A couple of big announcements for Microsoft's My Xbox Live today. First, the app has been released for Android devices, giving users of the OS access to Xbox Live features such as Achievements, messages and other social content.

Meanwhile, the iOS version has seen some significant improvements, notably the ability to control the Xbox console remotely. Specifically, you can fire up games from your collection or launch a selection of curated content (featured games, movies, etc.). You can even directly control some applications, such as Netflix. There is, however, a slight delay between phone taps and on-screen reaction, so you're probably better off using a controller. Still, it's pretty nifty and gives us a hint of what we can expect from Smartglass later this year.

Finally, the iPad version of My Xbox Live now features Retina Display support and better authentication. The app is free on both iOS and Android.

Sony's got a pretty swanky skyscraper in Manhattan. That skyscraper, however, may not feature Sony's logo much longer – not to mention the employees it houses – as the private-equity firm Blackstone Group for the potential sale of the 55th and Madison-based, 37-story building.

Said talks apparently didn't conclude with a plan. A variety of potential outcomes are up in the air: renting out part of the building, selling the whole thing and leasing back part of it, and outright sale are all proposed in the piece.

"Sources familiar with the structure" valued the building at somewhere between $700 million and $1 billion, and Sony outright owns the structure – that kind of capital infusion would significantly impact the ailing hardware manufacturer's bottom line. The company's fiscal 2012 results depict a grim reality for Sony, with even its Consumer Products & Services division (read: PlayStation) suffering losses.

Update: The commercial real estate group Newmark Grubb Knight Frank was originally named by the NY Post as party to these talks. The group has since refuted those claims.

[Image credit: Rafael Chamorro]

Activision, the "that's no moon" of publishers, has created a strategic relationship with mobile platform and analytic company Flurry Inc. to publish indie titles. Actually, it's to "identify and assist third-party developers in the development, publishing, distribution and promotion of independent titles on iOS and Android platforms."

The interesting part here is the games will be published under the Activision Mobile Publishing brand, but indie developers retain the rights to their intellectual property.

"Activision and Flurry are uniquely qualified to provide mobile developers with funding, resources and unmatched marketing expertise, while also allowing them to retain their intellectual property," said Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg. "We are confident this relationship and our new platform will yield significant results and are excited to launch it."

It'll be interesting to see what type of indies this relationship nets. For anyone interested in hopping into this pool, we stress: have a good attorney.

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Worms 2: Armageddon for iOS was recently updated to enable asynchronous play. It means the worms are no longer bound by timers or quick lunch breaks. Now they can unleash their turn-based death over days or weeks – whenever players find the time to make their next move.

The asynchronous play supports up to sixteen simultaneous matches, along with continued support for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and local hotseat modes.

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The App Store ecosystem works wonderfully for Apple and the people who purchase and play games on their iPads, iPhones and iPods; the same can't be said for all app developers, Lonely Few's Rod Green told us today. Green and his partner, Yeong-Hao Han, are out thousands of dollars and at least two years of development time on their iOS debut, Brainsss.

It did well, by Apple's standards. By Yeong-Hao's standards, however, the two years he and Green put into making Brainsss an intricate, highly stylized, top-down zombie title was a poor business move.

"From a business point of view, that was probably a mistake, but we really wanted our first iOS game to turn out exactly how we wanted it to be," Yeong-Hao told CBS.

Green and Yeong-Hao are now focused on creating titles with quick turnaround and less complexity, a method the App Store seems to support, if the flood of single-swipe hits is anything to measure by.

Piracy also played a part in the dissemination of Brainsss, but Green said he doesn't see that as a negative: "In short we feel that most of the time these pirates aren't actually lost revenue at all, but more a chance to get the awareness of the game out there. It's the nature of the digital age and something we felt we needed to just accept rather than waste time trying to prevent."

Below: find an infographic breaking down the sales of Brainsss over its first month, along with some more information about user behavior and piracy trends around the world.

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Hidden in Square Enix's booth, among the dapper murderers and fluffy dimensions, was an iOS rhythm game about a flying, sword-wielding woman and her animate teddy bear who fight demons together in gothic-looking tunnels. Powered by Unreal Engine 3. Sure, why not?

Demons' Score isn't just inspired by Elite Beat Agents and Ouendan.; it marks a return to touchscreen music gaming for iNiS, who created both of those (along with the brilliant Gitaroo-Man), which makes it a pretty cool rhythm game by default. You tap icons in response to an indicator – when a clock-like hand hits the top of the icon, you tap, and you receive a score based on your timing. You'll also have icons that require swipes, multiple timed taps, lines that you drag at a certain speed, and icons that you tap as many times as you can before they disappear.

Taking advantage of multitouch hardware, Demons' Score also features multiple simultaneous icons for you to tap at once. Oh, by the way, all these icons appear in front of enemy demons that you kill upon successful contact.

Along the way, as you fight through disco-musicked demon gauntlets, the boss is constantly bothering you with funky, funky taunts. Why is all the music and dialogue disco-themed? I have no idea!

In 2010, Rod Green and Yeong-Hao Han left lucrative, steady jobs in the mainstream gaming industry to enter the erratic world of indie development with their own studio, Lonely Few. They assumed making a complex yet accessible, high-quality zombie game for iPad would do well on Apple's App Store, and they were right.

Brainsss, Lonely Few's breakout title, became a featured app, generated a fair amount of media buzz and received stellar user reviews when it launched last month, and it is what Apple would consider a "success."

Unfortunately, Green and Yeong-Hao would consider it something else entirely.

The pair put $20,000 into the development of Brainsss, and at the end of the first month, after its launch-sales spike and the end of its "featured" spot, the game has generated $31,000. This has to cover the initial development costs -- which included paying for the engine license and Apple SDK -- and their salaries for the year.

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Industrial Toys was created by three self-described and proven industry veterans: Alex Seropian (Bungie founder), Tim Harris (Seven Lights founder) and Brent Pease (Bungie San Jose). They came together in Pasadena, California, in February 2012, with a mission to create hardcore games for mobile, touchscreen devices.

Since then, Industrial Toys has picked up sci-fi writer John Scalzi to help build its worlds, Marvel's Mike Choi and DC's Phil Tan as artists (and to balance the company's comic zen), and a handful of "grizzled veterans and fresh, new talent," president Tim Harris told Joystiq at E3.

There are a total of 15 employees at Industrial Toys, split down the middle between those new to the industry and those who may have seen too much of it, Harris said.

If splitting an odd number of employees into two even groups seems like an improbable feat, know that it isn't the most ambitious of Industrial Toys' goals: By the end of the month, Seropian and Harris plan to release information about their first title, a sci-fi shooter with a world potentially as large as World of Warcraft's.

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Before hitting Nintendo's portable systems, the duo from Adventure Time are gracing your iDevice's screen. Adventure Time – Legends of Ooo: Big Hollow Princess is a new point-and-tap adventure game for iOS in which Finn and Jake team up to stop the evil Ice King, who is running around freezing princesses like there's a time and a place for that kind of thing. Protip: it's never cool to freeze a princess. Don't even think about doing it.

You can download Adventure Time – Legends of Ooo: Big Hollow Princess (compatible with iOS 4.1 and higher) right now for $.99. Adventure Time – Legends of Ooo: Big Hollow Princess even features new voiceovers from the show's actors, exclusive to this new iOS game.

Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada and publisher Natsume revealed their next project together at E3. "Project Happiness" is a new IP in which you run a shop in a small village, buying and selling items to improve the shop and learning the stories of all the customers who come in over the years. Natsume later revealed plans to put it on 3DS and mobile; during an interview at E3, Wada said it was planned for a "variety of platforms."

Wada recruited top talent to create his new game. Character designs, for both humans and the adorable "sprite" creatures that inhabit the world, are by Pokemon character designer Atsuko Nishida. The music, including that heard in the above trailer, is composed by legendary Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu.

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Max Payne is staring down a countdown clock set to hit "0" on June 14 – and we all know what happens then. That's right, Max Payne Mobile will launch for Android devices. Boom, baby.

Max Payne Mobile brings the complete, classic Max Payne to mobile devices with HD graphics and Social Club integration, among other new features. It launched on iOS devices on April 12.

The following Android devices will be able to play with Max on June 14:

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Alex Seropian, Bungie co-founder and creator of the Halo franchise, has a new studio focused on creating mobile, hardcore games, and his first title is going to be -- wait for it -- a sci-fi shooter.

As a hardcore game, Industrial Toys' sci-fi shooter utilizes Unreal Engine and will exist in a world similar in size to the Elder Scrolls or World of Warcraft universes, Seropian said. As a web-based title, it may have some similarities to Team Fortress 2, president Tim Harris suggested after we asked about any online multiplayer capabilities:

"It's interesting you bring up TF2," Harris said, laughing.

That's where the familiarity from Industrial Toys ends: Seropian and Harris, the latter formerly of Seven Lights, are looking to innovate the touchscreen-control space in a major way, while adding community features integrated on a level other mobile games can't, well, touch.

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Microsoft's SmartGlass initiative aims to enrich the entertainment offerings on Xbox with an informative, context-sensitive "surface," spread across compatible tablets and smartphones. Phil Spencer, Corporate VP of Microsoft Studios, tells me you can expect SmartGlass support from all of the company's games after the feature becomes available this fall.

"It just makes so much sense for a developer who wants to supply, maybe not time-critical information, like 'that enemy is getting ready to shoot you,' but information that augments what's happening on screen," Spencer says. He used last year's Halo Waypoint Atlas app, which offered multiplayer GPS tracking, as an example of how SmartGlass features could share additional game information without hampering the moment-to-moment gameplay. "And then you're even going to see situations like with Ascend, where there's actually gameplay that happens on the phone, even when you're away from your television and that interacts back with the online game that's happening. So I think you'll see information sharing, context sharing while you're in the room, with video and with games, as well as gameplay happening in more distributed environments."

SmartGlass will be encapsulated in a single app that syncs with your Gamertag and enables features based on what you're playing or watching (provided they support SmartGlass). "You don't have to log in and out of each app – you know, 'I'm gonna start the Mass Effect app, and now I'm gonna start the Game of Thrones app.' So you have this surface, this smart surface," Spencer says, "that sits on any device that you already own that's always in sync with what's happening on the television, and it knows where to go and grab the right content to display at the right time, to make sure that if you're playing Halo, then the Halo surface is available on SmartGlass."

During its E3 2012 press conference, Microsoft showed a concept of what might become Halo 4's SmartGlass functionality. The app, as shown, allows players to track stats and send game invites via tablet or smartphone. Microsoft has said that it supports the "device you already own," but hasn't directly addressed SmartGlass variations between iOS, Android and Windows 8.

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Zen Studios passively announced a few months back it was working on some PopCap-branded pinball tables, and now the company tells us the first one will be available by "end of summer." The company didn't reveal any branded table specifics, but looking at PopCap's highest-profile games, we'd venture to guess: Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle or Bejeweled.

Despite working on new intellectual properties like CastleStorm and KickBeat, the Hungarian developer knows where its bread is buttered and plans to support Zen Pinball and Pinball FX 2 into the future.

It's no secret that we very much enjoy Monsters Ate My Condo. We love giant unicorns with an addiction to cosmetic surgery who used to front '80s rock bands but now work at self-esteem help lines. It's our kyrptonite. Previously exclusive to iOS platforms, PikPok's puzzle game is finally making its debut on Android. It's available right now in the Google Play Store for $.99.

And to celebrate being App of the week on the App store, Adult Swim is also offering Monsters Ate My Condo on iOS for free. This offer will only be available for a limited time, so make sure you hit up iTunes and give it a download before these giant monsters have gotten their fill of plaster and Ikea furniture.

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PowerA predicts it will earn $50 million in retail revenue from its line of Skylanders accessories alone this year. Up next it's built some Medal of Honor: Warfighter controllers and will unveil its "MOGA" mobile gaming controller, the latter of which you can check out in the gallery below, along with an Arkham City batarang controller and other goodies.

Oh, and it has a lineup of pretty awesome iPhone 4 Star Wars cases to match the Star Wars notification sounds you already have enabled on your mobile phone. Nerd.

If peripheral maker PDP's booth had a theme at E3 this year, it was to be as bright and colorful as possible. From "Rock Candy" controllers in a rainbow of colors to glowing controllers, headsets and even HDMI cables, everything was designed to stand out on drab, utilitarian entertainment centers everywhere.

Turns out I didn't need to worry about finding the Hawken E3 party. First, it was in the Luxe, a grandiose hotel in the same plaza as the Los Angeles Staples Center. Second, the electronic billboard directly below the Luxe insignia read "HAWKEN" in bold white letters, a building to the north had the game title and Machinima symbols emblazoned in lights across one side, and a bumping party overflowing with people in Hawken swag spilled out onto the Luxe's second-floor balcony.

Welcome to the opulent stage of high-profile pseudo-indie development.

Hawken, its developer Adhesive Games and parent company Meteor Entertainment, are not representative of the standard indie community, but they carry that already nebulous label in a vague, but real, way: Meteor is the publishing arm of Adhesive and it has only one client and one focus, Hawken.

"First of all, we're no EA," Meteor Entertainment's Paul Loynd told me at Hawken's June 5 E3 party, hosted by Machinima. "And we only have one game. This is our thing. We're excited to be working on Hawken."

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Time to break out your good staff of summoning because Wizards of the Coast will launch the next installment in its Duels of the Planeswalkers series later this month. Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will launch worldwide on June 20 for Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, Steam on PC – and, for the first time, iPad.

As for pricing, it's not necessarily a given that Duels 2013 will be a $10 title – Wizards reps would not confirm pricing.