Playable Press

In December 2009, Rovio Entertainment released a colorful little physics puzzler called Angry Birds on iOS, and it wasn't terribly long before the millions of downloads piled up and the title became the veritable face of mobile gaming (and some might say of gaming overall for this decade). Success like this is never left alone for long, and in addition to the formal sequel - Angry Birds in Space - the breakout developer has now let slip a few specifics for a spinoff title featuring the series' antagonists, Bad Piggies.

Considered the standard in MMORPGs since its release and explosive success in 2004, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft has successfully weathered close to a decade's worth of potential usurpers (oftentimes billing themselves as WOW-killers) and remained at the top of the heap by an incredibly healthy margin. However, there's one opponent that it seems even the high fantasy juggernaut is vulnerable to: time.

The Pandaren have long been the object of desire for World of Warcraft players looking for a little more variety in their choice of playable races, and very soon that dream will be made a reality. On September 25, exactly two months from today, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria will be available for sale at $39.99 apiece.

It's a good week to be a Team Fortress 2 player; Valve's upcoming Pyromania update is set to deliver not only plenty of content for everyone's unintelligible flamethrower-wielder, but the final Meet the Class video - which we've been waiting a full year for since June 2011's Meet the Medic - will see release this Wednesday. Is the Pyro a woman? An undercover Combine? Several squirrels stuffed into a suit? Hopefully the digital video will finally give us an answer.

Eleven years is a long time for a game to be in development by anyone's standards, and the longer things take to roll out a product the longer expectations have a chance to build. After all, when you hear that someone's been working on anything for a long time it's only natural to expect something great out of it. Now we could sit here and make Duke Nukem Forever jokes all day, but suffice it to say that Diablo III, while not a failure to near the same degree, represents a similar trend in the harm long delays can do.

Junction Point's second pass at a Mickey Mouse palatable to modern audiences (i.e. one with an actual personality) is shaping up nicely, with fan input over the original Epic Mickey's lukewarm performance being taken into close consideration by all parties involved. Disney Interactive has officially narrowed down the game's release window to a specific date, and it looks like we'll be playing two player split-screen co-op with Mickey and Oswald within the year.

Despite record-breaking sales figures (3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours) Diablo III's launch didn't go quite as smoothly as Blizzard may have wanted; Already sacrificing PVP at launch to keep the release within the foreseeable future and still suffering from connectivity issues, the game's heavily advertised real-money auction house feature was officially "delayed indefinitely" last week after issues forced its intended May 22 start to be postponed.

Diablo III's launch, while hotly anticipated, has been plagued with difficulties: PVP was removed from the retail version to be patched in later, the heavily advertised in-game real cash shop's launch has been delayed a week, and now within hours of its launch a game-breaking bug has been discovered in Blizzard Entertainment's latest release.

If fledgeling studio Chucklefish is actually going to deliver everything it's advertised for its initial project, Starbound, we'd imagine things are pretty busy right around now. Studio founder and head Finn "Tiy" Brice, formerly a member of Terraria studio Re-Logic (and it shows when the two project are compared), has promised an "endless" supply of procedurally generated planets to explore, each of which players will be able to colonize, terraform, and even manipulate the weather of in 2D Metroidvania format. With these and an ever-growing list of new features, the estimated late summer launch is starting to look more like optimism than reality.

The world loves an underdog story, and ambitious iOS project République has been a textbook example. It was days away from its Kickstarter's expiration with only roughly half of its $500,000 goal donated - as you may remember us discussing - which is usually the kiss of death for one of these projects. But, thanks to an eleventh-hour monetary blitz, developers Camouflaj and Logan now find themselves with a surplus of almost $30,000 with three hours to go.