Blizzard, better known as the Internet’s favorite digital crack dealer, takes a long time to put out games. But when they do, the reaction is usually massive.

Like, for example, the reaction to “Diablo III.” For the record, “Diablo II” came out twelve years ago. And now “Diablo III” is the most preordered PC game of all time on Amazon, as well as Blizzard’s most heavily preordered game ever.

And that’s because…because…er…well…honestly, we’re not sure. It’s not like the original two Diablo games were bad or anything, but “Diablo III” seems to very much a “click until the target falls over” type of game.

Then again, that’s all “World of Warcraft” is, and they make $150 million a month off it, so maybe we’re not the people to ask on this one.

(Image via Activision Blizzard)

“The Old Republic” is pretty much what people want out of a Star Wars game. You pick a character, pick a quest, and start killing everything in your path. OK, so maybe you’re not killing everything in your path if you’re a Jedi, but still.

Anyway, apparently the appeal is a bit more limited than we thought, since “The Old Republic” has dropped 400,000 users since its launch. EA has put a positive spin on it, since they’ve said it can be profitable with as little as half a million subscribers.

Reports Ars Technica:

In a conference call accompanying the earnings report, EA Labels President Frank Gibeau said the drop was in line with the company’s “original assumptions” about how the game would fare after launch. Nonetheless, he added that the company “intends to increase subscribers” with continual upgrades, including new guild features, player vs. player improvements, and “elder gameplay” that keeps the game appealing to high-level player.

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Ever wondered why hero characters in movies, comic books and video games always seem to land in a three-point stance when dropping from on high somewhere? ME TOO! Does any real human ever land like this when leaping off of something? No, they do not. Ever. Yet, it persists.

A popular visual trope often associated with martial arts. After performing a particularly cool move, or dropping from a great height, the character lands on the ground in a crouching position, feet wide apart and supporting their weight with one hand on the floor while the other hand is outstretched away from their body, usually pointed diagonally upwards. Extra coolness points are added if said hand on the floor is a fist that actually causes damage to the ground you land on.

Someone made a supercut of various characters sticking three-point landings to illustrate the proliferation of this phenom. Enjoy…

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Erin Catto is your typical programmer: he loves math and physics. So much so that, six years ago now, he wrote and freely distributed a physics engine for video games called Box 2D. It was simple. It was effective. It was small.

And it’s the primary physics engine for “Angry Birds,” turning Rovio into a billion-dollar company and rewarding Catto with…a sweatshirt he doesn’t even wear:

“I have the sweatshirt but actually I have never worn it because it’s red”, he told NPR. “I generally don’t wear red. That’s a silly reason. If they would send me a blue one I would wear it!”

Catto isn’t particularly bothered by the fact that something he wrote made some other company a huge success: Box 2D was so amazing he easily landed a high paying job at another digital crack dealer, namely Blizzard, as a Principal Software Engineer. And he’s just happy people like his code.

But, seriously, Rovio, at least send him a blue sweatshirt. And maybe buy him a house. You owe him.

(Image via Rovio)

I’ve never really thought about whether the hours upon hours of my life I dedicated as a kid to 8-bit and then 16-bit video games could be romanticized in a way that makes them seem admirable, but apparently the answer is “yes.” From YouTuber RockyPlanetesimal (with the help of Michael Nyman’s “A Wild And Distant Shore”) comes this compilation of clips of the most basic element of classic video games that I simply like to think of as, “TOTALLY WORTH IT.”

Never again will I feel like I should have dedicated more of my youth to fine-tuning the little athletic ability I had and learning how to talk to girls.

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To Westerners, Japanese dating games are really weird. Also called “visual novels,” these are games where you…go on dates. Not surprisingly, they’re very popular among the socially awkward. Equally unsurprisingly, they’re popular among 4Chan.

So when it came out a bunch of 4Channers were making a visual novel about dating the disabled, everybody feared the worst. For no reason, it turns out, because this is not only not what you’d expect from the words “4Chan” and “disabled,” it’s apparently a genuinely good, sweet, and well-made game about dealing with disability.

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Look, I know what you’ve been thinking — you wish you knew more about Jay-Z. Don’t we all? If only the man would give us more insight into his past, his ambitions, his personal financial status, what kinds of problems he has and doesn’t have, etc., though his music. Look, I know — it’s frustrating. But now there’s “Empire”…

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Puzzles, for a certain kind of person, are a fun but maddening exercise, especially insanely complicated ones. And there’s nothing puzzle designers like doing more than torturing their fans with puzzles that go beyond the range of complex and into the ridiculous.

Like “Fez,” and its floating black monolith.

“Fez” is a puzzle game designed by Polytron that’s available on XBox Live. The basic gameplay is a mix of 2D and 3D, crossed with optical illusions — the game spends a lot of time messing with your head, starting with the fact that you can “complete” more than 200% of the game.

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If you’re a gamer of a certain age, you probably played “Max Payne,” the noirish game that was the first to introduce “bullet time” to video games, which essentially meant you spent a lot of time playing the game like it was a John Woo movie and pretending you could totally leap into the air with two automatics and shoot eight guys in the face.

And now, as part of Rockstar’s ongoing experiments with mobile platforms (see also their release of GTAIII on iPad), we’ve got “Max Payne Mobile” for three bucks. But is it worth it?

In terms of the actual game, it’s nothing new — it’s “Max Payne.” In terms of controls and playability…wow.

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