Dishonored, the latest game from the crew at Arkane, and the first to be published by its new corporate overlords at Bethesda, still has that new game smell. Take this screenshot above, for example: Did you realize that this "retro-futuristic" world, based on 1666 London and powered by whale oil, had leggy robot flamethrowers? Strange, that new game smells kinda smells like burning.

Take-Two's net revenue for its first quarter of fiscal 2012 (which ended June 30) represents a downturn year-over-year -- $334.4 million versus fiscal 2010's $375.4 million (Take-Two shifted its fiscal calendar since then, in case you're wondering why we're comparing Q1 2012 with Q3 2010), with a net loss of $8.7 million instead of profits of $26.3 million. Last year around this time, of course, everyone on Earth was buying Red Dead Redemption, pushing Take-Two's profits into the stratosphere.

With the game sold to all of Earth's residents to date, that leaves only babies born in the interim as the audience for new copies of the game; that market of babies has done well enough for the company to count RDR and its Undead Nightmare expansion as one of the leading products in this quarter, with 2 million retail copies of Undead Nightmare shipped life-to-date and 9 million Red Dead Redemptions. Other leaders include Duke Nukem Forever, LA Noire, NBA 2K11 and Carnival Games: Monkey See, Monkey Do.

Game industry analysis firms NPD and EEDAR have announced a new partnership "aimed at improving the measurement and analysis of the evolving video game industry." Specifically, it appears that EEDAR will help NPD round out its coverage of downloadable game sales.

Together, the two firms hope to create a "total market tracking service for interactive entertainment," providing a broad picture of both physical and digital sales data. As part of this strategy, EEDAR's GamePulse service will immediately begin incorporating NPD's point-of-sale data.

Traditionally, NPD has only reported physical sales of games in North America, though the group has been attempting to expand its coverage of downloadable sales in recent years. Given EEDAR's expertise in the field, it seems to be a good partnership for both firms. It's worth pointing out, however, that Steam, undoubtedly one of the largest digital distribution platforms, does not share its sales numbers. In other words, getting a truly accurate picture of the downloadable landscape could be difficult.

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Those eager to overthrow evil in a polite, turn-based manner will have to wait a bit longer before diving into Might & Magic Heroes VI. Posting on the game's official forums, Community Developer Irina Kassina has announced another delay for the role-playing strategy hybrid, this time lasting until October 13.

Kassina explained that player feedback gathered during the beta, specifically relating to bugs and game balancing, highlighted the need for more development time. "Thus, we took the decision to delay the release of Might & Magic Heroes VI in order to secure a bit more time for the dev team to take into account your comments and deliver the best quality game," she wrote.

The beta will begin a second phase with additional single- and multiplayer maps on August 16. If you've won a key through a community contest or pre-ordered the game, you'll be granted access to the latest round of testing. And just think of the power you'll have over us! Your glitch-detecting prowess could determine whether or not we write another post about this game being delayed.

Producer Mike Inglehart and his team at Hothead seem to be serious about making The Baconing the best entry in the Deathspank series yet. Prior to jumping into my demo, director of marketing Oliver Birch showed off a 17-page Word document filled with complaints and ideas for improvement, taken directly from their community. You talked, and Hothead says it listened.

But one of the biggest changes is the addition of producer Inglehart, who recently joined Hothead and has been tasked with overseeing this third entry in the irreverent series. The Next Level Games transplant dove headfirst into refining the The Baconing, creating what he thinks is not only a funny game, but also one that is less monotonous than its predecessors. One thing is certain: it's definitely more challenging, as several deaths during my demo will attest.

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We still don't understand how the time-shifting RTS game Achron works -- the concepts of rewinding, summoning reinforcements for things that haven't happened yet, and whatever other kind of chrono-frippery Hazardous Software has put into the game are well, well over our heads.

The best way to understand Achron, we suspect, is to play it, which you'll be able to do starting August 29. Hazardous sent Joystiq a note letting us know the new date -- a note we suspect arrived from a future in which the game is already out, hence the certainty of the date.

If you'd like to travel into the future yourself, you can pre-order the game for $29.95 and hop into the beta.

It is good to chop fruit with your hands.

That's likely to be my very dumbest thesis for the remainder of my games-reviewing career, but let's face it: Fruit Ninja Kinect is an astonishingly dumb game. Its unswerving singlemindedness sets a new standard for simplicity: The game oscillates between binary states of chopping fruit and waiting to chop more fruit, with little extraneous cruft to pad the two. There is fruit, and then you chop it, and then the fruit -- in a burst of citrus and points -- is gone!

Such a single-faceted premise would be a mark of death for any game, even a budget-priced downloadable title. Luckily for Halfbrick, it is good to chop fruit with your hands.

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With the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution just two weeks away, it's a perfect time to remind our younger readers that while it may be developer Eidos Montreal's debut project, it's not the first game in the series. That distinction belongs to 2000's Deus Ex, developed by Ion Storm Austin under the watchful eye(s) of Warren Spector (think: Epic Mickey) and Harvey Smith (think: the newly unveiled Dishonored). If you've never played it, Deus Ex: New Vision may not make that process easier, but it will make it more palatable.

New Vision is a mod four years in the making, which updates Deus Ex's aging visuals (they weren't much to look at in 2000!) "with around 75% of the world textures remastered at high definition." We've got some screens in the gallery below, and a year-old video of the beta above. If you're interested, grab the mod from Mod DB at the Source link below.

When you've made big money like Shane Kim, former VP of Microsoft Game Studios, you wanna get paid even more spreading that acquired knowledge around like Nutella on breakfast toast. The latest bit of supplemental income for the former exec is a seat on the board of Zipline Games.

"Shane's knowledge, advice and help will be invaluable as we enhance the Moai platform and partner with more and more game studios," said Todd Hooper, CEO of Zipline Games. The plan is for Kim to advise on the development of the Moai mobile, cloud-based platform.

Kim, who spent almost two decades at Microsoft, also recently joined the board of GameStop to advise on its GameStop Impulse digital distribution platform.

"Hey man, come in," a weary looking Jonathan Blow said. He was welcoming me into his temporary New York City abode, a swanky hotel in midtown where he'd been put up for a few days to show off a preview build of his next game, The Witness. His bare feet indicated to me that I'd either just woken him up, or that he was very comfortable with strangers. It turned out to be a combination of both, as Blow's PR-less presentation style (and sleepy demeanor) soon revealed.

"We started the game about two years ago, for real. I actually started it as a prototype earlier than that, before I finished Braid. I wasn't convinced I really wanted to do it, because I was still in the mindset of 'I'm the lone indie developer who types everything in himself and this is gonna be a much more ambitious project.' So I didn't wanna do it for a while, then I played with some other game ideas. Kinda liked those, but decided I really wanted to do this," Blow cursorily explained before I jumped in. While the dev process has seen contract workers, Blow's new studio (the ... uniquely named Thekla, Inc.) still only employs three full-time devs, himself included. "We're gonna be going into more of a production-type phase this next year," he added.

The work of just one 3D artist has made the game's mysterious, puzzle-filled island alive with bright, colorful, abstract flora. In fact, outside of a handful of expected bugs I encountered, The Witness is shaping up to be another standout work from a developer already well-respected in his field. Blow left me with one final note before I jumped in: "What you play here is basically the game, it's just gonna be a better version of this that we show."

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The Interactive & Digital Entertainment Festival was held in Cannes in June; a retail-focused festival, publishers bring their games to sunny southern France in the hopes of attracting the attention of Europe's buyers. One way to do that: A sand sculpture!

French marketing crew Urban Act were commissioned to recreate the already iconic image of Drake in front of the crashed plane in the desert to promote Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. Note how they've got the workspace roped off, just in case someone's got a Godzilla game to promote.

The 'Blitz 1UP' program, an initiative by developer Blitz Games meant to provide free development and QA assistance to indie games, has closed after three years of activity and support of "over 30 games."

"We've had some great successes during our time working on this initiative," said producer Neil Holmes in a statement on the forums. "But unfortunately we haven't consistently reached the levels of success we had hoped to, and sadly we have now closed the programme to new applications."

Holmes said that the lack of success is partly due to the fact that Blitz 1UP couldn't afford a great deal of marketing for its titles. "The other issue we have had is with the portals we have worked with," he said -- meaning Steam. "Getting their approval on indie games is difficult and their decision making process can often appear quite random. Even when we have succeeded in getting games on to Steam they've often only stayed on the dashboard for a few days before disappearing into the indie games section, which results in a massive drop in sales."

Blitz is launching a website called Indie City in order to continue promoting Blitz 1UP games. The new site will offer "powerful community tools through blogs, forums, achievements and global leaderboards to help keep indie fans coming back for more," as well as recommendations tailored to each user.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that Fatshark's PSN explorer-and-bird treasure hunting expedition, Hamilton's Great Adventure, won't be arriving on time -- because "on time" would have been April and that deadline has passed. A subsequent July release date also sailed on by.

Today, Fatshark announced a new release date, slyly blaming the delay on protagonist Ernest Hamilton taking five weeks of paid vacation. It'll now be released on August 23 in North America and August 24 in the rest of the world -- just in time to compete with Street Fighter 3. But if you don't want to wait, you can check out the PC version that came out in May.

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In a tweet, Hideo Kojima announced that the Snatcher-universe radio drama, "Suda 51's Sdatcher," will be released as a free download. A CD will be sold later to pay the voice actors, including many Metal Gear series cast members. There's still no official release date for the drama, but it was planned to be concurrent with Hideradio podcast number 300 -- they're on 298 right now. Kojima subsequently tweeted the character art of Jean Jack Gibson above.

Kojima also said that he's heard the music Akira Yamaoka is making for the drama, which was to be '70s progressive rock and '80s electro pop. Per Andriasang's translation, Kojima likes it but questioned its reception by the masses. And when you bring in Suda 51 to make a podcast radio drama based on an adventure game from 1988, you don't want anything to get in the way of that built-in mass appeal.

Zumba Fitness. Its name should cause perspiration, an elevated heart rate and total fear in any competitor on Chart-Track's UK all formats chart. In its eighth week in the top spot, the game saw a 16 percent increase in sales and outsold the next four titles combined. Those four consist of Dirt 3, Cars 2, Just Dance 2: Extra Songs and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean.

Although Zumba's eight week run is... impressive? Yeah, let's say impressive. It still has a long way to go before defeating Who Wants To Be A Millionaire's 18 weeks and Wii Fit's 16-week reign.

No new releases entered the Top 40 last week. Now, to find a crowbar to help detach this collective facepalm.

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The folks at NetherRealm Studios have formed a habit of slathering rich, thick nostalgia all over the compatibility packs they periodically issue for Mortal Kombat, and up until this point each pack has been a veritable pallet-swap parade of klassic kostumes and fond memories from a bygone era. Earlier this week, however, news broke of an upcoming compatibility pack which harbors "Retro Cyber Sub-Zero" in its trojan-horse like belly, and that ish ain't canon.

It's so not-canon, in fact, that our entire concept of reality shattered into a million tiny pieces. We were so distraught over this heresy, that we did a little digging to see if any of the Mortal Kombat mythos can be trusted, and it may shock and astound you to learn that some of your favorite characters don't even exist.

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Do you feel like you're making the game you always wanted to play?

Absolutely -- I think with mobile games there's always the desire for a game you can pick up and be into the action straight away. I'm a big fan of Bejeweled Blitz -- I used to spend an hour of tube travel each day desperate to top my friends' best scores of the week. I wanted Sloopz to have the same appeal and after finally being able to top the scoreboard of a game (I'm sure this won't last) I feel I've hit the nail on the head.

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BioWare Montreal developer Manveer Heir works on the Mass Effect franchise by day and champions race equality in games by night, having discussed the importance of diversity at the DICE 2010 panel, "Games of Color," and more recently speaking with Gamasutra about the delicacies of developing with race in mind. After little change over this one-year span, Heir is still an advocate for bringing diversity to game development, seeing games as a portal to a broader social commentary:

"You can think of fantasy games where if you were the dark elves, you know, the Drow, were always looked upon... They were the black people of the fantasy world, right? And if you played the dark elves, you were treated like garbage by many of the townspeople," Heir said to Gamastura. "So, my only question is, why can't we do that when we're actually talking about real people?"

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