For Bethesda's regular around-the-web round-up today, they spotted a few cool devices that we thought deserved attention: A modified Xbox 360 controller (they can be adapted to PCs, of course) in the theme of Dishonored and a LEGO Pip-Boy 3000SI.

Being a big fan of platformers—like the classic Rayman and Megaman series—I cannot help but have a 6th sense for the good ones. Instantly, while traversing the indie mega booth at PAX East, I was drawn to a quaint alcove housing what was my sleeper hit of the convention: Contrast. This indie-developed game combines out-of-the-box thinking and puzzle aspects with the pinpoint-precision of platforming.

In Contrast, the player takes the role of our shadow-stepping protagonist, Dawn, and ventures out into a noir-stylized world wrought with mysteries and disappearances. With story-elements abounding and classic platforming and puzzle-solving at the heart of gameplay, Contrast offers a bit more depth than the tried-and-true 8-bit platformer.

As of exactly one hour ago, the case, power, and cooling manufacturer NZXT. Corp has officially rebranded itself as NEXT. (note the period, for legal purposes).

The company made the announcement in a closed-doors meeting with the press, where NEXT. representatives told us:

"With its new-found identity, NEXT[.] would like to address its new direction for product design. While NZXT[.] took pride in its unique, innovative and practical designs, NEXT[.] will take this design philosophy to absurd new heights."

The representative noted that the proper pronunciation of the new name is phonetically: "Nekst PERIOD" (heavy emphatic 'punch' on the period, for legal purposes).

Welcome to another edition of Mik's picks. While most other people are out looking for Easter eggs, I've been out looking for eggs on Tiger Direct and Newegg. For this edition, we found some great discounts on SSDs, monitors, APUs, and GPUs. We'll keep this one short -- the GN team is exhausted coming out of some heavy post-PAX coverage, and we're sure you could all use a bit of a breather this weekend, too.

Let's get to the good stuff.

In this episode of Saturday Heat Signature (the 12th installment!), we take a gander at the upcoming Kickstarter project by Pathea Games: Planet Explorers.

The game focuses on survival and colonization, with the core concept being that you (a survivor of a crashed colony spaceship) must scrounge-up resources, establish a base camp, and assemble other survivors in effort to make your place on this new world. Planet Explorers has a massive scope, and for purposes of simplifying things (perhaps a bit too much), it can almost be thought of as an amalgamation of Spore and Minecraft: The game has fairly freeform customization in terms of vehicles, structures, weapons, and is also voxel-based (non-cuboid, for once), allowing full point-to-point destruction or manipulation of terrain.

Everything's described pretty thoroughly in our Planet Explorers gameplay preview & overview video, found below: