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EA Bioware released the Mass Effect 3 demo, which revealed the game's incredibly low resolution textures and amateurish animation. If you want to see Commander Shepard wobble to victory, you can download the demo from EA's horribly redundant Origin service.

Rayman: Origins bombed hard on consoles, and now Ubisoft is hoping to recoup some of the loss by releasing it on the PC (5 months too late). The launch of Rayman: Origins was a textbook case of publisher stupidity. The ingredients for a disaster:

• Sequel to a franchise nobody remembers
• 2D platforming game
• $60 launch price
• Local-only multiplayer
• Released in the middle of a deluge of blockbuster AAA games that actually had marketing budgets

The console versions are selling for $20 at Toys "R" Us already. Friendly advice to Ubisoft:

• Nobody likes sloppy seconds; nobody wants to play games months or years after they were initially released; either treat PC gamers as first-class customers or don't release your games on the PC at all
• If the PC version of Rayman: Origins isn't $20 or less, nobody's going to buy it

Razer frequently partners with Blizzard, and they get heads up on new products being released. It's interesting that they're going to be releasing an action/rpg mouse around the same time Diablo 3 is projected to come out. The mouse has six side buttons that map exactly to Diablo 3's action bar.

Given that Rage was miserable and its sales poor, it's no surprise that Zenimax has canned some of id Software's staff.

In 2010, gAAAmer expressed misgivings about id Software's direction, and unfortunately, Rage reinforced id Software's status as a second-tier game developer.

You can read gAAAmer's in-depth postmortem on id Software's Rage: Schadenfreude.

In a miserably failed attempt to hype up the graphics capabilities of Ivy Bridge CPUs, Intel tried to pass off a video playing in VLC as real-time gameplay. Better luck next time, beret-capped weirdo:

diablo3.gamona.de is reporting that Blizzard has booked a holding area for Diablo III boxes in late February / early March. This fits Blizzard's plans to release Diablo III in "early 2012." If true, Diablo III and Mass Effect 3 are going to be released right on top of each other.

The following video showcases some bugs in the Diablo III Beta:

• Keybinds not saving after exiting the client
• Disappearing enemies
• Stuck character / jittery camera

Diablo's 15th anniversary retrospective included a few seconds of new cinematic footage, but Blizzard removed the footage shortly after they posted the video on their site. Here's the missing footage:

Blizzard will make the real money auction house and 50 "dollars" available to beta testers in the upcoming Diablo III Beta Patch 7.

In what will likely be the last gasp of World of Warcraft's relevancy before it's buried by the B-Team and bamboo, World of Warcraft's final major content patch for the Cataclysm expansion comes out tomorrow.

In an interview with The Official Xbox Magazine, Yoshinori Kitase talks about the challenges of developing content-rich games with competitive graphics.

Naughty Dog has released a patch to make Uncharted 3's aiming feel more like Uncharted 2's.

Grab the latest version of MAME at the Latest MAME Release page.

The Nintendo DS / WiiWare version of Cave Story is now available for the PC for $8.49 on Steam. It has remastered graphics and sound.

Steam is selling Mass Effect 2 for $5. Sound good? It doesn't come with any of the game's DLC. The best mission in the game happens to be DLC. If you actually pay for the DLC, which includes the segue to Mass Effect 3, it'll cost you $36.

Don't be fooled by seemingly-cheap sales on DLC-heavy games.

Ed Boon has confirmed that there will be no version of Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection for the PC now. Disappointed PC gamers will have to be satisfied with MAME, which has perfectly emulated MK1-3 for around 10 years.

id Software has made the DOOM 3 source code available.

Users are experiencing stuttering, video playback synchronization errors, and poor framerates with Batman: Arkham City's DX11 renderer.

Rocksteady Studio's sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum is now available for the PC.

Bethesda released a patch today prevents gamers from patching the EXE to make it large address aware. The game is now unplayable for a large group of players.

Skyrim is a 32-bit game. Because it has flawed memory management, it can sometimes use more than 3GB of RAM, which causes silent crashes to the desktop. Patching the EXE to make it large address aware allowed the game to use up to 4GB of RAM if it needed it.

The first Zelda game developed specifically for Nintendo's Wii is now available.

In celebration of World of Warcraft's 7th anniversary, Blizzard released a new commercial starring Chuck Norris.

DICE is releasing the first major Battlefield 3 PC patch next week.

Grab the latest version of MAME at the Latest MAME Release page.