Happy Mother’s Day!

• Everyone’s favourite Playstation creator, “Krazy” Ken Kutaragi, has joined Marvelous AQL as an external director. Marvellous AQL are the parent company for XSEED, and recently became the proud owners of Atlus Online, renaming it to Marvelous USA. Kutaragi was kicked upstairs after the Playstation 3 launch debacle, and eventually left Sony altogether in 2011.
• If you have a CUDA-capable NVidia card, and want to try out that amazing face-rendering demo that NVidia showed off a few months ago, you now can. The “Digital Ira” demo shows just how realistic facial animation can be achieved on modern GPUs. The demo includes three different lighting environments and motion-captured facial animations. You’ll need a 400-series or later NVidia GPU and DirectX 11 to take advantage of the demo.
• One of the top raiding guilds in World of Warcraft, Exodus, has called it quits. This comes after the demise of a number of other rading guilds over the past year, including vodka. According to Killars’ Facebook post, the demise is due not to the game itself, but the highly competitive raiding scene. It doesn’t help that the game itself has been haemorrhaging subscribers, losing 1.3 million in the last quarter.
• In other Blizzard-related news, the Diablo III Auction House is back online. After being closed for several days while Blizzard audited accounts due to a gold-duping bug introduced in last week’s 1.0.8 patch, the controversial feature was re-enabled yesterday, and appears to be functioning normally again. An unrelated bug means that gold transactions can’t be for more than one million gold (the patch was supposed to increase this to ten million), however Blizzard expects to fix this soon.
• After appearing on GOG.com a couple of weeks ago, legendary FPS/RPG/horror game System Shock 2 is on Steam. The game has been patched to run on modern hardware, and is currently on sale for US$6.99 (regular price US$9.99). In related Steam news, the very very excellent Torchlight II is currently US$6.79. You could buy both games for less than regular cost of TL2.

Feature image is Ness’ mother from the game Earthbound, which is known in Japan as Mother 2.