S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 may have been cancelled, but it seems from survival MMOFPS, Survarium, will definitely suffice. Considering Survarium is from the same developers, Vostok Games, and the fact that it's destined to be a free-to-play, massively multiplayer first-person shooter that's all about, er, surviving, it should be the goods.

Of course, it all takes place in a post-apocalyptic environment (what else, it is 2012 after all), the developers have teased the world with a bunch of screenshots, and a developer's diary video talking about the game. The video goes for a nice eight minutes, but unfortunately doesn't feature any in-game footage.

So, what is Survarium, what do you do? Well, players in the game have to complete missions for different factions in order to earn money and status, pretty much how S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was played. Players can also work together for co-op missions, form teams for player-versus-player action, or play in "free play mode", where they'll be able to enjoy the freedom of interacting with human counterparts in the game. RPG elements will also be at play, such as leveling up and skill specialization.

[UPDATE: They've just hit $2 million!] If there's anything we know about the world, and technology, and everything around it, is that its in a constant state of change. Kickstarter is here to help that, and so are the guys and girls behind Ouya. What is Ouya?

Ouya is a kickstarter project, and a "new kind of video game console". Ouya love gaming on a bigger TV screen, they know that smart devices like smart phones and tablets are the current in-thing, but they also know that some of the best are abandoning the traditional platforms and moving toward where "it" is, and "it" is in smart devices. Ouya want to change this.

Ouya have raised (at the time of writing) $1,772,876 of their $950,000 goal. They have 14,144 backers, and 29 days of Kickstarting to go. Kickstarter has confirmed that Ouya has achieved the biggest first day ever for one of their hosted projects, and it's the eighth project ever to crack the $1 million mark.

Western Digital have just announced a fresh new series of HDDs, this time bound for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Enter the WD Red NAS HDDs, designed specifically for SOHO NAS systems with one to five bays. WD have had the Red series of HDDs compatibility-tested with top NAS box manufacturers for power and performance, which is something that is perfect for NAS setups.

WD's Red NAS drives come in 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB capacities, all in the 3.5-inch form factor. WD's Red line sports NASware technology, which is designed to improve reliability and system performance, reduce customer downtime and to simplify the integration process. WD's Red customers also get something special, free premium 24x7 dedicated support, and a three-year warranty.

Western Digital's Red line of HDDs is their fourth color to enter the market from the company, with the other colors being Black, Blue and Green. WD puts this down to the "Power of Choice", with their storage solutions clear and easy to identify. Blue for "solid performance and reliability for everyday computing", Green for "cool, quiet, eco-friendly", and then we have Black which features "maximum performance for power computing", and of course, Red for "home and small office NAS".

Valve are a company that don't like to stay the same, and I love them for it. The company that are known for Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and many, many more amazing games, have announced a new feature that will see users voting for what titles appear on Steam.

At the moment, Valve has an internal group that decides on what launches on Steam, but since Valve don't really employ psychics, it can be very hard to please the entire community. Valve wants to stop this, so in late-August, the company will launch "Steam Greenlight". Steam Greenlight will use the system introduced by the Steam Workshop from last October.

The Workshop lets players rate and comment on content, such as Team Fortress 2 items, Skyrim mods. Valve have said:

What I imagine is probably the coolest person ever, has just sold their insane catalog of video games for Nintendo home systems from the NES/Famicom through to the GameCube, as well as the full lineup of every game released on any Sega system.

All of this comes in their boxes, with original instructions. It amounts to more than 5,000 games, with the collection mounting up cartridges for the NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube and Virtual Boy, as well as anything published (!) for the Sega Master System, MegaDrive/Genesis, Game Gear, Saturn and Dreamcast. The Dreamcast collection is a stand out, funnily enough, which includes 550 games, and is advertised as factory sealed, all of it.

The seller also states "all games ever released on NEC systems, all factory sealed!" and included a buy-it-now price os just 999,999.99 Euro, or at the current exchange rates, US$1,238,099.99. Not bad, considering the seller would need to have some very exclusive industry access, or the ability to walk through walls in order to build this type of a one-of-a-kind library. The seller does state "you can email me asking the presence of a specific title in a fullset, but you can be 99.9% sure it is present".

It looks like Next Issue is about to become much bigger than they were yesterday, with the release of an app on iOS, with the iPad app hitting the App Store today. For those of you who aren't in the know with how Next Issue works, it wants to be the Netflix, or Spotify of the magazine world.

Next Issue offers monthly subscriptions for unlimited access to their library of 39 titles. This breaks down to around $10 per month for all the monthly and bi-weekly magazines, or alternatively, $15 for all of that, as well as access to tabloids and other weeklies. One note: the free app is the magazine reader, you'll need to download the apps through Next Issue's browser-based store.

What magazines do they have on offer? Well, most of the big players are on-board: Conde Nast, Time, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp. This means you'll have access to The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated and Popular Mechanics. Next Issue Media has also talked of wanting to double the catalog by the end of 2012, as well as grabbing deals with more publishers. I think I may just have to have one of those $15 per month subscriptions!

Before the sure-fire-hit $199 tablet from Google and ASUS hits, the Nexus 7, the tablet has been overclocked, flashed with a custom ROM, rooted and replaced with a full tablet user interface (UI). 'FadedLite', a member of the XDA-developers forum posted some instructions on how to do the rooting.

But, it seems that rooting the Nexus 7 isn't as easy as previous smart devices, as the Nexus 7 features a locked bootloader. We all know that things like this can usually be overcome, with experienced developers trying their hand on the Nexus 7, provided they have sdk, can use adb as well as fastboot, and have debugging on the Nexus 7. They'd also need to download Su and CWM.

Overclocking on the Nexus 7 is impressive already, ramping up to 1.5GHz thanks to a kernel build from zaventh. The kernel does sport other features such as voltage tweaks, and support for init.d. The kernel is insecure, which is to be expected in its early days. User 'jcarrz1' offers an "enhanced" Android Jelly Bean experience with a custom ROM. This custom ROM sports init.d support, Zip alignment, a host file that blocks ads, the Aroma installer, Busybox, the Nexus 7 boot animation, an uncluttered appearance, the removal of some unnecessary apps, and enhanced speed.

It seems as though LG wants to claw their way back up that smartphone winning mountain, with their first quad-core smartphone arriving in the form of the Optimus 4X LTE this month, but there is a follow-up coming soon that should also impress. This device is said to have a camera that beats the Optimus' 8-megapixel rear-snapper.

A report from The Chosunilbo says that LG Electronics chairman Koo Bon-moo has direct input into the planning and development of the as-yet-unnamed device, which is due to his dissatisfaction that the mobile-making division of LG has not taken full advantage of technology produced by fellow LG subsidiaries.

What makes Bon-moo's blood boil is that parts from LG Display, LG Chem and LG Innotek are featured by numerous LG competitors, including Apple, but last year, the LG Electronics chief said to have pointed out that LG is not "making enough" of the technology. Recent smartphone industry data from Strategy Analytics revealed that LG hold just 3.7-percent of the industry-wide shipments, with Samsung taking 30.6-percent, and Apple with 24.1-percent.

AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 has been quite elusive until now, but "New Zealand" is now rumored to be hitting sometime late this month. It will sport two Tahiti XT GPUs and 6GB of GDDR5 memory, with special editions of the 7990 reaching an amazing 12GB of RAM on-board.

VR-Zone cites some of their sources saying that the boards are being sampled right now, with it all ramping up to a product launch before the end of the month. Pricing is one of the details that has been left out for now, and AMD are known to change pricing at the last minute.

Do you think we need a Radeon HD 7990? So there can be more broken 3DMark records? The only time these bad boys would really stretch their legs is for multi-monitor gaming, or when games really ramp up their graphics engines in the near-future, hopefully. I would love to see what one of the 12GB cards could do, CrossFired up with another HD 7990 12GB card, on 6 screens, oh the pants-wetting would be glorious.

With Microsoft making the decision to make their own hardware may have upset other OEMs, Samsung are still going full steam ahead on releasing a smart device based on Windows RT and it will be released in October.

The Windows RT-based tablet from Samsung will sport an ARM-based processor, and has now opened up a new avenue of business for the company, since they're now supporting Windows 8 and Windows RT-based devices. The move is sure to help Samsung have more devices on offer, with multiple OSs to choose from, to combat their main competitor, Apple.

Windows RT is set to become the first mainstream OS from Microsoft built for touch-screen devices that works on energy-efficient chips that are usually bound for smartphones. Most traditional desktop and notebook PCs run x86-based processors.