If BioWare had shown Kelly in the trailers for the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC, I’d be pissed — because they completely left her out of the final product. I’m still pissed, but I’d be even more pissed if they had my hopes up.

A (somewhat) similar issue occurred with Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game was possibly the worst game ever made (in 2013). Our own review called it “an embarrassment that should never have been released”.

This was particularly cutting because the work in progress demonstration trailer had previously showed a far better game. Some gamers were so riled up that they launched a class action lawsuit against Sega and Gearbox for false advertising.

Opinion around the interwebs has been divided. While most players support the lawsuit, some just aren’t sure whether it has a chance of succeeding. Today, we’ll be looking at whether the Aliens: Colonial Marines pre-release demonstration trailer was false advertising enough to give grounds for a lawsuit.

From the debacle that was 38 Studios, to the sadness of THQ’s closure, studios and publishers go bankrupt all the time. Much-loved gaming franchises linger in limbo as their publishers just… run out of money.

The only chance these games have is if a new publisher comes along and “buys the IP”. We see these words on gaming websites often. But what does “buying the IP” involve, anyway?

I’ll tell you why games do not cause murders. Of course, you already know this. However, with all the negative attention games have received on this topic lately, it’s good to look at how games may actually influence the minds of killers. (And to justify that trollish headline.)

Because really, any violent media can inspire someone to kill in a certain way—including video games. It’s been proven. But while the anti-gaming lobby would have you believe that this means games cause murder and should be censored, they are very much mistaken.

To understand why, we need to look at what leads people to murder.

Back in the nineties, Lara Croft was actually a man. Yet Larry Croft never saw the light of day, because one sex symbol named Larry was quite enough. Okay, well, actually, Tomb Raider’s creators vetoed him for being too similar to Indiana Jones. Then, they went back to the drawing board.

This hasn’t stopped other developers from copying Indy, however. In The Secret World, my character wields a whip. She found the whip by using a “time tomb”, called the “TARDIS”. She also has a fancy fedora hat. The other day, she wielded her whip, while wearing her hat, riding on a train to recover an ark. The ark, after all, belongs in a museum.

That quest was great fun, but the obvious ripoffness of at least three IPs got me thinking: how far can a game go in blatantly copying someone else? We all know how paranoid publishers can get about gamers copying games. So what gives with the double standards?

Last fortnight I presented an argument that DRM leads to less abandonware. It was not well received. Yet just as I’ll always argue that Kelly is more attractive than Liara, I stand by every word I said.

Some commentators, though, made the point that DRM was actually taking away gamers’ rights under copyright. It was an interesting argument, so one I thought we’d discuss this week. As it turns out, the best argument against DRM is nothing to do with gamers’ rights, but that publishers themselves have enjoyed huge benefits from breaking DRM in the past.

Do you remember the Amiga? No? It was, for almost a good decade, the flag-bearer of the Glorious PC Master Race. The Amiga was competing with the NES, SNES, Master System, and Mega Drive—all at once. Against these consoles, the Commodore Amiga had the supreme gameplay, sound, and graphics capabilities, because Nintendon’t (I’m so clever).

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Commodore made a series of downright stupid decisions, and lost their entire grip on the home PC market. Had it gone differently, you could have been reading this on the Amiga operating system Workbench, rather than Windows. Now, your only views to past greatness are Ebay, YouTube, and emulated abandonware.

This sums up why we need DRM quite nicely. Tis a tale of obsolete hardware, abandoned software, and very loose morals.

Gamers are making half a million a year from selling game mods on the Steam Workshop. Not many, mind you, but just like the existence of aliens… it’s possible. Gabe Newell now wants to extend the concept to the Steam store itself.

Gabe sees Steam as just a boring old store, and wants to change it into a series of mini-stores, with games being sold in personal, individual stores created by gamers themselves. To be quite fair, he didn’t mention giving them any money, and right now, it’s just a pie in the sky.

But given the success of the Steam Workshop, could Steam actually become a store where gamers make money from selling games? “I’d buy stuff from Yahtzee”, says Gabe.

You’re gonna die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you will die, and horribly. When you do, will anyone care? No!

But maybe, if you accomplish heroic deeds… and buy enough low, low priced digital microtransactions, bards will sing epic tales of your adventures. At least, that’s the premise of Wizardry Online, Sony Online Entertainment’s new free-to-play MMO—with permadeath, open PvP, and player corpse looting.

‘Tis an interesting concept. Unfortunately, the premise is let down by clunky controls, forced multiplayer, and graphics that might have been good at the turn of the century.

Are contracts with publishers so draconian that trusting Kickstarter and jumping into the arms of a sometimes-not-very-enthusiastic public is the only way to go? Here, we look at how exactly development contracts screw over developers, and why this makes Kickstarter so popular.

What if I told you that right now, you could be playing an action-RPG with the quality of Diablo, completely free of charge? Well, you can: Path of Exile, an online action RPG from New Zealand’s Grinding Gear Games, just entered open beta. I spend the better part of this weekend playing to see how it’s shaping, looking at whether it’s worth spending your time on.

And did I mention it’s free?

Gun control and video games are in the news a lot lately, with violent games being blamed for everything from classroom massacres to increased crime rates. Our resident lawyer looks at the facts.

With the United Nations getting ready to draft harsh internet censorship laws to prevent copyright infringement, Sega taking down fan videos left right and centre, and American lawmakers worried about counterfeit baby food harming American babies, the world of copyright is a scary place. Let our gaming lawyer Patrick Vuleta explain it all for you.