Taking up the mantle of Mandalore the Indomitable after his death at the Battle of Onderon, Mandalore the Ultimate shaped the ragtag Mandalorian warrior clans into a powerful mercenary force. Himself a Taung, the Predator-like alien race that made up the original Mandalorian clans, Mandalore the Ultimate recruited humans and other species to his banner. His decree of uniform armor for his warriors lead to the well-known "Mandalorian Battle Armor" worn by everyone's favorite jet-packed bounty hunter, Boba Fett.

Mandalore the Ultimate's inclusive recruiting strategies are reflected in his "everyone's a Mandalorian" ability. He deals out an impressive 30 damage with brutal speed, attacking up to three times in one turn. Mr. Ultimate is also an effective commander, giving all his troops a startling amount of battlefield mobility. Knights of the Old Republic booster packs will be released on August 8, while the KotoR campaign book for the Star Wars RPG will come out a few weeks later. The dual release is perfect for fans who have been longing to run a campaign n the Old Republic era. Images by: Wizards of the Coast.

Hecatomb is a collectible card game produced a few years ago by Wizards of the Coast. Each player is an Endbringer seeking to bring about global apocalypse with the help of various foul minions and evil deities. It shares some mechanics with Magic: the Gathering, but it differs from every other CCG in two ways. First, the subject matter is mature. The horror theme is expressed with some pretty graphic and disturbing cards that straddle the line between PG-13 and R. The cards themselves are also very different.

The pentagon shape takes some getting used to, and the cards are printed on flexible plastic, which also feels a little weird. The idiosyncratic design isn't just for aesthetic purposes - certain sections of the cards are transparent, and the game allows you to stack them together, creating hybrid abominations to do your bidding. The parts of the cards that show through create interesting combinations of abilities and effects. It's pretty cool.

Unfortunately, Hecatomb failed miserably, and Wizards no longer supports it. There's a silver lining though. Low demand means you can pick up large quantities of cards for bargain prices. I scored a few booster boxes (yes, entire boxes of booster packs) at Origins last week for $10 each. I've found them online for as little as $9 per box. If you have some friends who enjoy creepy horror-themed games, you can build a decent collection for the price of dinner and a movie. While a lot of the cards are centered on demons, undead and other supernatural beings, the final expansion, Blanket of Lies, focused on three races of hostile aliens invading Earth. There's some great sci-fi weaponry and a bunch of nefarious government agents prepared to take out anyone who knows too much. So just play dumb. Images by: Wizards of the Coast.

If you've ever played Car Wars, the pen-and-paper game of post-apocalyptic vehicular combat, chances are that you probably love it despite all its flaws. Now, imagine playing it on a 12' by 8' 3D city block filled with skyscrapers, ramps, an overpass and carnage, not to mention 15 other psychotic drivers. Scared yet? Drop your flaming oil and warm up the missile launchers - this is Car Wars: Rogue Arena.

I had a chance to talk with one of the Rogue Judges at Origins Game Fair this weekend; they're a gaming club based loosely in Chicago and Indianapolis, and they put on dozens of events at game conventions across the U.S. purely for the love of the games - These guys and girls are gamers who simply enjoy putting on events for others, and Rogue Arena is definitely their most famous event.

It takes about four hours to play (about two minutes in Car Wars time) and inevitably ends in a blazing, glorious crash of some kind. Using a slightly modified Car Wars ruleset, with movement templates scaled up to Hot Wheels size, the cars themselves have weapons and armor modded onto them, and various weapon effects like smokescreens (cotton balls) and oil slicks add to the overall mayhem. The judges goad and heckle the players, mocking anyone who dares apply brakes with comments like, "the management is not at fault if you forgot to take your anti-convulsants before getting into your car."

Rogue Arena is such a popular event at Origins that there was a line of people hoping to gain entry, even though all 16 seats had sold out four days earlier. This is the 8th year that Rogue Arena has been run at Origins, and the Rogue Judges plan on running many more. For next year, they're even considering expanding the city block, so be warned: Even more carnage is definitely on the way.

The goal of the game is to fire enough lasers, torpedoes and missiles to damage your opponents' ships. If you do enough damage, you can warp off the map and return with...a bigger ship! With more weapons! It's actually a scaled-up version of the out-of-print game Silent Death by Iron Crown Enterprises (I managed to track down a copy).





Silent Death is usually played as a two-player game, with each player commanding a squadron of small ships. The Red Shirt crew throws down old-school every now and then, but the larger-scale AstroSmash game (Up to 12 can play at one time) is a convention highlight for anyone who plays. ICE offers the large scale ships as resin models for $15 each, just in case you wanted to host your own AstroSmash party.





Red Shirt Games really brings the sci-fi to these events; In addition to all the space combat of AstroSmash, they also run Injurious Games, a 'Mech vs. 'Mech battle game (with a rather odd name, to be honest) that can also involve alien spiders and mutant space marines. One of their most popular events is the "Keep What You Kill" battle: You show up, the Red Shirts show you how to play, you and an opponent duke it out, and any 'Mechs you destroy during the game, you take home with you. That's pretty freakin' awesome.

Terrorwerks is a Live Action Role-Playing scenario put together at game conventions by PST Productions and Airsoft. You don't need any experience to enlist - they put you through a ten-minute boot camp before you hop on your jump-ship and head planetside. The whole scenario lasts about an hour and costs $18.

Your mission is to clear an off-world mining colony of alien critters. Problem is, your ship crash-landed, communications are down and the colony has no power. You need to escort the drones from Corporate and your precious engineers to restore systems and escape, all while fending off alien attacks. You're armed with an Airsoft rifle that shoots soft BB-like pellets, strapped into a tactical vest and helmet, and then it's, "Move ! Move! Move!".

The Terrorwerks crew let me tag along on a mission as an observer, but someone handed me a rifle and before I knew it I was shouting "Contact!" and firing on full auto along with the rest of the greenhorns. It's difficult to convey the awesomeness with photos, because the scenario takes place in a huge hall cordoned into rooms and corridors, darkened and filled with smoke and lighting effects. Throbbing, evocative sound effects add to the tension. What sets it apart from your basic game of Lasertag are the NPCs, the Terrorwerks Marines, Corporate suits and aliens who never break character. My moment with the guy from Corporate was amazingly cinematic, and running around in the flickering light with people yelling, "Medic!" was flat out the most fun I've had in ages. We may have been the most poorly trained squad of Space Marines ever, but most of us got out alive, and we even retrieved an alien egg. Terrorwerks will be offered at next year's MegaCon in Florida in addition to hourly run-throughs all this weekend at Orgins.

Martian Chess was created by Looney Labs (it's not just a clever name - the company's founder and chief designer is named Andrew Looney). The pieces come from their Treehouse game sets - translucent colored pyramids of varying sizes that can be used for a wide variety of games, including a space empire game called Homeworlds. Two to six players can participate, though for odd numbers or numbers greater than four, you'll need the special tiles pictured.

The key difference between Martian Chess and Earth Chess is the fact that you don't own or control the pieces you begin the game with. Whenever a piece moves into your quadrant (or quintrant or whatever), you gain control of it. Capturing a piece is worth points: 3 points for Queens, 2 for Drones and 1 for Pawns. Queens move like Earth Chess Queens, Drones move laterally one or two spaces, and Pawns move diagonally one space. The game ends when any player's quadrant is empty of pieces.

It sounds simple, but playing a few games reveals a great depth of strategy and the need for well-considered tactical sacrifice. The Looney Labs people let me in on their game, which we declared to be the Martian Chess World Championship (Earth Division). I lost. Andrew Looney developed the game after noticing that when Bill and Ted journeyed to heaven in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, the chess set in Heaven only had white pieces. That lead to the development of "monochromatic chess," which lead to Martian Chess.

Treehouse. [Looney Labs]

Crappiest way to encourage people to use their imaginations and experiment with evolutionary possibilities in a game devoted to both: Last week saw the release of EA/Maxis' Creature Creator — a component of the upcoming evolution game Spore — and the entire internet greeted it with a cry of happiness. Creature Creator lets you build any organism you like, quickly fleshing out an animated being as cute or hideous as you can imagine. An algorithm animates the little beast, giving it realistic motions for its body shape. You can share your creations with other users, too.

Of course, one of the first things that people did was create the most obscene-looking creatures they could. It turns out the Creature Creator is very versatile when it comes to adding body parts that look like penises, vaginas, and anuses. Thus, within a day after Creature Creator's launch, Sporn was born. Instead of laughing the whole trend off and coming up with ways to prevent people from uploading their dirty bits to kid-friendly areas in the Spore community, EA reacted with censorious poopheadedness. They banned users from the Creator Creator community who uploaded naughty creatures, and requested that YouTube yank any Sporn videos. What the hell, people? Is this any way to encourage people to think about evolution, which is after all very much about genitals and where you put them? I can understand wanting to wall off this grown-up stuff once kids start playing the game, but squashing it entirely? Crap! Luckily, io9 has managed to procure some of the best Sporn available and we've edited it into a smashing NSFW music video for you.

Infographic above via UK Telegraph.

The first d20 version of the Star Wars Role-Playing Game did not have many fans, what with the lack of balance and generally overcomplicated rules. The recent Saga Edition, while still d20, is a sleeker, faster Star Wars RPG. But something was missing - bad guys. The void has been filled by Threats of the Galaxy. Essentially the Monster Manual for the Star Wars RPG, Threats of the Galaxy provides full statistics on a wide variety of general villain and NPC types (information broker, diplomat, pirate, Sith apprentice) and several specific villains from the entire spectrum of Star Wars mythology. The aforementioned Bossk gets a page, along with Darths Maul and Bane and many more. At more than 150 pages, your PCs are going to have their hands full.

Just a reminder to my fellow io9 gamers - I'll be at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio next week, bringing you all kinds of science fictioney gaming goodness. If you'll be at the con too, drop me a line via the email link on the front page. Maybe we can all get together for some Car Wars or old school Battletech. Image by: Wizards of the Coast/Lucas Books.

[Threats of the Galaxy via Amazon]

The creator creator allows you to design a unique look for your critter, and to pack it with attributes that will aid it in its quest for survival. A social animal will have to make friends and influence creatures. A herbivore can only eat fruit it can reach, and a predator can only feed on prey it can outrun or outfox and outfight. You can guess which path my Chlororaptor is designed to take.

Your critter's biology - the choices that you made while creating and upgrading your creature - will influence the culture that develops as your creature moves into the civilization phase of the game. Twitchy many-eyed herbivores built by nature to constantly search for and flee from trouble do not easily develop into Klingons. The game is likely to be more forgiving than evolution, but one can imagine a player sighing, "The appendix...what was I thinking?" You can also add my creatures to your games. Spore is kind enough to keep track of the statistics, giving me a chance to see how successful my voracious sack of algae tends to be.

Environment, change, and consequence aren't the whole story, but they are a pretty good introduction. As a teacher I've always been interested in entertainment that manages to educate without being obnoxious. If science is done entirely without a sense of play it ends up being wearisome and fruitless. And Spore isn't the only game to figure that out.

Programs like Folding@home use your home computer or Playstation 3 to process the dynamics of protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that are wadded together in specific ways. Fold them into the wrong shape, and at best you'll have a nonfunctional protein. At worst, you could be looking at the beginning of Alzheimer's. The math to describe protein folding is typically too much for a single computer to handle, but thousands of idle PS3s between games of Call of Duty 4 can do a lot of sums.

With apologies to the King of All Cosmos, this is how I imagine Folding@home on a PS3.

Foldit takes this approach a step further. Instead of taking advantage of computers, Foldit takes advantage of users. Teams of folders compete to produce the best 3D shape for a given protein. Human beings are good at manipulating 3D shapes and solving puzzles - computers aren't, or, at least, aren't yet. Given the rules of how different pieces of a protein will interact with one another, what likely shapes will it assume? Give a computer this problem and it will laboriously and ponderously churn its way to an answer that might be obvious to you or I (for a simple protein). Give the same computer the wrong algorithm or starting conditions, and you'll get nowhere fast.

Dr. Leeroy Jenkins prematurely rearranges a protein, much to the chagrin of his Foldit guild.

Games like this take advantage of what NYU digital studies professor Clay Shirky has called the cognitive surplus - the spare time to ponder and participate that technology and culture have been steadily generating ever since the human race moved past subsistence. Though some of the surplus ends up devoted to projects like Wikipedia, much of it is naturally expended creating and consuming art and entertainment. The amount of work required to appreciate entertainment varies, but many would argue that the complexity of popular television narratives has increased significantly. A good narrative is a puzzle with people in it, and requires a bit of that cognitive surplus to enjoy.

The alternate reality game I Love Bees tapped into that surplus with a vengeance. A beekeeper's website begins to display disjointed and enigmatic fragments of text. What follows is a complex narrative involving the Halo universe and an damaged artificial intelligence. Players were rewarded for solving puzzles given to them by the game team with a new clue or an advancement of the plot towards. In Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming, Dr. Jane McGonigal discusses how players - without prompting from the game team - naturally developed strategies for distributing workload and solving puzzles efficiently. Given a list of numbers that could be GPS coordinates, the mathematically inclined began working out alternate theories while the more physically adventurous (and geographically fortunate) began visiting locations and looking for commonalities. A relay puzzle required the communication of facts given to the players via payphone increasingly quickly to the next player at a distant payphone - one break in the chain, and that part of the narrative ends. Despite a scant 15-second pause from one call to the next during the most challenging part of the puzzle, the players never wavered. Another part of the game involved an artificial computer language, which the players were so successful at deciphering that, by the end of the game, the game team was using the player documentation to write hints.

Expert analysis of data, peer review, and the effective coordination of large groups in an emergency emerged in-game. These are talents that are useful for more than finding out what happened to a fictional bee fancier's web page. The energy, brilliance, and sheer bloody-mindedness of your gamers is a largely untapped resource. I imagine Final Fantasy minigames where players fold magical widgets into protein shapes for bonuses, or an alternate reality game where FEMA takes notes. Hybridize real problems with compelling narratives, and you may find that you and your guild inadvertently cured cancer.

The Zerg have apparently abandoned their original homeworld of Zerus in favor of Char, a distinctly inhospitable planet formerly mined for heavy metals by the Terran Confederacy. It swings around a pair of binary stars in a highly elliptical orbit that melts a good portion of the crust for a few months out of every year. Other than a thousand or so Zerg hive clusters, the place is utterly barren.

So why are the Zerg there, and why are they fighting to stay there? Just in case their blend of Predator/Aliens/Starship Troopers bugs/Borg attributes wasn't horrifying enough, they might be basking in Char's harsh radiation to accelerate beneficial mutations (they're all about manipulating their own genes, those Zerg). Or they might be denying the Confederation access to resources, or using Char as a staging area for incursions into the core worlds. None of those sound like good news. Blizzard has set no release date for Starcraft II, so I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for World of Starcraft. Images by Blizzard and Starcraftwire.net.

StarCraft Planet: Char. [Starcraftwire.net]

If you don’t know Will Wright, he’s the visionary standard-bearer for "sandbox" games – instead of exotic mazes with pre-packaged surprises, these are free-running simulations, where fun emerges from how players use the systems to accomplish goals they create for themselves – hence the industry buzzword, “emergent gameplay.” So in Sim City, for example, you’re free to make your city an idyllic Bedford Falls, or a sleazy, jazzy Pottersville, or a smoking crater. Plenty of fun either way!

In Spore you have whole alien species to play with. You design it, then guide it as it scratches its way up the evolutionary ladder, from micro-organism to animal life to tribal society, to global empire to space faring galactic civilization – as all species must! With each step, the scale of the game jumps an order of magnitude, like in the old Powers of Ten short, which was one of the game's inspirations.

The Creature Creator by itself is already a fantastic achievement in UI design – it’s ridiculously easy to create a vertebrate organism, configuring the spine then choosing from a huge library of arms, legs, sensory organs, skin, body ornamentation, everything positioned, scaled, rotated. It's a powerful 3D design program broken into sweet, manageable toylike chunks, and makes the least of us feel like a Pixar animator. The engine's flexibility seems endless.

Spore then looks at your alien’s anatomy and calculates how it walks, speaks, dances, and fights. It generates ability scores, and these presage something of the future strategic landscape, as interstellar diplomats or hegemonizing military horde.

But that's not all – once you’ve got your alien, it gets uploaded to a communal server, and is downloaded to populate other players' universes. Spore is a “massively single-player” game – the solo experience is embedded in the many tentacles of a fully -featured social networking service., letting you tag and sift and comment other players’ creations. The Creature Creator is being released early as a free download, so that the "Sporepedia" will already be seeded with user-made content when the game launches (I assume there is some mechanism for filtering out the inevitable flood of aliens that look like penises and/or the cast of Family Guy).

As a science fiction fan, I like Spore’s classic, friendly space-opera vision of the galaxy: It's a place where aliens of every shape can evolve, develop space flight, and cruise around to weird planets, messing with less-evolved creatures, and trading and fighting with other aliens. I feel in my bones that this is the way life in the galaxy should be, and now we're going to live it.

A few caveats. Powerful as the editor is, the aliens it makes inevitably bear a family resemblance to one another. Morph them how you will, share a rounded, fleshy feel that makes them look like they're made of many-colored putty. They move with the same stagy, cutesy toddler-like motions, so despite the fabulous variety in shape, it's hard to make something that feels truly alien or dangerous. Walking around the room, one parameterized alien starts to look like another, and I'm left feeling that the possibility-space of alien life is only partly explored.

And…it's an enormously generative plaything, but will it, ultimately, be fun? Without individualized characters or anything human to look at, will we come to care about our legions of BEMs? Will the algorithmically generated galaxy feel like a limitless universe of wonder, or just one randomized planet after another?

It's easy to take shots at a game as ambitious as Spore, a game whose scope, ambition, and top-notch level of execution are frankly jaw-dropping, but as a game designer and gamer, I can’t help but cheer it on. Will Wright and the Spore team are hammering at the limitations of the video game medium itself, as a tool for storytelling and self-expression.

My prediction is that Spore will rock our collective world. Their vision statement references "Sandkings," so that's got to be a good sign. So download and begin seeding the galaxy! Just be careful when they make a castle with your face on it.

EVE Online has long been known for having one of the most complex economic systems of any MMORPG, and for being visually stunning. It is a pleasure to simply fly around the many star systems and take in the scenery, though you will eventually get your ass handed to you by pirates. With Empyrean Age, freebooters have become the least of your problems. Even high-security systems have fallen into the conflict, and everyone is choosing sides. Players have the opportunity to advance in ranks through their chosen militia by accepting missions from their warfare agent. Taking over a system control bunker will give your faction control of the system, but it will take a highly coordinated assault to get the job done. The expansion also opens a new region of space, The Black Rise. Fighting for control of these 49 new systems will affect the future shape of EVE Online. The war drums are beating (even though no one can hear them, on account of the vacuum). Image by: CCP.

War Is Coming: Empyrean Age. [CCP Games]

Your web-swinging looks like it'll work pretty dynamically, with the ability to speed up and slow down. You'll also have "Spider-sense" to help you find the bad guys, and the ability to switch between the red and black uniforms. And there'll be a kind of Matrix-esque "time dilation" during fights, which sounds like it simulates Spider-Man's ability to react at super-speed to people's attacks. You won't just be working to fight those alien invaders, whoever they are — there will also be some missions related to fighting crime. And from hints the developers dropped in an interview, it sounds like the story could turn out different ways, depending on what you do. [Team xBox]

Shortly after the release of Dark Heresy, the role-playing game based on their Warhammer 40k miniatures game, Games Workshop closed down subsidiary Black Industries, which produced all their RPG products. Although Dark Heresy garnered strong reviews, it seemed like the system would never see any supplements to expand players' optons. Enter Fantasy Flight Games.

FFG now holds the rights to Dark Heresy, and they're putting out all the handbooks and adventures fans have been waiting for. The Inquisitor's Handbook fills many of the gaps in the system, offering a ton of new character options and paths, and an equipment section that is worth the price of the book by itself. The production values are top notch and the book is filled with stunning art. The coolness factor can pretty much be summed in two words: Metallican Gunslingers. Plus, this makes the perfect companion piece for Dark Heresy: Purge the Unclean, a trilogy of adventures set in the Calixis Sector.

Dark Heresy still only explores a narrow slice of the 40k universe, that of the Imperium Inquisition. No space marines, and not a lot of aliens. But if you're not interested in that other major RPG game released last week, it's worth a look. Image by: Fantasy Flight Games.

The Inquisitor's Handbook [via Amazon]

Aces of the Galaxy was released for the Xbox Live Arcade this week, and it brings all the retro rail shooter goodness consoles were known for, back in the day. There's a back story involving alien slugs and some kind of stolen superweapon, but seriously, it's all about blasting alien ships by the dozen. You have three weapons to choose from and can play cooperatively with a partner through three different "paths." Temporal shifting lets you slow down time to pick off whole squads of enemies with ease, and the graphics are gorgeous.

The game is pretty hardcore about the old-school ethos, though. No save games. No continues. You'll feel like you need a stack of quarters by your side whenever you play. If you get misty-eyed whenever someone mentions Defender or Gradius, Aces of the Galaxy is probably worth the 800 Microsoft points (roughly $10) to download. The best part? Throw some mp3s on a flash drive and plug it into your 360 so you can slaughter aliens accompanied by the tunes of your choice. Might I suggest some fine vintage NWOBHM? Image by: Team Xbox.

XBLA Wednesdays: Aces of the Galaxy and Roogoo. [Team Xbox]

The Lovecraft-inspired Lords of Cthul will be a tricky faction to manage, as their big beasties don't deal the raw damage that the other kaiju are capable of. They also need to manage their non-giant minions better, since they can fuel themselves with the lifeforce of the hapless cultists and minor demons.

Meat Slaves are basically walking incubators for other (nastier) monsters, while Task Masters (pictured) use telekinesis to chuck friends and foes across the game board. It looks like Monsterpocalypse won't be based around predictable 1-on-1 monster battles, but will instead make a combined arms tactical approach crucial for victory. If only they could get the license to make a Cloverfield unit. Images by: Privateer Press.

Lords of Cthul. [MonsterInsider]

Last week, NCSoft released "Issue 12," the latest batch of free content for City of Heroes/City of Villains. In addition to epic villain archetypes, a bunch of game tweaks and improvements that players have been asking for were rolled out. Both heroes and villains also gained access to two new areas of play: the Midnight Club is the hideout for a secretive group of heroes and features an interesting puzzle game that gives characters access to an in-game badge; Midnight Clubbers can time travel to a realm in ancient Rome called Cimerora, which results in some pretty awesome robot vs. centurion battle scenes.

The Champions Q&A revealed some of the difficulties designers are having adapting the pen and paper Champions RPG to an online game. Certain power types will be tied to certain archetypes. If you have a defensive archetype, you can still choose offensive powers, but they'll be more expensive than your defensive powers. It appears that powers will be customizable via advantages and limitations, but not right away at level one. And also, no fatties.

Randy Mosiondz: Scaling will allow you to make "chunky" characters, but nothing on a massive (Blob-level) scale.

Champions Online Q&A Decoded. [Rock, Paper Shotgun]

With a variable map that encompasses an entire galaxy, hundreds of playing pieces, multiple winning strategies and a minimum play time of four hours, Twilight Imperium pretty much defines "epic sci-fi board game." If you're playing with six players (or eight, with the Shattered Empire expansion), plan to spend an entire day sparring with your friends over planetary systems and Galactic Council votes.

Each player has hidden agendas that they pursue to accumulate victory points, along with shifting public goals and a strong political component. You can wage war to win, but you can also legislate your way to victory. One of the strengths of Twilight Imperium is the feeling of participating in a true science-fiction narrative as each game winds its way to an epic conclusion. You can head over to the official site for the FAQ, optional rules and notes from the game's designers.

By the way, for the io9 readers who are gaming nerds like me, I'll be hitting the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, OH next month to bring you tons of info on all the latest tabletop aliens, space marines and star destroyers. Image by: Fantasy Flight Games.

AudiOdyssey was developed because an MIT grad student looked into games designed for the visually impaired, and found that all of them were designed solely for blind people to play. Sighted people couldn't play them successfully because they weren't as good at reading audio and tactile cues. That meant that a group of blind and sighted friends couldn't hang out together and play the same games.

Using the Wiimote (or just a computer keyboard), AudiOdyssey players build up audio tracks played by a DJ in the game's fictional nightclub. If they layer the tracks properly and create a good song, the club's patrons will fill the dance floor. The game is early in its development, and can be downloaded for free. A more advanced version is in the works.

Is the game any good? It seems to have accomplished the major goal of bridging the gap between blind and sighted gamers. A visually impaired MIT grad student, Alicia Verlager, who playtested AudiOdyssey was quoted in MIT's press materials:

"The element I probably most envy about gamers is just the way they hang out together and share doing something fun," she says. "It's the social aspects of Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft that I really want to try myself and so hanging out with other gamers playing AudiOdyssey was really fun."

New Video Game Lets Visually Impaired Share The Fun. [Science Daily]

The basic Anti-Monitor action pack comes with one giant Anti-Monitor figure, a few other figures and a map. Anti himself has three different levels of power representing his awesome cosmic might in the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The con exclusive Anti-Monitor will represent his more recent incarnation as a member of the Sinestro Corps. In addition to a repaint and a corps emblem on his chest, he'll have a totally different combat dial with reduced power levels, making him easier to fit onto a standard team. Image by: Wizkids.

Announcing 2008 Convention Exclusives! [Wizkids]

The dastardly alien Kerak obliterated Earth and are hunting down all humans. Seth Walker, Allied Security Force, is the man to beat them. The game's designer promises ethical choices similar to BioShock - early access to cybernetic implants boosts your power, but the best late-game payoff comes to "pure" humans. Is that a nod to Rom the Spaceknight or Norrin Radd I detect? This looks to be a PC-only title, but a console version might be in the pipeline. Image by: Gas Powered Games.

PMOG was launched by GameLayers, who said in a statement this morning:

So many of us spend hours each day on the web. What do we have to show for our time? PMOG gives players points for surfing with the PMOG Firefox extension. Those points can be used to leave traps or treasure on any web site, for other players to find. Suddenly, surfing the web is a casual multiplayer online game.

PMOG provides a web-wide platform for people to poke, gift or share links. "PMOG is arms dealer to the web," quips Merci Victoria Grace, GameLayers Chief Creative Officer and co-founder. PMOG game events are created by other players, and layered over the web that we all share. Players see PMOG "Mines" "Crates" or "Portals" affixed to CNN, Facebook or Google. Players can unlock badges based on their web surfing on sites like BoingBoing, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. The entire internet now offers a chance to play.

You know what that means, don't you? You are all part of a game, right now. You can feel it when you go to work. When you pay your taxes. When you quote that cool speech in the Matrix for the fiftieth time. So make your web surfing count by checking out PMOG and going on a quest.

PMOG [official site]

Speaking as someone who has personally fought a Mechwarrior battle over a reactor whose cooling tower looked suspiciously like an empty bottle of Coke, the Reactor set (pictured) is the ideal target for your assault lance to obliterate. The City Block and Manufacturing Facility sets will also see heavy combat, while the Wilderness set adds a touch of color. Each piece is cast in resin and fully painted and comes with a unique Battlemech. If cotton ball smoke bombs aren't cutting it anymore, Gail Force Nine also has laser-cut plastic smoke and fire markers. They have licensed products for a few other sci-fi miniatures games as well, including AT-43 and Warmachine. Image by: Gail Force Nine.

While the rules for Monsterpocalypse haven't been completed yet, a few things are known. Monsters come in factions, such as alien invaders, cybernetically enhanced giant humans, dinosaurs or robotic military units (plus a monster that looks suspiciously like Cthulhu). Players will control smaller monsters or tanks along with their main monsters. Trashing a building will generate a power-up for your monster, and monsters will have "Alpha," "HyperMega," and "UltraMega" forms.

Anyone who collects all three issues of the comic book series will be able to get a limited edition monster. You can learn more at the official site, or read game designer Erik Yaple's blog about the Monsterpocalypse design process. I'm already saving my pennies to buy a case of this when it comes out, but if Privateer could get the license from Toho to make minis of the classic Godzilla monsters, this would officially be the Greatest Game In the Universe. Images by: Privateer Press.

Thanks to Seth L for the tip.

Here's another view of the mining station on the planet.

And here's what you'll find when you start exploring. Uh oh, blood.

Serious uh oh — some kind of morphing yucko monster. As you can see in the video, there are some great robo-spider looking monsters too.

Plus, there is a comic book based on the game illustrated by the fucking awesome Ben Templesmith.

Look out for Dead Space this Halloween. And you can see a lot more cool artwork and video on the Dead Space site.

Dead Space [Official Site]

I like the thing where you can "customize your civilization." I wish I could do that in real life. And the improved Colony Management tool looks pretty sweet. Plus there are nice snippets, like the origins of the "Arena of Agony," and great dialog like "Can you believe there are some civilizations that believe eating others is wrong?" Plus, apparently destroying an entire universe is not a trivial effort. Other new features:

• New campaign detailing the final chapter in the Dread Lord wars
• The star destroying new unit, the Terror Star, arrives
• Unique technology trees for all 12 civilizations
• Unique planetary improvements for each civilization
• New 3D-engine-powered map editor
• New Scenario Editor for creating highly detailed custom games
• New Campaign Editor for players who want to create their own custom epic campaigns for themselves or to share with others
• New Metaverse Tournaments: specific maps & scenarios recorded to the Metaverse with prizes for top players
• New Ship: Atlas. Makes ships in a fleet more lethal
• New Ship: Fortitude. Gives ships in a fleet more hit points
• New Ship: Driver. Makes ships in a fleet move faster
• Unique weapons per civilization
• Updated Planetary Invasions
• New enhanced textures and graphics for planets and ships
• New Galaxy Size: Immense (vastly bigger than current galaxy sizes)
• Extra alien portraits and logos
• Legacy of the Telenanth: Detailed back story of Galactic Civilizations

Branching level paths, new powers and unique costume options for villains are just a few of the additions in store for CoH fans. Episode 12 will also feature a set of missions that will send heroes and villains through time to ancient Rome to aid the Midnight Squad. New super powers will be unlocked for the game's pre-existing archetypes, and a host of tweaks and improvements to gameplay will make it even easier to save (or destroy, as you prefer) Paragon City.

If anyone wants to go heroing with an io9er, stop by Infinity server and say hi to Cyber Sabre. Electric blasters rule. Image by: NCSoft.

Issue 12: Midnight Hour. [NCSoft]

There's no release date set (they're still in open beta), but you can check out the recently released demo of the game at the Worldshift official site. Images by: Black Sea Studios.

Merchant of Venus incorporates all the great elements from 4X computer games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) in board game form. The basic game is actually bloodless, but optional rules for combat make the game more balanced. Players spend their first few turns finding out which alien races populate the star systems on the board. Then they set up trade routes, monitor supply and demand and start earning cash, the accumulation of which is the game's win condition. Hey, it's the 32nd century, and there's money to be made.

Since cooperation is usually required to keep trade routes profitable, combat is used mostly as a last resort, but it keeps the other players in check if one of them starts running away with the lead. One player can take the role of the Rastur, a standoffish race that inhibits trade, while other races have their own attributes. Players can even find interstellar artifacts that will give them bonuses, such as faster ships. Maybe if enough people write letters to Hasbro, they'll put this classic back in print. Photos by: Avalon Hill.

Baio writes:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

We also learn that the software infrastructure of the game might have actually become a character in the game itself. Designer Stu Galley wrote in an email:

I've been talking with Tim Anderson about using the New Parser in this game. It still needs a lot of development, and in the end it may prove to be slow in operating, but it promises to be very capable. Now here's the question: should the game itself make a big deal out of the New Parser? For example, the game could begin with the parser introducing itself to the player, asking the player to type a few sentences to "warm up" the parser, before getting on with the story itself. The parser could take on a personality, explaining that this is its first job, that it means well but it may not succeed. Perhaps it gets depressed and refuses to work at all. Perhaps the parser is in fact Marvin's new aural interface module, depressing him even further.

You can download Air Rivals, create an account and play the game completely for free. Like Exteel, the giant robot fighting MMORPG we talked about a few weeks ago, you can spend a few bucks to buy better weapons and cosmetic upgrades, but you can also earn credits to buy those things just by completing missions.

The in-game graphics are not stunning, but at combat speed you don't really notice. The ships and characters are anime influenced - between missions you leave your ship (called a Gear) and walk around a spaceport. There you can meet other players or select new missions. The loading screens feature some truly awesome sci-fi art.

Your craft is controlled through simple mouse movement, and the dogfights can be pretty exhilarating. As you advance in levels, you'll be asked to select a faction in a galactic rebellion. You can then compete in battles that will earn points for your faction. When a faction hits a certain point threshold, the game automatically sends a massive mothership to attack the other side.

The game can seem a little off-beat at times. Much of this can be chalked up to its origins with a German developer (Gameforge 4D), like this description of weapon upgrades:

Legend system is for upgrading weapons and armors to upper-class with virtue and wickedness vigor.

Last week we talked about five of our favorite sci-fi miniatures games, and Seth L was kind enough to point us to a game not on our list. Infinity, by Spanish publisher Corvus Belli, has been out for a few years and is steadily gaining fans among tabletop warlords. The miniatures tend to have a distinct anime feel, while the game's evolving backstory borrows a few elements from Battletech. The rules are based around D20 rolls and have several cool, innovative mechanics, such as the ability for certain units to "hack" the electronics of armored or robotic opponents, shutting them down. You can read through the quick start rules here, and there are tons of images of miniatures (which do not come prepainted) as well as the full rulebook in PDF at the official site.

And just in case you thought I was joking about the nun in a thong:

Photos by: Corvus Belli.

Car Wars, Steve Jackson Games. Yes, the rules are flawed. It can take two hours to play through two minutes of action. And the "miniatures" were really 2D paper cars. But you can't beat the concept: Road Warrior style running battles between heavily armed and armored cars and trucks. If you've ever gone to a car dealership and asked which options package includes "Autocannon," this is the game for you. Photo by: Steve Jackson Games.

Star Wars Miniatures, Wizards of the Coast. Another game where the concept outshines the rules themselves, which were shoehorned into the Star Wars setting from Wizards' D&D miniatures game. They aren't bad rules, just a little dry. But anything that allows you to recreate the Battle of Hoth is a sure winner. Bonus: you can own your own Stormtrooper army. Photo by yowzer.

Heroclix, Wizkids. If you're looking for a comic book themed miniatures game, Heroclix is pretty much your only option. Luckily, it's a great game. You can choose between both Marvel and DC universes (or mix and match), and unless your tastes run to the impossibly obscure, a version of your favorite character already exists. Heroclix is a quick-playing game that captures the action of a good comic book fight scene.

Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop. I'm going to confess that I've never played Warhammer 40K, so I can't speak to the rules. The minis are gorgeously sculpted, and the game's near ubiquity means that it will never be hard to find an opponent. Line up your Space Marines against your buddy's Tyranids and make your own "What if Earth waged all-out war against the aliens from Aliens?" scenario. Photo by: Games Workshop.

BattleTech/Mechwarrior, FASA/Wizkids. Whichever flavor you prefer, this classic game of warring giant robots is the godfather of sci-fi minis games. Old-school BattleTech featured metal minis you painted yourself, an intricate and detailed combat system, and the occasional hour-long turn. Bolstered by a rich backstory of galactic politics and conquest, the franchise was revitalized when Wizkids released a clix version. The larger-scale, prepainted miniatures negate the need for paperwork, and the game itself presents a compelling version of combined arms sci-fi warfare.

Top photo by: Catalyst Game Lab.

No game play footage has been released, though the official site has a cool teaser trailer. Developer Bethesda has revealed that "America's First Choice in Post Nuclear Simulation" will take place in first or third-person POV and features a huge explorable world along with the series' trademark character creation and advancement system. When you leave your home vault to find your missing father, you'll face moral choices in addition to the pausable real-time combat system. Should you negotiate with those raiders, or just shoot them? Should you pimp your wife out for cash, or earn it yourself? Tough call.

Sadly, the trailer shows us very little about the game's plot or gameplay. The English-language title screens reveal the game will be a prequel to the other Star Ocean games, but publishers Tri-Ace and Square Enix have been very tightlipped with details since announcing the game in September of 2007.

All we know for sure is that the game will combine sci-fi and fantasy elements, allow the player to control a spaceship and explore different planets. And it features a hero named Edge Maverick. They haven't even announced the platform yet. The game has an official website, but there's nothing there beyond a pretty intro screen. The animation style of the trailer is interesting - at times it's hard to tell if you're looking at traditional animation or CGI. For some reason it reminds me of the old Voltron cartoon. Someone please explain to me why no one's made a Voltron video game yet.

Exteel strips the RPG right out of MMORPG. It's all about the fighting. From the main screen, you can set up or join any of the usual modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Territory Control and a variation called Last Stand that lets you team up to take on computer opponents. Players can form clans and move up a ranking system. Each battle earns you experience points to upgrade your pilot and credits to upgrade your mech. You can also buy NC Coins from publisher NCSoft, which in turn can be used to purchase a new paint job or that sweet Hellrazor Plasma Shotgun.

Running through the tutorials gives you enough credits to upgrade your basic trainee mech, and from there you can spend a little or a lot to outfit your robotic engine of destruction. I've been having a lot of fun with a modest mech I equipped with just a $5 outlay.

With no real storyline to spea