This past Friday, a shopper at a Best Buy in Rochester, MN noticed this large sign proudly proclaiming that Blizzard’s long awaited Diablo III would be launching on February 1 of this year. Complete with digital countdown clock, the sign promised a midnight opening to go along with the release. While it’s easy to get hopeful with the the purported release so tantalizingly close, this is probably just a case of retailers making up plausible sounding dates for a release. A big clue is that they spelled “February” as “Feburary” on the sign.

Though we waited forever to get our hands on StarCraft II, and though we then learned that the game would be releasing in three parts instead of one whole part, and then we learned that the subsequent thirds would take a couple or so years each to release, we’re still pretty excited for those thirds. Even if we’re pissed that Blizzard is really bad at releasing anything having to do with StarCraft in a timely manner, but then we check out the newly released trailer for the second installment, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, and then we’re even more annoyed that Blizzard is really bad at releasing anything having to do with StarCraft in a timely manner.

According to the accompanying text posted along with the video, the footage is rendered entirely within the game’s engine, which is impressive considering all of the non-gameplay, cinematic footage, which you can check out in big, pretty format after the jump, and join us in being mad at Blizzard for taking too long. Yes, any amount of time that the game isn’t released is too long.

Fans of Blizzard’s long, long awaited sequel Diablo 3 have been chomping at the bit for information on the game since it was announced in 2008. True to form, Blizzard has remained tight-lipped, only periodically posting new information to the game’s official website. On the subject of a release date, the game’s developers have stuck to their guns saying it will launch when, and only when, it is “ready.” That changed a little bit this past Friday, when screenshots and a video of the game leaked on to a fan forum.

The images and brief video of the character selection screen are believed to have come from a Blizzard employee involved in a closed “friends and family” beta test that is rumored to be underway. They show the game’s launcher, some of its controversial authentication system, and then snippets of gameplay. The video is achingly brief, and reveals little more about the character classes that wasn’t already known.

Of course, it should be noted that these images, if legit, may bear little to no resemblance to the final product. However, the mere existence of this leak is exciting if for no other reason than reminding fans that this game could be coming soon, and looks like an awful lot of demon-slashing fun.

Read on after the break for the video and images.

Regarding World of Warcarft, there are basically only two groups of gamers: Those who play it and those who know they won’t like it. Both groups are fairly large, but with the latest patch, Rage of the Firelands, Blizzard is attempting to turn that latter group into “those who know they don’t like it, but play it anyway.” Now, rather than the free 14-day limited trial, WoW has shifted over to a limited free-to-play trial: Instead of 14 days to test out the game, players will be able to play some of the content forever, but with a limiting level cap of 20 that will only be removed once they upgrade to the full version of the game.

Dubbed the World of Warcraft Starter Edition, the free-to-play “trial” includes the base game and some content from the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, namely the two added character races. So, not exactly a massive shift to a free-to-play model like every other game seems to be doing lately — even games that never had a subscription to begin with — but still, a step in what many people would call the right direction for WoW, a game that needs to reach a new audience, but is so widely known that most of that potential new audience already knows it doesn’t want to play WoW. At least if the game moves to some kind of free-to-play model, all of those people who wouldn’t want to play may give it a shot. It’s entirely possible that this free-to-play trial could be the first step in that direction.

(Blizzard via Joystiq)

It’s been a rough winter, and it’s only going to get worse. See that big, white, fluffy mass that looks delicious dessert topping smeared over most of the Easter and Midwest United States? Keep that positive thinking going because that’s a massive snowstorm that is making life very difficult for the next little while. NOAA and the Weather Channel are calling for snow, freezing rain, blizzard conditions, and have even issued a tornado watch for portions of Louisiana.

‘Thundersnow” is so last week. Welcome, friends, to Tornadsnow.

(via Gizmodo, image from NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center)

This week, we reported on a StarCraft II mod creator who faced copyright infringement charges by Activision-Blizzard, when the game maker took down a video of his mod after providing him the tools to create said mod. The StarCraft II community immediately cried foul, coming to the support of Ryan Winzen, a college student who used the official StarCraft Editor to create “World of StarCraft,” a mod that tried to emulate a StarCraft MMO. But now, not only has Blizzard withdrawn its complaint, it’s extended a congratulatory hand to Winzen and invited him to Blizzard headquarters to meet its own developers. How did things suddenly become so cool?

Yesterday, the gents over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun covered a StarCraft II mod which turned the game into an MMO, obviously named World of StarCraft. The mod was in very early stages, but a video showed it had a mocked-up character creation screen, as well as fighting and experience-gaining working for the Ghost class. The mod was made using StarCraft II’s Galaxy Editor, a powerful level creation tool that Blizzard encouraged modders to use, essentially challenging modders to create unique and complex things. Of course, now that a group of modders began work on a very unique and complex creation, a StarCraft MMO, Activision-Blizzard sent out some copyright infringements to YouTube in order to get the video of the mod taken down.

Yesterday afternoon, NASA‘s GOES-13 satellite took this satellite photo of the blizzard that whacked the East Coast this past weekend as the snow clouds moved towards the Atlantic Ocean, pulled by the same powerful low-pressure system that had brought the blizzard. You can almost feel the cold.

>>>See also: Time-lapse video of the blizzard.

(via NASA Goddard Images)

According to an article over on TorrentFreak, a pirated release of Starcraft II, with a torrent size of 7.19 gigabytes of data, has been downloaded around 2.3 million times totaling 15.77 petabytes of transferred data. Even more interesting, the torrent was only released about three months ago.

With the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm only a few weeks away, Blizzard has begun rolling out the different phases of a world event that will culminate in what they’re calling the Shattering: In character, the dragon Deathwing will rend the world asunder, and out of character, they’ll change the game world to reflect the changes coming in the new expansion.

One of the characteristics of this world event is the appearance of a insidious doomsday cult in response to the strange natural phenomenon going on elsewhere. Last night a new phase of quests went live, revealing that the cult situation has gotten so bad that leaders in two major cities (one Alliance and one Horde) have decided that anyone looking to get through the gates must be searched for cultist propaganda.

If you’re like us and have been watching certain online communities grow more agitated about rights to privacy, or if you’ve simply been following (with or without trepidation) the reaction to the implementation of backscatter X-ray scanners in US Airports and a pat down designed to discourage people from opting out through humiliation… well, this seems awfully apropo.

(If you’re a WoW player and you haven’t done the quest yet, you might want to skip the rest until you’ve done it, if you don’t want to know how it goes.)