Don't ask me why I wound up googling this cutscene from Phantasmagoria over the weekend, but I did, and I watched it, and good lord. It's even worse than I remembered!

Go ahead and watch it. (Viewer beware: It is NSFW and also INTENSE and NASTY.) Now ask yourself: It may have made it into a game in 1995, but would a scene like this pass muster in a modern-day video game? No, I have to think. It would not.

We see a lot of awful violence in games these days; torture and decapitation and throat-stabbing are de rigueur. But somewhere between intense eyeball trauma and murder by force-feeding, gaming has drawn a line.

I'm all for freedom of expression, but you know, maybe it's okay if we give the censors this one.

659 people are playing standard multiplayer and 68 people are playing Zombies mode on Wii U. More than last week.

For comparison, there are 511,529 people playing standard multiplayer and 124,321 people playing Zombies mode in Black Ops II on Xbox 360.

Of course, it's not fair to directly compare a console that launched last week with a console that's been around for six years. So let's do some math.

Microsoft has sold 70 million Xbox 360s worldwide to date. If you take that 635,850 number (total multiplayer + zombies) and divide it by 70 million, you get a ratio of 0.009, which means that 9 out of every 1,000 people with Xbox 360s are playing Black Ops II as I write this.

Nintendo has sold 400,000 Wii U consoles in North America to date. (It hasn't been released anywhere else.) If you take 727 and divide it by 400,000, you get a ratio of 0.0018, which means that a little under 2 out of every 1,000 (or 9 out of every 5,000) people with Wii U consoles are playing Black Ops II as I write this.

As for Madden, well... Madden doesn't even have enough online players to complete a football team.

We'll continue to check this out regularly at different days and times just to get an idea of how many people are playing at any given moment.

And by the way, if you've seen exponentially more people playing at one specific time, let us know below.

Telltale's fantastic Walking Dead game was a surprise for several reasons. Not only did it reverse the studio's reputation for middling-to-unsatisfactory games, it will no doubt be in the running for many a publication's Game of the Year award. It proved that good writing and characterization can carry a video game, that the point-and-click adventure game still had some life left in it, and that choice and consequence can feel vital and terrifyingly important.

And on top of all of that, its episodic structure may well signal a change in the way we consume games.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that the game premiered back in April. It feels like it's been with us for a lot longer than that. Over the course of seven months and five episodes, we all became wrapped up in the harrowing, zombie-filled story of Lee, Kenny, Duck and, of course, Clementine. With the release of last week's season finale, the story that began in April finally came to an end.

When I think back over those months, the most remarkable thing wasn't how good The Walking Dead was, it was the way we all experienced it. Every six weeks or so, a new episode would come out. We'd all quickly play it, and then talk about it, and anxiously await the next one. In that way, it was unlike any game I've ever played.

The debut, "A New Day," impressed us with its credible characters and interesting dilemmas. "Starved For Help" threw up some schlocky thrills, but more importantly, demonstrated that the first episode wasn't a fluke, and that the series would likely be strong throughout. And the third episode, the emotionally devastating "Long Road Ahead," immediately put the game in the running for best-in-class.

What was so cool about all of that was the timeline over which it happened. Because we had to wait between episodes, we the audience could digest and discuss each new entry, and the game became a social phenomenon to an extent that few other games are. With each new release, people would be on Twitter, or Facebook, talking about the latest development, dancing around spoilers, fretting about the fates of our protagonists and comparing notes on the decisions they'd made. It stood in contrast to the way it goes with most video games, where people chatter for a week or a month after the release date and then move on to other things.

The rare long-lived game, like Borderlands 2 or Skyrim, carries on past this point, but many games, particularly AAA console games, seem to lose their critical mass of interest within about six weeks. But not The Walking Dead. Here we are, still talking about it, seven months after its release. To put that in perspective, the much-hyped Fez, blockbuster Max Payne 3 and excellent Trials Evolution were all released at around the same time as The Walking Dead. But Telltale's game retains far more conversational capital now.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that The Walking Dead was terrific. It was daring and smart, brave enough to allow for real tragedy, and emotionally affecting without feeling manipulative. It was based on a popular intellectual property, and came along right when some people were getting frustrated with the AMC TV show based on the same series. (Though I'd argue that the series has finally found its footing in this new season, but that's a separate article.) All of that played a vital part in the game's success—note that I didn't write this article about Telltale's similarly episodic but less successful Back to the Future and Sam and Max games, and certainly not their by-all-accounts risible Jurassic Park game, which was meant to be released episodically but wound up being lumped together into a single release. It also helped that the game was released on just about every platform possible, from PC to Mac to consoles to iPhones, giving it a much larger potential audience than your average video game.

But the role of the episodic model in The Walking Dead's success shouldn't be overlooked. I found it refreshing to experience a game in the same way that I experience TV shows. For once, I wasn't way ahead of a bunch of my friends, I hadn't already finished, and didn't have to wait for them to catch up so we could talk about it. By necessity, we were all on the same page, and so conversation flowed so much more freely. Wouldn't it be cool to see more games like this?

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that The Walking Dead will change everything. No single game could. The current way we create and consume games is pretty established, and any change will happen in bits and pieces over time. And just as single-serving movies exist alongside TV series, massive one-shot games will continue to exist alongside episodic ones. But Telltale's success could send a signal to other developers and publishers that the episodic model really works, when done properly. Most AAA publishers gamble huge amounts of money on making a splash and quickly selling millions of copies, and find little relief in post-release-window sales. Most games need to do big business in their first month on the market, otherwise they'll be deemed failures. It's a crazy and unbalanced model, and it's in need of some alternatives.

Episodic games like The Walking Dead could offer an avenue for change. For seven months this year, it was possible for fans to get in on The Walking Dead while it was still happening. For seven months, people talked about, recommended, and hyped the game. And now that it's finally complete, even more people can buy it as a complete package, a "Season 1 DVD," if you like. We won't have final sales numbers on The Walking Dead for a while, but it's a good bet that sales of the game continued at a much more consistent rate since April than, say, Max Payne 3. And more to the point, it was a fun, different, and refreshing way to experience a video game.

The Walking Dead isn't the first episodic game ever—Telltale has been pursuing this course of action, with limited success, for years. But Walking Dead is certainly the most successful one, and as such is something of a proof-of-concept. I've had hopes for the format for a long time—the episodic structure is why I will always prefer Mass Effect 2 to the other games in the series, and I find that I have more fun dissecting TV shows in real-time with my friends than I do games. In fact, I'd argue that in terms of structure, length, and format, story-based video games share more in common with television programs than they do with films.

We live in a golden age of television, where visionary writers and showrunners have embraced the TV format to tell long-form, novelistically satisfying stories. From The Wire to Deadwood to Mad Men, TV has granted the opportunity to tell complex, rewarding stories with a more flexible structure than film. It's no coincidence that Game of Thrones, the defining epic of the past (and likely next) several years, is happening not on the silver screen, but in living rooms.

With that in mind, it's not such a stretch to imagine that Telltale's The Walking Dead game could be a sign of things to come. And if more games were to follow in the footsteps of television, it could be a very good thing indeed.

Call it a hunch. Call it a journalist's instinct. There's just something about these Wii U consoles that seems rather flimsy:

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Clearly people are hoping to cash in on the Wii U cardboard boom.

eBay

This is how Pikachus are born. Don't let the pokéballs deceive you.

The cosplay idea is cute. In theory. And I don't want to be mean, but it does sort of creep me out. And I love kids!

If anyone knows who is in the picture or where it's originally from, drop a mention in the discussions down below.

How Pikachu is born [9gag via Geekologie]

Far Cry 3 is a really, really good game. One of the year's best, I'd wager. I've had so much fun with it that I'm playing it again, just for the heck of it, and shooting for 100% completion.

One of my big gripes, however, is the unfortunate amount of screen clutter. The problem is even worse on a second playthrough, when I'm already familiar with the rules, objectives and mechanics.

The game's invasive, pestering heads-up display is one of the most annoying in recent memory. My annoyance is doubtless due in large part to the fact that the game itself is so good, its world so lovely and immersive, that I wish it'd get out of my way. Far Cry 3 is a game that demands to be documented with screenshots, but the invasive HUD stymies every attempt.

Rare is the moment when there isn't some sort of message on screen, either a note nudging you on towards your next story goal, a tutorial for a skill you mastered the first time through, or a tip on how to overcome your current obstacle. All of these are perfectly helpful for some players, but unfortunately, more experienced players can't turn any of them off. Not the tips, the tutorials, the objective reminders and waypoint indicators, or the info-stocked mini-map. (And by now I hope we all know how I feel about mini-maps.)

This image up top is from a hunting mission in the game, and I think it sums up how annoying the HUD can be. Here we've got not one but two text boxes on the left-hand side, as well as the mini-map in the lower-left. Not only that, but you've got to do this mission with an RPG (which on its face is awesome, since you're hunting rabid dogs… with a rocket launcher), so the right side of the screen is filled with a huge weapon.

The result is greatly reduced visibility, a problem that would've been greatly mitigated by giving players the ability to turn off or minimize the HUD in the options menu. Alas, the game allows for none of that. All that's left now is to hold out hope for a patch. Given how deep, unpredictable and flat-out fun Far Cry 3 is, I can see myself playing it for months and even years to come. It's a shame the game will always treat me like a newbie.

The mediation has failed, and Hostess is closing its doors for good, selling off its popular brands to the highest bidders. Now that the initial panic has subsided it's time for clearer heads to prevail. The end of the Twinkie as a Hostess product is not the end of all golden sponge cakes.

There is another.

Several others, really. Hostess held no monopoly on stuffing creamed sugar inside preservative-laden cakes. Salvation is around every corner, as I discovered in my local Walmart as I wandered about trying to not look like a Black Friday shopper this weekend. "Oh, I'm just here for toilet paper and soda. Oh hey, cheap TV? Might as well." I am subtle. You could barely even see the blades I affixed to my elbows—not until it was too late.

My wanderings brought me, as they often do, to the snack cake aisle. It's not that I buy a lot of snack cakes, mind you. The snack cake aisle is also the Hot Pockets aisle, and I made a vow that my pockets would never run cold.

The week before last that spongy aisle opposite my local grocer's freezer was a barren wasteland, with nothing but a few lonely (and disgusting) strawberry Hostess cupcakes. That was before Walmart sprang into action, filling the shelves with box after generic box of Great Value-brand cakes. Misleading chocolate cupcakes. Not Ding Dongs. Faux Ho-Hos (and a bottle of rum). And of course, Golden Crème Cakes—Twinkies for poor people.

Twinkies for everyone now, at least until somebody buys the brand and does twisted things to it (Meat Twinkies!)

Of course I've developed an incredibly sophisticated palate over the years, so that everyone might not include me. Surely a certified snackologist like myself could tell the difference between a real Twinkie and a Golden Crème Cake. I decided to hold a taste test.

On one plate I placed a Golden Crème Cake. On the other, I placed nothing because there are no Twinkies anywhere.

So far it wasn't going so well.

I tasted the Golden Crème Cake. It tasted like a Twinkie. I sampled the emptiness. It was hollow, with a hint of despair. Quite telling.

Rather than rush the results, I spent the next two days emptying the entire box of ten. The verdict? I still felt just as sick as I would had I eaten nine official Hostess-brand Twinkies.

That leaves one unaccounted for. I needed that one for the final test.

Yep, that's a Twinkie, more or less.

The truest test of whether the Golden Crème Cake can take the place of the Twinkie is not one I can perform—not without an immensely powerful intergalactic artifact.

I'd like to think the Golden Crème Cake would pass that final test, but let's face it—if it didn't, we wouldn't live long enough to notice.

Today Dorkly asks, "What if the world's most popular websites were Pokemon?" Ash probably would have had a hard time collecting all of those gym badges with Pornotubeon at his side.

If you could carry around any website in a ball in your pocket, bringing it out whenever you pleased to rollick and play a midst the tall grass, which would you choose?

Would you go with Facespook, the ultimate evolution of Myspectre?

Perhaps the internet-toughness of Torchan, keeper of the mighty Flamewarthrower?

All nice choices, but what if you had one Pokemon that could evolve into any of seven different ultimate forms, one of which is a pink and yellow, video game obsessed squirrel-looking thing?

Maybe I'm a little biased.

For more website-based Pokemon and other internet rage-inducing humor, head over to Dorkly right now.

I was not planning to spend an hour shooting and bludgeoning zombies to death on Facebook, yet here we are.

I wandered over to Zynga.com to grab a screenshot of FarmVille for today's winners and losers post, and there was the image for Eruptive Entertainment's Citizen Grim, all darkness and evil and flames and pretty redheads, not at all what I expected to see there.

The game's been around for a while now. Had I seen it sooner I would have played it sooner, but despite its many advances, Facebook still makes it hard to discover new games in a timely fashion. Had I known about this story-driven, 'mid-core' survival horror game sooner, then so would have you folks.

You're not sure how you got here, or why the citizens of Grim County have been transformed into hideous beasts known as Reapers. All you know is you've got to find your brother Alex, place businesses to aid in your survival, gather resources to upgrade your weapons and kill anything that gets in your way of doing so, be it lowly cannon fodder to powerful boss. Hire a merc or two to help you out if you'd like, just wipe them out.

Citizen Grim is a sublime combination of common social gameplay tropes and isometric survival horror shooter. Click on your enemies to auto-attack with melee weapons, firearms or other instruments of destruction as they relentlessly attack. Activate waves of Reapers to earn rewards and a spot on the leaderboards.

It's not quite an action game, not quite a social click fest. It's somewhere in-between, and that makes the setting and slaughter all the more unsettling.

Citizen Grim [Facebook]

This morning, I saw someone tweet an article called "Gaming Journalism versus Nintendo." Catchy enough headline. I had to check that one out.

The article, written for the website Not Enough Shaders by a writer named Emily Rogers, levied a number of accusations at a large gaming website that was not named. (The article has since been taken down, but the folks at NeoGAF have saved the copy and you can read it in its entirety here.)

According to Rogers, an indie game studio named AckkStudios took an interview with a large gaming website the week after Hurricane Sandy.

"Hey wait a minute," I thought to myself. "I work for a large gaming website. And I interviewed an indie game studio named AckkStudios the week after Hurricane Sandy."

According to Rogers, the folks at AckkStudios were upset that the interview had not yet been posted on that large gaming website. Rogers wrote that AckkStudios thought the interviewer only wanted to talk about how Nintendo mistreats indie game developers, and when AckkStudios wouldn't comply, the large gaming website decided not to post the article.

"That's not really how my interview with those folks went," I thought, "but my interview still isn't live. November has been so busy, and I haven't had a chance to transcribe it yet. Is she really talking about me?"

Then Rogers started getting more specific. "For the record, I'm NOT talking about IGN, GameSpot, Eurogamer, or Destructoid," she wrote. "The site I'm speaking of is just as well known as those sites though."

Okay. That certainly narrowed it down. Rogers continued: "The irony is that the top guy behind this site has been regularly defending gaming journalism when his site has been the biggest contributor in manufacturing click-bait controversy." Could this have been a reference to our editor Stephen Totilo's recent story about game journalism?

"For the big site I am referring to, it has quite a negative reputation from Nintendo fans," she wrote. "Some gamers have made past claims that this site has an agenda against Nintendo, and I never believed it. I just assumed that Nintendo fans were being way too sensitive and defensive about any criticism against Nintendo. But now I'm starting to think there might be some kind of an agenda from this site."

While I certainly don't think Kotaku has an agenda against Nintendo, I've heard complaints like that before. This didn't seem like a coincidence. So a few hours after the article went live, I sent an e-mail to the folks at AckkStudios expressing my disappointment and explaining why my interview with them had yet to be published. They responded with an apology, and denied that the article was about us—"You guys were great in your interview, and we really enjoyed doing it," AckkStudios co-founder Brian Allanson told me—making the whole situation even more confusing.

I also posted on the NeoGAF message board to explain my side of the story. Shortly after this, Rogers pulled her article from the web. She tweeted that she should not have written it. She also deleted several tweets referring to what had happened:

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Rogers continued to deny that the article was about Kotaku, although I couldn't shake the feeling that it was. So I sent her an e-mail asking if she'd hop on the phone—she said no, and she wouldn't comment on the record for this story—and I re-listened to the audio recording of my interview with AckkStudios. It certainly didn't seem leading. In the 37-minute conversation, we spent maybe two minutes talking about Nintendo's policies, and the talk never turned negative. I thought their game was very interesting, and I told them as much during our conversation.

So I gave AckkStudios another call to clear things up. Speaking to me on the phone this afternoon, Andrew Allanson, Brian's brother and co-founder of the company, told me he thinks Rogers' article was a series of miscommunications and incorrect facts. He said he did indeed think Rogers was talking about Kotaku, as AckkStudios had not had any other interviews with large gaming websites. He said they spoke to several European magazines and websites, and that they had received a call from someone who claimed to be from IGN (and said he would call them back later, but never did), but he couldn't recall any other recent interviews.

Allanson added that they had talked to Rogers about their interview with me, but he said they hadn't told her anything that she had written—"I had no idea she was writing an article about this," he said—and he said he asked Rogers to take the article down.

"She did exactly what she was accusing other people of doing... She is probably linking a lot of unrelated things," he said. "It's just bad journalism."

Rogers would not speak on the record for this story, although she has said on Twitter that she "removed the article to prevent any politics for the studio."

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Rogers also has some history with AckkStudios—according to the Allansons, she helped facilitate their relationship with Nintendo by writing an article about their game, Two Brothers. "Within maybe three days of the article being up, we were contacted by Emily, who said she was in touch with someone at Nintendo of America and they wanted to put us in touch with a representative," Andrew Allanson told me in our initial phone interview three weeks ago. "Within maybe two weeks of getting in touch with Nintendo, they gave us the go-ahead to start developing for the eShop."

It's a messy situation, and I don't know exactly what conversations have gone down between Rogers and the folks at AckkStudios over the past few weeks, although it has become clear both to me and Andrew Allanson that the negative article was indeed about Kotaku.

It's too bad. Their game sounds really interesting.

Two Bros

Some games tangled in controversy are not worthy of attention. This one certainly seems to be. Two Brothers, a game developed by the two brothers Brian and Andrew Allanson, looks and sounds fascinating.

The Allansons first started working on the game in January of 2010 as something of a hobby in addition to their full-time jobs—Brian is an artist for iOS apps, and Andrew composes music for films, concerts, and games—and eventually decided that it might just be good enough to release.

"On the weekends, Brian will work literally from 8'o'clock in the morning until... 3'o'clock in the morning," Andrew said when we all spoke three weeks ago. "It's only gotten crazier since we started working on it. I don't think we ever entirely intended on finishing it until it eventually kind of proved to be something we wanted to make. So Brian has put in a lot of time into it on the side. We eventually realized it had something, it had some potential to it."

Late this summer, they launched a Kickstarter for Two Brothers. It earned just over $16,000 in funding, selling itself as an old-school action-RPG designed to appeal to your nostalgia-loving soul. On first glance Two Brothers looks straight out of a Game Boy Color, and the brothers say that's intentional. Color plays a large part in the game, which the Allansons say was inspired by the likes of Secret of Mana and Link's Awakening. The whole plot revolves around color. You play an inventor who, after a near-death experience, envisions an after-life filled with colors, and starts to become obsessed with seeing and re-discovering those colors. So that's your job.

It's rather non-linear, the Allansons say—they compare the game to Shadow of the Colossus in that you'll be exploring the world and hunting down colors in any order you choose. One section, for example, tasks you with going out to the ocean, finding a color, realizing it was swallowed by a fish, finding a fishing rod, fishing for that fish, and then making your way inside of it to track down that color.

"In the game, one thing we should point out is that everyone lives inside of animals," Andrew said.

"Why do people live inside of animals?" I asked.

"Why not?" Brian said.

Touché. Two Brothers was originally slated for PC, OSX, and Xbox 360, and now that the Allansons are licensed Nintendo developers, they plan to bring it to Wii U too. They say their experience with Nintendo has been nothing but pleasant, and that the only real restrictions involve in-game advertisement and product placement. They can charge what they want and add whatever they'd like without worrying about an outside force enacting creative control over their product—Nintendo gets final approval, but the Allansons say that's mostly for bug-catching and quality-controlling.

"It's refreshing to hear that you guys are having this experience with Nintendo," I said, noting that Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime had made some disparaging comments about "garage developers" in the past.

"I'm relieved because I didn't know what to expect," Andrew said. "As soon as it was very clear that they had a direct business plan with how they want to work with indies, and that everything was very fair, the sort of stereotype of Nintendo being difficult to work with as an indie developer... I feel like they're trying to fight against it."

The Allansons want to keep working on Nintendo consoles. They've got some ideas for how to use the Wii U's GamePad with Two Brothers, and they say they've been tinkering with their next game—a game that Brian says will feel like "3D Earthbound"—which will be their next project for the Wii U. (Two Brothers will be out early next year.)

"We're not promising it'll be as good," Brian said when I pointed out what a lofty promise "3D Earthbound" would be to so many RPG fans. "But we promise it'll be inspired."