If you're playing the PC version of Tomb Raider, you may be having trouble with the quicktime events—enough that you're just watching Lara die over and over again every time a QTE pops up. Not fun.

At some point early in the game, Tomb Raider tells you what to press during QTEs: the "F" key. Then, it might never tell you again. Maybe you missed it. So then when you see this type of screen:

You might feel confused—what the hell are you supposed to press? Now you know. F.

Not everyone sees that, though. It may be a bug, though it is not one I am alone in experiencing. Kirk Hamilton, on the other hand, sees this:

Which does tell you what to press—but even so, in the heat of the moment, we're trained to look at the QTE itself. In this case, the white circle. Why does the prompt on the circle not tell you the button to press?

Hopefully this helps you see fewer of the gruesome death scenes in Tomb Raider. If nothing else, it's really just further proof that quicktime events kind of suck. Or, excuse me. I meant quick timer events.

Vector's appearance as one of two new games in this week's Android chart has got me thinking about switching things up. There's just not enough variety in the traditional week-to-week top games rankings, so starting next week I'll be tracking top new games instead.

It'll be a little more work — I'll have to reference my phone instead of the Google Play website — but I think the "top new" charts in the mobile version are more in the spirit of the original idea of these weekly posts — to help readers discover new games they might have otherwise missed.

Games like Vector, through I've posted about the playable action movie parkour sequence several times now. That even a small portion of the game is available for free seems extravagant on the developer's part. You should have it on your phone.

Tune in next week for the freshness
!

We like to hold the things we make near and dear, treating them as if they were our babies. It's no different with George Lucas and Star Wars.

As you might know, Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney in 2012—and so was Star Wars. Right now, a third trilogy in the Star Wars film series is planned, and it'll be directed by JJ Abrams.

Having the whole thing actually happen, however, required negotiations between Lucasfilm and Disney about the future of the series. According to a recent article by Businessweek, those negotiations were kind of tricky. First, Lucas wanted to make sure that some of the people who had worked on Star Wars before would still be able to do so in the future.

A simple and understandable request. Disney agreed to ample collaboration even if "Disney, not Lucasfilm, would have final say over any future movies."

Once work started on the new movies, things got a little dicier:

The reality of giving up control weighed on him, though. At the end of every week before she flew home to Los Angeles, Kennedy says, she asked Lucas how he was feeling. Sometimes he seemed at peace. Other times, not. "I'm sure he paused periodically to question whether he was really ready to walk away," she says.

At first Lucas wouldn't even turn over his rough sketches of the next three Star Wars films. When Disney executives asked to see them, he assured them they would be great and said they should just trust him. "Ultimately you have to say, ‘Look, I know what I'm doing. Buying my stories is part of what the deal is.' I've worked at this for 40 years, and I've been pretty successful," Lucas says. "I mean, I could have said, ‘Fine, well, I'll just sell the company to somebody else.' "

It was only after Disney agreed that solely a few select people could see the treatments that Lucas actually turned them over. Then came sealing the deal—signing papers and whatnot.

At the end of October, Iger arranged for Lucas to fly down to Disney's Burbank headquarters and sign the papers. He thought Lucas seemed melancholy. "When he put that pen to the piece of paper, I didn't detect a hesitation," Iger says. "But I did detect there was a lot of emotion. He was saying goodbye."

When you consider that Lucas previously controlled "every aspect of Star Wars, from set design to lunchboxes," his reaction makes sense. Of course saying goodbye wasn't easy. Still, ouch. Hopefully Disney does something worthwhile with the property.

How Disney Bought Lucasfilm-and Its Plans for 'Star Wars' [Businessweek]

Lately, a rumor has spread about how EA might ban users who request for refunds on SimCity. It's bunk.

This was a widely-posted chat, in which a sales rep supposedly tells someone that if they tried to dispute the refund claim on SimCity through their bank, they'd get banned on Origin. Naturally, the image scared folks.

Today, the Origin Twitter account stated the following:

Which assuages fears that asking for a refund, period, might get you banned—though not that disputes with your bank would. We've reached out to EA for comment on that specific detail.

The return policy they link to says that they do not offer refunds on digital downloads, though physical purchases bought through the Origin store can be returned within 14 days of purchase—which means that, while EA won't ban you for asking for a refund, you still won't be getting one if you bought the game digitally.

It's been a long road for feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian. Last summer, she ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a new video series examining sexist tropes in video games—her goal was $6,000 and she raised nearly $160,000. In the midst of the Kickstarter drive, Sarkeesian was subjected to a brutal, organized harassment campaign (someone even made an online game that simulated punching her in the face), all of which drew even more attention to her project.

As Sarkeesian explained to Kotaku, the extra funding gave her the opportunity to increase the scope and scale of the project, but it's also meant a lot more work, and some delays. She's now released the first episode in the series, which takes a look at the "Damsel in Distress" trope. Certainly a prevalent trope, that one.

Sarkeesian has already launched a tumblr to highlight many examples of this particular trope, and this video will take a deeper look. Give it a watch.

Sure, shooting people is an option in Black Ops II, and that's plenty of fun. Or, you can play catch with your enemies. With a live grenade. Don't worry, it won't go off. Here's how.

The folks over at defendthehouse found that, if two people have the "fast hands" perk—which allows you to throw back grenades thanks to a reset timer—they can just keep throwing a live grenade back and forth forever. Kind of absurd, eh?

Now the question is: how many grenades can be juggled between two folks?

Playing Catch with a Frag! [Myth 6 of 31] [defendthehouse]

The four seasons are all beautiful in their own rights, even if I do want to stab winter with its own icicles right about now. So while you're pillaging the land and creating massive structures, why not mimic the season you see outside your window inside your computer window?

If you do decide to download the real life seasons mod, it'll look a little like what you see above, by MinecraftMill.

And as a bonus, doesn't that track playing in the background ("Spirit Of Life" by Blackmill) sound a little like it could be playing on one of Mass Effect's planets?

Real Life Seasons Mod | Compatible With All Minecraft Versions [YouTube via MinecraftGIFs]

As the disastrous SimCity launch lurches toward the end of the week, it feels like it's been one catastrophe after another.

Earlier this morning, EA started disabling features to get the game to work. And in the latest hit against SimCity, megaretailer Amazon.com has stopped selling digital copies of the game.

SimCity is now listed as "Currently Unavailable: We don't know when or if this item will be available again." That's standard language for an unavailable Amazon item, but still, yowch. The Amazon description continues:

Important Note on "SimCity"
Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information.

While Amazon's page doesn't explicitly say that they've put the game on hold due to the server issues (it's possible, for example, that EA asked them to halt sales to limit new users, or that they've simply run out of codes), it certainly looks as though that's the case. I've reached out to both Amazon and EA for clarification, and to find out under what circumstances Amazon will begin to sell digital copies of the game again.

Earlier this morning, Mike gave SimCity a "Not Yet" verdict. Sounds like Amazon agrees, for the time being.

(Via Giant Bomb)

Yesterday, a video game shattered yet another Kickstarter record: in its first 24 hours, Torment: Tides of Numenera raised $1.7 million, becoming the fastest Kickstarter to earn a million dollars.

Tides of Numenera is a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, a role-playing game that came out for the PC back in 1999, and it's received blessings from a chunk of the old Planescape team, including designer Chris Avellone. Maybe that's why it's made so much money.

People love Planescape. People really love Planescape—to the point where they'll dish out a whopping amount of cash just to see a new game that carries on its legacy.

You might be asking: why do people love this game so much? Here are a few reasons:

It's not fantasy... or sci-fi

It's something in between. It's set in D&D's Planescape lore, which is sort of the RPG equivalent of Internet: you can access an endless number of worlds, but some of them are sketchy and full of pedophiles. Although the isometric look feels a bit obsolete today, it's still easy to appreciate Planescape: Torment's fascinating world, which sometimes looks like it was built in a junkyard and other times looks like it came straight out of Lovecraft.

Planescape: Torment's world is sort of like a cross between Cirque Du Soleil and the Necronomicon. It's unforgettable.

The characters are all flawed and memorable

Party members in Planescape: Torment fight. They squabble. They get on your nerves. They say things that you might not agree with.

There's the ghostly suit of armor with a twisted sense of justice who only joins your team if you lie to him about who your main character really is. There's the insane wizard who spent his life setting so many things on fire that as punishment, a bunch of other wizards set him on fire. There's the succubus healer who runs a brothel—but not the kind you're thinking of.

Planescape: Torment only gives you a few playable characters, but they're all interesting. They all stick with you. When you piss them off—and you will, while playing Planescape, piss people off—you'll feel remorseful about it. Or maybe you won't. Maybe you'll get angry at their disloyalty. Maybe you'll want to kill Vhailor, and maybe you'll want to shove Morte back into the tower of skulls from whence he came. That's all part of the fun.

Your choices actually matter

In Planescape: Torment, a lie can bring a person to life. You can talk your way out of boss fights. You can even convince the final boss to kill himself.

When people talk about Planescape, they generally talk about how good the writing is, but they're not just talking about prose and flow. They're talking about how your decisions carry weight. How every bit of dialogue almost feels like a puzzle to solve, a tree full of complicated choices whose branches all lead to different possibilities.

There's a question asked frequently in Planescape: Torment. "What can change the nature of a man?" It's one of the driving themes behind the game. But the real question you'll be asking as you play is: how can you change the nature of man?

Maybe it's just the little things

In Planescape: Torment...

• You can die. You'll come back to life. This is an integral part of the game.

• You can join a cult that worships death, or a cult that believes that everybody is a god. Or you can just become an anarchist.

• You can visit a pregnant alley, then prevent it from getting an abortion. This makes even less sense than it sounds.

• You can piss off the deity-like Lady of Pain and find yourself trapped in a maze for all of eternity.

• You can kill the incarnation of your character's mortality.

Although Planescape hasn't aged super well—and you need a high-resolution mod if you plan to play it today—it's a special sort of game, and it's had a significant impact on a lot of people. No wonder so many people want to throw money at the sequel.

Image by ~mr-nick/DeviantArt

A handful of recent job listings may offer some hints as to Amazon's future ambitions in the gaming space.

One opening mentions that the online giant "is looking for a software engineer to contribute to the design and construction of next generation of distribution technology for online video games." The listing's copy also talks up the "[building] very cool software that affects a lot of people" vis-a-vis some sort of multiplatform client that interfaces with Amazon's web services. An evolution of Amazon's Game Connect offering, perhaps?

The team at Amazon working on that next-generation distribution technology is apparently separate from the "Amazon Advanced Game Technology team" which has "big plans to break several molds and launch entirely new technologies and businesses around digital games." Their endeavors will help "at propelling our customers' gaming experiences to the next digital era."

Amazon's Advanced Gaming Technology team previously created the Amazon Android Appstore's "Test Drive" feature that allows users to try out Android apps in their browser before buying—essentially a cloud-based trial. This sort of virtualization tech has very obvious applications with PC games and the like.

A senior manager on the Advanced Gaming Technologies team writes on his LinkedIn page that he is leading an effort to solve "some of the problems which have plagued gamers for years"—namely, "limited selection, high-prices, terrible lag, audio/video synchronization, and expensive hardware." Coupled with a recent opening on the team talking about "solving some challenging virtualization problems," I do not think it is unreasonable to speculate that Amazon may be considering a cloud gaming solution in some capacity.

The Amazon Game Services team—which handles products like GameCircle and Game Connect—is looking to create additional "unannounced offerings to game developers" that will integrate with existing game engines such as Unity and Unreal.

MMO publisher and developer Trion Worlds recently registered a number of domains pertaining to something called "Planetjackers," hinting perhaps at a new unannounced title from the company.

On his CV, one Trion Worlds artist says he is working on "Unannounced Projects" in addition to Rift and the upcoming Defiance. Trion also recently posted job listings vis-a-vis an unnamed "colorful new action game.

Also of note: a brand director who left Trion Worlds last month claims on his CV that Trion and Syfy's upcoming transmedia release Defiance has a $1 billion value, and that the budget was around $100 million, with an additional $25 million for marketing. The budget numbers are vaguely corroborated by a recent Forbes piece on the game, which said the game alone cost $80 million, and the total cost of both the show and game was "well north of $100 million."

According to the portfolio of a game designer at Spanish studio Tequila Works, the studio's followup to last year's 2.5D horror platformer Deadlight will be hitting both Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

Tequila Works' website states that the developer is working in tandem with a "major publisher" on the title, which a job opening describes as "a brand new experience in the new IP universe." Additionally, another job opening asked for candidates with an "Understanding of [Unreal Engine 4]," indicating that the title will be hitting next-generation platforms.

The studio also recently partnered with gaming talent agency DDM and investment firm Seahorn Capital Group to raise money for its projects that could potentially allow Tequila Works to bypass the financial precariousness of the traditional publisher-developer relationship.

It's unknown what this new project might be, but an early October tweet from the studio's Twitter feed mentioned that the prototype they were working on at the time was "eerie," so their next game will probably share the creepy atmosphere of Deadlight. The project's reveal may not be very far away: while discussing the benefits of GDC with Dust: An Elysian Tail co-writer Alex Kain, Tequila Works' CEO Raúl Rubio Munárriz said "we won't have the pressur [sic] of showing our games... Let's leave that for the E3." (It is, however, entirely possible that Munárriz was just discussing E3 in general.)

Big Red Button Entertainment is something of a rarity: a studio that has existed for five years and operated under the radar without having shipped a single game.

Founded in early 2008 by two Naughty Dog veterans—art director Bob Rafei and creative director E. Daniel Arey—Big Red Button had ambitions to become "the United Artists of games." The duo wanted to use Big Red Button as a vehicle to AAA games that were genuinely accessible and solve the one of the major issues of contemporary games: players not necessarily completing the games they buy.

Arey seems to have left the company several years back to join Blizzard, and he currently appears nowhere on the studio's list of employees. Curiously, a since-removed page of "Advisors & Consultants" listed him as a "Creative Consultant" alongside Doug Church, who apparently served as a "Creative Advisor" to Big Red Button prior to joining Valve.

Big Red Button spent the first few years of its existence creating a portfolio of original IP, and secured an alternative financing arrangement contingent on the signing of a publisher or similar partner. They briefly worked with the now-defunct Jerry Bruckheimer Games on an IP called "Ten Minute Man." (The relationship between the two companies actually led a Jerry Bruckheimer Games production assistant to jump ship to Big Red Button.)

As of mid-2010, Big Red Button was pitching IP "to publishers such as Sony, Konami, and Activision." By spring of the following year, Big Red Button landed an "unannounced major project with third-party publisher," which seems to be the title they are presently working on.

Big Red Button's recruitment copy describes the project as a "next-gen landmark AAA console project," and job openings hint at a cross-generation "character driven, 3rd person action" title with co-op gameplay and some sort of mobile integration. The Big Red Button copy also mentions the company is keen on "delivering authentic gaming experiences that are as fun to watch as they are to play," so perhaps the game is not too far removed from a cinematic action-adventure title like Uncharted?

Finally, a producer at the studio says the project has a "$19.9 million budget" with an estimated "34-month" production cycle and a present studio headcount of 28 people. Also, the domains itsasnowday.com and monstersurgeon.com—both registered in fall 2011—redirect to Big Red Button's site, though neither of those quite sounds like a name of a AAA action title.

superannuation is a self-described "internet extraordinaire" residing somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone. He tweets, and can be reached at heyheymayday AT gmail DOT com.

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