An office prank to replace a framed picture of a scantily-clad female Hawken character with a scantily clad male character in the office of the CEO of Hawken publisher Meteor Entertainment has a surprising result. The prank, detailed over at The Hawkeye Initiative, explains how some Meteor Entertainment employees decided to replace a picture of a female character with a male character.

Here's something you won't see every day: a video showing what a LEGO game version of AMC's hit series about making meth - Breaking Bad - might look like. The parody video created by animator Brian Anderson mixes the popular show's plot and characters with the humor of a LEGO video game with amusing results. On the YouTube page for his video, Anderson offers the following disclaimer:

Over the weekend, a Philadelphia skyscraper was transformed into the world’s largest video game by a Drexel University professor who used the building’s lighting system to display a working version of Pong.

The gigantic game of Pong was the creation of Drexel professor Frank Lee, who has spent the last five years working on the idea.

Game Informer has a nifty little video of a recent meeting with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who they ran into while in Montreal to cover the new Thief game. After bumping in to Wozniak, GI managed to convince him to do an interview. But the interview isn't the most interesting part of the story. Apparently Wozniak holds the high score in Nintendo Power magazine for Tetris on the original Game Boy.

If you like free things then you may want to get in on this action. From now until March 31 you can play the beta version of Desktop Dungeons for free simply by signing up here and proving that you are not some sort of filthy robot (no offense to filthy robots out there).

Polygon has an interesting interview with Plague Inc. developer James Vaughan, who reveals to the publication that he has been asked to speak to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. Plague Inc. is a unique strategy game for iOS that lets the play take control of a deadly pathogen and infect one person - patient zero - with the end goal being to spread the plague to every corner of the globe.

Chris Roberts' Star Citizen has surpassed the $8 million dollar funding mark from several sources including over $2.1 million on Kickstarter alone. That milestone is leaps and bounds above the original pitch for $500,000. The PC based space sim from the man behind Wing Commander, Privateer and Freelancer continues to break new ground for a crowd funded game, raising more than a half million dollars in February alone.

Here's a story I can get behind - and if I owned a Wii U - I likely would have thrown my .02 in the mix. For years North American gamers have been begging Nintendo to bring another Earthbound game to our shores. For no real reason Nintendo has refused to do so, despite releasing multiple titles (it's called Mother in Japan) in its home country - Mother on NES, Mother 3 on Game Boy Advance, and various sequels.

Just a friendly public service announcement: you can get the first episode of The Walking Dead game on Xbox Live and for iOS devices right now for free. While many claim the free episode of the game will be available until the beginning of the new year, it is probably best to download the game while it's available for sure. Why take chances, right?

The Walking Dead has already won numerous awards for creating a classic adventure game with an intense narrative from the popular comic book series and television series.

Update: The Humble Indie Bundle 7 has already generated $583,036.16 on the sale of 93,430 bundles. Pretty impressive if you consider that when we wrote the original story it was just over $50,000!

Zachary Cohn dropped us a note to let us know that he has been on the Reddit sponsored bus tour to promote Internet freedom. The tour, the "Internet Bus Tour 2012," has been traveling between the debate locations to promote and highlight the ultra importance of Internet freedom. With both democrats and republicans providing support for the concept in their party platforms this year, Reddit and other advocates of freedom online want to push the issue to the forefront of the presidential policy debate.

With just one day until the release of Runic Games' latest action RPG (now with online play and LAN support) Torchlight II, we thought it would be a good time to mention that you can download the soundtrack to the game for free. The full free soundtrack can be downloaded from www.torchlight2game.com. It's been mixed and mastered specifically in professional CD-quality.

Polygon has an interesting story of a security firm that has decided to use Microsoft's Kinect sensor to manage their surveillance technology through hand gestures and voice commands

Threadless has launched the Threadless Loves Minecraft Challenge, which challenges both the artists of the Threadless and Minecraft communities to design a t-shirt using characters, tools, blocks and other inspirations from the popular game.

The top designers will each receive $3,000 cash, a $500 Threadless Gift Certificate and an all-expenses paid trip to attend the annual MineCon convention at Disneyland Resort Paris November 24-25, 2012.

The U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has created a robot that is supposedly capable of outrunning Olympic champion Usain Bolt - and it looks like Ravage, the cat-like Decepticon from Transformers.

DARPA is calling it a "Cheetah" robot, and funded its design (it was designed and tested by Boston Dynamics) for use in "emergency responses, humanitarian missions and other defense missions."

You can check it out in the video to your left.

At Gamescom in Cologne, Germany today Sony announced a new initiative that will give PS3 players an incentive to buy: free games for the Vita. Dubbed the "Cross Buy initiative," players who buy a PS3 game in this program will get the PS Vita counterpart game for free.

For example, gamers who buy the PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale will get the PlayStation Vita version free. Sony also announced that Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time and Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault will be part of the initiative.

Kill Screen (a wonderful site that you should read regularly if you don't already) has a story on a game called "The Other Bros.," which re-imagines the story of Mario and Luigi in the 1960's. Naturally they are inspired by those popular Nintendo video game icons and not directly ripping off Nintendo. The company making the game, Michigan-based 3D Attack, describes the Other Bros.

Barring any technical glitches, the Mars rover Curiosity is scheduled to land on the planet Mars sometime this weekend, and with the help of Microsoft and your Xbox Live account, you'll be able to be a part of it.

BioWare has announced Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar, a free-to-play action RPG coming to the PC and iPad later this year. According to BioWare, Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar will feature action RPG gameplay, BioWare-style storytelling, cross-platform play, and a whole lot of other features to be revealed at a later date.

I'm not an expert on these sorts of things, so I’ll have to take the word of Eurogamer when they call an eBay auction that sold for a whopping $1.32 million the "biggest game collection" in the world. We'll leave that determination to the officials at the Guinness Book of World Records...

Beginning Friday, June 22, a group of dedicated gamers in Lafayette, Indiana will host the fifth annual Mario Marathon fundraiser to benefit the Child’s Play Charity. The group has been doing this since 2008, and has managed to raise over $242,000 for Child's Play to-date.

After a little fact checking (on the part of Blizzard) and some discussion about if it was a legitimate claim, Canadian Diablo III player Kripparrian (with help from wizard friend Krippi) is officially the first person in the entire world to complete Blizzard's RPG on the Inferno difficulty level. He did this with a Hardcore character to boot, which means that the game ends if you die.

The popular indie documentary about indie game development will be the very first feature-length film to be made available on Steam. Indie Game: The Movie will be available on Steam June 12, but those who buy it early before its release can get a ten percent discount. According to filmmaker James Swirsky, the 1080p video "will be DRM'd as much as any other Steam product/game," which means you'll need to be running the steam client in order to watch it.

Venture Beat has a fascinating report on a new Detroit-based startup called Are You a Human, who want to replace that irritating CAPTCHA text people have to use to prove they are human on just about every website on the Internet with playable mini-games. Obviously we endorse any idea that can eliminate CAPTCHA because it's irritating on so many levels...

How long does it take to complete the single player campaign in Diablo III on Normal difficulty? I have no idea, but it took Level 32 Barbarian Yoshichan 12 hours and 29 minutes to beat Blizzard's freshly released game. This NeoGAF post (thanks Eurogamer) shows off a final shot of the Barbarian character's stats.

Andrew Eisen, E. Zachary Knight, and I have been toying with the idea of doing a podcast for quite some time, and after much discussion, consternation, and a couple of dry runs with the process of recording and editing one, we've finally come up with our first episode. We're calling it the "Super Podcast Action Committee," mainly because we like the idea of being part of a Super PAC, but without all the red tape and influence peddling.

Adriasang reports that Square Enix has launched a free streaming music service that you can access with PC and Android devices. Though the site is intended for those who reside in Japan, you can get at it directly from your PC by visiting the streaming music website. Most of the site is in Japanese but there is a small bit of English as well - enough for just about anyone to figure out how to navigate around the site.

What the F@#k? Apparently Ubisoft encouraged developer Demiurge Studios to make their first independent title, Shoot Many Robots, as filthy as possible. According to Demiurge CEO Albert Reed Ubisoft encouraged them to drop as many f-bombs as they liked in the game.

To avoid some potential legal problems related to shadow rendering code Creative Labs apparently holds a patent to, id Software has decided to hold off on releasing the code. Rather than risking legal action, id Software co-founder John Carmack has decided to rewrite part of the Doom 3 engine's code. Yesterday it was revealed that id Software had delayed releasing the code to the public because of Bethesda's concerns of potential liability related to the Creative Labs patent.

The Department of Defense have developed a new simulation technology to help the Navy track enemy submarines and they are testing it by rolling it into a commercial computer game. The Defense Advanced Research Project Arm's Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) software simulates tracking the evasive maneuvers used by submarines. The agency says that the software will soon be rolled into the ACTUV program's computers.

But the real kicker is who will get to test this new technique: simulation game players. DARPA has integrated it into the Dangerous Waters computer game by Sonalysts Combat Simulations and has made the ACTUV Tactics Simulator available online as a free download as well.