Hitman: Absolution is, for the most part, a serious game. It's a great game. But there's definitely some lowbrow humor at work.

Kirk's not the biggest fan of the back-to-back, incessant appearance of nasty jokes. But, and maybe it's because I haven't actually played the game yet, I find it hilarious in Achievement Hunter's video above where they compile a bunch of "bromance" scenarios.

There's some cuddling, some hand-holding, and then some more rated-R-implied content.

I know, I know. It's like I'm five.

I really loved Thomas Was Alone, a charming indie puzzle platformer from developer Mike Bithell. Apparently, the folks who make games for Wired's UK division liked it, too, because they cranked out a game that cribs heavily from Thomas Was Alone.

CFBDSIR2149 Was Alone doesn't have the endearing narration of Danny Wallace or the excellent soundtrack by David Housden. But the newsgame tied to an article about an orphan planet does parrot the tone, text boxes and get-to-the-exit level design of Thomas. Despite being an unmistakable—and inferior—clone of Bithell's game, no acknowledgement of that inspiration is in the text. The developer of the CFBDSIR2149 game does mention Thomas Was Alone in the comments.

Bithell himself found out on Twitter:

As of this writing, there hasn't been any change in the article text. No game deserves to be ripped off but it's especially troubling when it happens to an indie release. Everyone go play Thomas Was Alone. It's better anyway.

Update: Mention of Thomas Was Alone—and a link to the game on Steam—as inspiration has been added to the article. All is well.

When My Little Pony for iOS and Android launched earlier this month I could count my Gameloft Live friends on two hands. Now I have 500. They say you can never have too many friends. In my case, too many friends destroyed Ponyville.

In the screenshot above you'll notice entirely too many chests. When players send gifts to their friends in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, they show up as these chests, dropping from the sky onto the unsuspecting town below. When I started playing I was lucky if I got one or two per session. Lately I've been getting several hundred a day. All at once.

There are so many there than tapping on them to reveal the hearts inside has become a chore, so I left the batch here alone, figuring I could get back to them later.

The next day I logged in to the same screen, and another flock of a hundred chests dropped on top of the existing one. Before the game finished loading, it died. There were too many objects attempting to load at once.

I tried reloading; it died. I restarted the iPod Touch, ensuring all other programs were terminated; still the game died.

So I deleted the app and reinstalled it. This deleted everything I had built over the past three weeks completely.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic doesn't save your progress online. Everything is local to your device, so when I downloaded the game on my iPad, for instance, I had to start over again from scratch. So when I deleted the app and restored it, everything went poof. All of my progress. $30 worth of in-game purchases. Gone.

But hey, at least I've still got my friends, right?

It's too bad that 36You's surreal, hilarious fake boyfriend app Boyfriend Maker has been pulled from Apple's app store. It was likely pulled because the games now-infamous "chat mode" opened up all sorts of bizarre and risqué dialogue.

The game won a healthy following purely due to its strangeness, and thankfully, people who managed to snag the app while it was still on the store are still updating the Boyfriend Maker Tumblr with odd highlights from conversations with their virtual significant others.

Here are some of my favorites, in which we learn that the boyfriend is racist, calls his penis Krull, and is a fan of "Team Jakeward."

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Boyfriend Maker [Tumblr]

About a week ago we all got the opportunity to get our hands on Sony's brawler, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

I mentioned in my review that BioShock's Big Daddy was one of the highlights, if for nothing else than his third-level special move. It's gorgeous, and one of the most uniquely done action moves that I saw from any playable character in the game. It's also somehow sad, inspiring memories of the twisted utopia that was Rapture.

In case you haven't seen it yet, watch all three super moves in the video above. Or feel free to skip to 25 seconds in for that third-level super move that I keep raving about.

We've known for a couple of weeks now that Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden, one of my favorite role-playing games and one of the best indie RPGs out there, is getting a sequel.

Today, the creators have launched a ridiculous Kickstarter for the upcoming RPG. They want $35,000 to make it a reality.

(Some highlights of the Kickstarter: $100 gets you a full-sized body pillow based on Cyberdwarf, one of the game's characters. $10,000 gets you lunch with pictures of the developers.)

So what exactly is The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa? I hopped on the phone a few weeks ago with creator Eric Shumaker to talk about what he has planned for the sequel to his beloved role-playing game.

"I think we've probably made as good a basketball RPG as you can probably make," he said when I asked if Barkley 2 would feel like the first game. "We don't want to run that into the ground. There's definitely basketball in it... I think it's a lot funnier than the original Barkley. I think everything about it is better than the original: the humor, the gameplay, everything. It's still like really weird, and I dunno. If you're familiar with the stupid YouTube videos or any of the other stupid games I've made, I feel like it's consistent along those lines."

Just don't expect any random basketball players or pop culture references. The folks behind Barkley 2 are selling it this time—for $10 or so at first, Shumaker says—and they don't want to get sued for mentioning the likes of Wilford Brimley or LeBron James.

"It's the same attitude as the original Barkley, but it's different structurally," Shumaker said. "I don't think you could call it a JRPG, but you also couldn't call it a Western RPG. It takes my favorite ideas from both genres and puts them together, so it's not knocking down one genre a few pegs. The original Barkley made fun of JRPGs but didn't offer any solutions. I think this one does, offers some solutions to problems in the genre."

Shumaker says he wants to blend the narrative strengths of a JRPG with the choices of a WRPG. Your main character, for example, an amnesiac (who may or may not be Hoopz Barkley, son of Charles, whose fate was left up in the air (or up in space) after the first game), can be customized in a number of ways: history, personality, class, gender. Then, when you get to a certain point in Barkley 2 where your main character's real identity is revealed, you can decide whether to accept that new personality or reject it, and keep the identity you created.

"It's really weird," Shumaker said. "It's a really weird game.

But he's proud of it. He's proud of the graphics—"I can't believe how good they are," Shumaker said—which he compares to Suikoden II. And he's particularly proud of the humor, even without all the random pop culture references.

"If you thought that Barkley 1 was funny because it included all these basketball players as opposed to the juxtaposition of how stupid it was with how serious we took it, then maybe you should re-evaluate that," he said. "I think what made it funny was just how ridiculous it was. And the story of Space Jam and everything, that's all there, that's not changing at all. That's all really important. It's just not like 'Here's Kevin Garnett, here's Shaquille O'Neal or whatever.'

"It's an extremely funny game because we're maintaining the same attitude, we're maintaining the same talent and consistency. We're not relying on those— I think in Barkley we sort of relied on those references to be funny. This time we're generally just a lot funnier, a lot smarter now. We just have a better perspective."

Unlike the first Barkley, which was at its core a turn-based JRPG, this will be a top-down, actionier experience. You'll use your mouse to steer the direction of your gun as you shoot down monsters and enemies in Necron 7 (a "mysterious dwarf space ziggurat" on which you're held captive).

They've got a gun generation system that Shumaker compares to Diablo or Borderlands, and a gun fusion system that he says is sort of like Persona. There are rocket launchers that shoot sludge. Machine guns that shoot gravity bombs. That sort of thing.

"We basically want to give the player as much control over abilities and tactical options as possible," Shumaker said.

There are six or seven members on the team behind Barkley 2, and they've been thinking about this game for quite some time now. Shumaker, 24, is studying computer science at Montgomery College. He took the year off from school just to make this game. If the Kickstarter doesn't get funded, they'll still make it, but they might scale back a little bit, Shumaker says.

You can see gameplay footage from Barkley 2 in the video above. And if you still haven't played Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden—which now has a Mac port—well, seriously, what are you waiting for? It's totally free.

Here at Kotaku, not everyone is a fully-fledged PC gamer. But some of us would like to be.

Like a certain Tina who has a certain birthday coming up this Friday. Who also has a certain older brother who spoils her. See where I'm going with this?

So he and I will be doing our research and digging into the best parts to put into my soon-to-be glorious PC machine. But maybe you guys have a few suggestions. And maybe some of you are, like me, looking to chip off a piece of this whole "master race" business.

Let's share and weigh in on the absolute best pieces of hardware that would create the most optimal beast to run the shiniest of games.

Spicy Horse's web-based Worms-meets-Mother Goose trajectory shooter Crazy Fairies flies from Facebook to Android, bringing cross-platform multiplayer to the Droid-loving masses.

Crazy Fairies is a turn-based shooter in the same vein as the PC classic Worms, with a heaping helping of American McGee's penchant for twisted fairy tales. Players choose a character from several fantasy archetypes and then take to the battlefield in single and multiplayer shooting matches. They'll collect fantastic weapons, level up their characters, and participate in massive online tournaments against fellow Android players, browser gamers and, eventually, iOS warriors.

Grab Crazy Fairies for Android for free at Google Play, or just go play it on the web. It's a heck of a good time.

AMD kick-started 2012 with the release of the Radeon HD 7970, the first member of the Radeon HD 7000 GPU series. This launch marked the introduction of the first-ever graphics card to be made on a 28nm design process, representing the company's most complex GPU to date, with 4,313 million transistors in a 352mm2 die.

Following this release, through the year AMD shipped seven additional 28nm HD 7000 cards targeting price ranges from $100 through to $400, which is where the HD 7970 sits today (nearly 30% below its debut price). Most of AMD's lineup has undergone similar price cuts to address stiff competition from Nvidia's own 28nm GPU offerings.

Nvidia arrived slightly later to the party, roughly two months after the HD 7970 debut, the GeForce GTX 680 at $500 was cheaper and faster than the HD 7970, forcing AMD to make swift price cuts even though the GTX 680 remained in very limited supply for many months.

This price war of sorts continued as Nvidia dribbled out new GTX 600 parts over the next five months. Discontent with reactively slashing prices, AMD made an effort to improve margins by releasing overclocked versions of its two top models: the HD 7970 GHz Edition and the HD 7950 Boost.

By mid-September things had settled down and models had been consolidated. We finally had a better idea of where things were going to stand in terms of price and performance, and neither company seemed to have another major release in the works. And then, AMD threw us a curve ball.

The new Catalyst 12.11 beta drivers delivered major performance gains in many popular games such as Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Civilization V, Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs and StarCraft II. While most titles ran around 10% faster depending on their settings, Battlefield 3 was 20 to 30% faster.

Around the same time, Nvidia released a new beta driver of its own (GeForce 310.33) which claimed modest gains for the GTX 680 and GTX 660 in several titles, and this driver has since been replaced by the GeForce 310.61 update, which made further performance enhancements. This is what we'll be testing today.

With updated pricing and performance across the board, we figured it would be worth revisiting both company's offerings to see where you should spend your hard-earned cash this holiday season and into early next year.

Continue Reading...

• Test System Specs & 3Dmark 11
• Benchmarks: Aliens vs. Predator, Alan Wake
• Benchmarks: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Crysis 2
• Benchmarks: Dragon Age II, Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Benchmarks: DiRT 3, Hard Reset
• Benchmarks: Just Cause 2, Medal of Honor Warfighter
• Benchmarks: Sleeping Dogs, The Witcher 2
• Power Consumption
• Final Thoughts

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Republished with permission from:
Steven Walton is a writer at TechSpot. TechSpot is a computer technology publication serving PC enthusiasts, gamers and IT pros since 1998.

With tens of millions playing on Facebook and mobile phones, Zynga stalks the streets of New York City, hunting for anyone that's yet to sample Zynga Poker. Either that, or the game is opening for Gov'T Mule—sighted near Kotaku's NYC office.