The fourth major title update for Gears of War 3 is set to drop tomorrow, offering players yet another round of tweaks and bug fixes. For one, Savage Grenadiers and Savage Drones can now perform SWAT turns in Beast Mode.

King of the Hill is also tended to -- ring locations are now visibile in spectator mode, and on some levels the ring locations have been moved. Other multiplayer tweaks include balancing the pistol fire rate between hosts and non-host players. And one particular glitch involving the elevator area on the map Hotel has been fixed.

The minor maintenance, which goes live at 2AM PT tomorrow, precedes the launch of the Forces of Nature DLC pack next week. For the full update notes, check the source link below.

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What's your game called and what's it about?

Our game is called Desi Leaves Town and it stars an eccentric frog that gets himself into all sorts of situations in his attempts to stave off boredom.

Desi is an escapist who blames the world around him for his predicament but everything is pretty much his fault.

The game's story is told through cartoon segments, puzzles and action challenges. You do all sorts of things like assembling the perfect chair to knocking kids out with bread.

What inspired you to make Desi Leaves Town?

Desi Leaves Town came out of a conversation Nicholas Kratochvil -- the game's writer -- and I had at a bar. I had this idea for a mini game with a pompous frog that would berate you if you sat him in the wrong chair.

Nicholas said it reminded him of Against Nature's main character Jean Des Esseintes and maybe we could do an interactive adaptation of the novel instead of a mini game. And the next day we started working on it.

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The fact that Street Fighter X Tekken's character DLC exists on the disc is a contentious issue in its own right, but now a preemptive compatibility countermeasure is being exploited by nefarious ne'er-do-wells with hacked Xbox 360s.

As seen in the video above, unreleased DLC characters have begun showing up on Xbox Live. While this doesn't cause any technical problems for law-abiding citizens or break the game in any way, Capcom is unpleased: "Quite ballsy for folks to be taking hacked Xbox 360s on Live where they are detectable," said Capcom senior vice-president Christian Svensson. "In any event, we already have openned channels of communication with MS on these issues Friday night."

Initially, Svensson asked members of the Capcom Unity forums to take screenshots and record videos of offenders, but that thread has since been closed. "We'll catch them ourselves," Svensson added, presumably just before donning a cloak and cowl and jumping out the nearest open window.

Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and Sora Ltd. head Masahiro Sakurai are friends. So when Hideo Kojima wanted one of his most famous characters, Solid Snake, put into Sakurai's fighting series, Super Smash Bros., all the two had to do was talk. "When I was developing Super Smash Bros. Melee for GameCube, Hideo Kojima contacted me and practically begged me to put him in there, but at that time we were deep in dev and it was too late," Sakurai told Kotaku back in 2006. Snake didn't end up in Melee, but did appear in the Wii's iteration of Super Smash Bros.: Brawl.

So what drove Kojima to "practically beg" Sakurai to get Snake in the game? "My child likes Super Smash Bros., so we play it a lot together. And he told me that there's no character that you made in that game," Hideo Kojima told a group of interviewers late last week ahead of the Smithsonian's "The Art of Videogames" exhibit. Aside from his son's pleading, Kojima pointed to Metal Gear's low profile on Nintendo consoles as a second reason.

"As you know, we did make Twin Snakes, but generally speaking, there hasn't been a lot of Metal Gear on Nintendo platforms. So from that perspective, I thought it was a good way to expose younger people to this character, Snake," he said. It must be working, as Snake is one of Brawl's most popular characters.

Despite a brief scare last week, NECA's replica Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device is still on its way to virtual store shelves, albeit in fairly limited quantities. Think Geek's listing for the gun has gone up with an estimated availability date of May 18, although pre-orders do not appear to be part of the plan.

Instead, interested enthusiasts register to receive an email notification once the Portal gun goes on sale; from there it's first come, first serve. NECA has only manufactured 5,000 of the $140 replicas, and considering that Portal 2 sold three million copies in its first two months on the market, we expect demand to be fairly high. Remember when you learned about sharing in kindergarden? This is why.

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The set of platforms on which you can play Binary Domain will soon no longer be ... an area composed only of two things. Sega announced today that Binary Domain is coming to the PC in North America and Europe this April.

"As well as the excitement generated by Binary Domain in the console press we were seeing increasing numbers of players asking for a PC version," said Sega's SVP of Marketing Gary Knight. "So we listened and we delivered." Of course, being a PC game, it's being released both retail and digitally -- Steam puts an April 6 date on its version, which comes with some totally '80s ninja costumes.

Hydrophobia developer Dark Energy Digital has been shut down, administrators confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz.

The site reports that the company's assets have been combined into a "pre-packed" deal with the recently created Dark Energy Publishing, a new company founded in January by Dark Energy Digital owners Pete and Deborah Jones, along with technical director Gary Leach. GI.biz also notes the new outfit may "take control of physical assets and IP at a bargain price."

Hydrophobia struggled to find a large audience, despite significant attempts to fix the game after it launched. We've contacted Dark Energy Digital's administration team for comment.

The pandas are coming, the pandas are coming! More precisely, it's the Pandaren, and whether or not you feel this is Blizzard nuking the fridge on its stalwart cash-Tauren, there's no denying it's the cutest expansion to be bestowed upon the warriors of Azeroth.

Blizzard took us to the land of kung fu pandas to check out more details about the game, but here are several trailers of the terrain we'll explore when the expansion arrives.

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To help players operate Kid Icarus: Uprising with its unconventional (and uncomfortable) circle-pad, L button, and stylus-based control scheme, Nintendo has packed a 3DS stand with every copy of the game. That way, you don't have to awkwardly support the whole weight of the system with your left hand while aiming with your right.

The motivation may be unfortunate, but the accessory itself is quite nice, securely holding the 3DS in place when in use -- with rubber pads to keep the system from sliding around -- and folding flat when not. See for yourself in our gallery. Kid Icarus: Uprising (and this stand) arrive in North America this Friday.

This is a column by Kimberley Wallace where each week she visits an in-game world, acting as a travel agent. Read as she explores the nooks and crannies of each (probably war torn) landscape.
To say that Dalentarth is alive is an understatement; lush hues of green explode across the land, waterfalls magnify the deepest of blue water, intoxicating flowers jump out at you, and sky-scraping trees remind you how minuscule you are. Wolves and bears have taken to this world, along with a few new creatures you've never truly set eyes on, such as Kobolds, rat-like humanoids who mysteriously don't seem to gather candles.

Many visitors often have troll sightings. Be sure to refrain from feeding them, as you would be the snack! A warning for those who are arachnophobic: the Dalentarth region has a bit of a spider problem. With giant poisonous spiders, though, this is the perfect place to conquer your fears. It doesn't get any better of a deal than that, so please send your thank you letters to our agency. We love helping you overcome adversity!

Can we interest you in visiting a place that you thought only existed in your childhood fantasies? Take a moment and think back to when you were young, and in the blink of an eye, your imagination could turn anything into a mystical, magical place. That's the Dalentarth region of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - a fantastical forest in bloom with the most vivacious, neon colors around every corner. It's a portal back to the wide-eyed innocence that let you see beauty where others saw only darkness. Let that inner child come back and dive into a world of non-stop wonderment, vibrant with life.

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Us and the Game Industry's common dreams ltd squeaked by its deadline with $20,256 of its $20,000 Kickstarter goal -- not that raising tens of thousands of dollars from 373 people is exactly "squeaking by." Us and the Game Industry will officially be able to continue production, complete shooting and edit its footage of successful indie developers into a complete movie, its Kickstarter page reads.

Us and the Game Industry began filming in March 2009, so this isn't a bandwagon response to the success of Indie Game: The Movie; it's merely a different approach. Where Indie Game featured a host of relatively (and previously) unknown developers working on unreleased titles, Us follows more established powerhouses, including thatgamecompany as it builds Journey over three years, Johann Sebastian Joust's Douglas Wilson of Die Gut Fabrik, Jason Rohrer of Inside a Star-Filled Sky and "more," common dreams promises.

Gaijin Games has told Eurogamer that Runner2, which we recently played in a very early state, will be released in November of this year, despite originally being slated for "early 2012." As Eurogamer notes, that puts the PSN/XBLA game somewhere within the Wii U's release window. Accordingly, co-director Mike Roush told the site that a Wii U release is "definitely something we're thinking about."

Gaijin's plans for the PS3/Xbox releases were made before the announcement of the Wii U. "When we made these decisions we never knew about Wii U, he said. "So rather than us 'leaving Nintendo', it's that these decisions were made a year ago," Roush said. "We would never leave Nintendo, we love them to death."

Some of the most memorable moments in Remedy Entertainment's thriller, Alan Wake, sprang from episodes of a short, Twilight Zone-inspired television show hidden throughout Bright Falls.

"Night Springs" fleshed out Wake's world and also helped inspire the downloadable spin-off, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, in which the hero is caught in the middle of an episode arc. Six original episodes were featured in the original Alan Wake, and Joystiq has the exclusive season pass.

Today, we feature one of the most chilling episodes: "Man in the Mirror."

This happened over the last week, but we can't let it pass by because hahahahahaha. Dynasty Warriors VS., an upcoming 3DS game in the confusingly prolific series, will have optional Zero Suit Samus and Skyward Sword Link costumes you can put on your custom character.

Nintendo and Tecmo Koei have become surprisingly friendly in the last couple of years. Team Ninja developed Metroid Other M for Nintendo; Nintendo is co-developing and publishing Fatal Frame games; and Nintendo allowed the use of a Metroid-themed level in Dead or Alive Dimensions and a classic Nintendo-inspired mode in Samurai Warriors 3.

As has become custom, Electronic Arts has revealed a new batch of games that will see their online service shut down soon. The games losing online service April 13 include some fairly new titles, like MMA, Create, EA Sports Active 2 and Spare Parts, the last of which was released in January 2011.

More notable, as noticed by Beefjack, is that MMA actually featured EA's Online Pass, a system EA's own Online Pass site states is meant to extend the life of its products. In MMA's case, the online "life" lasted for a little over a year and a half. As noted on EA's service page, games that have their servers shut down represent "fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles."

See the list of affected games after the break.

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