Twas my birthday this past Saturday, I turned 33. That’s the age when young people think you’re really old and old thing think you’re still a whinging youngster. It’s also about the age when you start to think that birthdays are kind of stupid but you still get really pissed if no one calls and you don’t get a cake (they did and I did). Also it's Valentines Day! So if you're home all alone, just remember that your games love you, now and forever. Why not go and play some. It's all commercial rubbish anyway right? Now I need to type fast, I have a romantic dinner with my wife to get to.

Some exciting and interesting stuff also happened in game world. So lets get to it.

Double Fine, the game studio founded by game dalai lama Tim Schafer, started a Kickstarter project to crowd fund their next adventure game. In eight hours they had made their goal of four hundred thousand dollars, and in twenty four hours they’d leapt past a million dollars, enough for two games and change to spare for DLC! The Double Fine funding drive still has thirty three days to go as well. Fingers crossed they work on Brutal Legend sequel as well. Here's the Kickstarter page for Double Fine Adventures with updates and an amusing video http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure

In separate but possibly related news Tim Schafer lamented his lack of a friendly millionaire to fund Psychonauts 2 on Twitter. Then, like a prince charming on a white horse, a millionaire appeared. Markus Persson, or Notch, or also ‘the creator of Minecraft’, got in touch and said simply, ‘let’s make this happen’. I’m sure Notch jumped in just before Bobby Kotick could.

Sega Australia has recently cut 37 of their 80 staff as part of a ‘restructuring’. The team had previously worked on a London 2012 Olympics game and will now refocus on digitally distributed titles. The group had previously been the Australian division of the Creative Assembly who had worked on the innovative but flawed Stormrise and several Total War titles.

Blizzard announced a drop off 1% to its subscribed player base for World of Warcraft. While haters may whoop and cheer and that this perceived decline of the lumbering billion dollar giant of the games world that is WoW, that’s a drop from 10.3 million subscribers, to 10.2. Not to mention we’ve still got Diablo 3, Mists of Panderia and a rumoured Starcraft 3 campaign all coming this year. I guess Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic didn’t make that much of a dent in the armour.

Blizzard, obviously as they have enough money to be dicks whenever they like (also, where’s my Diablo 3 beta code ya dicks?) are suing Valve over the rights to the name DOTA. But isn’t that just a genre? You ask, how can they trademark a genre? Well DOTA, orDefence of the Ancients, was originally a fan made game mode using the expansive Warcraft 3 level editor tools. It became insanely popular, outgrowing its humble roots and inspiring even more popular copycat titles like League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth; so popular that its creators were brought on board by Valve to create a sequel, DOTA 2, from scratch. Blizzard (although I smell Activision lawyers behind this, that brimstone and rotten cat food odour) has decided that the DOTA trademark, despite being created by someone outside the company using tools they bequeathed to their fans in good faith, is somehow, "By virtue of use, the DOTA mark has become firmly associated in the mind of consumers with Blizzard”. Except that it hasn’t, because DOTA players are a tight knit community of dedicated players and are reasonably savvy as to games and where they come from. But reality doesn’t matter much in regards to the law and trademarks. They also claim Valve hasn’t used DOTA for anything yet so they should be able to claim a trademark. Except of course, if you google DOTA 2 and see all the videos, images and articles about the in development title. Really, this is just another dickish legal move to make money that has nothing to do with trademark or rights, it’s just dickish. I’d give it the same score of the scale of dickish behaviours as Bethesda’s legal action against Markus Persson over the use of the word Scrolls.

Mark Rein of Epic Games announced that the Unreal Engine 4 will release sometime this year.

Syndicate will feature noted Scottish thespian Brian Cox, creepy bad guy from The Crow Michael Wincott and the woman I’ve long been having a torrid affair with in my mind, Rosario Dawson.

Zynga has cut a deal with Hasbro to produce toys and board games based on their notorious facebook games. Interesting to see if the mind numbing mediocrity and boredom of a Zynga game can transfer to real life (sorry mum, Mick made me write that.

Super Meat Boy is coming to smart phones and pads. But not in the format it currently exists, the developers are looking to create a whole new version of Meat Boy for portable devices.

If you never played Amnesia the Dark Descent, well you missed out. You missed out on pissing your pants in terror and not realising until you stood up, on sleeping with the light on for a month, on developing an irrational fear of corridors. Amnesia was an exercise in psychological torture for people like me (read: pussies). Imagine my dread upon learning of a new Amnesia game, currently being teased with a link to a google map view of China. There’s also something called Thedarkswarm.com that isn’t functional yet. Needless to say I will play this game, during the middle of the day with the windows open and Adventure Time on the TV.

It’s been confirmed that Fumito Ueda is still working on The Last Guardian, the much anticipated follow up to Shadow of the Colossus. But progress is apparently going quite slow.

So Skyrim has won just about every game award out by now, just recently picking up the NY Video Game Critics Circle Awards for best game along with a host of other awards and this week winning the top award and four others at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences 15^th Annual awards show. Yes, it is that good. Strange that biggest selling game of 2012, Call of Duty: The Latest One, didn’t win anything, although it’s self proclaimed rival Battlefield 3 picked up best sound design. Mind you, I think that should have gone to Skyrim as well, but maybe it was just getting embarrassing.

Speaking of Activision Blizzard, they had a pretty good last year, being the number one most profitable company thanks to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, continued strong sales of Black Ops and Skylanders making quite a killing during the holidays. A new Call of Duty game has been announced for this year, so take your bets as to when we reach the oversaturation point (I’ll be surprised if this one outsells Modern Warfare 3) and Diablo 3 is apparently confirmed for Q2 2012. I say apparently as Blizzard has long had the reputation for refusing to announce a games release window till it’s completed. This sounds like it might be coming more from the Activision side of that zany partnership.

The stupidest thing I read all week: Developer Double Helix is making a game based on the film Battleships, which is based on the famous boardgame. The Battleships game will be a CoD style FPS game in which you fight aliens. This is what happens when decisions are made based on marketing stats instead of logic.

Yes, the Kinect Star Wars game really does feature a dancing game element. Yes, it does involve scantily clad Twi’lek dancers and Leia in full ‘Jabba’s slave’ gear. Yes, there are pictures and yes, in a way it is a little sad many grown men will buy this game solely for that reason.

During his DICE 2012 keynote address Todd Howard, the lead behind acclaimed games like Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim discussed the traditional ‘Bethesda Jam Week’, where developers get to spend a week creating whatever they want on company time. Last year they had to create something in Skyrim.  Here’s a video of some of the results.

And here’s a list of everything they created that might someday appear in a Skyrim DLC pack, I’m hoping for all of them:

•Seasonal foliage

•Flow based water shader

•Spears as weapons with a new animation system

•Kill cams for ranged combat (follow the arrow!) and magic

•New stealth options like water arrows and assassinations

•Guards relight areas

•Paralysis runes

•Moving platforms and hanging structures in dungeons

•Water current in dungeons

•Dark dungeons, requiring you to light your path as you progress

•New companion options like switching combat style, getting them to train and even craft for you

•List favorite followers in the game's menu

•Build your own home from scratch

•Adopt children

•Combine magic to create new attacks

•Goblin enemies

•'Way Gate' fast travel

•Epic mounts like a flaming horse

•Mounted combat on horses

•Dragon mounts

•'Soul bug' familiar

•Kinect-enabled 'shouts'

•Enhanced water effects

•Footprints in the snow

•Verlet surfaces for non-rigid objects ...

•... Like fat giants!

•Ice and fire arrows

•Werebears!

•Lycanthropy-specific (werewolf) skill tree

•Become a flying Vampire Lord

•New Vampire imp minions

•New Mudcrab animations

•Giant Mudcrab enemy