 13, and FIFA 13.

EA Games on Wii U Will Require Origin [IGN]