Let's face it, the Doom reboot has some audaciously bad box art. It's so bad that everyone thought it was just a placeholder image rather than the finished product. Bethesda and id have heard the call from fans, and soon we'll be able to vote for the kind of demon-slaying chaos that belongs on a Doom box.

Bethesda revealed two new box art images on the Doom Twitter account, saying that polls for voting will open up soon. Both pieces of artwork were designed in-house by id Software, and it shows: they're so deliciously devilish and match the brutality of the franchise.

The first box art image is my favorite--it's a throwback to the original artwork that made Doom an infamous game that our mother's cringed back in the 90's. The second one is rather simple but effective. It's something I'd expect to see on the halls of a dark, blasphemous fane where black-cloaked Satanists enact terrible rituals.

The planet of Faykreed from the upcoming Star Ocean doesn't seem to have the brightest of futures. The denizens are of the underdeveloped planet are under attack by something dark and menacing that seems to be unstoppable.

The heroes of Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness will have to make some tough decisions to save the world, and it's all being set up rather dramatically, and epically in this new trailer. It also reveals that a young girl by the name of Relia seems to hold to key to the story.

The trailer seems to be completely in-game, showing off the progress they've made with the graphics. This is also the first time that we get to hear the English voice actors as they take on the roles of their characters.

According to Microsoft, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney has it all wrong: Redmond's push into Windows 10 PC gaming isn't the beginning of an oppressive regime, but a "fully open ecosystem" that taps the freedom of the platform.

In a recent op-ed piece for The Guardian, Epic's Tim Sweeney called Redmond out for its new invasive push to utterly dominate PC gaming. The developer, who has had a long-running relationship with Microsoft with its Gears of War franchise, says that Microsoft is "curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers." Sweeney is calling for gamers, developers, and publishers to fight this move.

Microsoft has delivered an official response to Sweeney's statements, saying that the Universal Windows Platform--which powers Windows 10 PC gaming--is quite open. "The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store," said Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows. "We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required."

The momentum for Splatoon seems to have settled just a bit. Out of the gate it was an extremely popular game, and for good reason. It was a somewhat less violent (well, different in it's display of violence) third person shooter that let you shoot huge gobs of paint at your friends. Nintendo is definitely not neglecting this exclusive, either. They've announced plans for more free updates coming this year.

The first update will improve all of the less-popular abilities, such as "Cold Blooded" and others. There'll also be some changes to the ranked matchmaking and they're planning on putting in some new stuff for their Splatfest events. This update will be out on Tuesday, March 8th.

In two more future free updates Nintendo wants to add a few new weapons that also include some cool variations on some of the more popular ink-shooting weapons. We should be seeing those updates starting in April. It's really nice to see them stick to adding free content. Splatoon might have had a slow start, but once people actually play it, it grows on you pretty fast.

But only to the New 3DS. Older 3DS owners are left in the dust and won't have access to the SNES titles coming to the Virtual Console. For those that do have the newest model, they'll be able to enjoy a fairly good-sized catalog of games that originally were released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

During the Nintendo Direct yesterday, they were proud to announce that they'll be rolling out a number of new titles to the Virtual Console. Super Mario World, F-Zero and Pilot Wings will be available starting yesterday (March 3rd) while Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart and Earthbound will make an appearance on March 24th and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country 2 will all be available on April 14th.

Even though the games are also currently available on the Wii U's Virtual Console, there isn't a cross-buy mechanism in place. You'll have to buy each version separately.

Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney is calling for gamers and the industry to fight against Microsoft's oppressive new push into PC gaming, calling it a "closed platform" that monopolizes PC gaming as a whole.

Sweeney recently wrote a scathing op-ed on The Guardian, calling Microsoft out for its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) ecosystem

"With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce. Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem. They're curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers."

Amazon seems to be moving in the opposite direction of the other big mobile companies that are looking to strengthen their devices security. The latest Fire OS is removing support for encryption starting with version 5.0.

The OS that Amazon uses is a fork of the Android Open Source Project, but it takes out any compatibility with Google's own apps even though it relies heavily on the underlying architecture. Notably missing now, is full device encryption, something that's been greatly improved (and mandatory on some classes of devices) with the release of Marshmallow. Apparently the option of encryption just wasn't used very much by their user-base.

What this means is that the anything that you put on it won't be automatically encrypted, making the storage open to attackers who wish to sync or connect directly to the tablet. To be clear, it only applies to anything on the tablet that's being stored. SSL/TLS connections and communication with Amazon's AWS for your cloud content is still just as safe as ever, and your content in the cloud is likely to be encrypted at rest on their servers, as well, which is quickly becoming the standard.

Just how much does EA make from "extra content" - or DLC, per year? A very cool $1.3 billion, which was revealed by the company during the recent Morgan Stanley investor conference.

EA's Chief Financial Officer, Blake Jorgensen, said: "The extra content business is a billion-three [$1.3 billion] a year. Half of that is roughly our Ultimate Team business". One of the big money spinners for EA is Ultimate Team, which was the biggest contributor to the earnings of EA's extra content category.

Ultimate Team combines the FIFA, Madden and NFL franchises and lets gamers buy, trade and sell player cards for both real, and in-game money. Ultimate Team's mega success is due to human nature, says Jorgensen, where he also added that players will "typically pay money to beat their friends".

Microsoft has a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to Windows 10, with one of them being DirectX 12. We loved the explicit multi-GPU support found in Ashes of the Singularity, powered by DX12.

Well, the company has just released a new teaser video that shows off the benefits of DX12, with the vide featuring footage from DX12-powered titles like Quantum Break, Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Ashes of the Singularity, and Just Cause 3.

Microsoft says that DX12 offers up to 20% more performance from your GPU when compared to DX11, and up to 50% from your CPU.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has fired off some shots in Apple's general direction, saying that the current Macs aren't powerful enough to provide a good VR experience.

Luckey was speaking with Shacknews at the time, saying that in order for Oculus to provide Mac support for the Rift, Apple will need to release a Mac with enough GPU horsepower. Luckey said: "If they ever release a good computer, we will do it". The Oculus founder and flip-flop wearer said that that current Macs are just no good, as they don't have the right combination of hardware.

Luckey added that Apple "doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs", so even if you dump $6000+ onto a new Mac Pro with AMD FirePro D700 graphics "it still doesn't match our minimum specs". Oculus doesn't want to support Macs because of the lack of high-end GPUs, as they wouldn't be capable of playing VR games at the intended resolution and 90FPS frame rate. But, if Apple does decide to throw in better GPUs inside of future Macs, Luckey added "like they used to for a while back in the day", then Oculus might change its tune.