Far away from the charts and the mega-commercial releases and the grinning Bobby Koticks, there is an exciting world of games loaded with passionate expression, dazzling ideas and a staggering wealth of creativity. They are independent games and they are being celebrated at next month's International Festival of Independent Games, aka IndieCade. The 32 finalists of this year's IndieCade awards are full of innovation, originality and win. Give them your time...

There was no official news of a zombie mode at Activision's big Call of Duty: Black Ops event in L.A. this week. No official news at all. In fact there was close-to flat-out denial that the best bit of World at War was even going to make it in to Treyarch's new Cold War CoD.

But fear not. Official word only means so much in this industry. And the word that came out of the event unofficially was that not only are zombies definitely in , they've defected to Communism this time. Click on, and I'll explain all.

You can never have enough top-down shooters. Unless of course you just inherently hate fun. Buster Red is a damn fine one, too, with a neat art style, some clever ideas, and a solid control interface. What could go wrong? Very little, it would appear...

We've had our first hands-on time with Black Ops, the Cold War-spanning opus that finds Treyarch mining new eras for face-blasting inspiration. While this is the developer's most Modern Warfare-esque offering to date, Black Ops manages to distinguish itself, most notably with the introduction of Wager Modes, in which players can put their money where their trash talking mouths are. From the rampant customization options to the unique new Killstreaks, Black Ops is shaping up to be a worthy entry in the Call of Duty canon.

While we were hoping to get a taste of the rumored Commie Zombies, there was more than enough competitive multiplayer to keep us occupied for a few drunken hours. Here's what we managed to write afterwards...

Duke Nukem Forever has solidly become the most appropriate use of the word "forever" ever. Why doesn't it die?! Yes, believe it or not, there's a new tease on the internets that suggests, again, that the game may actually exist and be due for release.

DNF was first announced in 1996 as a proposed sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. There have been promotional hints all the way up into the late 2000s. There was even a legal battle as to who owned the rights to the never-released game's name, which dragged on into 2010...

In an interview with Spanish website 3D Juegos, Capcom exec Keiji Inafune revealed that Resident Evil 6 is on its way post-haste, and that we'll have an announcement from Capcom shortly. We'll give the legendary designer the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't implying a game-compromising rush, but rather that RE6 is simply high- priority at Capcom: 

"Given the great success that supposed for us Resident Evil 5, we want that Resident Evil 6 leaves as rapidly as possible to the market. In fact, you will shortly have the news of Capcom about this," he said...

We're kicking off Episode 11 of GamesRadar's Trailer Trash Theatre with a few more awful trailers from last week's GamesCom conference. We didn't get any multi-racial-pseudo-family-acting-like-morons-in-the-living-room trailers in this episode, but there are still many more ways to make a trailer... trashy.

Click on over and watch the video!

There's a very good chance that portable gaming changed forever last night . We're talking serious vision-of-the-future stuff here, and even better, that stuff is available right now. To you. For free. Trust me, shit just got real.

Last night Epic Games, creator of Gears of War, Unreal Tournament and the is-there-a-single-HD-game-that-isn't-made-with-it Unreal Engine 3, released a free tech demo on the iPhone's App store. That demo is called Epic Citadel, and is a real-time, fully controllable, first-person look at the Unreal Engine 3 running on a device supposedly less powerful than a PSP. It looks like the screenshot above, which I took last night as I played. And that is to say, it looks like a full-sized console game.

All the rules of portable gaming have changed, and if you click on, both myself and Mr. Towell will tell you why.

Still no official word on zombie mode yet (seriously guys, what the hell's going on?), but this new video from this week's CoD: Black Ops multiplayer event in L.A. reveals a a whole new online angle set to bring ecstatic joy and elegiac, murderous despair in equal measure.

Wager Mode allows players to bet in-game currency (COD Points, no doubt named after a high-level creative strategy meeting between a bunch of high-level creative execs, who rewarded themselves with yachts) on their final ranking, over four different match types of varying harshness. How harsh? Why, that particular knowledge is held within the fortified keep of a dark citadel, deep amongst the dread mountains of a faraway mystical kingdom. In order to attain it you must journey...

Oh alright, just click through the link then. Jesus, I try to spice things up...

By now, it's possible you've finished Mafia II's story. You may have even scrounged around and found all 50 of its hidden Playboy centerfolds, giving you a complete set of what might be the best collectible whatsit ever dropped into an open-world game. But you can't really say you've exhausted Mafia II's potential until you've hunted for its ultimate collectibles: the whopping 159 developer portraits disguised as wanted posters...