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The Avengers has become a worldwide phenomenon, and a huge supply of official images and bootleg copies of the movie have lead to a deluge of animated gifs and memes.

Forum members LokiPoki and BenTheo have been posting them in our official Avengers discussion thread here. You can continue reading this post to see all the images so far. We’ll update with more as they come in.

Spoiler Warning: many of these images are from later scenes in the movie.
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It’s been over a week since Diablo 3 launched to the ravenous public. And after 12 years of waiting for the second sequel to one of Blizzard’s top tier franchises to finally be released, who couldn’t expect some bumps along the way. Between crashing servers, players already finding their accounts hacked, and the now meme-worthy “Error 37” debacle, the patience of many gamers has been put to the test. (a very online-oriented test too, mind you….no single-player offline tests here)

However, Blizzard was confident in their ability to weather the storm, and announced that the game has broken PC gaming records, with sales going beyond 3.5 million (well, 2.4 million, if you subtract the copies given for free to WoW subscribers) within the first 24 hours of the game’s release. (Starcraft 2 only saw a opening-day sale count of around 1 million, to put into perspective) While not mentioning sales in actual dollar signs, Blizzard is still making sure that they are dedicated to providing a steady and stable gaming environment for all Diablo 3 players.

Just ignore those “Server Down” messages. They’ll go away eventually.

What have been your experiences with Diablo 3 thus far? Let us know in the comments!

Last month, I reported on a fantastic fundraising project started by German video game composer, Chris Huelsbeck (Turrican, The Great Giana Sisters, R-Type, etc.). The fundraiser, based on Kickstarter, was a project started to raise funds for a new fully-orchestrated soundtrack anthology dedicated as a tribute to all three of the Turrican games.

Within 2 weeks of the project start, the entire goal of raising $75,000 in order to fund production was fully amassed, of which Huelsbeck was excited for. However, what he perhaps wasn’t prepared for was for it to nearly double it’s original goal. With less than 2 weeks left of the June 3rd cutoff, the fund has nearly broken $140,000. With this extra support from fans and backers, Huelsbeck has increased the pledge rewards as a thanks for any and all contributions, from signed exclusive merchandise to early beta releases of the anthology music, to a hand-crafted music box featuring Turrican music!

It just goes to show how much dedicated fans are willing to give to pay homage to the great loves of our childhood.

The past 48 hours have been a series of buzzings about a supposed new Castlevania game for the Nintendo 3DS handheld. Website GoNintendo’s rumor mill has been churning out speculation about the supposed handheld title, called Castlevania: Mirror of Fate. According to these rumors, the game will be developed by Castlevania: Lords of Shadow producer Davis Cox, will be 2D, will be a part of the Lords storyline, and will be co-operative play with 2 starting characters.

Cox himself, who took the Castlevania reigns starting with Lords from previous long-time producer Koji “IGA” Igarashi, is currently keeping tight lipped on whether or not any of the rumors are true, as he is prodded by obviously curious Castlevania fans on his Twitter.

Konami has gone on record saying that there will be a Castlevania reveal at this year’s E3 conference, though most believed it to mean the official drop of a Lords of Shadow 2 game. If rumors prove true, it might be a dual-wield info drop for Castlevania this summer.

The scheduled release date of GI Joe: Retaliation has been moved back nine months from June 29th, 2012 to March 13, 2013. According the Deadline, the reason is reportedly a decision to do a post-production conversion to 3D.

Choice quote:

We’re going to do a conscientious 3D job because we’ve seen how it can better box office internationally, … Jim Cameron did all of Titanic‘s 3D in post — and look how well that movie turned out.

As a fan, I’m utterly disappointed. As a business decision, I think they are foolishly ignoring the positive hype they’ve worked so hard to build around this movie. The move may allow the film to perform better, though, due to fewer blockbuster movies opening around the same time and the better performance of 3D films internationally, added to the increased cost per ticket.

I am curious to see how this year’s JoeCon will procede since it seemed pretty clearly scheduled to coincide very closely with the movie’s release. You can imagine the fan disappointment in that circle. How about Hasbro? They have an entire toy line planned for release this summer with no movie to support it for another nine months. I’m going to go ahead and call this a totally inconsiderate move by Paramount to all of its partners.

A scanned page from a Japanese magazine has been floating about today revealing the next figure in the Transformers Masterpiece line in Japan. That figure is MP-12 Lambor, or Sideswipe, as he is known state-side. The image looks like a cgi rendering of the figure. It is interesting to note that the image shows him being in scale with the MP-10 Optimus Prime figure. A silhouette is also shown of MP-13 whose identity is still a mystery.

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