Perhaps it's not surprising, but what this video from The Clan of the Grey Wolf reveals is that much of the tech behind the Wii U's GamePad is stuff you may already be familiar with—only used in a clever, innovative way.

As the video points out at the start, this seems to be a thing with Nintendo hardware, where they use proven tech to create something completely new.

What I like best about this video is that it dives deep into technical things, but does so in a remarkably approachable way.

It's cool that Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is in Far Cry 3, though perhaps funnier that the poor kid is doomed to be called "McLovin" for the rest of his life. I mean I still call Sean William Scott "Stifler" even all these years later.

(Side note: Did you know that Stifler's insult for Finch in American Pie was "Shitbreak" and not "Shitbrick"? Because Finch had to go home to take a dump. I had NO IDEA this was true, I always thought it was shitbrick. Which is way funnier, in my estimation. Shitbreak is terrible. Anyway. The more you know.)

Er, okay. So this video from Gamefront shows how to track down McLovin, who also starred in the game's goofy promotional web series. If you find him, you'll earn the the "Say Hi to the Internet" achievement.

Far Cry 3: Say Hi to the Internet Achievement Guide [Easter Egg] [Gamefront]

Wii U users, there's a new firmware update available for your system. Clocking in at around 600MB, it doesn't appear to do anything drastic (like speed up loading and menu times). Here's what Nintendo says it does do:

Further improvements to overall system stability and other minor adjustments have been made to enhance the user experience.

Ok then!

UPDATE: Here's a friendly reminder from Nintendo

Summary of System Software Versions [Nintendo]

I've never been one of those people that considers shopping "fun." I shop because it's necessary, because I need something. If gamification has taught us anything though, it's that all it might take for something to become fun and interesting is to make it a game.

In this case, a start-up called Little Black Bag launched a service that puts a twist on the Japanese idea of fukubukuro. Fukubukuro is a custom where merchants sell fun-bags that contain the prior year's clothes and shoes—at a steep discount. It's not uncommon for people to trade, too.

Little Black Bag is like that, only you know what's in your bag. When you sign up, you can save your preferred brands as well as take a quiz that determines your personality. You then pay a flat fee for your 'fun bag', and the items you get you are free to trade. Wired reports that this set-up makes the service more like a game than anything else.

Little Black Bag is not your typical flash-sale e-commerce site. It's part online community, part online store. Murillo likens Little Black Bag to a "massively multiplayer online shop," with more similarities to Farmville than discount e-retailers Gilt or Rue La La.

Unsurprisingly, players shoppers will aim for items that they know will trade well, even if they don't actually want them. And, like you might expect with a game of this sort, there's badges to earn and other such social elements.

Granted, as interesting as this is to me, Little Black Bag doesn't really feature the type of stuff I'd buy. But I could see myself participating if this idea expanded to other types of digital storefronts. Steam lets you do something similar, and that's really sweet.

Image Credit: Wired

Massively Multiplayer Online … Shopping? It's Real, Addictive and Brutal [Wired]

Lately, it seems everyone's been talking about Lara Croft. The iconic star of the Tomb Raider franchise is getting a makeover in next year's Tomb Raider reboot—or rather, a makeunder. The new game is a combination reboot and origin story, focusing on a young Lara's fight for survival on a terrifying island lousy with hostile wildlife and human-sacrifice aficionados.

At E3 in June, Tomb Raider executive producer Ron Rosenberg set off a firestorm of debate when he told Jason that Crystal Dynamics' goal was to get players to "want to protect" this new, younger Lara. He made matters worse by referencing what he described as an attempted rape early in the game.

I recently went down to Crystal Dynamics to play through the first couple acts of the game. Afterward I spoke with creative director Noah Hughes about the many changes the writers have made to Lara and the delicate balancing act of re-creating an iconic character.

"I think a lot of perceptions out there sort of focus on the dark side of the island, and the vulnerability of Lara early on," Hughes told me. "And really, our goal was to create that distance between experiences, distance between Lara at the beginning of the story and at the end of the story."

Hughes was seated across from me in a conference room in Crystal Dynamics' Redwood City offices. He was sporting the tell-tale signs of a video game developer neck-deep in crunch-time: Puffy eyes, somewhat sleepy demeanor, inside-out shirt. But when he talked of the game he was shepherding across the finish line, it was always with a smile.

Several times Hughes came back to the notion that this game presented a narrative arc, and that was crucial to understanding how they're presenting the character. Lara may be desperate, scared, and fairly weak in the early goings, but by the end of the story, she'll have grown.

"Tonally, you look at the early bits, it's almost survival horror," Hughes said. "But then you saw the tower, and it's supposed to be this emotional high, this open vista. And that other aspect of it, as much as you see Lara challenged, what we really celebrate is Lara's growth, and the player becoming more powerful. Going on the journey with Lara, what is it like to become a hero. It pushes you to change as a person, as a character."

But in order for the game to convincingly give you that feeling of growth, it has to start at a low point. "There's an aspect of a survival story that tries to remind you of your vulnerability, or at least your mortality," Hughes said. "We don't want the island's lethality to melt away, but at the same time it's sort of an escalation. At the beginning of the story it is very much a survival story, and you see Lara teased with snippets of this island's history, but there's an aspect to surviving this island that is more than just shooting guys. There's an aspect of getting to the bottom of the mysteries. Lara and her friends are going to have a tough time getting off the island."

Surely the story will benefit from a clean slate. I've played just about every Tomb Raider game, but by the time I played 2008's Tomb Raider: Underworld, I had no flipping idea what was going on. There was a crazy super-powered bonde woman, and an evil, supernatural version of Lara, and at one point I think her mom came back from the dead as a zombie… it was crazy, and had nothing to do with the other reasons I liked the game. The new Tomb Raider gives Crystal Dynamics an opportunity to start fresh and lose all that needless junk. (My words, not Hughes'.)

"For the most part, we're wiping the slate clean as far as the events that transpire in Lara's life," Hughes said. "As we go through future adventures, one of the things that's fun about a well-known property is echoing the canon that has gone before it. That's an aspect that's great—audiences who know the characters enjoy seeing that. But it is a reboot—we are saying those things didn't happen."

This does raise the question of what makes this a Tomb Raider game at all. "The answer is Lara," Hughes said. "I would say rather than re-architecting Lara, we looked at Lara through a different lens. She's young in this case, but she's still a brilliant archeologist. Part of her strength against her opponents is her ability to use her wits and her intelligence, and that aspect of how her indomitable will. Lara as a character, has always been really admirable in the way she'd… well, I guess it's best expressed to me as: You look at this island, and she has no business surviving this island.

"And it's not purely gunplay that's going to make her succeed. It's that brilliance; it's the athleticism, it's the gunplay, but it's also being smarter than her opponents. So we tried to capture everything that has always been true about Lara, but deliver it in a sort of a way that felt a little more dimensional or textured. In the context of becoming too iconic, if that's possible… that people [would] purely describe her based on physical attributes, a braid, or a pistol, or whatever. And we're really trying to tease out the character that is Lara, too. And those things are all taken from what's implied by the games that have come before."

So what would Hughes say to someone who, despite these assurances, still felt unsure of what they've done with Lara? "What's important to me on some level is that people sort of judge it for themselves," Hughes said. "The only thing that frustrates me is people's second- and third-hand perceptions of it. Our game really is about empowerment, it's about becoming a hero, we tried to treat our subject matter as respectfully as we can."

In the demo I played, I did go through the sequence where Lara is suggestively/sexually assaulted while tied up, then fights back and brutally kills her assailant. In the context of the game, it worked. It was troubling and intense, but didn't feel gratuitous or disrespectful. But that's just me; I could imagine a rape or sexual assault survivor reacting differently.

"We can argue whether it's respectful or not," Hughes said, "but a misperception is that this is a game about a vulnerable Lara. It's a game about a young, naive Lara like you or I, put in a situation where she has to grow as a character to survive. We try not to arbitrarily create adversity for her, we don't throw the kitchen sink at her, if you watch a survival movie you're going to see the character confronted with life and death situations. That's just the inherent starting point. What's exciting about the story, what's rewarding to experience along with Lara is that sense of growth. But without that starting point, we can't show that."

In the demo I played, Lara had a single pistol, but never two. Would we ever see her whip out a second one and go the full Woo? Hughes would only give me a cagey smile. "Part of the fun of a reboot is that people know and enjoy the character, and we enjoy our history too. Not necessarily a dual-pistol, but you want those moments where people say, 'Yes! She's becoming Lara!'"

Well, I'm interested. I like the idea of a Tomb Raider or Uncharted-type game where the character has an actual arc, and from what I played, Tomb Raider seems to be handling its version of Lara Croft pretty well. As always, we'll know more once the game is out.

You can check out my more in-depth impressions of the game itself here.

Last year, we reported that Bioware had specific opinions about Skyrim. They went on the record and stated that they admired the scope of Skyrim, and also acknowledged that both Skyrim and Dragon Age are lore-heavy games where your actions mattered.

While cagey on where they'd take Dragon Age next and whether or not it'd be influenced by Skyrim, they did mention that they were hoping to recapture some of what Dragon Age: Origins did well.

Now, in a Game Informer interview with Bioware's Aaryn Flynn, Bioware doesn't tiptoe as much when it comes to discussing what similarities we might see between both dragon-centric games.

"You can't look at a game like Skyrim and not think about how impressive what they've accomplished is—or [think] that's an interesting new direction or that there was something that didn't work well for them that we could take in a new direction. So, we're always influenced by these games, especially in a relatively tight-knight genre like RPGs," Flynn stated.

Perhaps more interesting is the idea that Flynn poses next: that the RPG genre should emphasize more exploration, like older games such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights do. Flynn even recognizes that Bioware's major franchises, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, have shied away from these roots—but that Bioware wants to return to them.

Idle musing: if Skyrim is an influence on Dragon Age, and Bioware wants to emphasize exploration... could we expect an open-world Dragon Age? I mean, look at that Dragon Age III artwork. That's kind of open-wordly lookin, eh?

We can't know for sure until they reveal more about the game. Unfortunately, following the mixed critical reception of Dragon Age 2, Bioware has been rather mum on what they're doing with Dragon Age III.

Game Informer

Everyone thinks that Metallica fell from grace, sold out, became corporate shills. But what if they'd gone out a different way? What if they suited up for battle, XCOM style, and went down in a blaze of glory while fighting off chryssalids?

Gus Mastrapa, metal-head games writer extraordinare, has imagined this exact scenario, renaming his XCOM: Enemy Unknown squad to match the names of the famed California thrash band.

"We got cocky," Burton said to himself. "We thought we could do this, but we couldn't. We should have stayed in San Francisco and made records. I never wanted to save the world. I just wanted to drink beer and play my bass." But that's all over.

For a moment he thought he could just give into despair – let himself just fade to black.

"Fuck that."

Cliff Burton racked his shotgun, driving his remaining shells into position. He checked the settings on his Arc Thrower. "If I can take down two of the fuckers maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to bag the last one."

I can't really do the thing justice, so just go read it. And remember, the next time you're feeling like you can't think of good names for your XCOM squaddies: There are probably a bunch more bands out there that want to save the world.

Heavy Metal XCOM [Bitcreature]

The other day, a colleague mentioned that she felt like there was something off about Halo 4's multiplayer. She was getting destroyed by other players, eventually feeling like she didn't have much of a chance when up against people with advanced abilities or gear gained from Spartan point unlocks.

This seemed like a marked difference from earlier Halo titles, where it was possible to drop in with your starting gear and have a reasonable shot at being competitive—even against people who totally out-leveled you.

I told her what most people might: that the game starts out that way, but then it peters off. After spending a few hours grinding enough XP to unlock what you want, you'll be able to perform better. After spending a bit of time with the game, you'll be able to tailor your loadout to make yourself a formidable Spartan.

Others, I imagine, might've been less courteous about their suggestions—a common response to this type of complaint is that you're being ridiculous if you whine about starting weapons and abilities because of course the starting loadouts are great! If you're good enough, right? I mean, look at how easily I own everyone with the starting weapons. You on the other hand must suck if you're not doing okay at the start, clearly.

But then I thought about it, and it hit me: why in the world do I act as if this is okay? Simply because unlocks are so common now, and just because you eventually reach a point where you have everything you need to be competitive, doesn't erase the fact that the game starts out unbalanced.

Not ridiculously so of course; developers wouldn't be able to get away with that. The starting gear in Halo 4 is reasonably good, but the stuff you get to unlock later, after putting some time in, still gives you the capacity to be even better. And I can't recall the last game with non-cosmetic unlocks that didn't have me feeling a tad frustrated at the start of my stint with the multiplayer.

Kotaku's own Tina Amini puts it well when she says this about Halo 4:

Getting the fanciest weapons requires real dedication, so it feels like it could be representative of how adept a player you are.

This situation is a constant; the latest game that evoked this annoyance was Black Ops II. To quote myself on that:

Point blank, I hated starting out in the Core playlists because it was immediately obvious that the game was not balanced. It can't be. Whoever has the better gear will invariably win in a duel, and the starting guns suck. Every bit and bob you can customize-attachments, abilities (ie, perks) and extra gear makes a huge difference in how effective you can be on the battlefield.

There's no sign that this will let up—not with RPG elements becoming so pervasive in our shooters, not with how popular multiplayer is. Sure, both Halo and Call of Duty have special playlists where unlocks aren't allowed, but you're not playing with the general populace and that doesn't change that unlocks suck.

The irritation is especially present if I hop onto a game a few months after release, when the community has dwindled to the more hardcore players. Then, the disadvantage of not having the same gear becomes pronounced: I'm being outplayed and outgunned.

In that case, people know the ins and outs of the maps, the tricks necessary to optimize play, and they've had time to figure out the popular strategies used in a game. You, meanwhile, might still be trying to figure out how to use your sub-par gun. I've had to resort to buying games at release if I'm thinking of playing the multiplayer, and that's not something I'm happy about.

Eventually, after I play enough, I'll forget about all of this. It's because the amount of time I play with the appropriate gear will vastly outnumber the hours I spent trying to become properly outfitted.

Beyond forgetting about it, I feel as if there's this weird community thing where it's like "Well, if we have to bear it, so can you." Isn't that a bad sign? When you have to tolerate something? Or like it's a rite of passage, a tradition. You need to grit your teeth because everyone else does it, and if everyone has to do it, what's the big deal?

It's one thing to play on single player and have a sense of progression, feel like you've earned the right to be powerful. It works there. It lends itself to games that feature progression not only narratively, but mechanically: and that's important.

But I shouldn't have to earn the right to play at what would normally be my most competitive in a mode where the entire point is to be competitive. Non-cosmetic unlocks work against the very point of multiplayer, they get in the way of embracing why you're there in the first place.

Always having something new to work toward works wonderfully as a motivational tool to keep playing, and that's why unlocks shine. You're always looking forward to what you might get next—which then sort of becomes what you "deserve." You worked for that ability/armor/gun. That other guy with the inferior gun? Welp, they haven't put their time in. Sorry, thems the breaks. Pile that on with "earning" the right to get killstreaks or ordnance drops for doing well, and things get a little messier still.

For the hardcore, this will make no difference: they're going to play the game long enough that any imbalances at the start are but a short, passing memory.

For everyone else, here's a question: after you unlock everything—then what? You'll have to play the game on, gasp, its own intrinsic merits? I've noticed that many games that rely on this progression model don't hold up so well, despite how unfair the system might be.

Worryingly, it doesn't look like multiplayer games are going to let up with these types of unlocks. Halo didn't used to be like this, after all.

Personally, the game I've poured the most hours into is a game that didn't have unlocks that affected the game itself. That game would be Gears of War 2. The thing about Gears of War is that you know exactly what you're getting from the get-go. And if what a game lays out in front of you is engaging, if that hooks you? You'll keep playing. You'll keep playing for a long, long time. Out of embarrassment, I won't tell you how many hours I've logged onto Gears 2.

The problem is that developers are invested in keeping you playing no matter what, and unlocks are an easy way to do that—even though it means we'll play for (arguably) the wrong reasons.

Normally I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with giving players reasons to keep playing. We want value from what we buy, we want to get as much out of our purchases as we can. But unless we continue to play because of the game itself—without these added layers of bullshit—what's the point?

Maybe the truth is that most games don't work so well in the long term without pulling tricks like these to keep someone playing. And maybe we're so fervent about getting the most 'value' out of our games, we're willing to overlook what a game does to keep you playing. For a developer that might be interested in keeping you engrossed because it means you're more likely to invest in new maps, modes and so on, that reality is perfect.

That's not nearly as gross as realizing that developers are aware of what's happening. Game academic Dylan Holmes noted that Battlefield 3 tells its users that they'd be able to "level the playing field" no problem... if they're willing to pay.

"Tired of fighting an uphill battle against Battlefield veterans?" it continued. "The Ultimate Shortcut Bundle unlocks 119 weapons, gear and vehicle upgrades." At which point it directed me to a link where I could pay Electronic Arts a mere $40 for said "shortcut."

It's worse when you consider what Dylan says next.

The point of unlocks in Battlefield 3 isn't to increase the fun I'm having; it's to encourage me to play more than I would otherwise. Take away the unlocks and the typical play experience remains unchanged.

Ultimately, in a world where we believe that time = money, the transaction that DICE proposes isn't a surprising one. We readily equate the two so, sure, we'll be willing to shell out the money for it. Some people even believe that paying for every piece of a game a la carte should be what games do next. But still, it's ridiculous to think that a developer wants to sell you fairness. What in the world?

Two things jump out about this to me though. First, that the people who this poses the most value to are either those who want to get to the meat of the game, or those who lack the necessary time to invest in the game. But both of these situations don't have to exist in the first place. The person who wants to get to the "point" of the game could just be given everything they need from the start. The person without time could also just be given what they need right away so that they can enjoy the game.

But immediately giving people what they need would inconvenience that whole ‘monetization' thing now wouldn't it?

I wasn't actively seeking a social game that combines cultivating a garden with puzzle adventure progression, but I'm not unhappy I stumbled upon it in Playdom's Full Bloom.

Last night, after an incredibly long work day, I went poking about the Facebook App Center (you knew they had one of those, right?), where Full Bloom was waiting, with its pleasant font and calming rose motif. In the mood for something relaxing, I popped into the game to see what was what.

Let me just say that I love that we live in a time where I can see the name of a game on a web page and be playing it within seconds. I know the more hardcore gamers out there detest this sort of thing, but playing in seconds (for free, no less) is one of the greatest things about browser-based social gaming.

Anyway, Full Bloom. Like King.com's Candy Crush or Puzzle Witch Sagas, the meat of this flora-focused little gem is match puzzles, laid out in levels along a set path, so you can see how far ahead of you your friends are. The puzzles are actually quite Candy Crush-ish, giving the player a number of moves to collect a number of flowers, tasking them with eliminating object from the board (though in this case it's bees instead of candy, which is never a good substitution) or clearing soil from a board by matching flowers above it.

Instead of simply earning a score and stars through these puzzles, the player also gathers resources—coin and supplies—used to cultivate the second part of the game, the garden.

As you can plainly see, I have leveled up my flowers considerably. I had to, after all, because areas of the puzzle progression board are unlocked through garden maintenance.

Garden Party is actually quite clever, combining two popular social game genres into a one-stop building and matching shop.

Full Bloom [Facebook]

The uprising has begun, and you're trapped on an island with the rebel goats.

YouTuber Robbaz used Far Cry 3's editor to create a fictional universe where goats are your primary enemy. It's a silly video, but it's fun to watch the goats fly into the air because of explosions. I would play the hell out of this if it was made into a real DLC where the goats actually attacked you.

You can bet your cookie jar that this won't be the last silly/goofy/crazy video to come out of the editor, but it's certainly the silliest I've seen today.

Far Cry 3 Editor - Escape from Goat Island DLC [YouTube via Reddit]