A lot of people don't seem to realize what the Wii U is. Is this cryptic Nintendo commercial just another Wii? I don't get it, some people said. Even Michelle Obama didn't make the distinction.

But maybe this commercial would help clear up that this is a new console. Or, hell, maybe it'd make things even more confusing when people started to shine light on their Wiis in the hopes that it'd evolve into a Wii U, like the Pokémon franchise Nintendo is so synonymous with.

Man, I wish my Wii would just up and evolve into a Wii U. Congratulations! Your Wii evolved into a Wii U. You don't have to spend any more money now.

FPS Russia is one of my favorite YouTubers, because I get to live vicariously through him shooting weapons that I doubt I could get my hands on.

Yesterday the esteemed shooter uploaded a video to show off some of Far Cry 3's weapons, which Kirk is a big fan of.

Watch FPS Russia shoot Far Cry 3 enemies Vaas and Buck with the various weapons, and definitely stick around for the end when he whips out the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. Holy shit.

From Yingpei Games, the developer formerly known as Epic Games China, comes Mercenary Ops, an Unreal Engine-powered on-rail zombie shooter that's one of the best Resident Evil games on iTunes, despite not being a Resident Evil game.

One look at the game's iTunes description makes its inspiration abundantly clear: "In Mercenary Ops, you are Leo, the seasoned mercenary hired to face his toughest mission – contain the exploding biological crisis in a small European town before the biological terror spreads to the major cities of Europe! You will face infected adversaries and bosses from out of this world!"

Leo. Not Leon.

Yingpei might have a little problem in the originality department — Mercenary Ops is also the name of what looks like an entirely different PC shooter from the developer — but it makes a pretty good on-rails shooter. The visuals are lush, the one-handed tap to shoot control option works incredibly well, and the tapping slaughter of biologically weaponized humans and animals is broken up by brief moments of finger-swiping drama. Hardcore players can opt for a more traditional control scheme, and gyroscopic aiming is available for those that enjoy looking ridiculous while playing an iOS game. There was a little slowdown on my iPod Touch 5th gen, but the less-powerful iPad Mini handles the game like a champ.

Mercenary Ops is available as a free one-level demo on iTunes, with an additional seven levels and Survival mode added via $1.99 in-game purchase. Give the free bit a try, and see if you are ready to take on the dramatic third level:

Oh, Yingpei.

Streets of Rage has to be one of the all-time classic side-scrolling beat-em-ups, right? It had a sense of an atmosphere of menace that other games lacked. After a fan-made game was scuttled by Sega, the only activity on the old-school series has been mobile releases of the original games. So it's a real shame that the remake demonstrated above never made it out into the world.

A tweet from Ubisoft level designer Sean Noonan revealed the footage, which comes from a digital downloadable that was reportedly in development at Ruffian Games. Destructible environments, brutal takedowns, street gangs straight out of The Warriors… it's all there. Throw this one onto the pile of promising dreams that will never become reality

Video Spotlight: Cancelled Streets of Rage "Reimagining" Footage Leaks Online [Sega Driven, via Spong and NeoGAF]

I've never played Morrowind, but when people rave about it—usually in sentences punctuated with faux outrage and admonishments like "How have you never played Morrowind???"—they like to play up its creative, bizarre world, a place where gods interact with mortals on a regular basis and wizards live in houses carved out of overgrown mushrooms.

Skyrim's new downloadable content, Dragonborn, takes you back to that strange land. The result is the game's best piece of DLC to date, a self-contained adventure that feels like a legitimate—and legitimately good—expansion pack.

If you're anything like me, you were probably disappointed by Skyrim's last two DLC packs, Dawnguard and Hearthfire. While Hearthfire was just a housemaking add-on, Dawnguard sold itself as a full-fledged piece of DLC—DLC that I found rather underwhelming.

Dragonborn, on the other hand, delivers on Bethesda's promises. Plunging you into Solstheim, an island located northeast of Skyrim and right on the edge of Morrowind, Dragonborn gives you a whole bunch of new stuff to play with: there's a new map, new types of weapons and armor, new dragon shouts, new cities, new enemies, and all sorts of new quests, from the mundane (find out where a wizard's assistant ran off to) to the insane (pick up a gem that turns out to contain the spirit of a goddess, who asks you to escort her to her temple and clear out the evil within).

You can also ride dragons, although that isn't nearly as cool as it seems.

More importantly, Dragonborn re-evokes that feeling of excitement, that rush of untapped whimsy that massive open-world games like Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas are so good at offering. A new map brings with it new places. New dungeons. New quests to discover and rewards to unearth. It's an explorer's wet dream.

Sadly, with a game like Skyrim—and consequently, with its Dragonborn DLC—the potential is often more exciting than the results. Unlock a particularly tough door, for example, and your only reward might be a couple wheels of cheese and a chest with some worthless armor. You might find that an enticing-looking fortress holds nothing but a bunch of generic bandits. Quests might end abruptly and unceremoniously.

The main quest's conclusion is similarly underwhelming, but in that as in all of Dragonborn, what matters is the journey, not the reward. It's the little moments of joy when you find a new location, or when you're exploring a corner of the map that nobody else would even bother exploring, only to find a hidden treasure or easter egg that you know the designers threw in just for you.

There are a few different types of dungeons to explore in Dragonborn, some better than others. While some temples and catacombs are just like every other Skyrim dungeon you've ever fought through, complete with draugr and blade traps, there are also plenty of great ancient Dwemer ruins to delve into. Some of these ruins have their own sets of puzzles—never quite Zelda depth, but they come close.

A large chunk of the main quest also takes place in a daedric realm—a plane run by one of Skyrim's many gods—that I won't describe too much, to avoid spoilers. It's pretty trippy, though, and one of my favorite parts of Dragonborn was maneuvering my way through the swirl of foul black goo and gruesome fog that makes up that bizarre world. And I haven't even mentioned the Cthulu-esque squid demons. Squid demons!

You visit this realm, by the way, as part of the main storyline, which is like all video game storylines in that you have to save the world from a terrifying evil thing. This time, the thing is Miraak, an enigmatic being that seems to want to kill you for one reason or another. Oddly enough, as you ask around Solstheim for more information, nobody seems to know who he is. Yet the name sounds peculiarly familiar to everyone. Riddles atop riddles.

This main quest—which is on par with Skyrim's best questlines in terms of quality and variety—took me roughly six hours to beat completely. There's plenty more to see and do on top of that, though. It is still Skyrim.

And since this is still Skyrim, you are probably wondering if Dragonborn is full of bugs. It is indeed. Random little glitches have become a trademark of the most recent Elder Scrolls (and Bethesda games in general) and Dragonborn follows suit. My game even locked up and froze completely once or twice. Royal pain in the ass.

But. Bugs aside, Dragonborn is a great piece of DLC. Worth playing, worth exploring, worth leaping into like you're starting Skyrim all over again. Because there's nothing quite like opening up a new map and imagining all of the adventures you're about to find there. It's a feeling that can't be beat.

Grabbing social gamers by their dangling music nostalgia glands, SongPop tops Facebook's list of the top 25 web-based and mobile social games of 2012. It also makes for a lousy top image, so I went with number 14, NaturalMotion's CSR Racing, instead. Pretty car.

Using a mystical combination of App Center star ratings, negative and positive user signals and engagement numbers between January and November, Facebook has compiled a rather diverse list of games in this year's top 25. Sure, it's got the requisite six Zynga games on it, but there's also a racing game, a little baseball and a mid-core dungeon romp. The times, they are a-changing.

Check out the full list below. Just don't try playing all of these, as they represent more lost productivity hours than your entire lifespan.

1. SongPop (FreshPlanet)
2. Dragon City (Social Point)
3. Bike Race (Top Free games)
4. Subway Surfers (Kiloo)
5. Angry Birds Friends (Rovio)
6. FarmVille 2 (Zynga)
7. Scramble with Friends (Zynga)
8. Clash of Clans (Supercell)
9. Marvel: Avengers Alliance (Playdom)
10. Draw Something (Zynga)
11. Hay Day (Supercell)
12. Baseball Heroes (Syntasia)
13. ChefVille (Zynga)
14. CSR Racing (NaturalMotion Games)
15. Candy Crush Saga (King.com)
16. Matching With Friends (Zynga)
17. Legend Online (OASIS GAMES)
18. Jurassic Park Builder (Ludia)
19. Dungeon Rampage (Rebel Entertainment)
20. Pockie Ninja II Social (NGames Limited)
21. Jetpack Joyride (Halfbrick)
22. Social Empires (Social Point)
23. Bil ve Fethet (Peak Games)
24. Ruby Blast Adventures (Zynga)
25. Pyramid Solitaire Saga (King.com)

Today's Nintendo Direct revealed tons of new, great footage of titles coming to the Wii U. In case you missed it, the whole video can be found above. To make looking up the new footage a bit easier, here's a list with the times to skip to to look at the most interesting games and new features.

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• Lego City: Undercover—00:31
• Game & Wario—12:04
• Pikmin 3—19:10
• Dragon Quest X—27:48
• Google Street View—38:03

Inception features dreams that are in dreams. Nintendo's newest Wario title, Game & Wario, is kind of like that, too.

Game & Wario is a collection of 16 mini games, but not a Wario Ware micro game collection that features an onslaught of bit-sized games that last seconds. Fans of the series are well aware of the difference.

One of the Game & Wario mini games is called "Gamer". In it, you play Wario Ware micro games on the GamePad. On the TV, you try to avoid being caught playing video games by your mom. When she comes to check on you, you must put down the GamePad so as not to get in trouble.

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How wonderfully post modern of Nintendo: Wario Ware games within a new Wario title. Next time Nintendo, try cramming a Wario Ware in a Wario Ware that's in a Wario Ware that might or might not be a Wario game.

プレゼンテーション映像 [@nintendodirectch]

From the Zynga studio that brought you the company's most unique game to date, Empires & Allies, comes a theme park management game that offers players unparalleled freedom to create their happiest place on Earth.

Build your own farm. Build your own city. Build your own castle. Zynga's large stable of social games have promised all of these things, but ultimately players are just placing buildings and decorations in different places on the same old map. The trend of FarmVille players using colored hay bales to create works of pixel art (here's mine, for example) sprang from a collective desire for more flexibility and room for expression, a desire that hasn't quite been sated.

Well, at least until later today, when CoasterVille launches on Facebook.

Having translated their love for PC strategy games to Facebook in the form of Empires & Allies, Zynga LA sets its sights on one of the most universally beloved classic PC genre, the theme park manager, games like Bullfrog's Theme Park or Chris Sawyer's RollerCoaster Tycoon. These are games with equal parts strategy and creativity, which is exactly what general manager Amir Rahimi and the Zynga LA aimed to create with CoasterVille.

The core cycle of CoasterVille is simple. The player builds attractions to bring guests into the park. The guests spend money at stores, which generates money and resources to create bigger and better attractions, which bring more guests, spending more money, and so on. It's the way of all 'Ville games. The difference in CoasterVille is the freedom players have to realize their vision of the perfect park.

It starts with the ability to change the park's terrain. Instead of saddling every player with the same green rectangular game board, CoasterVille gives park builders the ability to switch out green grass for dry ground, lush vegetation or a number of unique tile types.

From there players can choose from three initial park themes — Frontier, Jungle or Fantasy. One player might choose to stick to a single style, putting all of his or her resources into upgrading and developing attractions and businesses in that particular theme.

Or they can mix-and-match, Disney-style.

This freedom to create means that no two players' parks will be the same, making visiting friends' creations a joy instead of the resource gathering chore it's become in many of the other 'Ville-style games. Other players' parks can serve as an inspiration, as well as a means to harvest resources in case one wants to style swipe.

But what of the coasters? When I first got word of CoasterVille I was worried that the coasters in question were simple pre-crafted constructs. General manager Amir Rahimi put my worries to rest during a demo of the game yesterday. That frontier-themed coaster in the picture above? It's made up of more than a dozen segments snapped together. As I looked on he pulled them apart and rearranged them, swapped the less interesting bits out for loops and corkscrews; he basically created an entirely different ride in seconds.

Starting from scratch on a coaster is just as simple. Select from a number of coaster themes and just start dropping segments. They can be as simple as a single upward slope, or they can eat your entire park.

The most important aspect of any theme park is the visitors, and CoasterVille's tiny patrons are an incredibly animated bunch. During my demo Rahimi's showed me a crowd of patrons gathered about one of the park's out-of-order restrooms, icons above their head indicating they were desperately in need of release. He fixed a restroom on the opposite side of the screen, and soon the entire crowd was running across the park like crazy people.

Boost a ride to go faster and the guests will come running. Boost the ride too fast and they'll lose their lunch. Once they are done heaving, they'll head to the nearest food stall to refill.

There's an opportunity for deep strategy in CoasterVille, or a player can simply build what they want. There's that freedom of expression again.

CoasterVille is just getting started. In the coming months Zynga LA will be adding more park themes, more terrain types, more rides and park mascots that sing and dance for your guests amusement. Eventually the building fun will spill over into the land beyond the park, giving players the opportunity to realize their idea vacation destination, complete with boardwalks, shops and hotels.

CoasterVille launches later today on Facebook. You might want to get in line early; those queues can be a beast.

This month, Japanese snack maker Koikeya is releasing potato chips that have been designed with couples in mind. The chips are heart shaped and come in two flavors: Lemon Pepper and Sugar Butter. How romantic.

The Lemon Pepper chips have a "top hat" on them, so the presumption is that they are aimed at either men or individuals who own fancy headwear. The Sugar Butter chips are in pink packaging and have a ribbon on them, so they seem to be aimed at females—because all females have bows in their hair and like pink, right?

This is all pretty old fashioned: Lots of ladies like spicy food, and lots of dudes like sweets—and not all dudes date ladies and vice versa. But whatever!

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According to MyNavi, the chips are launching in December, because Christmas is somewhat of a romantic holiday in Japan (thanks Wham!). New Year's, however, is a family and spiritual holiday. The chips for lovers also hope to cash in on Valentine's Day, a holiday in which women give men chocolate, and White Day, a holiday in which men give women chocolate.

Chocolate? Why not potato chips?

恋の味がするハート型チップス!　カップル向けポテトチップス発売 [MyNavi]

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