The Vengeance range of gaming peripherals has been a great success for manufacturer Corsair, and the update to its impressive wee gaming mouse, the Vengeance M65, is going to do nothing to change that.

Corsair pretty much make everything that goes into putting together a gaming PC these days. In fact, I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see them badging up CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards in our Corsair-dominated future. But despite the broadening focus, now encompassing a huge range of components and peripherals, one thing has remained reassuringly constant - an emphasis on quality. So it was with the original Vengeance M60 mouse: a quality gaming rodent, with a 5700 max DPI capability and a rock-solid laser sensor backing it up.

What’s changed with this Vengeance M65 then?

As you might expect from the iterative nomenclature, and the fact they’re using an identical chassis, there are no radical stylistic additions here. Under the hood, however, Corsair have upgraded the laser sensor, shifting from the Avago LaserStream ADNS-9500 to the ADNS-9800.

That gives the M65 a maximum DPI setting of a relatively massive 8200.

Personally, I love high-sensitivity gaming mice, but with a DPI setting that high I generally find it a little too twitchy. One unexpected loud noise later and I’ll find myself facing in a completely different direction on-screen thanks to a slight involuntary jitter of my mouse hand.

You can pick up the M65 in Military Green, Arctic White or Gunmetal Black.

So what’s the point in shifting over to a mouse with a DPI setting you may never use? Well, it’s not just that headline figure that makes a difference - even lower down the DPI scale the improved Avago sensor makes its presence felt.

The translation of movement from your mouse movement to the screen is incredibly smooth, with none of the slight twitchiness I’ve experienced in using the M60 and M65 mice side-by-side. It’s an incredibly accurate mouse, right up there with the best of them.

This is an impressive update to an already impressive mouse, and given that it’s hitting the street with the same £50/$70 price-tag of the M60 - and you can pick it up in Stormtrooper white - the Vengeance M65 gets a big thumbs up from me.

It may not come with a huge range of extra buttons (the pricier M95 will cater for those needs), but if you’re after a sensitive, well-priced laser gaming rodent the Vengeance M65 is an ideal candidate.

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm will be the focus of two invite-only competitions at Major League Gaming's upcoming Winter Season event. It should give us a nice opportunity to see what the pros can do with those jerk Widow Mines.

First up will be the Winter Season Showdown, a 56 player showcase that will take place on weeknights and select Sundays between February 4th and March 8th. That will be followed up, after the game's release, by a 32 player Exhibition Tournament at Dallas, Texas, between the 15th and 17th of March. All matches will be streamed from the MLG website and Twitch channel.

It's an exciting prospect for esports fans. The Heart of the Swarm meta-game is still changing rapidly as the pros figure out the best strategies, and fit practice around existing Wings of Liberty commitments. It's slightly disappointing to see both events using an invite-only format. Having a qualifying structure would have been great chance to see some serious drama, by opening up the possibility of major upsets from newcomers who'd twigged to some unpredictable builds.

You can see the full broadcast schedule at the MLG site.

Thanks, Polygon.

Today is a good day for hiding, escaping, approaching and, er, shooting coloured blocks to make them disappear. You'll find all that and slightly more in the following webgames, a couple of which are brought to you by the letters G, G and J, which collectively stand for Global Game Jam. Read on for horror, HORROR, and maybe even some HORROR, plus a game that is basically Tetris With Guns.

Traal by Alan Hazelden, Jonathan Whiting Play it online here.

These indecipherable documents appear to be written in alienese. That or French.

If a tree falls in the forest and there are no people around to hear it, does it make a sound? Yes, obviously, because of all the animals, but the same doesn't appear to be true of a pixelly little guy with a flashlight. The dude in Traal - I'm going to call him 'Traal' - is non-existent to the various creepies that inhabit his very green dungeon, that is until he turns in their general direction and his torch-beam blasts them in the eyes. Creeping through each area is a matter of stealth and puzzle-solving, then; as you're unable to turn off your torch, you have to rely on walls to block the beam from your enemies' gaze. As a stealth or a puzzle game, Traal is unusual, tense and rather inventive, but the absolute best part is how your character looks like an adult jelly baby.

I Can't Escape by David Maletz, Chase Bethea, Josh Goskey, Natalie Maletz Play it online here.

The walls have eyes, but at least they don't have ears.

I Can't Escape is a dungeon crawler minus the role-playing, focusing instead on the horror of being dumped in a vast subterranean prison, with only your thoughts (and a bunch of creepy eyeballs) for company. Obviously you have to escape, but as the name suggests that's not going to be particularly easy. It's simple enough to descend into the labyrinth, but hard not to get irrevocably stuck in a sort of Labyrinth-esque oubliette; each floor is full of weak floors and holes, doors that need keys, and with things-that-look-like-ghosts lurking on the periphery of your field-of-vision. I'm not sure it's even possible to escape from I Can't Escape, but I'm looking forward to seeing people try. (Via Indie Statik)

Crush by Issam Khalil, Cat Musgrove Play it online here.

You fancy the blue cube, by the way. Hey, I'm not judging.

Crush is a game about sidling up to a person you have a crush on, while fending off unwanted conversations and fighting your desire to immediately do a 180 and run as far as possible away. I think it captures that awkward, terrifying, butterflies-in-your-stomach-feeling rather well. Every time you try to get close to the object of your affections, your body (in this instance, your body is a red cube) rebels and turns the other way. As an exploration of anxiety/panic attacks, I found Crush quite moving and effective, despite having no idea how to win out over my frustrating body. (Via IndieGames)

Super Puzzle Platformer Plus by Andrew Morrish Play it online here.

PROTIP: Spikes hurt.

Adult Swim's latest brill browser game is the clever Super Puzzle Platformer Plus, which introduces Tetris/Columns to the platformer genre like it's no big thing. It is a big thing, because it's one unholy mashup that works incredibly well. When it gets going, Tetris gives you more than enough things for your brain to worry about, but SPPP adds one more: the little guy with the gun tasked with blowing unwanted blocks from the screen. As with every game of this sort, you'll want to create as many coloured chains as you're physically able, but here that carries a significant risk: chains of identically coloured blocks are more resistant to bullets, the bigger the chain, the harder it is to break. Developer Andrew Morrish is currently working on Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe, which adds a two-player Vs mode, in addition to a host of other stuff.

Gabe Newell recently spoke at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs about productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. The school have now posted the full lecture. In it you’ll find information about how Valve operate, and why their unusual structure works for them, as well as the success of the Steam Workshop, and that Valve are supposedly the fourth largest bandwidth consumer in the world. If you’ve a spare hour, and an interest in the thinking and numbers behind the PCs largest distributor, it’s well worth a watch.

Thanks, Kotaku.

According to ArenaNet, the latest Guild Wars 2 patch - Flame & Frost Prelude - sees the birth of the game's new "living story". It's small, pink and wriggly at the moment, but the developers plan for it to grow over many updates into a tale that could result in dramatic changes to the world of Tyria. A post on the ArenaNet blog explains the Living Story team's plan.

"The job of the Living Story team is to bring the world to life," writes narrative designer Angel McCoy. "On an ongoing basis, we’ll spin out story threads that will introduce you to new heroic characters, mysterious plot twists, and dramatic moments that affect the world."

With Flame & Frost, that story is only being hinted at. "You can participate by volunteering to help the refugees streaming down from the Shiverpeaks in both the Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau. These refugees have lost their homes and their loved ones. They’re arriving in the Black Citadel and Hoelbrak with little more than the clothes and battered armor on their backs."

McCoy claims that each portion of the story will be available for a limited period of time, but will have a repercussions on the world. "The Living Story is simultaneously transitory and permanent. As the story arcs play out, the tale evolves." To ensure you don't miss out on anything, a new Living Story Achievements category will guide you to the relevant characters and locations.

"Story arcs will play out over time. You won’t necessarily know how long an arc is, and some could take months to fully unfold. We’re weaving many plot threads together to make one big cohesive world, a river of story, a living world."

Thanks, Massively.

"It's just a flesh wound!"

The latest patch for Chivalry: Medieval Warfare may not add anything as grand and regal as Brian Blessed, but developer Torn Banner understands what fans of the online dismemberment simulator really want: bludgeonings. Along with two modes and 13 maps, this huge content update brings a selection of brutal new weapons, including polehammers, flails and heavy flails. Things are going to get messy.

It's a massive amount of new content, all provided completely free. New modes include Capture the Flag and a Duel Mode, which comes with 10 arenas for your 1v1 grudge matches. There's also a full compliment of tweaks, bug fixes, added polish, stronger anti-hack measures and an option to specify how long corpses litter the battlefield. Well, you want to take pride in your work, after all.

Full patch list here, or you can watch a video tour of the update's new features below.

The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZVB) is suing Valve over Steam's refusal to let users resell their games. According to Carola Elbrecht, the VZVB's project manager for digital consumer rights, Steam users should be given the same rights as owners of traditional board games - allowed to sell their used copies on at will.

The VZVB's complaint is that purchased games are tied to a user's Steam account, with no option to transfer the license to a third-party. The organisation also notes that, for those games that use Steamworks, it makes no difference whether a game was purchased online or as physical media, as either way the game is locked to a Steam account on installation.

The lawsuit follows a cease-and-desist order the company issued to Valve back in September. That action was prompted by not only the resale issue, but also in response to the updated Steam Subscriber Agreement, which prohibited class-action suits against the company.

The consumer group have attempted to sue Valve over game reselling before, but the case was dismissed by the German Federal Court of Justice in 2010. However, back in July, the The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the trading of "used" software licenses was legal, and the VZVB are hoping that this lends credence to their case.

Of course, Valve aren't alone in this practice. No digital distributor offers the option to sell on your used licenses to a third-party. Elbrecht says that, while Valve are the target, the suit is meant to serve as a signal to other distributors that operate the same way.

Thanks, PC Advisor (via Slashdot)

After many years growing in its slimy cocoon, Aliens: Colonial Marines will finally come out on February 12. Though Gearbox hasn't talked about post-launch DLC plans, a ping on Polygon's motion tracker shows a $30 Season Pass for the incoming FPS lurking on GameStop's digital storefront.

According to the listing, the Pass provides a single price at a 33 percent discount for four DLC packs releasing in March and through summer. The add-ons offer "campaign content, additional multiplayer maps, new modes, character customization, and more."

Seeing as Gearbox already uses a similarly structured Season Pass system for Borderlands 2, it's no surprise Colonial Marines is following suit. What's more surprising is having your face eaten off by a player-controlled xeno popping out of nowhere in the multiplayer, which you can read all about in our preview and watch in the trailer below.

Octodad, a physics-based adventure by indie group Young Horses released in 2010, is about an octopus disguising himself as a human male. Let the brilliance of such a concept sink in for a moment. The student project slowly picked up media attention, and now in an official blog post, programmer Kevin Geisler has described the timeline of the adorably clumsy cephalopod's rise to fame.

Geisler notes larger events such as the Games Developer Conference and Independent Games Festival actually contributed less exposure than simple word-of-mouth from gamers and press sites. A two-sentence tip from the Ctrl+Alt+Del webcomic granted the first spike in 2010, and a bundle of YouTube gameplay videos picked up the pace shortly thereafter. Geisler highlighted Cr1tikal's early playthrough in particular, which racked up over 1.5 million views.

Frankly, I can't get enough of a cheery octopus perfectly convinced of his disguise as he crashes into everything not bolted down, which is why I'm looking forward to the sequel, Octodad: Daliest Catch, coming out sometime this year.

Check out the rest of Geisler's overview on Young Horses' journal.

Back in October, Sleep is Death and Passage creator Jason Rohrer revealed The Castle Doctrine, "a massively multiplayer game of burglary and home defense." Though the prizes you'll pilfer sit in homes owned by players, you'll never know who you're burgling or who you're getting burgled by. Speaking to RPS, Rohrer stated all thefts in Doctrine are intentionally anonymous to send a message.

"When you leave your home, when you go to sleep at night, log out of the game, or you go out of your house to go rob somebody else's house, then your house is open to being robbed by somebody else while you're not there," Rohrer said. "Then you return to your house to see the results of that robbery."

Rohrer wants to underscore the kind of disruption an identity-less thief causes when intruding upon someone else's life, no matter his or her background. "I’m breaking into somebody’s house and I don’t know if it’s a teenage kid, an elderly woman, or a little girl who owns the house in real life," he explained. "Someone’s put work into this house, y’know? Someone’s amassed this collection of stuff that they’ve spent a lot of time on, and when we violate it we’re actually doing harm to a person in a real way. The moral ambiguity of the whole thing is at the core of what the game is about."

As a rather morbid method for encouraging emergent scenarios, players can house a wife and child in their homes and try to protect them from fellow encroachers while targeting someone else's family. "They're not controlled by anybody else," Rohrer said. "You want to protect them because they're unique. If they get killed, they're gone forever and you'll miss them, right?" Heavy.

Check out the rest of Rohrer's interview on RPS.