This year's Spike Video Game Awards just concluded and in between the Samuel L. Jackson skits and Black Ops 2 commercials, some awards were given to this year's standouts. The Walking Dead won a few, shuffling away from VGA 2012 with the Game of the Year award and Best Downloadable Game, Best Adapted Game. Telltale Games also won Studio of the Year.

Journey had the most nominations this year and won Best PS3 Game, Best Original Score and Best Independent Game. Best Xbox 360 Game went to Halo 4, while Best PC Game went to XCOM: Enemey Unknown. You may have missed that last one because it wasn't in the actual show.

Borderlands 2 also snagged a few: Best Shooter and Best Multiplayer Game. Dishonored ended up being awarded with Best Action Adventure Game.

For the full list of this year's winners, head past the break.

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It's that time of year again!

The annual Spike Video Game Awards are about to kick off with host Samuel L. Jackson in Los Angeles and we'll be to cover all of the world exclusives and crack jokes about the giant hologram walls. So join us over the course of the next two hours or so while we try not to devolve into madness.

Update: Show's over, thanks for joining us in the liveblog!

Halo 4's episodic co-op campaign Spartan Ops returns January 21. The series goes on hiatus next week to make way for Mountain Dew and Doritos presents Halo 4 Infinity Challenge. January will bring the final five episodes of the season. Place your bets now if there'll be a second season. Spoiler: There will.

Spare the stick, get spoiled with the kids of South Park's latest trailer. We've also whipped up the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 trailer from tonight VGA awards.

Update: Sadly, the South Park trailer has been pulled, but we have the Castlevania trailer for you after the break.

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Masochism returns in Dark Souls 2. Announced during tonight's VGA awards, no release window or any other details. You kill Shy Guys though! There's also dragons, a dude in armor and a lady wearing a hooded cape.

Update: We've got the full live-action trailer just beyond the break.

Update 2: Sadly, this trailer's been pulled. We'll update this post (and the rest of our VGA 2012 posts with video) as soon as it's back up.

Update 3: From Software's Twitter account confirmed Dark Souls 2 will be on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

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The evil fungus of The Last of Us is among us on May 7, 2013. Check out the new trailer beyond the break!

Update: Sadly, this trailer's been pulled. We'll update this post (and the rest of our VGA 2012 posts with video) as soon as it's back up.

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The most cryptic trailer so far for the Spike Video Game Awards 2012 was one for a game called The Phantom Pain. We have no idea what it is, since we've never heard of developer Moby Dick Studio.

All we know is that it had a bunch of patients being mowed down and blown up in what looks like a hospital. It ends with a close-up on some dude who had a hook hand and kinda looked like Snake from Metal Gear Solid. We'll update as soon as we figure this out.

Update: Check out the trailer yourself just beyond the break!

Update 2: Sadly, this trailer's been pulled. We'll update this post (and the rest of our VGA 2012 posts with video) as soon as it's back up.

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In the early 2000s, two Western role-playing games grabbed the genre and shoved it into new and surprisingly popular directions. Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002) and BioWare's Knights Of The Old Republic (2003) modernized RPGs' technology, expanded the audience, and created the two most popular models for the genre moving forward.

Before these two games were released, the term Computer Role-Playing Game (CRPG) was commonly used to describe the games in this column. Ultima, Wizardry, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, these all came out on computers (at least initially), with DOS/Windows becoming the computer platform of choice as the decade progressed. But Morrowind and KOTOR were designed and released for the Xbox – and they succeeded there. The realm of console RPGs was opened to very different styles of game from the Final Fantasies which had dominated. This successful move opened entirely new modes of money-making, allowing BioWare and Bethesda to become some of the biggest developers in gaming overall.

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Capcom revealed a few details on the plan to continue Dragon's Dogma, the 2013 expansion pack "Dark Arisen." The DLC will feature the requisite "more stuff" you'd expect, packing in new armor and weapons, greater character customization options and a Japanese voiceover option, because nothing screams medieval fantasy like Japanese dialogue.

"Dark Arisen" will allow you to transfer your save file from Dragon's Dogma vanilla and takes adventurers to a new dungeon located in the Bitterblack Isle, Capcom-Unity says. It may not be the safest travel destination, but we hear Bitterblack's shopping district is a real must-see.

This is the Wii U GamePad, in one of its earliest iterations. The Nintendo Land team experimented with this device, a Wii Zapper with a screen glued to it, when coming up with ideas for the game.

"After development of Wii Sports Resort," co-director Takayuki Shimamura said in an Iwata Asks interview, "[co-director Yoshikazu] Yamashita-san and I were thinking about something new that would draw upon the knowhow for Wii MotionPlus. We tested gameplay that involved moving the Wii Zapper and having images from the Wii move in sync on a monitor in your hands. It was fairly well received..."

It was so well-received, in fact, that not only did it form the basis of the Wii U, it convinced Shigeru Miyamoto that the 3DS needed gyro sensors in it, "so even though the ship was headed out of the harbor, he called it back," said president Satoru Iwata.

A second controller prototype, visible after the break, looks more like the GamePad we know now, though it's built from two Wiimotes stuck to the sides of a touchscreen, wired to Nunchuk joysticks.

The annual Spike Video Game Awards begin in two hours. Whatever you may think about the validity of the awards, it's usually a solid two hours of trailer reveals. Also, if we gotta give up our Friday night to watch, the least you can do is commiserate with us as we liveblog the show.

What's everyone playing?

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We haven't had much reason to discuss Playcast Media recently, with the Israel-based outfit failing to beat OnLive to the cloud-gaming market back in 2009. As of now, the Playcast Media service is live in Portugal, France and South Korea, but the company is set to launch its platform in the United States early next year.

So what is Playcast? It's a cloud gaming service streaming through set-top boxes, tablets, smartphones and PCs – basically, anything that can run Android 4.0 and higher.

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Amazon's Kindle Fire, which uses the Android operating system, is available now through GameStop in the States. The game retailer will have the Kindle Fire HD 7" for $199.99 in "all 4,400" US GameStop shops. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9" and Kindle Fire 7", which cost $299.99 and $159.99, respectively, are available in select stores.

"And with customers able to trade old video games, devices and more toward the purchase of new products, including Kindle Fire, we're making it easier than ever for customers to get the holiday gifts they want," said Joe Gorman, vice president of mobile at GameStop. Trading in an original Kindle Fire can net customers up to $100 of in-store credit.

To entice you to purchase a Kindle from GameStop, rather than straight from Amazon, the retailer is offering a $25 Amazon.com gift card with Kindle Fire purchase through January 31, 2013. And with that you can purchase a GameStop gift card off Amazon and get right back to what you should have been given in the first place. Circuit complete.

Thanks to the power of the Elder God, the Legacy of Kain series is now on Steam. For $9.99 a pop, you can download Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 and Legacy of Kain: Defiance.

The Legacy of Kain games focus on vampire-turned-wraith Raziel and vampire demigod Kain. It's the series where Amy Hennig got her first crack as games writer and director. Hennig has since won two awards from the Writers Guild of America for her work on the Uncharted series.

Zooming in on yesterday's NPD data for November, it turns out Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 sold 7.5 million copies in the United States. The retail tracking service also told Gamespot that second-place entry Halo 4 sold 3.2 million units, while runner-up Assassin's Creed 3 moved 2.9 million copies.

NPD's data tracked Black Ops 2 sales from launch on November 13 until November 24. The game would go on, according to Activision, to reach sales of $1 billion four days later.

This week's Super Joystiq Podcast thinks 1 billion = 1 million x 1 million.

This week is all about the games with three full segments of impressions and opinions. Richard, Mike Schramm, and Dave discuss the Tomb Raider reboot and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance after seeing them at recent preview events. At least one of these games has a boss with a dozen-plus arms.

In the second segment, Richard is joined by Jordan and freelancer Heidi Kemps to revisit one of his first loves-- 3D Sega fighters of yore. Virtua Fighter 2, Fighting Vipers, and Sonic the Fighters all get their due. Xav rounds out the game talk with a special BioShock Infinite check-in after last night's preview event.

News closes the show with Alexander, JC, Jess, and Sinan talking Peter Molyneux, Nintendo Power, Google Maps on Wii U, Steam Big Picture, and more.

Also, be sure to jump past the break to check out this week's giveaway.

Listen to the Super Joystiq Podcast:

• Subscribe to the Super Joystiq Podcast in iTunes
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• Download the MP3 directly

Details about each segment are available after the break.

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In BioShock Infinite, the world of Columbia is under the command of man who refers to himself as a prophet and savior. Father Comstock and his flock rule the streets of the cloud city, but what kind of world is it? And why is Elizabeth, the woman players are tasked with taking out of Columbia, so crucial to the people of the city?

In an interview with Joystiq, Irrational Games boss Ken Levine details the themes of faith, how political and social issues shape gameplay, and how Elizabeth has evolved since we were first introduced to her many years ago.

For more on BioShock Infinite – which was delayed to March 26 – read our detailed impressions of the game's first two hours.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition rolled onto the App Store today, with the remastered BioWare RPG now available on iPad for $9.99. Trent Oster, head of developer Beamdog, revealed the current version is limited to iOS 6.0, although iOS 5.1 support is in the works.

Beamdog released Enhanced Edition for PC last week, with the Mac and Android versions still to come. While BG:EE comes in $10 cheaper on iPad than on PC, certain new inclusions such as Neera and Dorn II Karn are only available as in-app purchases.

The game's multiplayer is in beta at launch, but Beamdog said cross-platform multiplayer is coming to the game, meaning iPad rangers will be able to fight alongside PC druids, Mac paladins, and Android thieves. Other combinations will also probably work.

The build of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance shown off this week at a press event in Los Angeles was essentially complete, and while the game itself won't be released until February, finished product means that the collaboration between Kojima Productions (represented at the event by producer Yuji Korekado) and Platinum Games (represented by producer Atsushi Inaba) is also done. So when Joystiq sat down to chat with them, we only had one important question: How'd it go?

Both sides were unsure of the partnership when it began. Korekado said that "the challenge for us was the worry about what kind of game would this end up being," and Inaba told us that Platinum wasn't sure about taking over for Kojima's series on this iteration. But now that all is said and done, both sides also say they not only had a great time, but they'd do it again. "We could not have done that without Platinum Games' expertise, it would not have happened," said Korekado. "So of course, this tag team, we'd love to do it again."

Inaba was even more adamant about the two studios working together in the future. "From our side, it would be a waste to not do this again. We made a great game, and we'd love to do it again," he said. He agreed that when the project started, both teams were reticent about joining forces. "But after working together on the game for a while, they were both able to learn from each other and grow as people and as developers. And we feel that's a plus. Moving forward as a team, we'd love to do it again, no doubt." Obviously, nothing's been announced yet, and the goal right now is to get Rising in the public's hands. But it sounds like Platinum and Kojima are ready to make more Metal Gear music together in the future.