Unity Games, developer Electric Eggplant and the Heirs of Rube Goldberg (the group representing the family members in charge of Goldberg's estate) have launched an Android version of Rube Works: Rube Goldberg Game on the Google Play store for $1.99 USD (€1.49, £1.29, AU$1.99).

The game is said to be inspired by and pays homage to the imaginative and crazy contraptions depicted in comics created by the Pulitzer Prize prize-winning American cartoonist, National Cartoonists Society founder, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor Rube Goldberg.

With 17 days left to go before the YouCaring crowd-funding campaign to raise funds for Ron Nakada (the Senior Software Engineer at Blizzard Entertainment who is battling through Stage IV colon cancer) ends, it has managed to surpass it goal. As of this writing $25,664 has been raised from 678 backers.

Finalists for this year's Independent Games Festival have been announced. The list of nominees for the biggest prize of the show - Seumas McNally Grand Prize - include such notable indie games as The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe); Papers, Please (Lucas Pope); Don't Starve (Klei); Device 6 (Simogo); Jazzpunk (Necrophone); and Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings!" (Deirdra Kiai Productions).

Chucklefish's procedurally generated space-themed RPG Starbound has sold more than one million copies thanks to its inclusion in the Steam early access program and the company's own pre-order efforts. Starbound is currently an early access game on Steam, allowing consumers to play an early beta build of the game while developers make wild and drastic changes. Selling for right around $15 via Steam's early access program, players have been enjoying the game since December 4.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2014, a week-long gaming marathon in which participants speed run through a number of popular games, hopes to raise money for Prevent Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds cancer research and educational efforts. In its fourth year, Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 takes place until January 11. Donations will directly benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Here's a pretty cool story from Gamasutra - and a particularly awe inspiring thing if you happen to be someone developing a roguelike game. Glenn Wichman, one of the original co-creators of the super popular 1980s dungeon-crawler Rogue, served as a judge on the "Ultimate Roguelike Challenge" competition.

Joe Danger and No Man's Sky developer Hello Games recently suffered a calamity when its offices were flooded. According to a recent series of tweets by the Guildford, UK-based studio, the damage it suffered in its offices on Christmas Eve are not covered by its insurance policy.

Recently the "Take This Project" was quietly relaunched as "Take This," along with a new website at www.takethis.org. Take This is a support group for gamers (though it doesn't specifically exclude those people who do not identify themselves as gamers), games journalists, game developers, and other industry professionals that suffer from depression, anxiety and other challenges associated with mental illness.

Joe Danger and No Man's Sky developer Hello Games had a bit of bad luck this week when their offices were flooded. The developers detailed the calamity in a series of tweets:

"A river broke its bank nearby yesterday, and A LOT of water flooded in really quickly. A biblical amount. It was coming in the windows!" noted the developers official Twitter account.

A 12-year-old who just happened to be up all night playing video games in Danville, Kentucky, is being credited with saving his entire family. On Thursday morning at around 3:30 am, Jaxxyn Wood was on the first floor of his family home playing video games when he smelled something funny in the air. Jaxxyn said that he "smelled something really bad, like Legos on fire."

Upon further investigation he noticed that the ice machine in the kitchen was on fire.

Harvey Smith's book, "Big Jack is Dead," has been honored as one of the Best Indie Books of 2013 (in the general fiction category) by renowned book review service Kirkus today. The book written by Smith (who is best known for his work on hit games such as Dishonored, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Deus Ex, Cybermage, and Ultima VIII) tells the story of an executive returning home to deal with his father's funeral and confront the past.

Inspired by the software patent trolling efforts of patent house Treehouse Avatar Technologies, a new IndieGoGo campaign launched today seeks to raise funds for a project that will ultimately help the little guy. The project is called Operation Ninja S.T.A.R., and seeks to raise $17,500 to closely examine a patent owned by Treehouse Avatar Technologies to see if there is any evidence that the invention existed prior to the patent application. Their ultimate goal is to render the patent invalid.

Kotaku offers a mildly amusing story about a game development studio that decided to pirate their own game. Vitali Kirpu and Alex Poysky, the developers behind Pixel Piracy, have "pirated" a copy of their own game, and provided a free torrent download on their site.

Wargaming sent out an interesting announcement this afternoon about seven men who climbed Mount Everest and "sort of" claimed it in the name of their favorite online game... Seven World of Warplanes players have tackled the treacherous slopes of the Himalayas and celebrated by planting a very special flag on its highest peak.

UK-based charity Special Effect is hosting a 24-hour marathon early next year to raise funds for disabled gamers. The UK-based charity supports disabled gamers by providing them with adaptive technology that allows them to enjoy playing games. The marathon, the GameBlast weekend will take place on February 21- 23, 2014. From the website for the charity:

Over the weekend a core group from Team ECA based out of our headquarters in Wilton, Connecticut, spent 23 hours setting up and playing video games to support the Extra Life charity. They managed to contribute a substantial amount of the $3,200 in total donations (so far, donations are still coming in) for the Connecticut Children’s Hospital and the Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Westchester, NY - both Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

Despite its web site being the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the folks at the Extra Life charity managed to raise a decent amount of money (with the help of thousands of gamers) over the weekend. The charity sent out multiple emails over the weekend keeping Extra Life members in the loop as the events unfolded.

Organizers of the Golden Joysticks awards announced that Bioshock creator Ken Levine will be honored with a lifetime achievement award. This is the first time in the UK based awards show's history that it has honored an individual for his or her body of work. Levine will be honored for his work on the BioShock series, the classic sci-fi themed action role-playing game System Shock, and other notable games (on a personal note Freedom Force will always have a special place in my heart - ed.).

2D point-and-click adventure game sequel The Ballads of Reemus 2 managed to raise $15,170 CAD via its Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, putting the project $170 CAD above its funding goal of $15,000 CAD. As of this writing, the crowd-funding campaign has just over two days to go before its Kickstarter campaign comes to a close.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced today that it will honor Sony president Kazuo "Kaz" Hirai as this year's Champion Honoree at its annual charity gala event and dinner, Nite to Unite. Hirai has had a profound impact on Sony, playing a key role in shaping Sony’s vision for the PlayStation video game consoles and the company's handheld devices, as well as the PlayStation Network. Past Champion Honorees include Blizzard Entertainment's Mike Morhaime and Valve Software's Gabe Newell.

By the skin of its nose, Neverending Nightmare, Matt Gilgenbach's psychological horror game inspired by his battle with mental illness, has been fully funded. As of Friday, the game was around $20,000 below its $99,000 funding goal on Kickstarter. Neverending Nightmare's Kickstarter campaign ended over the weekend. By the time it ended it had managed to raise $106,722 from 3,608 backers.

The game will launch in August of 2014 for Linux, Mac, Windows and Ouya.

The next few days will either make or break the crowd funding ambitions of Matt Gilgenbach's Neverending Nightmares, a "terrifying psychological horror game inspired by the developer's battle with mental illness." The Kickstarter campaign for the game, to be released simultaneously on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Ouya in August of next year (assuming that it meets its funding goal) is within striking distance of being successful. With only 58 hours to go, Neverending Nightmares has managed to raise $69,437 of its $99,000 goal from 2,564 backers.

This week Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight are joined by Jeremy Powers (who you may know better here on GamePolitics as 'Zen'), who talks about the feel-good story of this past week: finally being able to play video games with his daughter. Using the second screen of the Wii U, Jeremy's daughter Jennifer (who has a vision impairment) was finally able to play New Super Luigi U with her family using the GamePad as her own personal screen.

Picture this:

Your young child wants nothing more than to play video games with you and the rest of the family but she's nearly blind and can't focus on anything more than a few inches from her face.  She can't see the game unless she puts her nose to the screen and you can't see the game when her head is blocking the TV.  What do you do?

Vlambeer's ridiculously popular iOS game, Ridiculous Fishing, is edging towards $1 million in sales, developers Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman revealed today during a panel at the 2013 Game Developers Conference Europe.

"We're so close," Ismail told Polygon. "We're almost at $1 million."

Something interesting happened this weekend after Brad Keselowski won the NASCAR Nationwide Series race at Watkins Glen: he credited video games for helping him to master the track. Keselowski told Motorsports Talk that he learned to navigate the legendary New York road course by playing video games, and that the knowledge and expertise he gained playing the track in the virtual world translated to success in the real world.

Way back in February we reported on the opening of the Sandy Hook Arcade Center, an arcade founded by Andrew Clure and Scott Cicciari, two long-time Newtown residents, who wanted to share their love of pinball with the community in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adult staff members.

Polytron producer Marie-Christine Bourdua said that she was pretty surprised to hear that Fez 2 had been cancelled. Speaking to Joystiq at the Torontaru July (a monthly meet-up for game players and developers in Toronto, Canada), Bourdua said that she wasn't at the home office in Montreal when Fish made his very public announcement about cancelling Fez 2.

Using Kinect, an artist named Luke Jerram has created an interesting pixilated sculpture of his daughter Maya. Using an Xbox Kinect, some aluminum sheets and more than 5,000 colored stickers, Mr. Jerram has built a sculpture on Platform 1 at Bristol Temple Meads train station in the U.K.

While the editorial pages at many gaming websites are featuring opinion pieces on how the Internet is a pretty nasty place for creative types, not everyone agrees. Of course all this soul searching and hand ringing is related to Polytron's Phil Fish saying over the weekend that he has cancelled further development on Fez 2 and has quit the games industry after a public dust-up with Marcus Beer (also known as Annoyed Gamer over at GameTrailers).