According to an MTV Multiplayer Blog post, August is the most painful month to be a gamer. Historically speaking, that is. For starters, two megaton Legend of Zelda games were apparently delayed in the month of August: Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. Lair was recently pushed back a few weeks, and if your memory is sharp, you'll recall GTA 4 has been delayed until sometime next year. All in August (or nearly in August, as the blog is careful to say).

Paranoia, or is our collective gamers' horoscope destined to bring us pain every year? At least we have Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to shine a bit of brightness on the gloomy August doom parade.

Bit Blot, the indie studio behind Aquaria, recently posted a short development feature about underwater fauna players will find in its upcoming exploration game. After all, what's the point of swimming around if there's nothing to try and bite you? Expect a battery of crustaceans to give chase under the sea, including a giant crab or two, as well as the not-so-friendly sea dragon. Players will also be able to ride seahorses as shown above.

Early in Aquaria's development, we were promised a thriving ecosystem of underwater creatures to interact with in the game. This is just an early taste. The team drew inspiration from the strange critters that swim Earth's seas. A thread on Bit Blot's forums is packed with images of strange and surreal animals.

According to a recent forum post, Nifflas, the creator of Knytt and Within a Deep Forest, may release the expansion to his upcoming Knytt Stories for free. At first Nifflas was considering releasing the pack for a modest fee, but after considering the extra work required to charge players (not to mention the fact that the taxman will take notice if he turns a reasonable profit), he's now leaning toward releasing it for free or as donationware.

Knytt Stories continues the atmospheric, exploration-based gameplay that Knytt brought to our attention, though this time there are more areas to discover and a few power-ups to find. Both the game and the editor have already been announced as free. Look for Knytt Stories at the end of August.

One of the first computer-animated TV programs, ReBoot, is about to get a second chance at life. Sure, even in 1994 the show was a bit campy and featured thin plots and bad voice acting, but look how shiny everything was! Now Rainmaker Animation is getting ready to "relaunch the brand in a new way" by releasing a series of three feature-length episodes.

The interesting bit is that we, potential viewers, help sculpt the plot. Five undiscovered writers were recruited by Rainmaker to prepare separate pitches for a new ReBoot storyline. These will be posted on the Zeros 2 Heroes website where visitors can work with each production team to help refine their ideas and later vote to choose their favorite pitch. "When it comes to long-standing genre entertainment properties, the fans are the real experts.", says Zeros 2 Heroes president Matt Toner.

Not a bad idea. Fans know what they want to see, and this way Rainmaker will ensure nearly everyone is satisfied. And if the ReBoot reboot tanks, fans can only get angry at themselves.

[Via Ain't It Cool News]

Aimed at what the publisher calls a more "mature audience", NEVES for the DS is a simple tangram game of shape turning, sliding, and flipping.We thought we'd get to assemble overly detailed silhouettes of Pamela Anderson, but in reality NEVES is just designed for the more cognizant mind of the older, discriminating DS player. No bright happy colors and hand-holding tutorials, just over 500 brain-hurting tangram puzzles, all with touch screen control. Atlus USA will be bringing NEVES to North America in November this year.

A reader of N+ recently sent in a note about Nintendo's unique marketing approach in Greece. To help promote Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, women dress up as nurses and walk around local beaches letting sunners test their brain age. This seems a bit counter-intuitive, as hot nurses plus scantily-clad beachgoers tend to make the blood flow to parts of the body that aren't the brain. But you have our attention, at the very least. More pics can be found on Nintendo's official Greek site.

[Via N+]

If you've never heard Tanguy Ukulele Orchestra, you're missing one of the few ukulele-flavored treats in the gaming realm. Just a guy with a computer, a voice, and a ukulele, Tanguy makes (often rough) arrangements of game themes such as The Legend of Zelda, Kid Icarus, and Gyakuten Saiban. Recently three more tracks appeared on the site, including an Alex Kidd medley, the first stage of Double Dragon, and the moon music from Duck Tales. Great stuff, and we dig the organic, ukulele-in-the-livingroom feel.

A German S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community has gone on strike, citing a lack of patch support from publisher THQ as their reason. The long-running fansite Oblivion Lost promises to hold the strike until THQ releases patches for every localization territory that actually work.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. launched with more than its fair share of bugs, but teams worked to patch the most critical errors as quickly as possible. The first patch squashed 68 bugs but rendered previous save games useless. Kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

While they're at it, let's move to strike the periods from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s name. Boy is that a pain to type.

[Via CVG]

Retro Treasures points us to a set of "handheld" arcade games (more like tabletop) up for auction on eBay. Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Dracula have been preserved from the dark era of 1981 and are fully operational, supporting two players simultaneously and running off those not-necessarily-rechargeable things called C batteries. The auctioneer has several other tabletop arcade games on the block, including Donkey Kong and Q-Bert. The prices seem a little steep for some, but sometimes nostalgia knows no limits.

[Via Retro Treasures]

Making Link out of paper or spending an afternoon crafting Quake characters is all well and good, but why choose Link when you can sculpt a curvy female forms such as Lara Croft's? Ninjatoes spent grueling hours studying every inch of Lara's polygonal body and has made a papercraft worthy of our attention. With 116 parts, this ain't no paper hat project, so if you want Lara, you'll have to work for her.

[Via PaperKraft]

Kyle Gabler, founder of the Experimental Gameplay Project and indie game studio 2D Boy, recently posted a few stats from his side project, Human Brain Cloud. The online "game" shows you a word or phrase and all you have to do is type in the first thing that comes to mind. The answers players give are amassed into a huge network of connected blobs viewable from the website. Nearly 800,000 associations have been submitted so far, connecting over 100,000 unique words and phrases.

What's the most commonly submitted word? "Sex", of course. The second most common is "me", while the third is "money". Good to know the collective consciousness of the human race has its priorities straight. Human Brain Cloud lets you sit and submit as many associations as you want, and we spent more time than we'd like to admit adding our two cents to the project.

[Via Independent Gaming]

Got an old Pokemon Pinball cart laying around? Then you, friend, have a one-way ticket to frugal gaming fun ... with rumble! Xyzzy has just posted a tutorial on Instructables on how to build a rumble pak that fits smoothly into your DS lite GBA slot. Yes, Nintendo released a smaller version of the pak for the Lite, but you'd have to spend money and be like a normal consumer if you did that. With Xyzzy's plans, you can make a mess, destroy a game cart, and probably injure yourself too!

[Via Infendo]

Slapping. The fighting style of choice for people wearing mittens, women, small children, and now, gamers. Rose & Camellia is a Japanese-made Flash game where you play a woman named Reiko who married into a noble family only to have her husband die shortly afterwards. The women of the house don't respect her, so its your job to slap some good old fashioned sense into them.

Fights are turn-based and you only have a few seconds to act. When it's your turn, click the "attack" button and swipe the mouse in an arc to slap the other woman. When she's on the offensive, click "evade" and make a mirrored arc to avoid the attack. Successfully dodge and you're ready for a counter-slap!

While the Wii surfs the waves of success, Shiny founder Dave Perry says the party won't last. Why? "Gamers are attracted to beautiful looking games. When a game comes out - a game like a Halo or something, something they haven't seen before - they'll drop everything and they'll drop their Wii controllers when it does.". And while waggle control is a step in the right direction, Perry notes that he doesn't feel it's the "final solution" to user interfaces.

We can see Perry's point, but a gorgeous game doesn't need a Cell processor to exist. You can, in fact, create a beautiful game on a weak system, or craft a butt-ugly title on a PS3. The Wii may not dish out the horsepower that makes it easier to push the graphics wagon further, but what makes games gorgeous is the artistic direction, not tech specs.

According to French gaming site Xboxygen (which doesn't cite a verifiable source), Activision has "announced" release dates for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. North America gets its taste on October 30, while Europe has to wait ten more days for November 9. CoD 4 ditches the World War II-theme for modern combat (hence the cryptic title). It also drops the familiar campaign system to unfold the gameplay like an "action novel of a television series". Check out our early look at CoD 4 from this year's E3 for more in-depth information.

We're still waiting to hear back from Activision.

Activision confirms that no announcements have been made: "The COD4: MF release date is Fall 2007-we haven't given out specific dates at this time."