Groove Coaster is moving from its extremely portable iOS format to the least portable format possible: a dedicated arcade machine. Taito has revealed plans for an arcade version of Reisuke Ishida's touchscreen music game, for release in Japan only this winter.

Rather than a touchscreen, the arcade game uses a mysterious "BOOSTER" system, seen above. Is it an Etch-a-Sketch type situation? We don't know. We do know that Taito promises a "very different control experience" from both other music games and the existing Groove Coasters.

The cabinet will make its debut at the Japan Amusement Expo on February 15 and 16. If you have an iOS device and haven't tried Groove Coaster, get Groove Coaster Zero for free and check it out. Put your headphones on if you're at work.

Steam Greenlight is still finding its place in this wild, mixed-up online world, and Valve is tweaking its systems based on community feedback, which is appropriate for a crowd-sourced service. Steam Greenlight now features an "Ask me again later" option next to the "Yes" and "No" voting buttons. Skipped items will disappear from users' queues for one month, before returning in a blaze of indecisive glory. Users can also view skipped titles in the new "Items to Revisit Later" menu.

Adding to the "favorite" ability, Greenlighters can now "follow" games and receive notifications when the developer posts updates. All previously favorited items are automatically part of users' follow lists right now. It's possible to follow collections as well, and collection owners can post updates that are sent directly to those interested in their bundles.

Developers get in on the action with this update, too, with a new set of detailed statistics showing how many people view their item and vote on it.

Ask a couple of Riot Games' employees what goes into choosing players for League of Legends' annual World Championships, and they'll rattle off a strange series of acronyms and words that represent tournaments from around the world: Major League Gaming, the IGN Pro League, ESL's Intel Extreme Masters Series, OGN, IPL, Dreamhack, Tales of the Lane, and so many more.

The route from just playing for free online to the top of the World Championship ladders is so confusing and circuitous that most press outlets don't cover it, most players don't follow it, and even most eSports fans couldn't explain it all. There's a jargon to it (littered with player and team names full of weird capitalization and strange spellings) that's about as complicated to understand as the notoriously complex game itself.

Riot's Vice President of eSports Dustin Beck even says that a recent tournament he attended was a big mess on its own: "The tournament kept pausing, it never started on time, you didn't have a schedule to know when your favorite teams were playing. It wasn't a fun experience, for me."

Still, eSports is one of the biggest factors in League of Legends' overwhelming popularity, with thousands of people attending these tournaments, and millions (almost ten million, in fact) watching live online. So how does Riot plan to smooth out those wrinkles that keep an even larger audience out of the game? The company will take the game into Season 3 within the next few weeks, and with it begins Riot's eSports headliner, the League of Legends Championship Series.

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The path to indie stardom is founded in tenacity, creativity, good timing and a heaping pile of luck. The developers behind Octodad, initially a student project and now the reason for Young Horses' existence as a studio, know all about spreading the word about an indie game (and probably a lot about crossing their fingers and hoping for a hit).

Programmer Kevin Geisler breaks down the Octodad media timeline on the game's official blog, noting that traditional events such as the IGF and GDC aren't huge draws for traffic. Octodad gets a break when other mediums pick up the story: The first major spike was a random note in a Ctrl+Alt+Del comic in 2010, and later from a swath of YouTube "Let's Play" videos. The "other" forms of advertisement even eclipse attention from established news sites, such as this one, at least in terms of traffic to the Octodad site.

The top YouTube videos for Octodad-flavored content come from outside sources, with Cr1tikal's 2011 gameplay video topping the charts at 1.5 million views. The top official Octodad video comes in at 430,000 views. Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are of course important draws, and Octodad finds itself in a lot of forum threads that mention similarly eccentric games, such as QWOP and Surgeon Simulator 2013.

For an overview of how Octodad does it all, complete with graphs and figures, check out the full blog post. Octodad 2: Dadliest Catch is set to launch this year for PC, Mac and Linux.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is the best soap opera since CBS cancelled Guiding Light.

If you've never played a Fire Emblem before, imagine Final Fantasy Tactics from an overhead perspective, or a particularly bloated derivation of chess. Nintendo's stalwart helped establish the turn-based tactical RPG genre, and Fire Emblem: Awakening features everything you expect from the series. Dozens of warriors team up to protect the magical Fire Emblem from an ever expanding army of evil miscreants. Each chapter is a different battle fought on a square grid, with your small army of various combat classes fanning out across the terrain to wipe out the opposing forces. The standard array of RPG unit types are present – warriors deal heavy damage with axes or lances, wizards hurl bolts of fire and lightning from afar, archers arch and thieves thieve.

Forget the standard medieval fantasy trappings, though. Forget the swords and arrows, the burly warriors and lithe Pegasus knights, the pointy-hatted mages and high-hatting nobles. Forget the vast array of combat tactics permissible by the game's open-ended approach to strategy. Forget the experience points earned with every attack. Forget the more powerful unit types unlocked once characters hit level ten, and the forges that upgrade your weapons, and the Paralogue missions that provide a secondary story to explore. Those are all vital to Awakening's compulsive allure, but what elevates Fire Emblem above other turn-based tactical RPGs are the deep roster of characters and the relationships that flower between them. You'll get as wrapped up in their stories as your grandmother did with the vengeful harridans and scheming suits of a soap opera.

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There is now, finally, a trailer and firm release dates for the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World "Online Multiplayer and Wallace Pack." It's coming February 5 to PSN, and one day later to XBLA.

Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley posted the trailer on his Tumblr; to see Wallace's "Hotness" and other special attacks, head over there and watch.

What looks like a teaser trailer for 'Year of the Snake' DLC for Sleeping Dogs emerged online, along with a list of trophies. The trailer, which its poster says was plucked from the game's directory, doesn't show much that couldn't be ascertained from the name, but the trophy list does offer a bit more info.

The Chinese crime cabaret involves a bomb squad you'll presumably join, and a bunch of cultists you'll definitely take down. There are also Evidence Collectibles to collect and give pride of place to in your Evidence Collection.

When approached about the DLC, a Square Enix representative told us, "No comment."

Show off your most impressive blops with the new Twitch integration in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The streaming service announced today that the Xbox 360 version will be the first to allow you to broadcast to your channel directly from the game, without the need for extra hardware. PC and PS3 versions are "coming soon."

The service even lets you use your Kinect as a webcam, for picture-in-picture broadcasting to show your reaction to your own amazing blops. Check out a video tutorial on Twitch's site, and then do us a favor and start using "blops" as a term for something impressive that happens within Black Ops. "Did you see those blops just now? Amazing blops!"

Suda 51's studio Grasshopper Manufacture has been acquired by Gungho Online Entertainment, known for its longstanding MMO Ragnarok Online. Rather than be renamed or realigned within the company, Grasshopper will continue to operate as Grasshopper Manufacture, much like Gungho's other acquired studios Game Arts, Gravity, and (ironically) Acquire, but will now have its games published by Gungho.

"We believe the strength of a publisher lies in its creative talent so with the addition of Grasshopper Manufacture and Suda 51 we are adding some of the most innovative talent in today's gaming world to our stellar family of independently-operated studios," said Kazuki Morishita, Gungho CEO (pictured, above, with Suda. "Suda 51 projects are known to put a unique spin on every game so coupled with our proven ability to support development with AAA resources including a tailored online experience, we believe gamers will benefit from this collaboration."

The good news there: Gungho has an American publishing operation, which recently released Dokuro, Puzzle & Dragons, and a selection of PSOne Imports, meaning Grasshopper games now have a built-in Western publisher.

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Separate from the closure of Warren Spector's Junction Point Studios, the developers of the Epic Mickey series, 50 more employees reportedly lost their jobs at Disney Interactive yesterday, according to the LA Times. The paper's source is "a knowledgeable person not authorized to discuss the matter publicly."

Disney Interactive Studios endured huge layoffs across 2011, including the closure of Split/Second developer Black Rock. We've reached out to Disney Interactive Studios for comment on today's report.

We learned yesterday Epic Mickey 2 sold 529,000 copies in the US during 2012, with that return on investment certainly sealing the deal on Junction Point's closure. Since then, Epic Mickey creator and Junction Point founder Warren Spector posted a public goodbye to his studio on Facebook, which we've printed in full after the break.

Spector was effusive in his farewell to Junction Point, saying he's rarely worked with a "team more dedicated or harder working." While he noted the games "polarized" critics and fans, Spector said he's never been part of anything as deeply touching as his Epic Mickey series.

Will the man behind Deus Ex be back? "Let just say, now it's time to move to the next adventure," Spector wrote. "I honestly don't know what that will be yet, so don't ask."

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Two men are fighting in space, as is often the case. The Earth, beautiful in blue, watches through a massive window while the two brawlers scuff and smash the sleek interior of a space station. I'm rooting for Batman, but my health bar's on the wane.

According to NetherRealms Studios Producer Hector Sanchez, this build of Injustice: Gods Among Us hasn't been tuned properly, so it's no surprise to see my masked nemesis, Bane, breaking my back over and over on difficulty spikes. To compensate I keep looking for an opportunity to activate Batman's special attack, in which he summons his hammerhead shark of a car to crush his opponent. Wondering how it gets up there – in space, at this hour – is a bit silly.

"It's a video game," says Sanchez. Everyone in the room chuckles, shaking off the perils of pondering the logistics behind a fighting game super move. That's a story on a microscopic scale compared to the one Injustice: Gods Among Us really wants to tell.

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The re-releases of Cyber Trooper Virtual-On and Virtua Striker are restricted to Japan, Sega announced today. The Sega AM2 duo are coming to Japan's PSN and XBLA on February 13, but unlike Sonic the Fighters, Virtua Fighter 2, and Fighting Vipers, the three games they were originally teased alongside, Japan is as far as they'll go.

That's sad news for fans of soccer and/or giant robots (which surely includes everyone), but you can still enjoy the Sega AM2 fighters on XBLA and PSN for 400 MSP/$4.99.

If your childhood was/is anything like our own, a good majority of it was probably spent blowing up and/or incinerating action figures that totally had it coming, on account of being found guilty of being the bad guy or belonging to one of our siblings. Valve and NECA's shiny new Team Fortress 2 figures follow a somewhat similar theme, though they typically prefer to be on the giving end, rather than the receiving.

Available at Toys 'R' Us, Amazon or directly from Valve's own store, both Demo and Pyro figures measure 7 inches tall, feature 25 points of articulation, include codes for in-game goodies, are individually numbered (1 to 10,000) and cost about $22.

Nintendo adjusted its annual net profit outlook from ¥6 billion to ¥14 billion (around $154 million) on the back of a weakening yen, with the company posting a nine-month operating loss of ¥5.8 billion ($63.7 million) compared to the corresponding figure of ¥48.4 billion for the last fiscal year. However, Nintendo's end-of-fiscal-year hardware targets took a big hit on the back of shipping 3.06 million Wii U consoles in 2012.

Nintendo now projects a figure of 4 million for Wii U by the end of its fiscal year on March 31, down from the 5.5 million the company predicted in October 2012. 3DS shipments are now expected to hit 15 million for the year, down from initial projections of 18.5 million.

Nintendo has now shifted 29.84 million units of its handheld since launch. Meanwhile, the Wii's life-to-date figures are up to 99.38 million, with 3.53 million units shipped across the nine month period.

Regards software, Nintendo shifted 11.69 million Wii U games since the console's launch on November 18, The best-performing games were the bundled-in Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros. U, coming in at 2.33 million and 2.01 million respectively.

On the 3DS front, Nintendo shipped 39.56 million units of the handheld across the nine months. Pokémon Black/White 2 soared to a total of 7.63 million on the back of almost 3 million sales in Japan alone, while New Super Mario Bros. 2 is at 5.96 million. Animal Crossing: New Leaf sits at 2.73 million, largely thanks to its popularity with Japan's female demographic. All figures are as of December 31, 2012.

The iOS port of Terry Cavanagh's flipping-centric platformer VVVVVV is running,undergoing testing by the man himself, though that shouldn't be taken as evidence of its impending release.

Cavanagh revealed via Twitter that while the game technically works, at least well enough to get two thirds of the way through without dying (above), the controls are only "acceptable" and the game won't be available to the public "for AGES." Real buttons are always the preferred control mechanism, Cavanagh added, but that he's hoping to "make it good enough to play."

Former Rare game director George Andreas left Microsoft earlier this month to join Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Andreas, who'd been with British developer Rare since 1996, is working as Creative Director at SCEE's London headquarters.

Andreas was creatively involved with much of Rare's work over the last 16 years, including the likes of GoldenEye, Banjo Kazooie, Perfect Dark Zero, and Viva Piñata. After the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2002, Andreas took on lead roles for Xbox 360 games, such as project leader and game director of launch game Kameo: Elements of Power, and creative director on Kinect Sports.

Android users still can't partake in the acclaimed slashing hijinks of Epic Games' mobile showpiece Infinity Blade or its sequel, but they can walk around its medieval setting and watch things, like, render and stuff, now that Epic Citadel is available for free on Google Play and the Amazon Appstore.

Originally released on iOS way back in the stone ages (read: September 2010), Epic Citadel serves as both Unreal Engine 3 tech demo and phone hardware benchmarking tool, allowing Android users to not only see how pretty UE3's rivers are, but also how well their devices handle rendering them. Our Galaxy Nexus, for instance, ranked in at the "High Performance" level, churning out an average of 43.9 FPS at 1196 x 720. During testing, framerates peaked just below 60 FPS and momentarily bottomed out around 18 FPS.

As with the iOS release, there isn't a tremendous amount to actually do in Epic Citadel, aside from looking at fluttery banners and lens flares, and its on-screen twinstick controls are only recommended for those who enjoy being 100 percent out of control of their movement. Still, it's very pretty.

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Demon's Souls and Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki is upset about leaving the series, he tells Edge. Dark Souls 2 has been passed to a new pair of directors, Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, a move that was "a company decision" according to Namco Bandai producer Takeshi Miyazoe, and was essentially done to inject the series with some fresh blood (large stains of it, no doubt).

Despite his feelings for the Souls series, Miyazaki admits, "Sometimes I'd like to work on a warmer game – not necessarily casual, but warmer in terms of the atmosphere and the environment." Given how pervasively gloomy the series is, we can understand how being mired in it every day might be draining. Furthermore, while Miyazaki is "sad about not being involved" with Dark Souls 2, he says, "Maybe this is the time to have new inspiration, so I'm fine about that."

For his part, he says that he is eager to play Dark Souls 2 "with a little bit of distance." The development team, fans and the press all understand "what the core of Dark Souls is," he says, and that core "will never change." Finally, while he'd rather not see "Dark Souls 8," he adds that the important thing is serving the series' fans. "We want to stay true to what they expect."