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Precursor Games, a development company started in 2012, was born out of faltering developer Silicon Knights. Over the course of just a year many of the programmers, artists, creative professionals and executives came over to the newly formed company. The exodus picked up especially after a multi-faceted lawsuit with Epic Games over the misuse and licensing of the Unreal 3 engine became a no-win situation for Silicon Knights in March of that year. There are two sides to the salacious story but now Precursor has set about creating a new line of games including a sequel to their cult hit Eternal Darkness.

Video games from movies are typically awful pieces of meta content designed to squeeze a few extra dollars out of an unsuspecting audience. But just uttering that sentence is now weird to me  as the games development industry has continually proven to be a risky business filled with exploding budgets and sales shortfalls. When it comes to movies I'm not usually this pessimistic but I've sat through enough of these horrible abominations that I'm starting to think someone owes me something entertaining for ponying up $60 every time.

If you're a readin' nerd like me you've probably spent a good deal of time obsessing over the late author Michael Crichton's many novels. Now because I like dinosaurs so much of all Crichton's varied works none grabbed my attention more than the Jurassic Park series. There's just something entrancing about a world world where big business and big lizards collide with "chaotic" results. As a game player I've always longed for someone to condense the experience of Jurassic Park into a playable open-world experience which caters to fans of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Just Cause 2 or Grand Theft Auto 4. Yesterday a project popped up on Kickstarter that seems to cater to this specific subset of fans.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a sexist neon monstrosity with sensibilities set firmly in the 1980's and that's fine by me. This first person shooter acts as a standalone expansion to Far Cry 3 and takes place in the alternate "future" of 2007. You play as Sergeant Rex Power Colt a cybernetic soldier working for the US Army. Nuclear war has broken out between the Soviet Union and The United States and Rex has been shipped out to a remote island in the Pacific to investigate the existence of an advanced bio weapon that could be used end the war. Your buddy Spider, another cybernetically modified soldier, has come along to watch your back on what is going to be a deadly mission.

In order to follow the Defiance science fiction series on television or play its video game companion, a persistent multiplayer role-playing title, you have to understand a few things. Probably the most important fact is that by the time you join the story many significant events have already come to pass. The Earth we know now has completely changed. In Defiance's timeline the year 2013 marks the arrival of the Voltans and their many giant Ark ships. The ships acted as multi-species lifeboats for the aliens from the dying Voltanis star system. 5000 years ago their binary star pair started to destabilize, an event that would force the exodus of every sentient race within the solar system.

Mark Jacobs has been an impressive presence in the gaming industry for almost 30 years now. Mark's not just known for his energy but also because of the passion he has for his many projects. Over the course of the nearly two decades while working as GM and CEO of Mythic Entertainment he was involved in a range of successful game launches Including the seminal MMO Dark Age of Camelot. 2009 brought about some significant changes following a range of consolidation moves made by EA which merged BioWare and Mythic Entertainment. In 2011 Mark founded City State Entertainment and set about creating his next big MMO project modeled on the successes of DAoC. Camelot Unchained is his new baby and with the help of an impressive team he's come to Kickstarter to rally fans.

Pathea Games' crowdfunding campaign for Planet Explorers is on track to reach its funding goals in just a few days. If it keeps up its average weekly earnings of nearly $27,000 it also means they'll have raised over $120,000 when all this is said and done. Pathea is an indie developer composed of a group of roughly 15 individuals who've been working on Planet Explorers for about a year now. Two weeks the team decided it was time to bring their hard work to Kickstarter so they could continue production. Fans responded almost overnight quickly pushing this campaign towards feasibility.

Battle Worlds: Kronos is a new turn-based strategy experience that KING Art Games has been working on as a pet-project for several years. Initially this German indie developer created a prototype and their fans lapped it up but the publishing industry wouldn't the give money needed to see a turn-based game fully developed. KING Art was forced to shelve Battle Worlds and focus on another title, The Book of Unwritten Tales, which served as a throwback to the heyday of point-and-click adventure games. It's here where they found their initial success proving that their fans would respond to the content and ingenuity of their design rather than focusing on what genre the game was released in. It seemed like the right time to delve back into Battle Worlds.

Imagine you had a great idea and you were working with the intentions of finally making it a reality. Muse Games had such an opportunity in 2012 with Guns of Icarus but due to a sour deal with a publisher they were left high and dry - almost penniless. The independent studio has pulled itself up by its bootstraps and turned to crowdfunding to get the word out about its new game. In February last year they realized success and now they're returning to seek indie venture capitalists for their expansion: Adventure mode!

This week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Bungie has been showcasing a bold and expansive vision for Destiny, their first person shooter set in a persistent world. Today Bungie designers Joseph Staten and Chris Barrett shared with fans and other developers a fantasy with mythology that mixes some ideas that are familiar and others that are literally "alien". The team has dubbed the resulting amalgamation "Mythic Science Fiction" and after getting a look at tons of brand new concept art it has become apparent that Bungie is creating a grand space opera much like Star Wars.