Opinions on Ed Key and David Kanaga's newly released game Proteus are likely as mixed as the crowd at a Justin Bieber/Mastodon double-bill. Personally, I think it's just lovely. It relaxes me, which certainly isn't true of most games I play these days. It's a rare game that just sort of is, and it manages to forge a connection with nature that's more spiritual than photorealistic. It's got soul, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And it's mysterious.

But hey, maybe you're not sold. After all, there have been plenty of folks making the (increasingly pointless-feeling) argument that because there are no clear-cut rules, Proteus isn't a game. (Personally, I made it a game: It's a game for me to see if I can hear all of Kanaga's music, and find all of the music-making little critters. I'm the only one keeping score, though.) Maybe you just want to see it in action to get what people are talking about.

If you'd like to get a sense of what Proteus is all about, check out this commentary-free playthrough by YouTube user OmGarrett. Watching really isn't the same as actually exploring on your own, but that doesn't mean it's not a pleasant, relaxing thing to do.

We've received several e-mails and comments today from people who couldn't find Fire Emblem: Awakening in stores. Quite a few retailers have yet to receive the new (excellent) strategy-RPG, which came out today for 3DS.

Game Informer says they called a few Best Buys and GameStops and heard that there's a shipping delay on the new Nintendo-published game.

We reached out to Nintendo of America to ask what's up. Here's what they said:

Nintendo makes every effort to make sure its games and systems are available at retail stores nationwide on launch day. Sometimes, because of the variables of shipping, different retailers receive their shipments on different days. Fire Emblem Awakening can be purchased right now from the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo 3DS.

In other words, if you really want it now, get ready to get your download on.

Following the PS4 announcement tease, the Internet seemed to explode in excitement. After spending the last few years with the 360 and the PS3, these reactions are understandable: it's like a collective "FINALLY!" But not everyone is excited, not exactly. Kotaku readers explained why in an informal poll over in Talk Amongst Yourselves.

Here's a reader's digest version of the responses I got.

Platform wars suck

"Always look forward to new hardware, but not looking forward to what community is going to become for months after launch," said BoxSauce.

Looking at at how popular this particular GIF was no matter where I looked, it's difficult to disagree with Boxsauce!

You'd think we'd grow out of this stuff. Apparently not. You can" look forward" to platform fanboys for the months to come.

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Maybe you're happy with current-gen?

"I got my Wii U and my PC, so I'm happy," remarked Dyram.

Many people turned out to be late adopters or have an immense backlog to go through—and adding to that pile of shame isn't exactly a priority.

It doesn't pay to be an early adopter

"Eh. I'm definitely not an early adopter, mostly because a console's first year of games is usually pretty awful. I'll treat any new console with a shoebox of skepticism," explained HerpDerpDerp.

When you consider how often new systems inevitably become updated with sexier, cheaper models, or how unlikely it is that first-wave games take full advantage of the tech, having a system day-one isn't always appealing.

And if you're satisfied with current-gen offerings, being an early adopter becomes even less appealing.

The PC master race don't need no new consoles

"I think I'm more inclined to invest into a more powerful PC," said rtanger.

For many, whatever the PS4 or new Xbox come up with would merely be catching up with where PC has been all along. Or, the idea of purchasing a gaming PC seems more appealing in an age where platform exclusives aren't what they used to be.

It's too early to be excited

"I'll be far more excited when I start seeing some launch game line-ups," stated WonderlandsMadHero.

So far, we don't know too many details. There's some vague hardware stuff, along with general aims (like say, wanting consoles to be more social.)

But for many, until we start talkin' games? There just isn't anything to get worked up about yet.

What about you, are you excited, hesitant or apathetic? Let us know in the comments.

EDIT: Feel free to express your feelings with ample gifs! Those are always fun.

This weekend, many noticed something curious: some Halo titles were listed in the Steam registry. Some assumed this meant that these titles were coming to Steam. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, that's not the case.

"We currently do not have plans to release any 'Halo' titles on Steam," said a Microsoft spokesperson to Kotaku.

Skeptical? I wouldn't blame you. When folks say there aren't any plans, it sometimes actually means "not yet."

It's worth noting that, unlike other titles which have now been confirmed—like Dyad—Halo 2 and Halo 3 pages were almost immediately taken down and can no longer be accessed. Maybe that means something. Maybe not.

We'll keep you updated if anything changes.

This weekend, many noticed something curious: some Halo titles were listed in the Steam registry. Some assumed this meant that these titles were coming to Steam. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, that's not the case.

"We currently do not have plans to release any 'Halo' titles on Steam," said a Microsoft spokesperson to Kotaku.

Skeptical? I wouldn't blame you. When folks say there aren't any plans, it sometimes actually means "not yet."

It's worth noting that, unlike other titles which have now been confirmed—like Dyad—Halo 2 and Halo 3 pages were almost immediately taken down and can no longer be accessed. Maybe that means something. Maybe not.

We'll keep you updated if anything changes.

We here at Kotaku have been having a lot of fun with rankings lately, from Halo to Grand Theft Auto to Final Fantasy to Pokémon. And now, it's time to rank the big daddy of single-player RPGs: the Elder Scrolls series.

Of course, when I say "big daddy," I mean it: size is of the defining characteristic of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. But while all the games in the series might be big, are they all equally good? Let's find out.

Before I start, a few notes: these aren't Kotaku's official picks, these are just my personal choices. I hope you'll offer your own list in the comments, and explain why you put them in that order. Also, I decided not to include expansion packs, even though The Shivering Isles is so much fun—I figured it would be better to include the expansion packs under the umbrella of their respective games. Lastly, I elected to keep this list constrained to numbered entries: so, no Battlespire, no Redguard, and no Elder Scrolls Travels games.

That make sense? Okay, let's go:

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1. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Morrowind is arguably the series' most distinctive entry, and it's also my favorite. The bizarre plants and animals of Vvardenfell stick with me even today—the misty, sticky swamps, the remote desert cities, and the burnished metal of Vivec. While Oblivion and to a lesser extent Skyrim often felt like rote "fantasy" settings, Morrowind almost always felt like a whole new world.

Despite my time playing Arena in particular, Morrowind was the first time I'd really experienced anything that felt both so open and so detailed. I'll never forget when I began to have nighttime visitors—I've forgotten the particulars, but there's a part in the story when you sleep and are attacked by assassins. Somehow, it just seemed amazing that the game's story really worked, that it was functioning properly and this world was reacting to me in the way it seemed to be. Part of that, I sense, was the relative opacity of Morrowind when compared with Oblivion and Skyrim; it wasn't always obvious that I'd achieved a quest objective, and everything was more organic and harder to read. (That was cool.)

I have a feeling that Elder Scrolls games will continue to grow and improve, but I'm not sure I'll ever recapture the feeling of playing Morrowind for the first time. And the music… oh, man, the music.

2. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I don't have much more to say about Skyrim, considering that I've written approximately 5,000 articles about it in my time here at Kotaku. I'm not sure I've ever seen a game become an EVENT in quite the way Skyrim did—for months on end, it was so much fun simply to get caught up in the thrill of it all. Especially the dragons.

It's a game I'm still playing, still modding; I'm still looking forward to the Dragonborn DLC, which has yet to come to PC. Every now and then, I have an insane desire to start up a new character and see if magic-using is really as weird as I've always found it to be. Skyrim didn't quite have the magic needed to usurp Morrowind as my favorite game in the series. But it came damned close. And hey, when all is said and done, it still might.

3. The Elder Scrolls: Arena

I'll never forget when I picked up the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. It was coming up on 20 years ago. I read the box in the Software, etc. in our mall and marveled at the thing—this was the most ambitious-looking game I'd ever seen. Could it possibly be as good as it looked?

Turned out… well, sort of. It certainly hasn't aged all that well. But at the time, I remember being amazed that there were so many places and things in this world, and that they were all different. The fact that most of the game was copy/pasted doesn't take away from my many memories playing it, adventuring through identical dungeon after identical dungeon, figuring out ways to exploit the questionable-at-best combat system. I remember the first time I enchanted a weapon—I'd somehow managed to get an ebony katana (which was pretty badass on its own), and I went to the enchanter (I think?) in order to charge it with a spell.

I had so little idea of how it would all work, and couldn't believe how complicated the whole system was. Would this really make my katana more powerful? Would it destroy it? What was going to happen?? I saved my money, then—and I vividly remember this—I woke up at 5AM before school began and went ahead and had the guy charge up my sword. And it worked! Something about that entire process just seemed so mysterious and real… it's the kind of thing that very few games manage even today, and it'll always be one of my formative gaming memories.

4. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Given how many hours I sank into Oblivion, it may seem surprising to see it so low on the list. But while Oblivion is an outstanding (even underrated!) game in many respects, its relatively dull setting of Cyrodiil and mostly boring, melodramatic story leave it somewhat below the other games for me. It may have polished the template set forth in Morrowind, but too much of the game felt like a soulless grind through a generic fantasy setting. I threw hundreds of hours into Oblivion, managed to level my main character until he could pick any lock, defeat any foe, and jump over most small hills. I sprinted into dozens of Oblivion gates, booking it past enemies and exploiting the glitch that let you quicksave, grab the Sigil Stone and warp out, then check the power granted by the stone and if need be, reload until you got something good. Man, did I have some mighty enchanted weapons in Oblivion.

The Shivering Isles expansion went a long way towards addressing some of Oblivion's personality deficits, even if Sheogorath was insufferable most of the time. But as enjoyable as it all was, something about the game just felt hollow to me. I think it was partly that I played it on Xbox 360—this was when I'd traded my gaming PC for a mac, and was just getting back into gaming after taking a few years off. As a result, I wasn't able to mod the game to the extent that so many others could, and past a certain point, I simply stopped playing.

5. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

Poor Daggerfall. If Elder Scrolls games are known for their size, Daggerfall is the Elder Scrolls game that suffered from being too big. "You like how big Arena was?" the folks at Bethesda seemed to ask, "Okay, check THIS out!"

Daggerfall also has the unfortunate distinction of being the game on this list that I've played the least of, which I'm sure at least partly explains its last-place positioning. But it's also a chicken-and-egg situation; I think I never got all that interested in it because it was just too big (and spread too thin) to handle. You can download it for free and see for yourself—this game is almost comically oversized. I've heard from plenty of folks who found things to love about Daggerfall, so I'm not ready to call it a disaster or anything. But I'm happy that Bethesda decided to go another direction with Morrowind, to shrink their scope while adding detail.

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So there they are, my list of the Elder Scrolls games, from best to worst. What's your order?

Candy is dandy, but it's also not very good for you. It's filled with artificial flavors, preservatives, hormones, genetically modified organisms (yum!), hydrogenated oils and corn syrup. That's why it's called junk food. The mission of Unreal is to remove the junk from junk food without removing the taste. That's a rather tall order.

I'd passed Unreal in the candy aisle at my local Target dozens of times without giving it a single thought. The packaging is all flashy and stylish, but when hunting for candy the eyes are naturally drawn to the classics. Peanut Butter Cups in an orange wrapper, Peanut M&Ms dressed in yellow. Everything else is either sub-par or high-priced, at least that was my perception.

It wasn't until a reader named Paul dropped me a line last week that Unreal got on my radar. I dropped the company a line, they sent out one each of their five products, and I ate them.

They were certainly different.

The story told on the Unreal Candy website is that a man named Michael and his then 13-year-old son Nicky got into an argument over Nicky's Halloween candy. Michael took it away, Nicky got angry, Michael told him it wasn't good for Nicky, Nicky looked it up and discovered his dad was right.

Instead of simply sulking, Nicky decided he wanted to try and make candy without all the crap in it. He called scientists and chefs. Armed with knowledge and professionals and his father and older brother, Nicky developed a line of candy that uses all natural ingredients—chocolate with more cocoa, real cane sugar, natural coloring instead of chemical dyes. They reduced calories, fats and sugars while increasing fiber and protein. They created healthy products that cost the same as their big-name counterparts (which surprised the hell out of me).

That's lovely and all, but Snacktaku isn't about buying snacks—it's about eating them.

My initial impressions of the taste of Unreal's five products were not positive. The chocolate was too bitter. The nougat tasted of vitamins. The colorful candy shells on the M&Ms weren't as colorful as I'd hoped. With the exception of the peanut butter cup, each left an odd amaroidal aftertaste.

In retrospect I might have been tasting science. I'd read so much about the process behind creating these snacks that I prepped my mouth for sweet interlopers, encroaching on the territory of Hershey and M&M Mars. I saw Unreal as the enemy, and that was unfair.

So I went to the store and purchased another five pieces of candy, along with one of each snacks' candy inspiration. Tasting each pair side-by-side, suddenly Unreal made much more sense.

Unreal 5 Vs. Milky Way

The major difference between all Unreal Candy varieties and their junked counterparts is sweetness. I never realized just how sickly sweet a Milky Way bar is until I took a bite of one followed by a bite of Unreal 5. Side-by-side the sugary-taste of the Milky Way was overpowering, while the Unreal bar presented a more refined, slightly darker flavor (blame the cocoa).

The Unreal bar is a denser piece of candy. The caramel is thicker and less forgiving, the nougat dense and a bit grainy. The vitamin aftertaste was still present, but considering the alternative cloying saccharine smack of the Milky Way, I found myself much more accepting the second time around.

Unreal 8 Vs. Snickers

A Snickers is a Milky Way with peanuts. The Unreal 8 is the Unreal 5 with peanuts. The comparison from above still stands with one addition—the Unreal peanuts had a bit more punch than Snickers' nuts. Not sure if it's a matter of where the supply comes from or what—they're just nuttier.

Unreal 44 Vs. Plain M&Ms

When I handed my wife a handful of Unreal 44s she thought I was giving her lentils. The vibrant colors depicted on the wrapper are certainly not indicative of the 70s shag carpeting hues of what's inside the bag. That's natural coloring for you; you aren't going to get bright blue or fire engine red—you get mud. I suppose they could have just not colored them at all, so I appreciate the effort. Still, ew.

In my mouth those not-so-colorful candy shells surrendered to my teeth much more readily than the M&Ms' protective coating, with the overall effect of further reducing the sweetness of Unreal's product versus the "real" thing. Where M&M's brought the sweetness, Unreal 44 gave me that same slightly bitter chocolate, somewhere between milk and dark—a more refined and polished experience. I might even say more mature, but I don't want to sound like a pompous dickhead.

Unreal 54 Vs. Peanut M&Ms

I think the peanut issue comes down to freshness. The Unreal nuts have more taste, while the traditional candy peanuts are more a texture. With peanuts in a starring role the Unreal 54s are hands-down tastier than Peanut M&Ms.

Unreal 77 Vs. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

The most divergent of the group of candy counterparts, it's not just the taste of the peanuts that sets Unreal 77 apart from the classic Reese's—it's the texture. Reese's peanut butter mixture comes across as dry and crumbly, relying on the moisture of your mouth to make it creamy (you should sell your saliva, it's delicious). Without preservatives the middle of an Unreal peanut butter cup is actually creamy, even before you mix it with spit. It's much more delightful than it sounds.

On my latest trip to Target I purchase an entire bag of Unreal 77. Individually wrapped cups are only 75 calories apiece. I ate all of them. I am not as ashamed as I should be.

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So yeah, maybe candy can taste better without all of the crap in it. My hat goes off to Nicky and his family for seeing this through and delivering a product that chocolate-craving snackers don't have to feel as guilty about eating.

If you're thinking about giving these a try, however, I seriously suggest going about using the same comparison method I utilized here. It'll give you a chance to bring home a sack full of candy, as well as a chance to say goodbye to the horrible shit you've been filling your body with up until now.

Sony has cut ties with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale creator SuperBot Entertainment, just days after the development studio laid off a number of its staff.

All of the game's future content will be handled by Sony's internal studios.

"Sony Computer Entertainment can confirm that the working agreement with developer SuperBot Entertainment has amicably ended," a Sony representative told Kotaku. "We have had a positive working relationship with this talented studio, and wish them the best of success in their next endeavor. PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale and the title's forthcoming DLC releases will continue to be fully supported by Santa Monica Studio."

SuperBot, an independent developer started in 2009, released PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale for Vita and PlayStation 3 last fall. Two weeks ago, the company laid off a significant number of staff.

We've heard from one source that as a result of Sony's decision, SuperBot will have to shut down. We've reached out to the studio for comment and will update should we hear back.

UPDATE: In an e-mail, SuperBot's director of operations David Yang responded to Kotaku's request for comment, saying that the company is "excited about beginning the next chapter of [their] future."

The full statement follows:

SuperBot Entertainment can confirm that the relationship with SCEA has ended on good terms. We are extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to work on with Sony on Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale, and are extremely proud of the work we have done. SuperBot Entertainment will continue working on projects that reflect our passion for games and our commitment to creating award winning titles. We are very excited about beginning the next chapter of our future and invite all of our fans and supporters to follow our journey.

UPDATE 2: In response to a follow-up question about whether the studio will remain intact with all of its staff, Yang told Kotaku that there are no layoffs planned yet.

"We don't have a reduction plan as of yet, however it is unlikely we can continue with our current work force for an extended period of time," he said. "We are still working things out and hope to continue on with as many of us as possible."

"Stories are the filter through which we understand the world." Those philosophical words come from Susan O'Connor, a writer who's worked on BioShock, Far Cry 2 and Gears of War. In the TEDx session above, O'Connor discusses how her work scripting characters for video games led her to an epiphany about the people who may not be the heroes in their own lives. It's a surprisingly poignant talk that could make you re-evaluate the way you interact with people.

Shawn McGrath, creator of psychedelic racing game Dyad, did not expect to announce today that his game is coming to Steam. But folks on the Internet figured it out.

What's a man to do? Whine? Complain? Go radio silent?

Not Shawn McGrath.

He busted out the webcam and some Windex and crafted the most honest game announcement trailer you've ever seen. Watch it above. Dyad will be out on Steam in March.

For more Shawn McGrath-related items, please consider:

The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code

This is a story about Doom 3's source code and how beautiful it is. Yes, beautiful. Allow me to explain.
After releasing my video game Dyad I took a little break. More »

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Dyad: The Kotaku Review

To say that Shawn McGrath's Dyad is intense is an understatement. The game may technically count as a mind-altering drug, and believe me, that's a good thing.
In my video review, above, I break down not only the experience of playing Dyad but also where it's roots lay and why it goes above and... More »

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