Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of reality TV on Mars, a 360 degree treadmill, and a mech for kids.

Sometimes when you do anything a lot you can start to get jaded and everything seemingly sucks. Say, writing about games. How’s that for a first world problem? “I play games and earn money for it. This is awful.” It’s like anything, though. If you ate bacon all day every day you would hate bacon. [...]

Following on from my last column, in which I looked at some of the most interesting looking RPGs on Kickstarter at the time, I thought I’d take a look at some of the most interesting Indie RPGs that are either in development or have been recently released. I’m a huge fan of the epic AAA-RPG and all the attendant production values and sense of scale that are usually attached to them, but there’s a special something that a small and dedicated team of true believers can bring to the table.

Indie RPGs might lack the polish of some of their higher budgeted brethren, but many of them are packed with some unique style, substance and character that would often be deemed too risky for a big budget title.

Despite knowing him for years, Alex Walker finds that Australia’s top StarCraft II player, Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender, still has the capacity to surprise.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the possibility of Windows 8.1 allowing users to boot straight to the desktop, Apple’s warranty assessment guidelines, and the Google Glass technical specifications.

I always, always wondered why there wasn’t more in the way of first-person survival horror. Bits and pieces here and there. The closest I think I’ve come to nodding along on that front was Condemned, but it was missing something. You were too safe. Horror has become ‘action horror’.

Outlast does not look like action horror. It looks like survival horror the way I’ve always wanted. I’ve been obsessing over it ever since I stumbled over it this week. I had to stumble over it, ‘cos no one’s really talking about it. Why would they? It’s not an EA presents deal and is, in fact, being put together by an entirely new and untested studio called Red Barrels.

You know what I love? Simulated physics. I love watching objects fall and tip and fling and crash and crumple in dynamic and believable ways. Simply by implementing a believable (not necessarily realistic) system of physics and gravity that affects the objects in the game word, a game is given a literal and figurative weight, and is opened up to all kinds of dynamic and exciting outcomes.

Half-Life 2 is nine-years-old. Nine years! Since then, simulated physics have become so common-place as to hardly be noticed.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of AMD’s belief that there will be no Direct X 12, fancy Google Street View videos, and how the next Xbox could take control of your TV.

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.

If FPS games have taught me anything, it’s that you always shoot first, shoot some more, and then keep shooting until everyone and everything has been shot. We expect that from games like this. We have for years and years now. Occasionally there will be the option to not shoot; to approach your target(s) in a more considered or subtle way. It’s always a clear and present line between force and subterfuge, maybe diplomacy too.

The choice is yours, so make it quickly before someone notices you and we default to shooting first, shooting some more and continually shooting until everyone and everything has been shot.

I was shocked to realise that this isn’t the way the world actually works during wartime.

April is turning out to be quite the slow month for retail releases, RPG and otherwise. It’s not a total dead zone as it has often been in the past, with a few AAA titles being released during the month as well as a few smaller games. The lack of boxed copies isn’t really going to effect how much of an impact gaming has on my wallet, however, as once again a number of interesting projects have made their way to Kickstarter, all but demanding that I give them all of my available cash in anticipation of a finished product somewhere down the line when I will inevitably not have enough time to fully enjoy them.

Unlike the last number of projects I backed, such as Torment: Tides of Numenera or Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, the new batch of interesting games aren’t asking for huge amounts of money and aren’t set to break any records for the most funded game on Kickstarter. This doesn’t stop them from being every bit as interesting.

Competitive gaming has been around for a long time, but its players, tactics and infrastructure can be little mystifying to the layman. People scream a lot; it’s a little intimidating. There’s a lot of action on screen; it’s a little confusing. It’s very in-depth and without prior knowledge, difficult to report.

Covering gamer rage has never been a complicated matter.