If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, THQ files for bankruptcy, gaming video giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of its staff, and we crown The Walking Dead as our 2012 Game of the Year.

You’ll also find reviews for Black Knight Sword, Mass Effect 3: Omega, and Middle Manager of Justice.

News:
The DeanBeat: The Newtown shooting will turn up the heat on video game violence — but will it make us think?
DayZ lead designer considered leaving the project
This week in the Nintendo Download: Mario, Wario, and Alex Trebek
Turn your friends into Pokémon in the next Mystery Dungeon game on 3DS
Writer McComb isn’t worried about the lack of the Planescape license for the new Torment game
Valve gives Plantronics the rights to officially brand headsets with Aperture Laboratories and Mann Co. logos
Visualizing a tough year for the retail core game industry
Rabbit pulls reimagined video chat out of its hat
THQ’s bankruptcy filing reveals new games
THQ files for bankruptcy, assets sold to investor Clearlake for $60M
Valve pulls The War Z from Steam over fan backlash, offers refunds
Nintendo’s TVii available tomorrow, but it won’t be fully functional
MeritShare finds a way to gamify employee recognition (exclusive)
Green Throttle Games launches developer program as part of play to take over living room gaming
Assassin’s Creed III glitches and issues addressed in massive patch (full details)
Dartmouth professor names Zynga’s Mark Pincus one of the worst CEOs of 2012
Get ready for great games on a thin laptop as AMD preps new mobile graphics chips
Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic
Nvidia’s next Tegra 4 processor may come with 72 graphics cores
Minecraft documentary free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers this weekend
Online gaming firm Aeria Games merges with Japan’s Gamepot
The spirit of BattleBots lives on in a new robot-building game
Arktos Entertainment acquires majority stake in game studio Hammerpoint Interactive (exclusive)
Why Google predicts Microsoft’s next game console will beat Sony’s
Developer id Software releases Rage add-on next week
Game videos giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of staff
NRA blames video games for mass murders

Mobile News:
Kabam scores big with highest-grossing game on App Store for 2012
Apple freezes the App Store in advance of the holiday app-downloading bonanza
Jordan Mechner’s Karateka remake returns to Apple (iOS) devices today
Mochi Media says 86 percent of Flash game developers are expanding into mobile (exclusive)
MindSnacks’ new iPad games help you learn languages, pass the SAT
After 6M paid downloads, mobile hit Pocket God wraps up with its final, apocalyptic update
Kamcord is helping users record 7 mobile-game videos every second
With more than 20M downloads, Battle Bears mobile game hits San Francisco’s billboards
Plain Vanilla releases its multiplayer video game quiz for iOS
MediaBrix’s responsive design ensures in-game ads will always look right (exclusive)
SGN launches its MasterKey tool for making cross-platform social and mobile games
Gamevil surpasses 200M game downloads on smartphones
Exclusive: Go Ninja developer brings Shaquille O’Neal back to video games

Best of 2012:
GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year: The Walking Dead
The best indie games of 2012
The best games of 2012 (GamesBeat staff picks)
The game industry’s 2012 holiday cards

Interviews:
Heroes of Newerth 3.0 adds bots, hopes to teach new players (interview)
Crytek’s chief: Nothing will beat Crysis 3′s graphics for at least two years (interview)

Previews:
Hawken’s open beta shows a thoughtfully designed mech combat game (preview)
Insomaniac’s Fuse lets you lead a team of four badass agents (preview)
Toki Tori 2′s simple mechanics reward your curiosity (hands-on preview)
Zen Pinball 2 on Nintendo’s eShop gives you a choice of dozens of pinball tables (preview)
The 3DS library gets a little weirder with these quirky eShop games (preview)

Reviews:
Marvel Heroes needs more humanity, more warmth, and more MMO
Black Knight Sword’s punishing difficulty requires more luck than skill to overcome (review)
Middle Manager of Justice is all business, no gameplay (review)
Mass Effect 3: Omega is explosive, nostalgic, and somewhat pointless (review)

Pieces of Flair: 
What sales managers can learn from the four types of online gamers
Solving a Wii mystery: The fate of the awesome toy WeeWaa
Exploring why some players are unable to initiate Halo 4′s single-player campaign
A history of bodies: Video game violence and the player
Love your free players to unlock the full potential of free-to-play games
What are your holiday gaming traditions?
Justin Bieber, Minecraft’s Creeper, and other cameos in modern games (gallery)

Goichi Suda owes me a new controller. The avant-garde game designer (who also goes by “Suda51”) is known for the distinctive style and offbeat humor he brings into almost every project he touches, such as killer7 and No More Heroes. But after playing his latest game, I now associate him with long nights of yelling at the TV as I died in Black Knight Sword for the hundredth time.

Out now on Xbox Live Arcade (800 Microsoft Points) and PlayStation Network ($9.99), Black Knight Sword is the second title to come from the partnership between Suda’s Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality — the first was the shoot-em-up Sine Mora earlier this year. Black Knight Sword puts a twist on the traditional damsel-in-distress fairy tale, where instead of saving the princess, you must fight her and her legion of walking heads, gargantuan guardians, and other creepy looking foes.

It’s a combat-focused platformer at its core, with the developers describing it as a “throwback to the 16-bit era with simple, yet addictive gameplay.” In other words, the game is pretty damn hard.

What you’ll like

All the world’s a stage
Black Knight Sword captures your attention even before you begin, giving you a front-row seat to its grand play. Hand-drawn curtains part way to reveal a small stage while an offscreen orchestra tunes its instruments, and you can hear the quiet voices of the nonexistent audience as they settle into their seats. But you can tell something is amiss as soon as the narrator speaks, informing you of the weird tale you’re about to witness.

After you take up your black armor and your magic sword, you venture into the game’s modern 2D world of seedy alleyways, sewers, forests, and other cities that normally don’t belong in a fairy tale. Along with the red curtains in the foreground, the background is stationary and only changes scenery as you plunge deeper into its five stages. It’s gorgeous to look at, and the sights and sounds (such as the audience booing if you die or quit) really make it feel like you’re playing a part in this unusual puppet show.

Odd sense of humor
Despite its tone, not everything is bleak and depressing in Black Knight Sword. Enemy design often astounds and confuses you with their mishmash of human body parts and machines. And you can find extra hearts (the in-game currency) or skulls that heal you inside of giant microwaves. Even the friendly folk, such as the one-legged metal cages that think they belong in a jazz band with their impromptu scats, are bizarrely adorable.

Rallying from behind
Unless you play on the slightly more forgiving Easy mode (I played on Normal), you’ll die a lot in Black Knight Sword — you receive a Trophy/Achievement called “Are you really the hero?” if you hit the Game Over screen at least 50 times. I spent most of my time with little to no health, occasionally refilling it at various in-game shops. You can choose to restart a level from the beginning if you’re low on health and out of lives (giving you three more to use), but I was too stubborn, and had trudged too far, to do that.

The most satisfying part, however, is the few precious moments of making a comeback at the last minute. Maybe you just narrowly avoided that fireball in time or spammed the attack button fast enough to kill the monster before it could get up, but whatever you did, you’ll feel like a god … at least until the next end-of-level boss smashes your face in.

What you won’t like

Simple combat
While the sword you wield looks cool, and you have the power of a spirit called the Black Hellebore, the combat is dreadfully boring. Sure, your sword gains new abilities after completing each stage, and you can upgrade your magic attacks by using hearts. But they’re too time-consuming to charge up or, in the case of magic, you’re given a very limited amount to use before you have to buy more. So you’ll be mashing your basic stab attack in most combat situations.

Recurring boss fights
You know those boss fights I keep mentioning? Well, you’ll have to fight them not just once, but twice. That’s not even counting the countless attempts and long hours (in my experience) it’ll take to defeat them in their first encounter. One particularly nasty fight that I hated transitions into a full-blown bullet-hell shooter: It took me an entire afternoon, with breaks in between, to successfully dodge the hundreds of bullets on screen and kill the creature spitting them out. I’ve never cursed so much at a game in my life.

So imagine my delight when I saw this same boss come up again before the end of the game. They do have less health the second time around, but it doesn’t make it any less infuriating. It sucked up any joy I had for Black Knight Sword and turned it into pure hatred. Isn’t this kind of thing illegal?

I suppose I should thank these fights for doing one thing right, because they also revealed that the lives system is useless. Rather than give up and start a level over (which also resets any upgrades you might have had), all you have to do is make sure you save your game at every checkpoint. If you die, just quit to the main menu and load up your file — if you still had lives, you’ll just start from the last checkpoint anyway.

Framerate problems
I’m not sure if this is true for the Xbox Live Arcade version, but on PSN, Black Knight Sword’s framerate frequently dipped into slideshow territory for a second or two. The most frustrating part about this is it usually happened during critical jumps or attacks — the game is hard enough as it is without these technical hiccups.

Conclusion

If you seek to conquer Black Knight Sword’s challenges, I suggest thinking real hard before you buy it. It’s a good-looking game with a unique style that screams Goichi Suda’s name, but the gameplay is rarely rewarding. So much is working against you that you feel like the only reason you’re making any progress at all is because of pure luck rather than skill.

Score: 60/100

Black Knight Sword released on Dec. 11 for PlayStation Network at $9.99 and Dec. 12 for Xbox Live Arcade at 800 Microsoft Points. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a PSN code for the purpose of this review. 

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