Guys! I’m going to Pittsburgh today to be an unpaid extra in The Dark Knight Rises. Do you think they’ll mind if I dress like Harley Quinn?

News Blips:

Bethesda’s lawyers have informed Minecraft developer Mojang that their new game, Scrolls, infringes on the Elder Scrolls trademark. Notch -- or as he is known by his mother: Markus Persson -- sent out a Tweet claiming that Bethesda’s lawyers insist everyone will confuse his Scrolls with their new game, Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. I think this is perfectly reasonable. When I was a kid, I would ask my mom for “the new Mario.” She would go to the store and return with Mario Lopez, because she is a mom and is easily confused. Scrolls will probably never be available in stores, however, and the audience for both of these games is probably savvy enough to tell the difference. Well, unless Steam has had a sudden influx of my mom.

Nintendo pulls the Wii U out of European trade show GamesCom. Is it the end times for Nintendo? Does its exit from the biggest video-game expo in the Euro zone suggest that the Japanese manufacturer has lost confidence in the follow-up to the Wii? Probably not. Sure, the 3DS’s performance has put a chink in the company’s armor, but it probably has nothing new to show for the system. Nintendo doesn’t want to disappoint people looking for that something new. If Nintendo was reconsidering the Wii U, what would you want to see changed? [Conceivably Tech]

DICE will include Back to Karkand DLC for anyone who pre-orders Battlefield 3. “When Lead Designer Niklas Fegraeus got the assignment to lead the expansion pack,” reads the Battlefield 3 website, “his thoughts immediately went to the four most played and loved maps in the history of Battlefield: Strike at Karkand, Wake Island, Gulf of Oman, and Sharqui Peninsula.” These maps are synonymous with Battlefield. They have appeared in most of the games in the series. Don’t worry; that doesn’t make this a rehash. It can’t be repetitive or iterative unless Activision's Bobby Kotick is involved.

Titan Quest’s lead designer, Arthur Bruno, explains that publisher THQ wanted a game grandmothers could play and stupid enemies so players wouldn’t think twice about killing them. In a forum post for the designer’s new game, Grim Dawn, Bruno went into great detail about the watering down his game received at the behest of the publisher. “I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it (even though his grandmother had never played a game before in her life),” Bruno wrote. The designer also claimed that a THQ mandate insisted that enemies never use language or build anything, since that would suggest they have intelligence greater than an animal. Everyone knows it is OK to kill something as long as its IQ is lower than that of Forest Gump's. Check out the whole diatribe here.

Sony looks to take on Microsoft's Summer of Arcade promotion with its own PlayStation Network Play. Per the press release:

With each pre-order from the PLAY program made in the PlayStation Store, gamers will receive a theme for their PlayStation 3 system. PLAY also offers gamers a separate gift with purchase for each order made throughout the duration of the program. In addition, PlayStation Plus subscribers will receive an automatic 20% off every PLAY program purchase. As a bonus gift, action fans that purchase all four PLAY titles in the PlayStation Store will receive a voucher code for Sony Online Entertainment’s PayDay: The Heist, at no additional cost.

The Play titles include: Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike Online Edition (August 23), The Baconing (August 30), BloodRayne: Betrayal (September 6), and Renegade Ops (September 13).

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