Nintendo has re-released The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition on the eShop today.

The DSiWare game is available for download on 3DS and DSi for free until February 2, 2014.

Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition was originally announced as part of Nintendo’s 25th anniversary celebration for the series at E3 2011. The remake, developed by Grezzo, is an update to a multiplayer mode from the Game Boy Advance port of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

It’s emerged that the purpose of Sony’s recent press invitation to an event in London was to reveal news of the new, slimline PlayStation Vita model, which will be hitting the UK very shortly. As we’ve reported before, the PCH-2000 version of the Vita – revealed last year in Japan – replaces the OLED display with a new, thinner LCD screen that affords it a thinner profile and better battery life than previous models. Now hitting the UK for the first time, Sony have begun to take pre-orders here as of today, with the proper launch penned in for February 7th. However, that cruise from Asia to the UK clearly isn’t cheap, since it appears Sony are adding quite a premium to the price for us Brits – at around £180, Sony’s recommended retail price equates to an equivalent 60% markup on their native price of 18,980 yen (just over £112); and is £10 more expensive than current Amazon prices for the older model. So I’ll throw this open to our readers: Would YOU pay an extra tenner for longer pleasure with a thinner and lighter model?

The patch that many players watching Chucklefish and Starbound had been waiting for has released. Furious Koala is the patch that finally brought “massive changes to disk serialization”. In other words – no more character wipes.

While this comes as a relief to most players, those who still want to play characters they will lose can choose to play in the new ‘permadeath’ mode. Other big changes include dropped items no longer despawning, saving many a player from rushing headlong into caves and breaking their necks in long drops trying to retrieve a treasured weapon before it vanishes, more move sets for the randomly generated beasts you find wandering planets, the removal of all Christmassy elements that the last patch brought in and a line that worryingly just says “Watch out for landmines”…

We’ll be diving into the game soon with some friends to show off the gameplay of Starbound soon, so keep watching. It should be good.

Patch notes are here.

A new snapshot has been released for Minecraft and with it comes a fairly massive thing, just for the map-making part of the community: an official ‘spectator mode’.

Spectator modes are useful for those game modes/maps where you don’t want players who are ‘out’ to interfere with the game for the rest of the players, but equally don’t want to box them all up in a ‘waiting room’ with nothing to do. The new official spectator mode can be turned on by typing the command ‘/gamemode 3’ or ‘/gamemode spectator’ and makes it so that spectating players are invisible to all but other spectators, can check inventories but not mess with them, inhabit the bodies of mobs (although not control them) and pass through blocks. In other words, it is a gamemode that turns players into ghosts.

Other notable changes include activator rails now being able to eject entities from minecarts, a new ‘invisible block’ for walling off areas of maps and the book copying can now differentiate between the original copy and copies of a book.

Snapshot notes are here.

In 2010, South Korea’s communications regulator became another on a list of worldwide regulators to fine Google for sucking up personal data during a Street View mapping project, which also recorded data about unprotected WiFi networks – the same stuff the company has received fines for from Germany and France. Four years later, South Korea has finally started to join in with holding Google to account. The regulator has ordered Google to delete all collected private data and to keep the public updated as this deletion progresses; as well as pay a fine worth the equivalent of US$196,000 to South Korea. Given the lateness and small size of the fine, forgive me if I don’t see Google getting out of bed over this, either.