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At the end of this week's Mod News, I will present you with the funniest thing I've read in ages. I'm mean, so you'll have to wait until right at the end, and I'm sure you wouldn't even think of scrolling down. First, you'll have to ingest and process the most interesting in this week's happenings from the mod scene. Laughs are a dessert.

Now this is a wonderful way to start a day! This, and a mug of steamy tea. Bliss. Everyone's favourite elephant in the (series of) room(s) is back! To pick up where our coverage of the original left off, the best approach to writing about it is to write as little as possible, so I've stowed some thoughts and a video after the jump. For now, go play.

Here's the splendid boardgame Settlers of Catan running on Microsoft's potentially splendid Surface tech. Surface is touchscreen-mega-PC theoretical fun, but more likely to be built into tables in public spaces than to be something you hook up to your own device. Here's how it could work for social videogaming (in the traditional sense of social, not the FarmVille sense). I'm fighting my overwhelming urge to grumble "but why don't they just play the boardgame? It must be far cheaper" - because I suspect that's very much missing the point.

That's the studio formerly known as 2K Boston formerly known as Irrational to you. As in Ken Levine's original-name-reclaiming bunch: the developers who made System Shock 2, SWAT 4, Tribes Vengeance, Freedom Force - and, of course, Bioshock the first.

And there's that Pandora's box opened. The important news, though, is that Irrational are finally taking the lid of whatever their new project is next week. Several years in the making, massively mysterious: whatever it is, whatever it's like, it's bound to be a big old chat-magnet.

This is somewhat inspired. You recall the Golden Wrenches circa the last Team Fortress 2 update? WiNGSPANNT despised his - number 31 - but had a bright idea of how to turn its annihilation into a force for good. In short, he's using its destruction as an excuse to raise money for Child's Play. To simplify the whole system, the twenty highest donators will be invited to join him on a server to observe this crushing to powder of a modern day Excalibur. Inspired by this Seven (Count 'em!) other golden-wrench owners are going to follow suit, with the whole ceremony being recorded for posterity. Hurrah! Anyway, go forth and donate, or watch this video which explains what's going on in further detail...

You can tell advertising is splendid if I'm happy to use it as a story-header. Anyway - it's a good week for documentation of a genre. Following the guide to graphic adventures, Georg Wille brings me news that Jason Scott is now shipping the long-awaited text adventure documentary "Get Lamp". And I do mean long-awaited. I did think we'd posted about it before, but the trailer actually debuted around the time RPS went public, so we never have. You can find more here or here. Alternatively, you can order the 2-DVD set directly here for forty dollars plus postage. So specialist pricing, but no harm in that. And the venerable trailer follows...

What do you suppose these frowning folk are unhappy about?

I'm going to have to tease you. I'm sorry. But you'll like it. Hint: it's not that they're all wearing exactly the same clothes.

You may remember a couple of weeks back we featured a game made by eight-year-old Ross, Alien Black Hole. What stood out about it was a really smart idea - needing to use your enemies to create paths to let you exit a level. Because we think Ross is a bit of a hero, making a game that clever at his age, we wanted to interview him to find out his thoughts. So with the help of his mum and dad, we got in touch. You can read it below.

They promised it. We hardly dared believe it was true. But the new Linkin Park single - The Catalyst - is now available via the medium of a Medal of Honor trailer! Gather your friends, put your phones on silent, and behold the might that is: Mr Beardy Guy in live action! With some shouty tosh in the background.

What's this? A press release has come tumbling through the RPS letterbox, bound in tattered leather and announcing the Spring 2011 release of The Sims Medieval. A full game of its own (presumably using the Sims 3 engine), The Sims Medieval will allow players to create their very own "Hero Sim (TM)" and then either head off on quests or focus on building up their kingdom. We're promised "drama, romance, conflict, and comedy" involving "characters from all walks of life, from Kings and Queens, to Knights and Wizards, Blacksmiths and Bards." Full press release, some screens and some thoughts after the break.

Who wants a good 10-15 minutes of braindead zombie shooting? Ah, you do. You do! IndieGames.com informs us of Big Pixel Zombies (from the makers of Big Pixel Racing), a browser game that sees players steering a proud pixel through the streets of a zombie-infested London, occasionally visiting shops to buy guns, steaks or dogs with guns strapped to them. I've run it through the RPS supercomputer and am informed that it's at least 62% as good as Hellgate: London, so there. You can begin blasting right here.

We are not amused. But we will be, soon! Paradox Interactive's new political simulator, Victoria 2 (the sequel to their 2003 title Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun), has just gone gold, and it's coming out on August 13th. Seems like it'll provide more of that Europa Universalis style no-frills strategy, but with a few neat additions, like two countries colonising a province at the same time and engaging in a non-violent battle for influence. Mm! Features list and trailer after the jump.

Sweet. The Master of Savy points me in the direction of One Step Back, which is another crisp arty platformer. Its "thing" is that a few seconds after you begin a level, a duplicate of yourself starts to ghost your path. Then a few seconds later, another follows. And another. If you collide with any of the ghosts, you die. The aim is to get to an exit - which only opens after a time limit. In other words, it's about navigating a route which allows you to avoid your previous paths long enough. Helpfully, like that-bit-in-Braid time only flows when you're actually moving. While its iffy wall jump is the main form of frustration, I found this a really lovingly designed shortform game, even before it hit its half-way change-of-pace. Do give it a try. And now, here's the heavy-heavy-monster-sound of Madness...

Is there a better genre name for these games than "a bit like Defense Of The Ancients"? I mean I was going to go with "Champion-based Tower Defence", but that seems too wordy. Anyway, whatever the taxonomy of the game, it's free to play Heroes Of Newerth for this week. I had a good old crack at this when it came out, and frankly struggled a bit with the arcane and unfriendly community, but it's quite the game once you begin to master the rhythm of things, and figure out how to avoid getting insta-ganked when things go awry. Probably worth taking a look this week if you're going to give it some time, that way you can be sure of full newbie servers. And I mean that in the kindest possible way. Even HoN's newbie servers can be a little challenging for beginners.

Yesterday revealed that Fable III has a web-based Villager Maker, which allows you, yes YOU, to design villagers that could find their way into the full game. What a clever idea. (And saving someone some work, I should think...) However, if you're planning to play the game on PC then you will be waiting an indeterminate amount of time longer to see said villagers, due to the PC version of game being delayed from the original October 26th date. MS say we should expect more detailed news on the PC version soon.

A splendid, PC-loving chap has made a 500-page book about the history of point and click adventure games - yer LucasArts, yer Sierras, yer Revolutions, yer all the rests. Even Simon the bloody Sorcerer. All the way up to Grim Fandango, bless its skull-patterned socks. Your coffee table would probably very much appreciate straining under the weight of Graphic Adventures' nostalgia-strewn, many-pictured pages - though you can also read a free digital version.

My dream game, until I have a grown-up's dream: a Transformers MMO. Design your own character, get deep into factional territory war, a universe full of weird planets to explore, a slew of alt-mode upgrades to pursue, endless humans to squish, cameos by Death's Head. The ideal sci-fi property for an online world, yes?

I will never have this. Too expensive, too ambitious. Yet Asia is getting Transformers Online. Dare I to dream the impossible plastic toy-based dream?

It seems pretty clear that Mafia II is going to be one of those games where the publisher-released assets are going keep on coming until they flood the internet, burying life as we know it under a series of informative or excitingly-edited game footage clips featuring well-dressed men doing violence. (Because, if you hadn't already realised, dudes are going to get shot.) This latest trailer is probably my favourite so far, because it's not spoilering so much as just leaping from event to event. It's also reminding me that I need to nip over and see John to get a glimpse of the thing in action. If you want to see what he thought about the early preview build, go have a read of this handsome preview.

Lots of people nodded at Dustforce , which the ever-wonderful IndieGames blog brought to public light. It's a platformer by Hitbox Team which is currently available in demo form, which includes two proper levels, a handful of custom levels and a (twitchy) level editor for you to play around with the custom ones with. Its controls take some getting used to, but this is startlingly beautiful, acrobatic platforming about brush-wielding sweepers whose devotion to leaf-obliteration humbles us all. Footage follows and the demo's available here.

Kieron: Hello Phill Cameron of the land of the north. How are you today? Phill: I'm fine, although I'm still recovering from chicken-apoplexy. Kieron: The chicken is the angriest of the fowl. I too have been thinking about Chick... wait a sec. Have you been playing Lord of the Rings Online's Free-to-play Beta? Phill: I have! Or, as I like to refer to it: Watership Down-but-with-chickens. Kieron: I think we should probably go around the back end to talk about that. You ever played the original version? Phill: No, I'm a LOTRO virgin. But you have, I gather?

UPDATE: Trailer embedded below. Interesting-looking family game? Yes, I am typing those words. Which makes me uncomfortable. And a bit uncertain about life. Anyway, Create from EA's Play studio is a multiplayer puzzle game for which the theme of "creativity". Explanatory video on the website shows it to be a bunch of painting, level-furnishing, simple tinkering, and physics tweakiness, and could be fairly interesting. Solutions to particular levels can be unique, and clever ones can be uploaded and shared via the website. The EA release says: "The more players explore the game, solve level-based challenges, and customize their world, the more rewards will be unlocked. Creativity will be unleashed as players design environments with easy-to-use brushes and tools, including textures, props and animating objects that bring the scene to life." The game is due for the "holiday". The fun is guessing which one.

There's a new video up over on the main Lego Universe site which shows a bit more of the building procedures in the game. For me it's this stuff - rather than the standard "hit bads for XP" MMO material - that is really interesting. This is kind of a CG mock up, rather than in-game footage, but it's worth browsing over this and the other videos there to get a broader picture. I get the feeling that the quest stuff is largely going to be secondary, and that - if we're lucky - it'll be the user-created content aspect of LU that will really shine. I've got my fingers tightly crossed for this one, not because of LEGO so much, because developers NetDevil have much to prove.

The perennial questions of the harm that games may be causing us and our children are extremely troubling. Every week seems to bring a new survey or study that demonstrates links between gaming and problematic behaviour, with renowned psychologists, sociologists and publicists explaining to us what it is we need to be scared of. Over the last fifteen years I have been studying this data and reading these papers, and I am now ready to publish my findings. Below is the result of a decade-and-a-half's research, and I think will once and for all answer the questions every parent, teacher, child and teenager should be asking.

Been meaning to play this for a while but finally - ahem - found time. Stream is basically a short-form Braid with a monochrome Flashback-esque aesthetic. The device being you can create a portal and send yourself back in time, leaving a ghost doing whatever you were doing. Use it to dodge guards, keep doors open and so on. It's a lot fiddlier than Braid, which becomes an annoyance in the more complicated multi-stage puzzles, but it's still well worth a shot. You can get it here and see some footage - in the form of a full spoiler-filled walkthrough - below...

Attention, soldier! Stand up straight! Take your hands out of your pants! Both of them, God dammit! Fileplanet are giving away beta keys for Company of Heroes Online, Relic's free-to-play reinvention of its award-winning RTS with added hero units and persistent development of your army. I've got my key and word on the heavily-shelled street is that this is really quite good, so I'll be posting a more detailed investigation later in the week.

RPS' ways are mysterious. How do you get us to post about something? You stick 40k figures in it. Or Transformers. Frankly, if you put Impactor in your game we'd probably end up skinning the site in your game's honour. Anyway - 40k models for TF2. "Coming Soon" says the Youtube-page-notes. "I miss Impactor" cries our inner six-year olds, embarrassingly. Footage follows.

Thanks to Terry for bringing ESSENTIAL INFORMATION to us which we must DISSEMINATE immediately. As part of the current Assembly GameDev compo the maker of the immortal Sumotori Dreams has released a new game. Archee continues his muse ("Drunken Real Time Physics" has a certain ring) with Tricky Truck. It's basically a micro-Stunt Car Racer with articulated Lorries, with you having to park your enormous vehicle at the end of a course. Not as funny as Sumotori Dreams, but more of a real game, I recommend giving it a try in hard mode, where you have to drive inside your truck and rely on checking out your mirrors and looking around desperately to stop yourself careening into harm. Go gets.

Peering back through time, my retrospective hands seized upon Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, which I use as an excuse to explore the Tomb Raider series a little. It contains a paragraph that says this:

Lara is, let's not forget, a truly dreadful person. Much has already been written about how she's a grave-robbing thief, uncaring about either history or wildlife. And despite her having encountered dinosaurs, dragons and giant killer statues, she's utterly blase about ignoring ancient texts warning of terrible plagues being unleashed upon the Earth if she takes one trinket or another. Screw Earth! She wants the shiny thing! Yeah, just steal it Lara. No one minds if you KILL EVERYONE ON EARTH. But of course Von Croy is the baddy, because he tried to do the world and its history a favour by killing her when she was a squawky teenager.

The rest is here.

"Cliff Blezinski, bless his heart, has no idea what it means to run across a battlefield underneath machinegun fire." This is very true.

Ubisoft's Clint Hocking once again demonstrates the pulsating mega-brain that will hopefully soon result in a game that isn't a weird Far Cry sequel, in this rather special Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab talk. It's from last October, but seems no less relevant for it. Discussed: war movies, hockey fights, Gears of War, Duke Nukem breaking the fourth wall without breaking immersion, how online functionality can augment immersion, and blurring the line between real and fake.

The first trailer for off-road racing sequel Dirt 3 was shown during ESPN's X-Games coverage last night, and you can see it below. Needless to say, it features Ken Block's fancy Ford Focus racing about a bit, suggesting different environments for vehicular athletics. Phwoar, eh readers?