Er, this is awkward. This Episode 3 trailer for The Wolf Among Us starts with a spoiler warning for previous chapters. Telltale's Fables adaptation is currently sat in my Steam library's ever-growing backlog list, and so I've decided not to watch it. I really hope it is a legitimate trailer I'm posting, and not say a specialist "adult" retelling of the Big Bad Wolf. That would be embarrassing.

Whatever it is you've just watched, here's a plot summary from the trailer's description:

"After discovering damning evidence at a bloody crime scene, Bigby is just steps behind the prime suspect of a horrific murder, but he's not the only one; other forces in Fabletown will stop at nothing to protect their interests."

Telltale also promise that "every decision matters," which, hopefully, will prove to be the case. One of Tom's big issues when he reviewed Episode 2 was the apparently limited significance of the choices you were asked to make.

While advertised as a "launch" trailer, Telltale are yet to announce the episode's release date.

Update: Telltale has now announced the release date: Tuesday, April 8th. So, next Tuesday. Hey, that's soon, isn't it?

After a weekend of watching the best players from the US and Europe compete in Hi-Rez Studios' MOBA Smite, I could pick out the most amazing plays by the volume of the crowd. The thousand-seat Center Theater in Atlanta erupted for every kill and chanted for favored teams, but only the best ganks and jukes incited cheers that grew louder and louder and louder. Sometimes the plays were so precise, so obviously above the skill level of any normal player, that I was already writing them down as the crowd went wild.

At least one incredible play happened in every match I watched throughout Smite's three day launch tournament, and I put together a list of the moments that really wowed me below. Each one is embedded with a timestamped video from a Twitch livestream so you can jump straight into the action.

Smite has a great built-in spectator cam that floats above the battlefield, letting you see a large portion of the action. But here's an important fact to remember about Smite: unlike League of Legends and Dota2, Smite's action takes place from a third-person behind-the-back perspective. Every incredible play below was made by a pro player who couldn't see anything behind them or see over the walls of the jungle.

If these plays look hard to pull off when you can see a huge portion of the battlefield, imagine how hard they'd be from the limited behind-the-back perspective. This first clip is the perfect example: one of Dignitas' players dodges death for more than ten seconds, and for most of that time he couldn't see where any of the attacks he was dodging were coming from.

Note: some of the archived streams below are lengthy, so it might take about 10 seconds for the clip to buffer and jump to the proper timecode.

Team Dignitas' ShadowQ jukes SK Gaming for 13 seconds



In the middle of a chaotic team fight, Dignitas player ShadowQ is reduced down to almost no HP. A single basic attack will most likely kill him. Instead of running from the fight, though, he pulls off the seemingly impossible--he dodges, moving in circles around one member of SK Gaming long enough for a teammate to come in, drop a stun, and kill that member of SK Gaming. A second later, another member of SK Gaming comes in to take out ShadowQ, who still has no HP. And ShadowQ jukes him too, keeping him in the area long enough for two members of Dignitas to close in for the kill. ShadowQ gets away.

Dignitas' Lassiz jukes SK Gaming, too



Not to be outdone by his teammate, Dignitas team captain Lassiz uses Freya's ultimate to escape after a dicey tower dive. He runs out with no HP and SK Gaming should have him dead to rights, but upon landing from his ultimate he makes two quick, incredible dodges to escape.

Team Solo Mid's Gamehunter gets the tournament's only pentakill



...and the announcers lose their voices. Gamehunter shows why his nickname is Godhunter.

Team Solo Mid's Lawbster just won't die



Things are looking bad for Cognitive in their second semifinal game against Team Solo Mid. They lost the first and are down 5 kills to 10 in the second game. In an engagement on one of their own towers, you'd think they could pick up this kill against Lawbster, who's down to almost no health as the squishy Poseidon. Lawbster has other plans. He escapes the teamfight, dodges an ultimate from Cognitive's Barraccudda, trying to warp out to safety, then dodging another series of attacks as he's forced to abandon his teleport and juke his way to safety.

Team Solo Mid's TrixTank lands a kill on the enemy fountain



Like in most MOBAs, the fountain at the far back of the base heals friendly players and quickly nukes any enemies who wander within range. Not quickly enough, in this case--TSM's TrixTank blinks in to land a killing blow on the retreating MLCSt3alth before dying himself. The play doesn't do much for TSM tactically, but it it's the kind of kill that takes incredible split-second timing to pull off.

Cognitive's Barraccudda pulls out a miraculous 2:4 trade with Team Solo Mid



After that last engagement in the base, Cognitive is in rough shape, and Team Solo Mid knows it. They go after the Fire Giant buff, the biggest jungle camp on the map, which empowers players like League of Legends' Baron Nashor. Cognitive has no choice but to move in and try to stop TSM from getting the Fire Giant. Turns out, TSM mostly just wanted a fight. Almost every health bar dips down to the 25 percent mark or lower as this turns into a do-or-die fight. Barraccudda wins the fight for his team, but it's not enough to stop TSM from taking the match a few minutes later.

Team Dignitas shows off perfect teamwork



After losing to TSM, Cognitive went down into the loser's bracket to face off against Dignitas. In their first game, they pulled ahead with an early lead and a massive 5000 gold difference. Things start to turn around when Dignitas' Zapman gets a kill. Despite having low health, the other members of Dignitas rally around Zapman to keep him alive. They'll soon start to catch up to Cognitive.

Team Dignitas secures their comeback with a Fire Giant bait



Dignitas has already pulled ahead at this point, but they set up a perfect battle at the Fire Giant to take on Cognitive. Both Lassiz and Zapman drop to almost no health but survive, taking out three members of Cognitive and securing the Fire Giant Buff.

Dignitas' Zapman backdoors the Cognitive Titan for the win



This is easily the most exciting finish of the entire weekend tournament. Using the Fire Giant buff they picked up a few minutes earlier, Dignitas pushed down Cognitive's left-side Phoenix, exposing the Titan. Cognitive knows they have to get the Fire Giant buff to have a chance to beat Dignitas, so they hover around it, waiting for it to respawn. They make a critical mistake, however, leaving that left side lane open. Cognitive think they can win a fight and then retreat to defend their base. Zapman starts pounding away on the Titan all by himself, and the crowd goes absolutely insane.

Dignitas' Anatoliy snipes Cognitive from the jungle



After winning the first match against Cognitive, Dignitas loses the second. A spot in the finals is on the line. Instead of playing conservatively, Dignitas goes all-in on aggression, beginning with a balls-to-the-wall tower dive from Lassiz. It's Dignitas' Anatoliy playing Ra, however, who makes an incredible long-range snipe to kill a member of Cognitive and allow his team to take down a tower.

Anatoliy snipes TSM's TrixTank off his horse



If that last shot looked hard, imagine how much harder this one was. Trixtank is playing Guan Yu, who can leap atop a horse to charge in and out of battles in a hurry. As his health drops low, he retreats on horseback, but just before he can round the corner into the jungle, Anatoliy snipes him from way, way out in mid lane.

Team Solo Mid wins the grand finals!



Dignitas put up a great fight, but they just couldn't pull out a win against the might of Team Solo Mid. In fact, no one could--TSM dominated the entire tournament, winning every single match they played. They didn't have as many flashy plays as Dignitas, but their consistently great positioning in teamfights, smart team compositions, and skill won it all for them. At the end, team captain Lassiz takes out TSM's captain Youngbae, but it's not enough TSM fells the titan, wins the grand finals, and walks away with a jumbo $100,000 check.

Caffeine, a first-person horror game powered by Unreal Engine 4, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. If it hits its funding goal, Caffeine promises to deliver a chilling, beautiful experience inspired by Doom 3, Condemned, and FEAR 2.
Set in the year 2097, the game has you playing as a young boy who wakes up on a caffeine mining station in a distant solar system. His memory is gone. In this future, which I pray I never live to see, an overpopulated earth is running out of the drug that allows me to do my job. It s not clear how one mines for caffeine in space, but let's go with it. You ll explore the abandoned station to find out what happened there, see spooky things, jump at shadows, and probably discover that you re not alone.
The game s developer Dylan Browne says that there will be no weapons in Caffeine, but you will be able to use the environment around you, solve puzzles, and learn about the world through notes and audio logs scattered around the environment. He also said that while the game started out in UE3, switching to UE4 gives him the freedom to push both its visual fidelity and gameplay.
Browne is hoping to raise AUD $80,000, which is around USD $74,000, by May 14. Note that, unlike Kickstarter, Indiegogo allows campaigns to keep the money they raised even if they don t reach their funding goal.
Check out the trailer for Caffeine below.

The Elder Scrolls Online has been officially playable by the pre-ordering type since Sunday. Look for the first of our review impressions later this week, but for now, we expect most players will share this observation: the UI is too sparse. ESO seems ashamed of its MMO mechanics, hiding damage numbers and useful information such as experience gains.

But knowing how we do love to customize, Zenimax has kindly made interface addons easy to make and easier to install. Here are our current favorites, as well as a few miscellaneous tips, such as how to disable the intro videos and plan your character build in advance.
How to install Elder Scrolls Online addons
Start by navigating to My Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live. (For pedants, that's X:\Users\\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live.) You'll see an AddOns folder unsurprisingly, you drop addons (in their own folders) into the AddOns folder. When you run TESO, there's a convenient menu called Add-Ons, and anything you've added to the folder should be enabled automatically. Just keep in mind every variant of the word "addon" and you're golden.



If you don't like an addon or want to swap mods depending on what you're up to, you can use the Add-Ons menu turn them on and off and reload the UI while playing. Some addons come with their own settings menus, too, so be sure to check the menu for customization options. Now, on to our favorites...
Foundry Tactical Combat
Get it at ESOUI

This mod is essential. It adds significantly more combat data, including floating damage text, low health, magicka, and stamina notices, and simpler bars. I can't go back to the vanilla combat interface after using it. I need floating numbers.


Wykkyds Framework
Get it at ESOUI

Another essential mod don't even start playing without Wykkyds Framework. The package adds a ton of UI options and the fantastic Bazgrim s Toolbar, which displays the current time, framerate, location, XP to next level, inventory space, gold, and more. It's all stuff you'd otherwise have to slog over to the menu to see, and that kind of inconvenience leads to starving horses.


Wykkyd's Full Immersion
Get it at ESOUI

This addon requires Wykkyds Framework, but has the opposite effect. Full Immersion adds options to remove UI elements, including the reticle, with a keystroke. It's great for taking screenshots, or to roleplay as a lost amnesiac who has absolutely no information about herself or her environment.

Strangely shoehorned in, but handy, is an emote selector in the chatbox. It's only useful until you've memorized all the emotes, but there are a ton. \sitchair


Wykkyd's Outfitter
Get it at ESOUI

Another mod that builds on Wykkyds Framework, Outfitter is a super-useful add-on which allows you to create multiple gear sets and hotbar configurations and bind them to a key. If your PvP build is different from your farming build, this is the quickest way to switch between them.

Get naked with the click of a button.
XPview
Get it at ESOUI

Adds a small UI window which calculates your XP-per-hour. It's useful if, like me, you play MMOs for the thrill of time management.


insMobs2Level
Get it at ESOUI

Adds an XP gain readout to the chat log after a kill. It's a simple addition and isn't really necessary with Foundry and XPview, but I like that the numbers are saved in the chat so I can scroll up and figure out how much XP I'm getting from what. I like numbers. More numbers please.



On the next page: filter out gold spam, disable the intro videos, and more...


Spam Filter
Get it at ESOUI

Are you the one spamming the chat, filthy NPC with your overpriced weapons.

So, I'm trying to beg for a group invite, right, but my pathetic cries are being crushed under stacks of asterisk-adorned URLS. That's irritating. Let's all agree to auto-ignore gold peddlers with Spam Filter, which detects unwanted chat garbage once you've set a few filters. After installing the addon, use the following commands in the chat window:

/sfactive - turn the filter on
/sffilters - list your current filters
/sfadd - Add a new filter.

The filter name is just an identifier for the filter. The definition is a Lua pattern, and is the word or phrase that will trigger Spam Filter to ignore the offending player. If Lua pattern sounds daunting, just know that you need to put a % before non-alphanumeric characters (like a . or ? ) for them to register as regular characters. A period, otherwise, will be read as any character (which is also useful).

The filter definition for a website you don t want to see chat messages about would look like: WWW%.GOLDAH%.COM." It would still work without the '%,' but it's good to be in the habit of precision. We aren't animals. Here s more info on Lua patterns.

Now that that's settled, GROUP INVITE PLS!!! GROUP ME!! HEY GUYS GROUP!!
Disabling the intro videos
I don't have anywhere else to be but hunched over my keyboard mashing Assassin's Blade at dull-faced bandits, but I'll be damned if I have to wait to get there. TESO is pretty swift about dropping players off in Tamriel, but not before a stop at the logo viewing theater.

To skip them, close the game and launcher, navigate to Users\\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live and open "UserSettings.txt" in Notepad. Search for "SkipPregameVideos." It's set to 0. That's all wrong. Flip it to 1 and save.
Crafting Simulator
Use it at ESOHead

Part of the fun of crafting is discovering what different ingredients do by trial and error. Another part of the fun is just making the thing you wanted to make. The Crafting Simulator over at ESOHead lets you experiment out of game, as well as discover new and interesting facts about the history of reclining men.


Skill Calculator
Use it at ESOHead

Assigning skill points is the most harrowing thing you'll do not just in ESO, but in life. If you'd kept practicing at that acoustic guitar, for instance, you could be that annoying party guest who brings his acoustic guitar by now. What a shame.

Fortunately, ESO is not life, so you can fiddle around with skills to find your optimal self. Another tool from ESOHead, Skill Calculator is an essential time sink for when you aren't sinking your time into the game itself.



For more addons and the like, head to ESOUI if you couldn't tell, it's our current favorite site for ESO downloads. It doesn't require a log in, and doesn't make you play "find the download button that doesn't go to a porn site." /applaud.

This is a chronicle of our absurd, canon-destroying playthrough of Star Wars Conquest, a mod for sandbox RPG Mount & Blade. Our campaign to ruin Star Wars appears each Tuesday. Header illustration by JawaStu.

Note: there's an issue with Chrome that causes GIF-laden pages to crash. If you stop the page mid-load, all content will populate anyway. Opening this story in another browser will work too. Sorry about that.

Uninstall KOTOR. Forget TIE Fighter and Star Wars Battlefront. There is only one Star Wars video game, and it s an unfinished mod for a six-year-old medieval RPG built by an indie studio from Turkey.

Star Wars Conquest is devastatingly open and filled with intentional and unintentional weirdness, and that immediately makes it more appealing than junk like The Force Unleashed 2. Broadly, the mod reskins Mount & Blade s map-roaming, army-gathering, and quest-taking sandbox gameplay with familiar Star Wars characters, settings, and weapons. Instead of riding in a caravan, you re in an X-Wing (crammed, presumably, into the cockpit with 60 soldiers and their gear). Instead of fighting on horseback, you ride a speeder. Instead of sieging castles, you conquer Hoth and Endor. Instead of running errands for kings, you pay fealty to Greedo.

Also, this guy.



But I m getting ahead. The first step, as in Mount & Blade, is character creation: figuring out who the hell I want to be in this storied universe. I have a rich spectrum of Star Wars archetypes from which I can sculpt a nuanced, original role. I could be a Wookiee commander in Mon Mothma s army. I could be a silver-tongued Mon Calamari ambassador. Or I could play as a Jawa merchant loyal to the Empire, going about the mundane business of buying and selling blue milk, dodging Tusken raiders (who fly around in ships for some reason) and fighting only when I had to.

Each of these characters is compelling, worthy of receiving their own multi-part, GIF-based diary series on a video game website. I don t build any of them because:

I can be a droid
I can instantly make that droid a jedi
I am given immediate, unchecked access to a lightsaber



Sold. Never, ever turn down the opportunity to play a video game as a force-sensitive C-3PO. Actually, that s something that The Force Unleashed got right, isn t it? I retract my criticism.


RISE, DARTH MOTHERBOARD
 

I m a Jedi robot, with a Sith prefix, loyal to Jabba The Hutt. My very nature challenges the pseudoscience of Star Wars, and I plan to use this identity like a wrecking ball through George Lucas canon. As my last act of character building, I dump ability points into navigation, mounted accuracy, wound treatment, and prisoner management, which ll allow me to take captives in battle that I can sell for ransom.

I m thrown onto the overworld map, a galactic view of dozens of planets and satellites in the Star Wars universe. I m sitting alone in a conical shuttle, the starter ship for characters loyal to Jabba. My first to-do is assembling an army, army being shorthand in Star Wars Conquest for sponge-mob of dudes who absorb blaster fire so you don t have to.



I pop between planets and moons, recruiting two or three low-level grunts at a time. I ll have to pay them at the end of each month, but I ve got enough starting credits to put a modest pile of blaster-fodder together. With any luck, many of them will die in battle before I have to pay them anyway.



En route to a planet, I m tracked down by one of the many groups of bandits roaming the galaxy. Great! A chance to break in my new recruits. What can possibly go wrong?





Oh god. Oh god. I m wounded, and my nine militia are all killed. I only manage to cut down four Hutt Bounty Hunters on the enemy side.

Worst, I m captured by my attackers, and made to helplessly zip around the system in their spacecraft until the game allows me to escape. I d like to think I used this time well, perhaps helping tutor my Hutt captives children so that they can attend a good technical college someday, or doing lots of robot push-ups in my cell, swearing vengeance. A few days later: After painful days of being dragged about as a prisoner, you find a chance and escape from your captors! I lose some basic items, and all of my army is gone. I m floating alone in space, an escaped captive of my own faction.

Move to the nearest planet, Saki, to begin rebuilding a party. I make a stop at Corellia, which I notice is the address of none other than Grand Moff Tarkin, aka the badass grandpa of the Galactic Empire. Holy smokes! Minutes into my game and I m already crossing paths with one of the most powerful figures in Star Wars. Time to get an autograph. I land on Corellia to meet with Tarkin.



All I ve gotta do is assassinate some random guy named Nimm and the Moff and I will totally be bros. Screw the Hutt Cartel--if I do enough jobs for the Empire, I can get in good with them. Before I dart off, I remember something from my time spent in Mount & Blade: any major character can be challenged to a duel. Will Tarkin spar with me?



God, look at this badass. Moff parries my attack, takes a vibroblade directly in the mouth and still cuts me down. You re my best friend, Grand Moff Tarkin.

Elated from a productive and non-humiliating training session, I zip over to Concordia. Though careful robotic deduction, I find my target:



And blast his face. For the Moff!



There s an unexpected casuality in the fight, though: Concordia s brave planet administrator rushed to my assistance, and my target stabbed him. Some weird scripting logic holds me responsible, and my relationship with the Empire drops by several points as the administrator dies. Oh well. I ll turn in this quest to Moff, he ll forgive me, and my relation rating with the Empire will bump back up.

Minutes later, Moff s ship intercepts me.



OH GOOD, I WAS JUST LOOKING FOR YOU, SIR, GOOD NEWS



I thought we were buddies buddies who can have a good laugh when one of them permanently lacerates the other with a vibrosword. What happened to us, man? I totally killed that guy you wanted me to kill without asking any questions can you at least let me turn in that quest so I can get the EXP and credits? Hmm?

I have to accept reality: my best friend wants to kill me, and he probably has an army of 92 Stormtroopers. I m forced into a fight on Corellia. Saddle up.



Alright, I think I can do this. There s enough room to maneuver, and only a couple of them are on speeder bikes as long as I maintain speed I should be able to kite the swarm for awhile, pick some of them off, and whittle it down. Stormtroopers have never been very smart, right? It ll take awhile, but OH GOD. I immediately get lasered in the chest and fall off my speeder.



A humiliating defeat at the hands of my mentor. But this won t be the end of Darth Motherboard.

Next week on Diary of a Droid Jedi: I embark on the singular goal of stealing Grand Moff Tarkin's teeth. Also, bar fights!

Oculus VR announced that it hired yet another virtual reality expert from Valve, Aaron Nicholls. His new title will be Scientist, presumably working under Chief Scientist Michael Abrash, another Valve virtual reality expert Oculus VR announced it hired last week.
Nicholls joins Oculus VR after four years with Valve, where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he made games and spent two years researching and implementing virtual reality technology, including a wide range of perceptual and physical considerations necessary for delivering presence in VR. Before Valve, Nicholls was at Microsoft, where he worked on games such as Gears of War and Halo 3.
It's been exciting working on VR at Valve, Nicholls said. Can't wait to continue working on the future with Atman, Michael, and the Oculus crew tomorrow.
This is the third high-profile Valve virtual reality expert to join Oculus VR in less than a month. In addition to Nicholls and Abrash, the company also hired Atman Binstock as its Chief Architect in early March. Binstock was one of the lead engineers and driving forces behind Valve s VR Room demo shown off at Steam Dev Days.

Cloud Imperium founder and creator of the upcoming Star Citizen Chris Roberts doesn t think Oculus VR betrayed gamers by selling out to Facebook. In a post to Star Citizen's official website, he makes an argument that s familiar at this point: Oculus VR needed a lot more money in order for the Rift to succeed.
It really needed a lot more funding than it has raised from its past two VC rounds, he said. Hardware is expensive: it s one thing to perfect the technology, but before you can sell a single Rift, you need to spend hundreds of millions on manufacturing and building a supply chain if you intend to make the Rift (and Virtual Reality) relevant for the mass market.
For example, he says that Microsoft invested well over a billion dollars just to launch Xbox One this fall, and hopes that Facebook s funding will allow Oculus to compete on a similar, mass-market scale.
While he isn t opposed to the acquisition, Roberts said that his own company has no interest in following a similar path. We don t need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make OUR dream a reality, he said, explaining that their development costs are not nearly as high as Oculus VR s.
Those development costs, as you may have heard, are funded by fans, who so far have raised a staggering $41 million.

As a roguelike, Dungeon of the Endless gives players more than one way to die. But it's also a mix of squad-based exploration, tower defense, and RPG-style upgrades, so there's also more than one way to stay alive, too. The game's newest trailer shows how these different genres work together to make the game cohesive.

As we saw in a first-look back in October, Amplitude Studios DotE has players dealing with the aftermath of a spaceship crashing into the remnants of an ancient civilization. How they deal with this event and the random way it may play out is up to them.



If you're interested in buying into the ongoing alpha early access, it's worth taking note of the current game state, according to Amplitude's Steam description: "In this Alpha version, many features are not available yet: the complete list of levels (you only get the first 3 levels out of 12) and their different environments including the final ending sequence, the complete list of monsters, the complete list of heroes including their abilities and objectives, Endless ruins and technologies and the use of science, a potential multiplayer co-op mode, online persistency and unlockables, as well as the final balancing of the game."

What that in mind, the Endless Space developer also has a handy and informative road map devoted to the game's progress here.

Virtual reality, SteamOS, fiber broadband, 4K displays, holodecks (you know, maybe) the next five years of PC gaming will radically transform our immortal hobby. What new experiences will the PC games of the near future provide? How will technology surprise us? This April at PAX East 2014, we'll look into that glowing future with the innovators and PC gaming stakeholders shaping it.

"The (Incredible) Future of PC Gaming" panel will be in the Albatross Theater and livestreamed to the world at 12 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, April 11th. Moderator and PC Gamer US Editor-in-Chief Evan Lahti will be joined by Oculus VR Founder Palmer Luckey, PlanetSide 2 Creative Director Matt Higby, Nvidia Director of Technical Marketing Tom Petersen, and Cloud Imperium Games Founder/Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts.

The panel will discuss the topics above and more, concluding with an audience Q&A. We'll remind you again as it approaches in the meantime, watch our panel from PAX Prime 2013, which featured Chris Taylor, Jon Mavor, Dean Hall, and Chris Roberts.

Courtesy of ASUS, we're also giving away a top-of-the-line ASUS G750JM gaming laptop during the panel. Be there for a chance to win.

LIVESTREAM: watch the panel live on "PAX EAST 2" at http://www.twitch.tv/event/pax.

Click here for a rundown of all of our events at PAX East.

With Goat Simulator out in just a few hours, it feels like the year's biggest April Fool's joke has been months in the making. While no-one else has gone as far as making a real game, plenty are joining in on the jovial japes of this most news-unfriendly of days.

Here's your round-up of PC gaming's best April Fool's announcements: from the continuation of Blizzard's now serial acronym, to the unexpected return of Phil Fish.

Outcasts: Vengeance of the Vanquished



"They re underdogs. Also-rans. Some, the punching bags for the so-called good guys. But now, their days of being pushed around are over; the misfits are taking control."

Blizzard are veterans at self-deprecation, and so it is here with Vengeance of the Vanquished. Their 'upcoming' fighting game features a roster of rotters, and the announcement post contains many great in-jokes and parodies. "You could use the matchmaker to find an opponent of equal skill, but where s the fun in that? For the right price, the Outcast Matchmaker will put you in the ring with an opponent who has zero chance against your skills."

Herald of the Stars



"One thing that has unexpectedly come to our attention is our audience s love for the acronym HotS. With recent successful titles Heart of the Swarm, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearth (of the) Stone, we took notice of players absolute love for this particular string of letters."

Blizzard also had surprises in regards to their existing games. Surprises like Legacy of the Void's renaming, Diablo 3's Happy Reaper , and World of Warcraft's more family-friendly patch notes.

Path of Exile goes Pay to Win



"We're always looking for ways to improve Path of Exile's monetisation so that we can bring you more content more quickly," write Grinding Gear Games. "Thankfully, microtransaction design was a very heavily discussed topic at the Game Developers Conference in March. We asked many highly successful developers how we should improve our monetisation, and their answer was unanimous: allow players to Pay to Win."

I'm alternating wildly between laughing and being a little bit sick in my mouth.

Arma 3: Karts



"Bring the battle to the race track in the adrenaline-fueled Karts DLC pack for Arma 3 ," write Bohemia Interactive. "Featuring the most skill-based discipline in motorsport, Arma 3 Karts lets you experience the intense thrill of open-wheel racing, while you burn rubber on some of the most iconic licensed circuits on Altis ... This is where rivalries are born; this is where the world s greatest go head-to-head. This is Arma 3 Karts."

Bonus points for taking the piss out of that Volvo advert. And goats.

Titanfall: Prime



You know how every year there's that one April Fool's joke that makes you think "yeah, I'd probably buy that"? Yup.

League of Legends: Ultra Rapid Fire



One of the big problems with lane-pushing games is that so much of your time is spent not firing giant, powerful spells at your enemy. Finally, Riot have fixed their game by removing mana and energy costs, reducing cooldowns and buffing the ranged attack speed. Even better, this is an actually real thing that you can play.

Minecraft

Minecraft is experiencing some problems.

Problems like...



And...



Guild Wars 2



Big heads = big fun. You cannot argue with these equations.

Just look at all this fun:



And yes, if you were wondering. World vs World is ridiculous right now.

That's your lot for now, but if anything particularly inventive has emerged, we'll update as necessary...

Wait, what?

im back! FEZ II is back on!— PHIL FISH (@PHIL_FISH) April 1, 2014

*Drops to knees, raises fists to the air* FIIIIIIIIIIISH!