So I have returned from my trip to England and Scotland and I’ve made some observations. First, after a whole night of highland dancing and whiskey drinking it takes more than a cup of coffee to recover from a Scottish wedding, two, games in the United Kingdom are ridiculously cheap, and three, Scotland looks like a real life Skyrim.

So what happened while I was gone? Quite a lot actually, and then even more so just in the last week since I originally wrote this cap. So consider this a mashup of the last few weeks

Also, if anyone guesses what movie the above image is from you get a no prize! (put your guess in the forums)

Continuous price gouging by major software developers has become a fact of life for Australians. For the last decade only a small percentage of consumers were really aware of how badly they were getting routed. Certainly this has been the case for video games, new titles in the states trading for less than half the recommended retail price in Australia. But with the rise of internet shopping and the Aussie dollar and amusingly the bleating of major shopping chains that they were losing business to online overseas competitors, the Australian government has turned an eye to this practise. Whenever a journalist has made pointed questions to Apple, Microsoft, Sony or Adobe about why Australians pay more the answer has always been, ‘It’s complicated’. The unspoken secret being that the simple truth is not complicated, the honest answer is, and always has been, ‘We’re greedy’.

So Senator Stephen Conroy, prompted by MP Ed Husic, has announced a Government Inquiry to force these tech giants to answer the tough questions. This will likely have as much impact as Conroy’s proposed Australia wide internet firewall, the giants in question will, if they send any representation at all, merely shrug and say ‘it’s complicated’, while charging Australian’s between 100% and 200% more than the rest of the world. I hope the impact is more subtle, that the inquiry highlights to less tech savvy users how badly they’re being cheated and encourage them to seek alternative methods of purchasing. That’s the only thing that will stop the price gouging, when the revenue goes down.

Dishonoured, the blubber punk open world first person epic from the makers of Thief, has its first trailer out and it looks amazing.

In a surprise move Peter Molyneaux, the father of Fable and Black and White, has quit Lionhead and Microsoft Studios and opened a new independent studio to focus on mobile gaming. I’m seriously beginning to think mobile gaming might really be the next generation of games.

You may have seen a YouTube video of one of those remote controlled Quad copters armed with a machine gun. Apparently it’s viral marketing for the next Call of Duty game due out later this year, which is strongly rumoured to be Black Ops 2 and release in November.

Okay, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 is official, trailer below. It's set in the future and enemy appears to be Anonymous. No really, that's not a joke. I hope Activision executives don't have any skeletons on their hard drives to be sniffed out.

Halo 4 will have a promotional series of videos titled Forward Unto Dawn, which will premiere each week for five weeks leading up to the games release. Halo Nerd Fact: Forward Unto Dawn was the name the UNSC ship John 17 was last seen in at the end of Halo 3.

The next God of War game will have multiplayer? Really? Apparently, really.

Festo, a German engineering firm, have created a robotic arm that’s controlled by a wearable exoskeleton glove and can feedback touch sensations to the user. The day when we can punch people through the internet is fast approaching! http://www.futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/robotic-hand-lets-you-know-what-it-feels-744220

Skyrim's getting it's very first DLC (wooooooooooooo!) called Dawnguard. No idea what it's about but according to hidden code in the last update for the PC version there's mention of Ice elves, an ice elf princess and crossbows. Sweeeeeet.

Nintendo posted a painful loss of six hundred million (USD), worse than expected by analysts. Contributing factors were thought to be the weakening Japanese Yen (also blamed for Sony’s profit shrinkage) and the impact of mobile gaming on Wii and 3DS sales. The 3DS in particular has been a clunker for Nintendo, moving nowhere near the estimated number of units. The Wii U better have a good Christmas launch or 2013 could be a very bad year for Nintendo.

Here’s the super cool Diablo 3 tv commercial if you missed it before. Man it sounds weird when American's pronounce it 'Deehablo'.

DTP entertainment, German developers of the cool looking XBLA title Awesomenauts, have gone belly up and the games release is now unlikley. Officially the release has been suspended, but that may well become, suspended forever, or as we call it Starcraft Ghost Suspended.

Here’s an interesting idea. Upcoming science fiction show Defiance is planned as a major cross media experience, with an MMO game world operating and reacting right alongside the TV show. Defiance will feature the talents of Dexter's Julie Benz, 24's Mia Kirshner, and True Blood's Grant Bowler, and feature writing by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, and music by Bear McCreary, who all worked together on the popular Battlestar Galactica series. That’s some serious scifi TV show chops there. But it’s going to take a particularly large and passionate fanbase to pull off such a project, it seems wildly ambitious. Trion Worlds will handle the game side of Defiance while US cable channel SyFy (shudder of disgust) will handle the show. Who knows, it might be good, or it might be a bigger disaster than The Matrix Online.

Dragon’s Lair, the first video game I ever played (and despised) is coming to XBLA later this month for the nostalgic and masochistic among you.

Two of the major minds behind Angry Birds, Antti Stén and Tuomas Erikoinen, who worked as lead server architect and lead artist respectively, have broken from Rovio to create a new studio, Boomlagoon. Brilliant name. Their first game will no doubt be something to watch for.

Crysis 3 is a thing, and has you playing as Prophet and skewering armoured squid aliens with a bow and arrow. Which is both daft and cool.

Crytek have also confirmed that no, Timesplitters 4 isn’t a thing. Sad face.

What the hell is a Playstation All Stars: Battle Royale? Why it’s a Playstation version of Super Smash Brothers. Yes that does sound fun doesn’t it?

This is a game called Reset, and it looks veeeeery interesting. Like ‘the next Portal’ levels of interesting.

Here's a video literally brimming with nostagia for people who spent their lives going right.

Here’s some pictures of Robots fighting alien bugs in Lost Planet 3, and as a bonus I’ll stick in the trailer if you missed it before. I saved this one for the end but, really, it's probably my favourite trailer of tbe