There’s a certain madness that goes along with achievements in games. Something about those virtual badges makes people display the kind of behavior normally associated with rats in addiction experiments, except unlike the rodents, the players aren’t being fed narcotics pellets.

World of Warcraft’s newest holiday event, the Easter-themed Noblegarden, is only the latest example of this.

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We’ve seen plenty of actors using Twitter for promotion or communication with fans. Brent Spiner may be the first one to use it as a minimalist novella.

Novella might be the wrong word for it, but I’m having a hard time coming up with the right one. What do you call a fictional autobiographical account of a washed up actor whose only gigs are Bar Mitzvah appearances as his old character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who is also getting embroiled in some kind of noir-tinged murder mystery, which is told 140 characters at a time?

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It’s a new victory for recursive gaming. PopCap has put a game inside someone else’s game to promote their own game.

The casual game sensation Peggle just branched out into a new platform: World of Warcraft. By installing the addon, you can play 12 themed levels while you’re doing those obnoxious old-world quests that make you fly all over the place.

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The walking dead are great adversaries for video games, which by their nature pit lone protagonists against endless waves of disposable enemies. But I think we may have finally hit the point of zombie saturation.

You’ve got Burn Zombie Burn out and getting reviews. Plants vs. Zombies is coming May 5th. Valve just released a new survival mode for Left 4 Dead. The Last Stand 2 is still one of Armor’s most popular web games. The Dead Rising 2 hype machine is starting to crank up. Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers is only a few months old. Resident Evil 5 was the spring blockbuster, though the series is edging farther away from zombies with each new title.

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There’s good news and and okay news about game releases making the rounds today. Let’s start with the good news.

EA has announced that Brütal Legend has a concrete release date. The Tim Schafer-helmed game was long in limbo after Activision dropped it as a publisher. The date is set for October 13th.

For a while, fans of Schafer’s old games like Psychonauts and Monkey Island were wondering if Brütal Legend would ever see the light of day, so this provides a little satisfying closure, even though EA’s commitment wasn’t really in doubt.

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Back to the Future for the NES was the second game I ever owned, after the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge that came with the system. My friend’s older brother, Carl, told me it was awesome, so I asked for it for my birthday.

I don’t know if Carl actually believed that or if he was deliberately feeding bad info to a gullible ten year old. Either way, Back To The Future was definitely not a good game. It was what I had, though, so I played the heck out of it.

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…at least until all the people in the beta learn how to play. Until then, I’m going to be guilty of getting mad at video games.

The beta doesn’t really come with a tutorial or a lot of instructions beyond the occasional tip, so the players haven’t figured out the bits like how to lock on to other people, or that workers can deposit supplies to outposts.

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We got one of the 5,000 slots for the current round of the Fat Princess beta, because we’re just that important of an editorial voice for video games.

Ok, so we got it because we know someone who works at 1up.com. Same difference. We get to tell you about it either way.

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For the second time, I’m going to have to amend my opinion of Resident Evil 5. I previously said once I was finished the plot, I’d probably be done with game for good.

Well, after we went back and did the game on co-op, completing the rock-punching silliness of the last boss, it unlocked Mercenaries mode. And Mercenaries is a lot of fun, maybe even more fun than the main game.

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Patch days must be godsends for World of Warcraft blogs. When all the game servers are down for extended maintenance, what else is there to do but read about the game instead? (Yes, you could go outside, you wags. I did that already. It’s windy.)

In that vein, here’s a few more things being added to the world in today’s patch that we didn’t talk about last week, particularly the new achievements.

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