It has been almost four seasons since I came into possession of a key, a portal, into another land. At first I explored fleetingly, a few steps at a time, then deeper, until my sense of reality became hazy. I would look at my soft pink hands on this side of the looking glass and wonder, where are the calluses from gripping sword and shield? Where are the scars from fighting for my life against wolves, bears and trolls? But now the pull is upon me, the desire for stinging snow storms on my face, for danger, plunder and glory. There are still dragons to be killed, disputes to be settled, and tales now of vampiric lords hunting at night, and vampire hunters armed with strange new weapons stalking them in turn.

Before I go into the top of the world, nary to return, allow me to leave you with these parting words. This weeks Wednesday cap.

Zynga has now shit the bed with a somewhat tragic level of predictability. The CEO Mark Pincus chucked $200m worth of company shares right before the stock tanked. In April the stock was at $12 a share, prompting many to dump their shares then. The second quarter this year saw stock drop to $3. So a bit of a disaster for investors, at least investors who weren’t insiders with the heads up to dump stock. When your business model is to create repetitive and boring games and/or to steal entire games in almost their entirely you’ve gotta know your company doesn’t have long term aspirations. Zynga was never about more than making a bunch of money upfront and then cutting and running just before the bill came, as many Zynga executives have done. So Zynga is almost dead, hurray.

Here’s a pretty cool trailer for free to plain MMO Shooter Planetside 2. There seem to be quite a few exciting and impressive looking free to play shooters on the horizon.

World of Warcraft will become Kung Fu Panda in September with the release of Mists of Pandaria. Preorders are available right now. In competition Guild Wars 2 will launch almost exactly a month earlier in August.

People who preorder Transformers War for Cybertron get early access to the demo. A policy that I completely despise, not long ago demos were free and worked brilliantly to promote games, they weren’t rewards for money down.

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger from Krome Studios, a 3D platformer game and probably one of the most popular wholly Australian made games of all time, is making a comeback after a multi year absence. Other than an announcement there’s no detail, but it’s pretty safe to assume this outing will be on mobile devices.

Battlefield 3 will have its next DLC pack, Aftermath, available in December, with another one titled End Game out next March. Both packs will have four new maps and new weapons.

And now for either the greatest news story, or awesomest hoax you’ll read this week. I think it’s safe to say that almost every gamer, or child of the golden age of Saturday morning cartoons, has dreamed of one day owning their own suit or powered mech armour. Well now a (unsurprisingly) Japanese company has made the dream a reality. For only $1.4 million US you can own this surprisingly bad ass looking real live mech suit. Holy crap pants, that is unbelievably awesome. Somebody buy me one.

Here’s a trailer for Silent Hill Revelation, coming out soon in 3D. While the previous film adaption by French guy Xavier Gans (who also made the lamentable Hitman but ALSO made the brilliant Brotherhood of the Wolf) was generally disliked by everyone, visually it was pretty bang on with the Silent Hill world. This films looks equally bang on. Might be good. Oh and no, Mick, if you’re reading don’t watch it.

The full amount of money paid out to Call of Duty founders Jason West and Vince Zampella to avoid going to trial may never be known. But experts are estimating the amount was somewhere between a bazillion and a gazillion dollars. In short they have no fucking idea whatsoever, but it must have been a lot. West and Zampella were eager to go to trial and were pushing for a billion dollars. I think we can expect a looooot of DLC for Black Ops 2 to cover that settlement.

The baddies of Borderlands 2 aren’t as stupid as they were in the original Borderlands. Which is good I guess. I imagine the crazy midgets still charge right at you at the right height too eat a shotgun blast though, at least I hope they do. A new enemy who sounds quite promising is the Goliath, a huge hulking guy with a helmet that sends him barrelling towards whatever’s in his line of site. Shooting of the helmet causes them to go berserk and attack everything around them, but they level up as they kill so hanging back and popping their helmet if they’re surrounded by buddies might not be a good idea either. Cannot flipping wait for this game.

Media darling and kickstarter success story the Ouya has now joined with OnLive to offer the platforms services through the new console. It doesn’t give specifics in the press release but they seem to hint that almost all of OnLive’s catalogue will be available through the Ouya. I hope the NBN is in your area soon.

Filed under ‘Things that aren’t surprising but still monumentally suck’, the DRM Ubisoft provides (forces down throats) for its PC games is even worse than first realised. Security researcher and Google employee Tavis Ormandy has published a discovery that the DRM installs a browser plugin that leaves your computer extremely vulnerable to internet based attacks. The plugin is supposed to allow Ubisoft to boot games up remotely through an internet connection, but due to poor authentication and malicious hacker could easily hijack your computer through this backdoor.

Ubisoft released a statement that a forced patch has been issued to fix the vulnerability. But due to the secrecy of the DRM process, secrecy that prevents vulnerabilities like this from being picked up by anyone other than malicious hackers looking for this sort of thing, it’s very difficult to independently verify if the patch is effective or not.

Considering the fact DRM’s long standing reputation for hurting the experience of faithful users while equally doing a rubbish job of penalising the pirates it should be persecuting this just seems like another reason why Ubisoft should give up this impossible fight and go DRM free. And yes I’ve probably shot myself in the foot to get a copy of Assassins Creed 3 for review now with that comment. Damn.

Here’s Ormandy’s report: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Jul/375

THQ are in a lot of trouble these days, despite layoffs and major restructuring the wolves are still at the door on the one time successful developer. But they remain optimistic; if sales of Darksiders 2 are good enough they will look into Darksiders 3. Also if they’re still around after Darksiders 2, but they didn’t explicitly say that. Just shuffled their feet and asked for $2 for the bus.

Star Wars The Old Republic is going Free to Play in the face of dwindling subscription numbers. The first 50 levels and all eight classes will be open to all with certain restrictions (as yet undetailed) bypassed with micro payments. The standard subscription service will still operate for those who want to access it.

PC, Mac and iOS versions of Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition will be available mid to late September. This new version of the dungeon crawler classic will have new characters and quests. Notably a half elf character named Neera, whose mage story line has a romantic subplot.

Parents, gird your wallets, Skylander Giants is out October 21.

Crysis 3 could, maybe, might be coming to Wii U. But at this stage it isn’t even planned. Unlike the Wii, which had developers initially falling over themselves to produce games for, the Wii U seems to be generating a lot of developer caution.

Here’s another excellent trailer for Dishonoured to demonstrate the games not all about arterial neck stabbing.

It’s just come to light that a few positions at Microsofts Vancouver studio have been axed after development was halted on the free to play simulator Flight and a Kinect educational tool called Project Columbia which sounds like it was very similar to the Sony Wonderbook.

Here’s a pretty interesting demo of Shadowrun Online, an MMO currently fishing for funding through Kickstarter: