Unlimited dragons, meet unlimited quests. According to game director Todd Howard, you’ll have plenty of time to master defeating Skyrim‘s infinite supply of dynamically generated wyverns, thanks to the game’s Radiant Story system, which will continue to generate quests ad infinitum.

“The vibe of the game is that it’s something that you can play forever,” said Howard in an interview with Wired Magazine.

The main and subplot quests are all still scripted by developer Bethesda, but the Radiant Story system, which records your actions and constantly rearranges the game according to what you have done, where you have been and who you have pissed off, will provide a steady stream of randomly generated new quests long after the scripted quests have been all quested-out.

“The world is probably the one thing that sets [Skyrim] apart from other games,” said Howard, adding that even the main quests have randomly generated elements geared toward leading players into interesting, unexplored parts of Skyrim‘s massive open world. “It feels really real [and] it’s just fun to explore.”

We will soon be returning to delivering your daily dosage of game-related snark, hopefully with some new writers. We’re looking for a few dedicated game-philes to join the ranks of our volunteer staff, writing posts, conducting interviews and reviewing games – more details to follow, just as soon as I finish digging this hole.

This dead hooker in the Raccoon Mario costume isn’t going to bury herself!

The world of Borderlands was big, as in “it would take a solid hour of pedal to the metal driving to traverse planet Pandora’s Mad-Maxian wastelands” big, but its story – not so much. Out of 126 total missions, only 47 were story related, a ratio that developer Gearbox hopes to better balance in Borderlands 2.

“The story missions in Borderlands 2 are about three times the scope of a single story mission in the first game,” designer Paul Hellquist told Game Informer. “And they twist and turn throughout; your gameplay is changing, your goals are changing…it will be a much more dynamic experience compared to last time.”

“Lots of fans and critics gave us the business on the story,” he said of criticism that the first game was too heavy on FPS, too light on RPG. Borderlands 2‘s story, penned by former videogame blogger and current Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? star Anthony Burch, promises to offer a more interactive, immersive experience, which we can only hope translates into fewer fetch missions. “When we took a look at what we had done last time, we said, ‘we can do way better than that’, so story has been, from the very first day, one of the most important things that we wanted to improve in Borderlands 2.”

So, to break it down: (dynamic story missions) + (chattier friendly NPC’s)/(smarter enemy AI) x (dual weapon-wielding dwarf with wicked facial hair) = <3.

Damn, that was one hell of a trailer! The game has yet to hit store shelves, and Dead Island already has a book deal. Bantam has announced it’s publishing the official novelisation of Deep Silver’s zombies-in-paradise game, penned by award-winning British Fantasy author Mark Morris. The book is scheduled for simultaneous release with the videogame on September 8, giving readers “a terrifying glimpse into the horrors thrust upon the four individuals who have unwittingly embarked upon the ultimate holiday from Hell.”

In addition to being a successful horror author in his own right, Morris has written novels featuring Doctor Who and Captain Jack Harkness, so he should have no problem merging his more macabre sensibilities with characters not of his own making. Especially when said characters are described as “four individuals with distinctive backgrounds and abilities [who] seem to be unaffected by the zombie apocalypse.” Wow, they really come alive right off the page, don’t they? Clearly Morris is not going to have to navigate the complex emotional malaise of Holden Caulfield. Just toss the love interest, the nice guy, the bad boy and the strong, silent type in a blender with some palm trees and rotting corpses and a dash of haunting piano music. The book writes itself.

Girls’ RPG Cinderellife is basically an enhanced 3DS version of Level-5′s popular mobile game Kyaba Joppi, in which you play a hostess club employee. Cinderellife stars a country girl who has come to “Neo-Ginza” seeking fame and fortune, but ends up lighting cigarettes, pouring drinks, and fending off the sexual advances of drunken salarymen at a club called The Castle. The gameplay revolves around chatting up your male guests – which range from powerful politicians to famous singers to anime characters – so that they’ll purchase overpriced food and drink items from the club’s menu.

What’s weird here, you know, other than Japanese culture, is that I don’t find this remotely as insulting as Hannah Montana: The Movie:  The Game. There’s nothing that gets my estrogen-fueled blood boiling faster than a developer slapping a Bratz or Barbie or Disney tween-sation skin on their latest suck fest and marketing it as a “Game 4 Girls.” It’s incredibly insulting, and I’m not talking about the generally poor quality of the games. I’m talking about using the numeral “4″ than the  preposition “for” – girls can grasp the subtle complexities of language mechanics just as well as boys!

The Dead Rising series isn’t about the mundane concerns of the coming Zombocalypse, like finding shelter, food and water as you wait out mother nature’s final f*ck you, it’s about cramming as many zombies as possible onto the screen. And while it won’t be hitting the ultimately unmanageable 7,000 brain binge-ers featured in the Dead Rising 2 tech demo, upcoming spin-off Dead Rising 2: Off The Record has “upped the [zombie] density by at least 30%.”

“This time around, because we made Frank a tougher character right at the beginning and we gave him more cool weapons that do a lot more damage, we actually managed to up the zombie density and have the world be a little more dangerous for him,” said producer Jason Leigh in an interview with Siliconera. “There are probably a few thousand zombies in any one environment.”

In addition to adding more zombies and new weapons, Capcom Vancouver is also providing players a chance to use Frank’s camera in game, with several missions that use the protagonist’s photojournalist talents for more than just acquiring Prestige Points.

Nobody puts PopCap in the corner! Nobody but Angry Birds developer Rovio, who have ruffled a few feathers by claiming to be worth more than the possible $1.3 billion EA’s shelling out to acquire PopCap Games.

“The valuation from our point of view is somewhere, I dunno, maybe north of PopCap,” said vice president of franchise development Ville Heijari in an interview with Eurogamer, adding that they’ve had inquiries from “many, many” different interested parties. “We’ve set the bar pretty high from early on, because we really think we have a lot of opportunities with our Angry Birds IP and there’s a lot of creativity at the studio beyond Angry Birds.”

Yeah, like Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio. And let’s not forget the Angry Birds flip flops, Angry Birds plushies and Angry Birds keychains. It might be my Peggle obsession talking here, but Rovio shouldn’t trash talk the brains behind Bejeweled, Bookworm and Plants vs Zombies until they come up with a non-avian inspired hit, no matter how much money they’re doing the Scrooge McDuck backstroke in.

The original King Of All Cosmos has partnered with Tiny Speck, the game studio founded by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, to work on their side-scrolling massively multiplayer game that takes place inside the minds of giants. “The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants,” said Butterfield in an interview with CNET. “So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants’ imaginations and grow…the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants’ imagination.”

Players won’t be farming or fighting, rather they’ll help collectively shape the world around them by doing favors and learning skills, like smoothie making and butterfly milking. In other words, Takahashi’s gonna fit right in.

Why, it’s none other than Booker DeWitt, protagonist of BioShock: Infinite, making his public debut. In addition to giving us our first glimpse of the disgraced Pinkerton agent turned private investigator, the accompanying wanted poster lets us know that DeWitt is a 37-years old white male, 6 feet in height and weighing 195 pounds, with green eyes and a scar above the right eye. And you should stare into those sexy, scarred eyes while you can. The cover, an homage to Uncanny X-Men #141 according to director Ken Levine, may be the first and last time you get to admire the DeWitt’s turn-of-the-century style.

Jack, the protagonist from Bioshock 1 and 2, was notoriously camera shy. Other than his iconic chain-tattooed wrists, he didn’t flash the goods in the first two games, which unfolded largely in first person perspective, though there were a few blurry security photos to be found floating around Rapture.

The team behind Deadly Premonition, 2010′s wonderfully weird low-budget, high camp survival horror game, is ready to start working on their next cult classic, they just need some cash to start the strange ball rolling.

“It’s high time we started working on something new,” said director Hidetaka “SWERY65″ Suehiro on his blog. “However, since the company I work for, Access Games, is only a developer at this point, we focus on creating games … we have to team up with a publisher and create a scheme for the entire process from production to release.”

“In other words, the reality of the matter is that I can say I want to make a new game! As much as I want, but that alone is not enough to start the process. Would anyone be ready to invest in us?”

This would usually be the the point where I’d make a punny “premonition” joke, but I’m in a hurry to start building that Deadly Premonition 2 kickstarter page – the world of videogames needs more sinner sandwiches!