League of Legends [official site] developers Riot are testing out a new super-fast justice system where bad behaviour will be punished within 15 minutes of a match ending.

The system is part of Riot’s ongoing effort to promote good behaviour amongst its playerbase. Jeffrey Lin (Lead Game Designer of Social Systems at Riot – i.e. in charge of creating and tinkering with player behavior systems) explains that speed is important when responding to abusive outbursts or bad behaviour in-game: “we know that the faster a player receives feedback, the better their chances of reforming.”

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When we posted about the Touhou Project games starting to receive official western releases, I was surprised by quite how many of you are fans of the Japanese bullet hell shoot ‘em up series. If you have Strong Opinions on this subject, then you can now offer them to Playism, Touhou’s western publisher.

Playism are polling fans to see which ‘Touhou Derivative’ games (fan games, basically) folks would like to see get western releases. They promise nothing, but are curious what you think.

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Telltale Games’ Game of Thrones [official site] series is the methadone to which I supplement my HBO habit, so imagine me with a pleasing grin as I write that Episode 4: Sons of Winter will launch this week on May 26th.

And boy howdy does it look like things suck for the family Forrester. Stuff “hangs in the balance,” threatens a pre-launch trailer. Gared is leaving Castle Black and heading beyond the wall. Mira is scheming over at King’s Landing. Asher is hanging around the slave city of Meereen. Start humming the theme song to Dynasty at any point as you watch the trailer below.

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The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III [official site], an action-RPG based off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which is inspired by a Tinder date I once went on is now out on Steam.

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Valve’s Dota 2 [official site] championship The International isn’t until August (though it already has a community-funded prize pool of almost $9 million), but is about to settle the four positions earned through regional qualifiers. Eight days of non-stop professional Dota 2 matches are kicking off on Monday, meaning very little sleep. A large number of prominent Dota 2 players, casters, fans and analysts are taking this opportunity to have join together in Bucharest to cast the whole event.

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This Sunday I am enjoying a post-Eurovision gaming session which mostly involves shouting obscenities at Snakebird. On my other monitor is a webcam trained on a bunch of delightfully wobbly walruses. This embed of the latter, plus a bunch of other bits and pieces is after the jump. Have a lovely Sunday.

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It s weird to think now that Rogue was one of those special treats I would get to play on my grandparents 386. Rogue, Prince of Persia and Alley Cat. All fantastic. Now, with Cogmind [official site], I m getting flashbacks to those days, but everything is green and there are guns. Cogmind looks similar to the original Rogue – a Roguelike, you might say – but it’s got a bunch of tricks up its sleeve, such as a Captain Forever-style system for re-building yourself with the parts dropped by destroyed enemies.

It s just launched a public alpha, which you can purchase if you like the look of the trailer below.

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Sundays are for watching as many final games of the football season simultaneously as possible. But you don’t care about that. You care only for the fine writing about videogames.

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Upcoming MMO expansion Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward [official site] brings with it a whole bunch (technical term) of new dungeons to explore and die inside. With the FFXIV development team taking heavy inspiration from past Final Fantasy games, this Dungeon Walkthrough trailer feels like a trip down memory lane, from FFX to FFXIII to Is that the Library of the Ancients from Final Fantasy V?

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Would you like to see a video of cars going really fast? That s excellent, because I just happen to have here a video of cars going very, very fast for you to look at. Unfortunately the trailer of Formula 1 2015 [official site] below comes alongside a delay. F1 2015 will now launch on July 10th, one month after its previous June 12th release date.

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