Recent;ly there seems to have been a lot of sales of smaller but successful companies to the bigger dominating forces in the media. And if rumours are to be believed, Unity might soon be one of them.

Unity is currently valued at somewhere around $2 billion according to VentureBeat. Inside sources say that the company has been courting the likes of Google to possibly prepare for a sale. There’s been at least one potential buyer they’ve had serious talks with and presentations given to more besides.

Unity of course is a very popular games engine that appeared in 2004 and due to its ability to allow games to be programmed for multiple different platforms, it has especially gained favour in the growing market of indie game developers. Heck, you could even argue that it helped the rise of the indies in recent years.

At the moment Unity is keeping quiet on whether or not there will be a sale of the engine to another company.

Costume Quest was a small little RPG that took the idea of kids’ imaginations fuelling the ability to change their home-made costumes into powerful entities with which to smack their opponents with. Great idea, good execution but somewhat repetitive after a while.

Now the sequel has been released after having been teased a few months back for an October release and it seems that the time is soon. Costume Quest 2 has been released and from the trailer it seems that the story is that of a kid’s worst nightmare: Halloween has been outlawed! (well, worst besides the cancelling of Christmas) You must travel through time and fight the forces of an evil dentist to save the holiday and the right of children everywhere to consume sugary treats and wear home-made costumes!

There should hopefully be enough new content to keep previous players happy and to draw in new players too. Thinking of giving it a go yourself? Tell us below!

Gaming for charity seems to be getting popular. There’s going to be an event taking place today and it’s thanks to a team-up between OnLive and Extra Life.

OnLive’s 7th annual Game Day event will occur from 12:01am PST until 11:59pm PST today, and through it users of the service from the US, Canada and UK will be able to play any of OnLive’s 250+ PlayPack games which include such titles as Darksiders II, Batman: Arkham City and Saints Row the Third. An OnLive account is required to play, but signing up is free. Joining with the OnLive fundraising team means that your gaming will also be raising money for around 170 children’s charities too.

“Our hope is to rally awareness and participation for Extra Life in advance of their Game Day marathon by offering free gaming and multiple tiers of rewards to anyone who joins in and games for the cause.” says Jeff Woods, the OnLive Team’s captain.

And in case the charity aspect wasn’t enough to get you involved, there’ll be prizes and rewards for those who raise certain amounts of money. Raising $5 will get you a free month of OnLive and more rewards are available to those who raise $25, $50, $100, $200, $300 and $500, including more free months of OnLive and free games. Also, the top five participants will get a MadCatz microconsole and controller or a Wikipad gaming tablet.

Good news if you’re a fan of the video games Disney Interactive makes. A sizeable number of their back catalog has just been released on Steam today, the main ‘jewel’ probably being Epic Mickey 2 – a game that had previously had its PC port cancelled everywhere except parts of Eastern Europe.

It comes as a bit of a surprise, after all the company that made that game, Warren Spector’s Junction Point, was shut down by Disney just after Christmas. That could be blamed on the fact that although Epic Mickey was a loved game, the sequel didn’t do quite as well and neither game really did as well as it had been hoped they would do. I’ve played the first on the Wii, and while it is a wonderful game the controls really could have used some work. Regardless, I’ll probably stick the sequel onto my wishlist.

Here’s the full list of games released onto Steam from Disney Interactive:

• Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
• Disney Alice in Wonderland
• Disney’s Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree Animated Storybook
• Disney/Pixar Cars 2: The Video Game
• Disney/Pixar Cars Toon: Mater’s Tall Tales
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• Disney Planes
• Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure
• Disney Fairies: Tinker Bell’s Adventure
• Disney Tangled
• Disney Universe
• Disney/Pixar Brave: The Video Game
• Disney G-Force
• LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• Disney The Princess and The Frog
• Pure
• Split/Second
• Disney/Pixar Toy Story 3: The Video Game
• Disney/Pixar Toy Story Mania!
• Disney TRON: Evolution

After a week-long break, the Hero of the Storm’s alpha servers are back up, bringing with it a load of new features that have been added during the downtime. Of course, Blizzard want players to put them through their paces so the bugs can be spotted and stamped out in a timely manner, and the three biggest features are custom games, observer mode and replays.

Custom games are in a fairly early form, but they are basically the game mode that allows players to set up their own games with their friends rather than entering into the matchmaking pool of players currently looking for a match at that moment. The mode and battleground can be selected and the teams and their heroes are displayed in the lobby along with any observers. Empty slots will have an invite button to allow for the the invitation of those who might be observing the match, or if you fancy just filled with AI heroes. The host of the game also has other controls, such as being able to swap people around between teams, kick a player or make them an observer and some customisation for the AI players too.

Observers can see all the information that players can, as well as cycling between the POVs of all the players so they can see all the action of the matches.

Replays allow for you to relive victories and losses and have a bunch of commands such as slow down, pause and speed up for use. Clicking ‘Watch’ in the menu will bring up the replays from recently played matches to view.