Diablo 3 players will be able to fight the legions of Hell worldwide, Blizzard has announced. When the game launches later this month, it will include Global Play, which will allow players from all regions to play with one another. Servers are divided into three regions, the Americas, Europe and Asia. Each player will be assigned a home region based on location, but will also have the option of playing on another server if desired.

All characters, items and friends lists will be exclusive to a single region. In other words, players will have a different set of each depending on which region they choose to join. The same rule applies to the in-game auction houses.

The Diablo 3 website has also been updated with a new guide to the auction house feature. Said guide explains the process of buying or selling items step-by-step. It also answers some questions regarding the transaction fees associated with auctions. All in-game gold auctions include a 15 percent transaction fee, while real-money auctions vary somewhat.

In North America, a $1.00 fee applies to all equipment auctions (weapons, armor, etc.), while a 15 percent fee applies to commodities auctions (gems, etc.). According to the auction house FAQ, the reasoning behind the percentage-based fee on commodities is that, unlike equipment, such items can be listed in bulk quantities.

The proceeds of real-money auctions can be transferred to a player's Battle.net Balance or to an approved third-party service such as PayPal. For everyone out there with dreams of Scrooge McDuck-level riches, be warned that transfers to third-party services are also subject to a 15 percent transfer fee. If you're still confused, check out the FAQ for yourself.

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The demo for Dirt Showdown will be alive and kicking up dust on Steam, Xbox Live Marketplace and PSN today, Codemasters has announced. The demo includes the single-player mode's 8 Ball race, which runs by San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and the multiplayer Rampage mode. Rampage is an eight-player demolition derby where points are earned for crashes and take-outs.

The Dirt Showdown demo also offers the first taste of RaceNet, a free online tracking and comparison extension for Codemasters racing games. Those who sign up for RaceNet get some special perks when the full game launches on May 25, including $20,000 of in-game currency. Yes, 20 big ones. Either that's an awesome bonus, or Dirt Showdown operates in a universe where everyone is a millionaire.

In 1993, we were too busy getting our chat room trolling on to play classic adventure games like The 7th Guest. Thankfully for us, modern technology lets us revisit older works via new platforms. The 7th Guest, for instance, has been available for quite some time on iOS and OS X.

But hey, maybe you – like us – have yet to purchase Trilobyte's seminal work? You'll be glad to hear, then, that the OS X and iOS versions of The 7th Guest are totally free today in celebration of May Day. We're not second-guessing it either! Free game!

Quake Live is receiving a hefty load of new premium content and, to celebrate, it's all free for a week. The classic shooter gains five new game modes, including one-flag CTF, Domination (territory control), Red Rover (zombies) and more. The update also packs in four maps, two from Quake Arena Arcade and two inspired by the popular Campgrounds map.

The content will be free to all Quake Live users through this Sunday, May 6. The $1.99 per month premium wall goes back up after that, so get it while the gettin's good. Head over to the Bethesda Blog for details on all the new maps and modes.

Max Payne 3's multiplayer and co-op offerings won't thin as quickly as Max's hair. Rockstar today announced plans for seven separate DLC packs spanning June through next fall, following the game's launch in May. June's "Local Justice Map Pack" kicks off the content expansions, adding three new multi maps, including one that works with the game's "Gang Wars" mode (Police Precinct), as well as the others (Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Payne Killer).

This summer will see four additional map packs dropping, and the fall will bring two more. Should all of this be conflicting with your good budget sense, Rockstar's season pass is returning from LA Noire, this time offering a 35 percent discount over buying each pack individually. The pass costs $30.

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Randomly generated action title Nekro has managed to randomly generate $100,000 from Kickstarter donations, thus reaching its goal. In fact, developer darkForge has raised $12,000 beyond its goal, with around 60 hours to go as of this writing. The developer hopes to use the extra funds to add more modes and options to Nekro, specifically character customization and an online co-op mode.

Should darkForge raise $120,000, it will include character customization, notably the ability to create either a male or female necromancer, while the co-op mode goal is currently $150,000. A versus multiplayer mode, unfortunately, is not in the cards, as "the amount of work required to balance spells, items and units is just too great," and darkForge would rather concentrate on the single-player experience.

We'll get to the Valve management talk in a minute. First and foremost, we have to highlight this critical information regarding Valve Software head and co-founder Gabe Newell's secret identity as a Brony, and how that relates to pranks at Valve:

"If you leave your phone at your desk someone will use it to send an email that says 'I like ponies.' Some people will make more and more elaborate photos of ponies that people might like. There are some incredibly entertaining characters who work here.

Of course, then everybody found out that I actually like the TV show My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic, so I never hear the end of it."

That was Newell speaking with Bloomberg BusinessWeek in a recent interview, following up on the recently loosed Valve Software new-hire handbook. But now that you know about Newell's affinity for magical friendship as it pertains to ponies, you might be interested to know how Valve's bizarre management structure (or lack thereof) got the way it did. As it turns out, Newell formed Valve's structure as a direct response to Microsoft's rigidity. He related a story regarding Microsoft Windows market penetration and id Software's FPS classic, Doom, to illustrate his point.

"There was concern among people who were working on Microsoft Office that people would buy computers and reformat their hard drives and install MS-DOS instead of Windows," Newell said. So, in order to find out if that theory was true, Microsoft didn't just ask its customers, it conducted surveys to get hard numbers. Thankfully for MS, the theory didn't cause any real issues. But the results of the survey were enlightening to Newell nonetheless.

"What was so shocking to me was that Windows was the second highest usage application in the U.S. The number one application was Doom," Newell explained. To him, this was a revelation. "It was a 12-person company in the suburbs of Texas that didn't even distribute through retail, it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-Internet mechanisms ... Microsoft was hiring 500-people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people, yet it [id Software] had created the most widely distributed software in the world."

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Publisher Nicalis announced last night on Twitter that it would not publish the retro-inspired, cave-exploring WiiWare game, La-Mulana, neither in North America nor Europe. The publisher informed GoNintendo that WiiWare sales are "almost non-existent" and that it would be "near impossible to sell sufficient units on WiiWare" to make it worth its efforts.

"The WiiWare market has a fraction of the players from 2008," Nicalis producer Tyrone Rodriguez wrote in a statement. "The window for release and success of software on the platform ended in 2009 and took a very steep decline. Players have moved onto other digital download platforms."

We're of the firm opinion that your time is too precious, too valuable to be spent reading a full review for a game that was already reviewed many, many years ago. What's the point of applying a score to a game that's old enough to be enrolled in the sixth grade? That's why we invented Deja Review: A quick look at the new features and relative agelessness of remade, revived and re-released games.

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When I said that Mortal Kombat was the best fighting game of 2011, it wasn't a statement I took lightly, nor was it a decision I arrived at easily. I've always loved Mortal Kombat as a franchise, for its hokeyness and that special part of American gaming history that it represents, but I had never thought any of its games were ever particularly good – especially from tournament-level fighting game standards. Mortal Kombat changed all that, not only by staying true to the series' ridiculous goofball roots, but also by being a solid, well-balanced, mechanically rich piece of game design. I know, I couldn't believe it either.

Fast forward just a little over one year to the day, and it's time for Mortal Kombat's encore performance on the Vita. Thankfully, the portable version of Raiden and friends' adventure through Outworld is just as fun, gruesome and reliable as its console counterparts, though perhaps a little rougher around the edges.

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This morning's Acti acci-reveal of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, ahead of tonight's big scheduled announcement, is just one more instance in a long line of Black Ops 2-related leaks. But today's leak is a biggie, revealing not just the game's title and launch date, but also new information on the game's setting. "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 propels players into a near future, 21st Century Cold War, where technology and weapons have converged to create a new generation of warfare," the site reads, outing Blops 2's new future setting.

The site also unveiled the game's box art, which depicts a pensive gentleman holding a handgun and a hunting knife. Beyond that, a tipster this morning sent over four screens of the game itself that were apparently snagged from the site's backend (the images section of the site has been stripped of any images for now). As the screen above indicates, drones seem to play some role in Blops 2. And those were teased less than a week ago by ... uh ... this crazy YouTube video.

There's also a debut trailer, albeit one that Acti still has set to private, which we're guessing will roll tonight during the NBA playoffs. What we can tell from the still thumbnail is that you'll either be watching someone else pilot a heli through Los Angeles, or taking the reins yourself (it's unclear from the image). Either way, we're totally psyched at the idea of destroying the site of E3 from a helicopter. Retribution, finally!

The site's pre-order page only lists options for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, seemingly eschewing the variety of other platforms that previous Call of Duty games launched on. It is, of course, possible that Acti is holding other platform announcements for the future, which we'll just chalk up as synergy with the game's near-future setting.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, before its official reveal tonight, has been exposed by some early switch-flipping on the game's UK site. The official trailer can't be accessed, but the site does note a November 13, 2012 launch date.

The information is in line with previous leaks, which feature the same iconography and the November launch.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light has been generally recognized as a great downloadable game that should be played by as many people as possible, which is why we're confused about its launch on the BlackBerry PlayBook. Get it? Because no one owns a PlayBook.

That's not true, we realize, but all is fair in love and bad comedy. Already a few happy PlayBookers and/or RIM and Square Enix employees have left gushing reviews on Guardian of Light's App World page, suggesting it's a solid experience even two years out and even on PlayBook. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is available now for $3.99 via the BlackBerry App World.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is celebrating its 10th birthday by giving everyone else a present, the little gentleman. This week, Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game of the year editions are half off, or even two-for-one if that helps justify your purchase. The sale runs through Monday, May 7 at 10 a.m. PT.

Now the real question: What does one get an elderly 10 year old whose only wish is to make everyone else's day a little brighter and wallet slightly lighter? Answer: A Nerf gun. Everyone loves a Nerf gun.

Team Meat's Edmund McMillen has made some more comments as he goes mobile with a completely new version of Super Meat Boy. According to McMillen, Canabalt is providing some basic inspiration for development.

"Canabalt is closer to what we're thinking about. But Canabalt is very surface-level stuff," McMillen told Polygon. "[The original] Meat Boy was a twitch-based game about memorizing things. [iOS] Meat Boy is the opposite. That's the foundation of its design. But it's also on a touch device, so there's that as well. We want to make a twitch-based platformer that's not about memorization."

As for the art style – the mobile version forgoes the pixels for a more hand-drawn look – McMillen says the more "gentle" approach allows Team Meat to lull players in, only to surprise them with some shocking visuals. "I'm happy about the art style. The more gentle and nice we make it look, the more vicious the story can be. Wouldn't it be so awesome to bait kids in with this happy little Meat Boy thing and then, the ending of the first chapter, instead of the squirrel getting his head knocked off, Meat Boy gets his face sawed in half? Like a skinned looking face looking at the screen?"

Ultimately, McMillen said, "My goal is to scare the shit out of my three-year-old nephew."

Sega Europe and Sega America CEO Mike Hayes is stepping down and exiting the building, though he may peek in through second-floor windows every now and then in "advisory roles." If the Sega corporate ladder is no longer available, the garden variety should suffice.

According to GamesIndustry, the departing executive will remain in the industry in assorted capacities, while COO Jurgen Post and Masano Maeda oversee the company in Europe and America, respectively. Sega has not yet confirmed when or how it intends to fill the CEO role in the future.

Sega's American arm was recently struck with unspecified game cancellations, layoffs and significant restructuring in an effort to create a smaller, more profitable business. The company intends to prioritize digital games and safe, mac-and-cheese IPs like Sonic, Total War and Aliens.

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Hackers built the Internet. Throughout the 1970s and '80s hackers altered the Internet from a strictly business communications system for the defense department and librarians into a robust online community for anyone with a computer to use as they pleased. The Internet and computer technology is still evolving, perhaps at a a faster, more public rate today, and hackers are still at the forefront of its design. Hackers such as Geohot, the guy who rooted Sony's PS3 early last year.

George Hotz posted the PS3 root key online with a statement reading "I don't condone piracy" in January 2011 and it spread online. Geohot became an unsuspecting martyr in the hacker community when Sony sued him and won an injunction barring him from ever tampering with a Sony product again. Thus began the hacker wars, The New Yorker suggests in a biographical run-down of 2011's events.

Hotz was brilliant in science and technology fields throughout middle and high school, winning $15,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007 and appearing in Forbes and on The Today Show for his technological achievements.

He hacked the PS3 master key while he was high on OxyContin and Vicodin. He didn't condone or participate in any of Anonymous' hacks into Sony's servers, and since his online spotlight has faded he's worked for Facebook, quit and run amok in Panama, and met with Sony engineers curious about his methodology. He has reminders to "Call therapist" on his whiteboard. Geohotz is human, The New Yorker makes sure to point out.

The full story is available here, or we figure you can just watch this eerily similar dramatic recreation of an antisocial programmer's rise to fame. They're both human, after all.

Tomorrow Bethesda hatches its scheme to coax your inner Dragonborn into speaking – well, Dragonborn with a second-language credit in English, anyway. The free Kinect update adds over 200 different voice recognition commands to English-speaking regions; there are a bunch of new things to memorize, so Bethesda made a handy glossary for you to load up on your iPad or print out. The .pdf files can be accessed by clicking here.

Simply boot up Skyrim and install the mandatory Xbox 360 update tomorrow. After spending some time with it ourselves earlier this month, we liked how it bypassed a lot of menu work. The Bethesda Blog says the German, Italian, Spanish and French versions are all "in final testing" and that we should hear more regarding those territories soon.

Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for Vita has a launch window of "late June" for European markets, Eurogamer reports. This coincides nicely with the North American release date of June 12 listed on GameStop and Amazon.

Metal Gear Solid HD does not include PSP's Peace Walker, as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions do.