It’s Tuesday again and my year has settled into a familiar pattern. My obsession with planned regularity means I must be getting old; I’ll probably start timing how long it takes me to poop soon. Old people do that right?

Anyway, playing Darkness 2 this week, the above image is one of the many hugely gruesome execution moves that are as violent as they are hilarious.

In non game related news my 10 year old daughter finally conquered her fear of bicycles and let me teach her how to ride a bike. After an hour she was riding up and down the street on her own. Sorry, you probably don’t care about that but I’m excited, I’m telling everyone, even the grumpy gas station guy I thought was a woman until he/she grew a beard.

Anyway, moving on, game news. Go!

In case you were wondering, the new R 18+ rating for games will go in effect next January 2013. While it’s certainly reason to celebrate, I’d temper your victory dance with a little scepticism. Those who acted against an R 18+ for games haven’t gone away or given up (unfortunately the fanatical aren’t good at giving up) and the language of the law related to this reclassification system is very ambiguous and open to interpretation. I’ll happy dance when we see good examples of the classification rules being applied.

If you’re not playing the Mass Effect 3 demo you should be, it’s pretty damn shiny and exciting. The multiplayer component has also recently unlocked and many people with complaints about Mass Effect ‘going CoD’ can pretty much just shut up now. Several copies of the game have been attached to weather balloons and launched into the upper atmosphere, offering the opportunity for eager and incredibly lucky people to get hold of an early  copy, assuming they don't all fall in the ocean.

Bethesda will be selling a combo game pack containing both Fallout 3 and Oblivion standard editions (no DLC in other words). Other titles for this combo pack could be “Relationship Destroying Pack”, “Hygiene Neglection Pack” and “Oh Shit I’ve Used All My Sick Days Pack”.

The Modern Warfare 3 Overwatch DLC actually makes me want to stop being a whiney hater and play some MW3. Wowza.

More CoD news. Due to a whole bunch of leaks by soon to be reprimanded contractors working for Activision, mostly by updating their public LinkedIn profiles and similar silliness, the next Call of Duty game to release this year is almost definitely Black Ops 2, with heavy duties handled by forever second place studio Treyarch.

Slightly more CoD news. Call of Duty is also coming soon to the PSP Vita adding some much needed game cred to the hand held that hasn’t quite been flying from shelves.

Transformers Fall of Cybertron has a section where you issue commands to Metroplex, the Transformer who transforms into a command base. Awessssssssssssome. To even the odds the Decepticons get Bruticus, the giant combined form Transformer made up of the Combaticons. Personally I would have preferred Predaking, the combined form robot of all the Predacons, but Bruticus is pretty cool. Fan fact, the people in charge of the Transformers license were considering retconning the Dinobots out of the toy lines very real and incredibly complicated canon continuity, it was the developers of Fall of Cybertron that came to Grimlock and teams rescue, altering the history to include them in their upcoming game. Champions in my book.

Rovio is working on Angry Bids in Space. They got there a lot faster than the Friday the 13^th and Leprechaun franchises did.

Launch trailer for Syndicate, a game that has been banned in Australia due to its ‘extreme violence’. Yes, the same Australia that Mad Max was made in. Where have our balls gone?

Day 1 Studios, mostly known for the FEAR series, have announced a game for this year that looks very like a new MechAssault. Very exciting, I loved MechAssault 2. The game, Reign of Thunder, not an official Battletech license game but a new IP (presumably as that’s cheaper than paying license fees) will be free to play and focus on third person shooting with RPG and customisation elements.

Coming soon, official Minecraft Lego sets. Which is weird because I thought all Lego was kind of Minecrafty all ready.

I honestly can’t keep up with the amount of Gears of War 3 content that keeps coming out. For a company that once proclaimed loudly they hated paid DLC and everything should be free, Epic hasn’t shied away from a non-stop splooge of available microtransactions every week since Gears of War 3 launched. The newest one is a map pack called Forces of Nature.

Prototype 2 continues to look pretty badass, I still gush over the original game and it’s super monster gameplay. Here’s a creepy trailer to pique your interest. Go ahead, get piqued.

I’ve been a fan of Resident Evil for a long time, and I was still a fan despite control changes in four and five and am eagerly looking forward to shooting a zombie US president in Resident Evil 6, but there’s these comments from Capcom detailing new controls changes, "shoot whilst moving; slide; roll in any direction, and to take cover along with the addition of an enhanced melee attack." That just seem to be feeding the haters.

Saints Row 3 has some new DLC, Gangsters in Space. I can never quite shake the idea that Saints Row 3 DLC is a prank being played on the people who buy it.

Farcry 3 has a new trailer to go along with its release date of September 4. Careful, it's got some booby naughty words.

Extremely popular iOS game Death Rally (4 million players strong) is heading to Android devices.

Dear Esther, a Half Life mod turned full retail game, went on sale and earned back its production costs 5 hours and 30 minutes. It sold over 16,000 copies in its first day on Steam earning back its $55000 production cost and turning a profit. Indie games are certainly doing some damn impressive business over the last year.

In other game success news Alan Wake for the PC decided to go as a Steam only release instead of a full retail release, and in 48 hours made back its development and marketing expenses becoming the number one game on Steam. The death of brick and mortar games stores takes a step closer.

Sony might be making a Twisted Metal Movie, angering Coulrophobia groups the world over.

Assassins Creed 3 has had a formal release date set off October 30. Seems pretty soon, but maybe Ubisoft are doing most of the coding using the personalities of their programmers ancestors.

The Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney film will have its cinematic debut in North America in June. The film, directed by award winning lunatic Takashi Miike, has received rave reviews and has been hailed as the greatest video game film of all time.

Yosuke Hayashi, the new head at Team Ninja since the departure of Tomonobu Itagaki, had some choice words about his predecessor’s reign of terror. "The old team was known for making games that just had two primary elements: Sex and violence," Hayashi says. "It was very obvious. The new team, we want to take it to a new level -- to a direction that contains emotional experiences that can move players." Hayashi’s goal is to make games, starting DOA5 with ‘real woman’ with emotional depth and character beyond pink hair and giant, shaking bosoms. Good for him I say, I can’t say how successful he’ll be, but good for him regardless.

During a conference call at NCsoft it was revealed that Guild Wars 2, the game best described as WoW’s only legitimate rival, is being developed for consoles. The PC version will be released first with a console version at a later date. This is first console wide release off a major MMO game. DC Universe taking the crown of the first MMO game on a console with its appearance on PS3.

Jordan Mechner the man who recreated ancient license Prince of Persia for Ubisoft and created one of the greatest games of all time, is all set to do the same thing for another extremely old game title: Karateka. One of the precursors to games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, Karateka featured a young Karate warrior storming a castle, fighting a different enemy on each floor Game of Death style, to rescue his girlfriend.

That’s all for this week. Now go teach someone to ride a bike!