Ever since Nintendo revealed upgraded new models of its popular Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL Handheld consoles (called, appropriately, the “New Nintendo 3DS” and “New Nintendo 3DS XL” respectively), Nintendo fans around the world have been eagerly awaiting their launch. Both models hit store shelves in Japan last October, followed by Australia and New Zealand a month later, but elsewhere in the world Nintendo has kept quiet on their plans – all we know for sure is an international release is planned for “2015”. Now though, we have a hint that a European release may not be far away.

Similar to what it did for the launches of the Wii, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo has announced a new Ambassador Promotion giving additional rewards to early adopters of the new console. Although the promotion is currently limited to selected Club Nintendo members, interestingly this does not seem to be limited to people in the original 3DS ambassador program – so all Club Nintendo members may want to check their inbox in the next few days to see if they’re eligible.

Should you be lucky enough to qualify, the exclusive Ambassador Edition set will be available to you at an asking price of £179.99. For this, you’ll receive a white New Nintendo 3DS model (note this is not the XL, which does not seem to have a similar promotion at this time) in a special ‘Ambassador Edition’ box; along some exclusive Ambassador Edition cover plates, and a slick Super Smash Bros. set in case you want to mix things up. Nintendo is also throwing in a charging cradle, stylus and a 4GB microSDHC card.

Although Nintendo are still keeping mum on the final launch date for the New Nintendo 3DS existence of this special, limited-availability promotion (which is basically a glorified invitational pre-order bonus) suggests that we may not have much longer to wait.

Yesterday on his Facebook page DJ Cutman revealed that they have been working on a project recently to do with Minecraft – a remix of Starbomb’s tune Minecraft is For Everyone.

The reveal came in the form of a post that read “I’ve got this big Starbomb remix just about finished with NO IDEA what to do for artwork! It’s about ‪#‎Minecraft‬… WHAT DO” to which followers responded with suggestions for what they could do for the cover art for the mix. Eventually a prototype cover was posted to the post which I’ve included below.

Starbomb of course are the comedy band formed between the members of Ninja Sex Party, Leigh Daniel Avidan and Brian Wecht, as well as flash animator Arin “Egoraptor” Hanson; who write and perform songs about various video games and video gaming related subjects with animated videos. No word yet if they’re aware of this remix.

Keep tuned to Sanitarium.FM and hopefully you can hear this track and many others in the near future!

Gaming’s sort of divided on the Five Nights at Freddy’s games. On one hand you have some people who dislike it because it relies on jumpscares to end a game and because the first game got so popular so fast it became one of those “Let’s Play fads” where everyone was playing it and therefore some swore off it because everyone else had already done it. But as a game it did have a wonderful tension-setting atmosphere, arguably most of the horror came from the waiting and paranoia it would grip you with, there were some great design elements (oh Mangle, you poor twisted fiend) and if you took the time to find all the hidden easter eggs you would be rewarded with some parts of what is a wonderfully creepy story.

I fall into the latter camp, mainly because I love the lore (missing just enough information to keep us guessing) and have a thing for creepy yet child-friendly things. So when I found out that the website at scottgames.com had changed from the OFFLINE image that’d been displaying since late last year to the image below, I was excited.

Wonderful creepy image, and looking at the website’s source also reveals one more chilling message of “I remain”. But then you lighten it a bit to reveal the 3 in the bottom-right corner… and something else that makes the image even more scary.

See those teeth on the animatronic? Stained red with blood maybe? Possibly whoever was responsible for the infamous Bite of ’87? There’s just so many things you could guess from this image if you know the backstory, and that’s what excites me.

Of course, this was only put up a few days ago so there’s been no more details revealed yet, but the auto-e-mailer for Scott Cawthon does confirm that yes he is working on a third game for the series and no he’s not going to tell us anymore yet. If it’s anything like FNAF2, we’re going to get more teaser images in the weeks to come and might even get to see what state the animatronics are in now… and that might help us place whether it’ll be a sequel or a prequel or a midquel or… something.

Can’t wait.

2011 seems a very long time ago, even though it was only 4 years ago. As time goes on you change as a person. I certainly have, most of that change coming in the last year or so. So my first Minecraft account name of chromefanfox really doesn’t fit me anymore as a person, which is why I have my main one under PredictedCyborg for gaming now.

However, having talked about implementing it in the near future last year, Mojang have begun to release little hints that they’re getting ready to make it possible for users to change those usernames that they longer like to something more fitting. I have a few ideas for my alternate account name already. The teaser came in tweet for from Mojang dev Kristoffer Jelbring, showing the change button in the account menu.

Teaser. #minecraft pic.twitter.com/Edv4CXwckL

— Kristoffer Jelbring (@KrisJelbring) January 5, 2015

A small feature maybe, but one that many have wanted for a while. As I said, time changes us and before the only way to get an account with a different username was… well, to pay again for it. And you can see how that’d be an unpopular option and why this change will be celebrated when it releases.

A new Steam beta client was rolled out yesterday. It contains an element that can be important for PC gamers, especially if you’re the sort to screencapture what you’re doing in an attempt to edit videos for Youtube.

The new feature is an FPS counter, which although small was something you could only previously do via a game’s built-in FPS counter, through a third-party program like FRAPS or various GPU addons/programs. Maybe you still prefer to use one of the previous methods if you’re used to them, but in case you’d like to try the Steam counter here’s the instructions to get it working for you by opting into the Steam client beta.

• Go into Steam, and click the “Steam” menu option in the top left.
• Go to “Settings”.
• In the settings menu, you should default onto the “Account” sub menu. Find the “Beta participation” section, and click the “Change” button.
• Here, you can choose to opt into the Steam client beta. Doing so will require you to restart the Steam client after a small update.