Phosphor Games has decided to put its ongoing bid to fund its super hero themed open world game Project Awakened on hold for the time being. The developer started the private funding initiative after it came close to funding the game via Kickstarter. Though that campaign failed, the developer noticed that thousands of gamers backed the project and decided to try again via its web site for the game.

Another day, another failed Kickstarter campaign. This time it is "Dizzy Returns," the brainchild of former Blitz Games developers Philip and Andrew Oliver, who finally and quite publicly threw in the towel today. The brothers admitted that their Dizzy Returns Kickstarter would likely fall short of its £350,000 goal - a goal that many in the community questioned and the brothers tried to defend shortly after they pitched the game idea on Kickstarter.

Yesterday we reported that Activision and developer Vicarious Visions had been working on Guitar Hero 7, but a report today from Kotaku citing an anonymous source close to the situations says that the game was a hot mess and overly ambitious.

In what has to be a record take-down of a questionable piece of marketing, Square Enix pulled a Facebook app promoting Hitman Absolution two hours after it was deployed after a scathing report from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The company later apologized for the app. The trouble began after RPS wrote about how "Hire Hitman" app allowed users to target and assassinate their Facebook friends, complete with death threats to your intended target.

Just a year after it launched, Zynga has pulled the plug on the follow-up to one of the games that made it a household name among Facebook users. According to this The Escapist report, Zynga will shut down Mafia Wars 2 at the end of this year. In a message to players posted on Facebook, Zynga announced that Mafia Wars 2 will shut down.

Sometimes crowd funding amazes the community and the developers looking to make their dreams come true and sometimes they show that an idea has no validity. Once in awhile there are sad situations like the one recently experienced by the team behind the game Alpha Colony, whose crowd funding appeal ended with team falling just $28 short of its $50,000 funding goal.

It looks like the whole "Six Strikes" plan concocted by MPAA, RIAA and six internet service providers in the United States has been pushed back yet again. The system was supposed to be deployed this summer and would issue warnings and - upon occasion - punishments to those suspected of committing copyright infringement on the Internet. This week the group in charge of that system, the Center for Copyright Information, announced that the ISPs involved were not ready to start sending out those warnings just yet, citing Hurricane Sandy as one of the main reasons for the delay.

Veteran game designer Don Daglow wanted to make a smartphone-based baseball game called Tony La Russa's Baseball With Fans so he launched a Kickstarter appeal to raise $249,000. Unfortunately after only a week of activity, the project only managed to bring in about $2,440 of that goal from 23 backers.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter says that Electronic Arts and Activision's mismanagement of big first-person shooter titles could end up contributing to another month of "terrible" software sales for the game industry in October. He is referring to Medal of Honor: Warfighter, a game that was supposed to be a major release for EA in October and Activision's 007 Legends, which fared worse than Medal of Honor.

The UK court of appeal was not happy and strongly admonished Apple for adding additional text regarding other court cases. Ultimately the court said that Apple's statement was "non-compliant," and that it must reword it within 48 hours, link prominently to it from its homepage until December 14, and use at least an 11-point font. The statement is currently linked at the bottom of the site and requires visitors to actually look for it. It's not exactly getting a prominent placement at the moment.

The public auction held Tuesday at what used to be 38 Studios' headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, raked in approximately $650,000, according to figures released by the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. Last week a similar auction was held at the site of 38 Studios' Big Huge Games division in Maryland. That auction brought in $180,000.

The state of Minnesota apparently doesn't like free online education that could benefit its citizens. The state has decided to tell California-based online education startup Coursera that it is not allowed to offer its online courses to the state’s residents without first getting permission from the state and paying a registration fee. Coursera was founded by Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, and partners with top universities around the world to offer certain classes online for free to anyone who wants access to them.

Here's an entry in the epilogue for OnLive - or at least what used to be OnLive - before it was sold to a holding company owned by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Gary Lauder. According to a report in the Mercury News, the cloud-based gaming service was sold to Lauder for a little under $5 million USD. Lauder reportedly paid $4.8 million for OnLive as part of an insolvency process this summer.

While some might still be arguing over who won or lost last night's first presidential debate showdown in Denver Colorado last night (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS pundits all agree President Obama had a bad night), Kotaku points out the biggest loser at last night's debate was Xbox Live. You may recall that Microsoft had been pushing live streaming coverage of the debate last night, along with interactive real-time reactions from fans.

If you're a video game tester and you act like a dumb ass (allegedly) you'll probably get fired. Just ask 20-something Blake Marsh, who decided to try a little political comedy with a dash of misogyny and hate on his Facebook page. It's too bad for Marsh that his bosses at Eidos Montreal weren't laughing when they found out.

Following a failed assassination attempt by suspect Richard Bain on the newly-elected Quebec premier-designate Pauline Marois that saw one person killed and another severely injured, Marsh decided to make light of the crime:

Yet another European Parliament committee has decided to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). By a vote of 19 to 12 the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade (INTA) soundly rejected the treaty.

A traffic stop in El Paso, Texas led to the arrest of a local man who found an exciting new way to hide his drug. While his method for concealment was certainly current generation thinking, it wasn't clever enough to trick the El Paso County Sheriffs' office. During a routine traffic stop because the driver failed to use his turn signal, police discovered three bundles of cocaine - two of which were hidden inside an Xbox 360 console - in a bag on the passenger seat of his older Mercedes.

Yesterday during THQ's conference call to discuss earning with investors and the media, the company admitted that they were wrong about a number of things.

"On our last call we told you we anticipated that our third quarter would be the largest in our company's history, " said President and CEO Brian Farrell at the start of the call. "Unfortunately, we were wrong."

Former Alorton, Missouri police chief Michael Baxton Sr. pled guilty on Thursday in federal court to two felonies after an FBI sting caught him stealing five game systems. His bad. According to the U.S. attorney's office, an investigation of "systemic corruption within the Village of Alorton by various public officials" brought Baxton down. Charges against other officials in the town may be forthcoming.

This Penny Arcade post details one of the worst public relations train wrecks in history. It all starts with a customer enquiring about a controller he paid for well in advance, but quickly escalates into the kind of conversation you don't want to be a part of. Honestly I’ve seen better customer service from people at the DMV..

While Americans were enjoying Thanksgiving last Thursday Australia's Internet service providers held a meeting to come to a consensus on how to deal with illegal file-sharing in the country.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's (R-Texas) effort in the Senate to kill the FCC's net neutrality rules has failed. The Senate voted, 46-52, against moving forward with a resolution that would have overturned federal regulations enacted in 2010 that govern anti-competitive behavior online.

"It's time to push back" against federal agencies that are overreaching their authority and enacting burdensome regulations, she argued before the Senate voted on a motion to proceed.

I'm all for letters to the editor, but one written by one Tina L. Bechtel, is particularly over the top and needs to be read to be believed. The Marysville, California mother of at least one son (at least the one she mentions in her letter) delivers what she calls her "long-overdue reaction to the 'supreme sellout' of our children," referring to the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year in the Brown v. EMA case.

Perhaps stripping the navigation out of its E3 demo for the Kinect-only Fable title, Fable The Journey. was a terrible idea.. In retrospect, Lionhead Studios boss Peter Molyneux thinks they should have left the navigational features of the game in the demo. Because it was stripped to keep a tighter control on the presentation, many media types and viewers believed the game to be an "on rails shooter."

This, Molyneux has claimed in multiple interviews this week, is not the truth, but he blames himself for that perception. Speaking to OXM after his part in the Microsoft E3 briefing, Molyneux actually apologized for the game's debut, calling the whole thing a "horrendous mistake."

"I made a horrendous mistake on the press demo on taking out the navigation allowing players to move," he stated. "I'll state on record now that Fable: The Journey is definitely not on rails."

Caught with her proverbial pants down, former FCC Commissioner and soon to-be Washington D.C. lobbyist for Comcast-NBC Meredith Attwell Baker issued a statement regarding her new job, the approval of the Comcast-NBC merger and the appearance of impropriety taking a job at the company has caused her.

The Republican commissioner issued the statement on Friday after several publications including the New York Times called into question her role in the merger and taking a job with the same company a mere four months after her vote. From her statement (found in full here - PDF):

"Not once in my entire tenure as a Commissioner had anyone at Comcast or NBCUniversal approached me about potential employment. When this opportunity became available in mid-April, I made a personal decision that I wanted to give it serious consideration.

Be wary of fake Battlefield 3 beta keys, says this Joystiq story. According to Battlefield 3 community site BF3blog, that website BF3nation is offering some fake Battlefield 3 beta keys to visitors. The site's owners were apparently received in a previous phishing scheme, so anything they offer is probably bullshit..

Joystiq says that EA has been trying to shut down the site for a while, but has so far been unsuccessful.

Right now EA isn't offering invites to beta keys for Battlefield 3, so anyone offering them is engaging in some sort of scam that will cause you nothing but trouble. Be vigilant. When Ea does start offering them you'll know because just about every game-related site on the Internet will be offering a chance to get one.

How could Fox News resist attacking Duke Nukem Forever? After all it's a game aching to court controversy - for reasons real or imagined. Fox News writers Jeremy A. Kaplan and Patrick Manning get together to take Gearbox to task for the multiplayer mode of the game, "Capture the Babe." They open by describing the multiplayer mode:

"A new videogame that requires you to abduct women and give them a "reassuring slap" if they freak out has gamers and women's rights-groups crying foul. Brace yourself for the awfully sexist world of Duke Nukem Forever."

Brace yourself for comments from people who know nothing about the game, save the ten minutes of video they found on YouTube:

Electronic Arts has brushed aside complaints that a developer from its studio BioWare had acted unethically in posting a user review disguised as a fan. Electronic arts downplayed a BioWare employee's positive user review of Dragon Age II on Metacritic, saying that it was normal for "people who make games" to "vote for them."

The publisher said it sees no wrongdoing in studios “voting for their own game," comparing it to movie makers voting their film up for an Oscar.

"Of course the people who make the game vote for their own game," an EA spokesperson told Kotaku. That's how it works in the Oscars, that's how it works in the Grammy's and why I'm betting that Barack Obama voted for himself in the last election."

UK TV retail queen Mary Portas (known as Mary Queen of Shops on TV) went after UK-based games retailer GAME in a very public way over the weekend after her 17-year-old son was not allowed to purchase a 15+ rated game at the company's Oxford Street store. Outraged that the store was following the recommended guidelines on ratings, Portas took her fight to the phones to contact the company's CEO and to Twitter.

The result was a very public display that some gamers responded harshly to - like this Eurogamer forum thread where users called her everything from a "see you next Tuesday" and a moron, to a b*tch and a drama queen. Good job, Internet.

Her initial argument was that staff at the store recommended games to her son, but then refused to sell them to him because he didn't have a proper form of ID.

As a general rule, everyone loves the antics of Sony Computer Entertainment America's fictional executive, Kevin Butler. His TV commercials are hilarious, and even his online chatter is good for an occasional chuckle. But a recent back and forth on Twitter may have put some egg on the face of SCEA’s marketing department. During a short exchange of tweets with Linux and Mac enthusiast Travis La Marr, Butler inadvertently retweeted the PS3 root key to all of his followers. The story is particularly embarrassing for Sony, who is in a mad dash to stop people from sharing that root key on the Internet.  

La Marr tweeted the code at Butler, and signed off with "come at me @TheKevinButler." Whoever handles that Twitter account for Sony did not notice the long string of code in the message. That person retweeted the entire message, adding the comment: "Lemme guess ... You sank my Battleship?"