Last week was that magical event called San Diego (Spanish for ‘a whale’s vagina’) Comic Con and within 24 hours of starting the event proved that this is the show. Forget your E3’s, your GDC’s and TGS’s, Comic Con is where you really learn about games. All the things we expected to be at E3 have shown up at Comic Con.

I’m planning on fulfilling a lifelong dream and taking my family to Comic Con next year, this year’s show proves to me this is in no way a stupid idea. The amount of information out of Comic Con, just on games, is immense. Let’s review shall we.

GTAV screens below. Rockstar have given us a tiny glimpse of their upcoming game while simultaneously refusing to talk about it. Masters of the anti-hype, they tend to cram all their marketing into the week before release and sell gangbusters which I fully expect them to do again this time.

Fortnite, the odd resource managing defence game by Epic will initially be PC exclusive as it’s the first game to run on Unreal Engine 4. Currently there’s no consoles that can even run UE4, so we’ve got a year or two wait until it’s available on any console.

Here’s an extended gameplay clip of Hitman Absolution that puts any fears I had for the games core mechanics being messed around with to bed, then slips a syringe full of nebutal in their vein so they don’t wake up.

Nintendo has decided 3D isn’t that great and won’t use it very much in their future products after the 3DS didn’t perform as expected. The new plus size 3DS’s will be sold at a profit, so don’t cry too much for Nintendo, they continue to rake in the cash.

Sad news for the Austin office of Bioware, staff have been laid off as part of a restructuring. All the staff involved were working on the popular (but not popular enough apparently) Star Wars The Old Republic MMO.

Halo 4 will work in some manner with the Microsoft Surface tablet, giving many people at least one reason to get one.

If you buy Medal of Honour Warfighter, which I’m disappointed to learn isn’t an FPS featuring some quasi Ghandi character fighting against the institution of war itself, you’ll get access to the Battlefield 4 beta. Which surprisingly isn’t a long way off considering the length of time between Battlefield 2 and 3.

And here’s a making off feature for Halo: Forward Onto Dawn, the web series launching just before Halo 4. Watching this footage makes you think the series could be really good, or really crappy. Also added the official first trailer right below too.

There was a very brief excited flurry at some leaked images of a Metal Gear Solid 5 logo. Then Kojima said ‘total fake’, and there was only silence.

A fan made Lego set based on the game portal has received the most votes to become a real life Lego creation. The system works. Have some cake.

There’s a new Ultima game in the works, most exciting is that it’ll be playable on iPad and PC and will be cross platform, save games can be accessed on either platform and people can play with any other player using any device. However the game isn’t actually an MMO. More a sMallMO. The games currently in Alpha and on release will be free(meium I suspect)!

Interesting story, Limbo was meant to be a PSN exclusive, but Sony wanted to own the Limbo IP as part of the deal. A pretty greedy move all things considered. The developers wanted to continue to own their own game and went to Microsoft instead and Limbo became one of the most popular indie releases of all time. In the new world previous business models are fast becoming dinosaurs and need to adjust their business models away from bottom line revenue generation to endorsing,  nurturing and rewarding creative talents instead of bleeding them dry and throwing them away. Otherwise things like the Ouya are going to destroy by erosion the big boys. Speaking which...

The Ouya people have quashed rumours that big partners are stepping in to take control and be evil and corporate. The console continues to be one hundred per cent crowd sourced and the Kickstarter has all ready guaranteed half the proposed inventory sold. I’ll be more excited when we get some details on how it’s really going to work as far as interface and things like that go.

Borderlands 2 has had a few amazing promotional videos so far, would you believe they have a new and even better one? Based on this video alone this game is a day one purchase for me.

Somehow I’ve only just learned about DayZ, an absolutely stunning zombie survival simulator Mod that uses ARMA 2 and its expansion Operation Arrowhead. The Mod was in the news recently for hitting half a million users. The creator Dean Hall, a former developer on ARMA 2 himself, revealed at a conference for Indie games that downloads of his free Mod had almost eclipsed sales of the original game itself. In the Mod you begin on a beach in the fictional post-soviet state of Chernarus, where a virus has turned the population into zombies. As a survivor with limited supplies, the player must search the world for supplies such as food, water, weapons and medicine, while killing or avoiding both zombies and other players. Player can receive fractures, die from shock, receive infections, and faint from low blood pressure. The player must eat and drink regularly, with body temperature playing a part in the character's survival. There are vehicles as well; I’ve seen videos of players who have teamed up to assemble a helicopter which they use to run foraging raids at supermarkets and schools and run well planned assaults of other player’s strongholds. Players can even camouflage their hideouts so other players can’t see them. On top of all this if you die, you die, you lose everything and begin again on the beach as a new character. The game is mind blowing, tossing out all the conventions of the triple A game model of being fun and balanced. Nobody wins DayZ, you just try not to die for as long as possible. There's a ton of videos on YouTube, game looks amazing, go check them out.

Ubisofts comic based on Assassins Creed The Fall is now available for iPad, first issue 99c and $2.99 each following issue. The follow up, called The Chain, is coming soon with events that tie into Assassins Creed 3. Despite my love for meta texts that tie into games I haven’t gotten into any of the peripheral Assassins Creed stuff, this seems like a good excuse.

In slightly more unpleasant Assassins Creed news the PC version will be delayed. Possibly as it has so much DRM in it they need to separate it onto a second disc.

Here’s the AMAZING gameplay video for Assassins Creed 3 from Comic Con. Plus right below it is the new Horde mode-ish online coop component Wolfpack. I want this game in my hands right now.

And lastly for Assassins Creed, here’s a cool trailer for PSP game Assassins Creed 3: Liberation featuring a playable female assassin (about flipping time) and her adventures while killing people in Independence War era New Orleans.

In case you were planning on buying Angry Birds on the PSN rather than on an iOS device, you should be aware the PSN release Angry Birds Trilogy, is 2000% more expensive than buying the same games for iPhone or iPad. Evidence of what we’ve always known, that console makers are completely taking the piss with online content pricing.

Mass Effect 3 has more DLC coming, something to do with an water covered planet and a Reaper called Leviathon.

Here’s the Street Fighter 25^th Anniversary collectors set for true Hadouken heads. It’s an impressive and definitive set for fans.

The next Playstation may have been outed by a factory in Brazil. This might not be the PS4, but rather a slimmer PS3 slim.

Resident Evil 6 will feature boobies, attached to a zombie spider woman, but still, boobies. Capcom seem pretty desperate to get the derailed hype train back on track after the demo on the Dragons Dogma disc has been getting some very bad buzz.

Rhianna Pratchet, the talented sire of Discworld creator Terry Pratchet, is the writer behind Tomb Raider, hopefully adding even further fuel to wild speculation the game is either exploitative torture porn or female empowerment tale.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron multiplayer was on hand to delight the hordes at Comic Con. It also allows people to create their own transformer avatar for online play. Call me cynical, but am I the only one who thinks the Transformers license gets most of its mileage due to the nostalgia of thirty year olds?

Defiance, the MMO and television show shared world project on SyFy, got a few more details. It’s going to have a strong Western vibe with the remaining humans roaming the wastelands of earth after a devastating war. There’s also a bunch of alien races living as refugees and trying to coexist with humanity, not always successfully. The scope and ambition of the project is pretty big. Should the show be successful there’s a possibility popular player characters could actually cross over to the television show in the second season.

Some bad news, overall sales of hardware and software for June 2012 continued the steady decline in the industry, dropping 29% from sales last year. It’s indicative that the current hardware cycle for consoles is getting too long in the tooth and the next gen had better materialise soon if we expect to see any change.

Super depressing game The Last of Us debuted a new character, no small thing as the entire game was meant to be centralised on just two characters. The new guy Bill is another survive who Joel and Ellie try to help repair a car so they can travel more safely. Of course I imagine everything goes badly. I’ve not seen it commented much but I’m getting a strong The Road (soul crushing post apocalyptic novel by Cormac Mcarthy) vibe of this game.

Transformers game guys High Moon Studios also demoed their new baby a game based on hilariously schizophrenic mercenary Deadpool. While he’s largely unknown outside of comics bar an appearance in Marvel Versus Capcom, the merc with a mouth Deadpool has long been a fan favourite. There’s also a movie long in the works with Ryan Reynolds attached so there may be a bit of Deadpool mania in the near feature.

Here’s a trailer for Gears of War Judgement’s new multiplayer mode Overrun. Looks like the reason to splash out on another Gears game.

Spartacus is a favourite show of mine. It’s hilariously exploitative with an almost equally measure of flying swords, blood and boobs in every episode. Kind of the antithesis of the cerebral character heavy Game of Thrones, Spartacus has the same amount of gore and sex but none of the annoying complex and rich plot. It’s also getting made into a game called Spartacus Legends debuting at Comic Con and set for release early next year.

Mistwalkers JRPG Wii game The Last Story has long been demanded of a local release by fans and despite even signing a petition, which somehow usually stops things from getting done, the game will be released in the west in August. Apparently if you’re a big JRPG fan, this is a title not to miss.

They’re still making a God of War game! Yay! Their new script writer wrote the Saw movies. Awww.

And the reward for worst officially released screen shot goes to Metal Gear Solid Revengeance. Who the fudge approved this abomination.

That's all for this week, see you next week.