Ever wonder how your favorite game got its name?

If your favorite game is Monopoly or Candyland, we’re guessing probably not. But many classic names have more interesting origins. Ancient Persian kings, boating, interracial marriages: it’s all here.

Unemployment. Microsoft Studios' creative director Adam Orth is going to have to learn to deal with it for a little while.

Orth, whose controversial Twitter comments about always-on connectivity last week stirred up gamers and forced a public apology from the Redmond-based company, is no longer employed at Microsoft.

Ouya console and controller (Credit: Ouya)The little system hoping to change the world faces some huge challenges.

When it was first introduced last July, the Ouya game system sounded like a dream come true for gamers frustrated with traditional consoles. With a focus on independent games, an affordable price point and a developer-friendly design, it seemed like a breath of fresh air for the industry.

Now the system is finally in the hands of its early Kickstarter backers -- just two months from hitting retail shelves -- and it appears the dream may well turn into a nightmare.

Marchaka and Michele (Credit: Marchaka)With this game, I thee wed.

There have been numerous wedding proposals done via video game modifications, but actually building a game from scratch for the sole purpose of asking for someone's hand? That's a new level altogether.

A Redditor who goes by the name Marchaka has a pretty ideal girlfriend in Michele, as the two share a serious love of video games. That got the wheels in his head spinning when he decided to pop the question.

Using a $70 role-playing game maker called VX Ace, he built Michele's Quest -- a Final Fantasy-style title that consists of four acts and four boss battles.

Post-It notes are eminently useful, but they don’t seem like the most promising medium for creative expression.

“Au contraire,” says YouTube videographer Michael Birken. Well, not literally, but the sentiment is expressed in the magnificent bit of stop-motion animation captured below. Ms. Pac-Man munches her way through a maze and Mario battles Donkey Kong to rescue his best girl -- all rendered with thousands of Post-It ‘pixels’ on an office wall:

Keeping up with the deluge of games flooding the App Store is a daunting task. Plenty of iPhone owners just pick a game or two and stick with ‘em, either because they’re overwhelmed by options or they just seriously love Angry Birds that much.

That’s too bad. iPhone gaming might be dominated by a few big brands, but dig just a little deeper and you’ll find some of the best game experiences on any platform. Here are 10 recent iPhone games that absolutely deserve a spot on your handheld.

EA COO Peter Moore (Credit: Getty Images)For the second year in a row, readers of the consumer-watchdog website The Consumerist have named Electronic Arts "the worst company in America," vilifying the video game publisher more than Bank of America, Comcast and Ticketmaster (which took second, third and fourth places, respectively).

The results of the poll are hardly surprising -- even EA predicted it would repeat the dubious honor -- but they were certainly conclusive.

Defiance, the game (Credit: Trion Worlds)By Eric Kelsey, Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Science-fiction drama "Defiance" wants to go where no television series has gone before, weaving a show with an online video game to achieve the elusive goal of parlaying success on one entertainment platform to another.

The new series, which premieres on U.S. cable channel Syfy on April 15, tells the story of frontier town Defiance, formerly St. Louis, in the near future following a 30-year war between humans and seven alien races.

Syfy last week released a multi-player, plot-based video game, developed with Trion Worlds, that lets users build their own personas and explore the landscape of a reshaped Earth in the San Francisco area. The game is made for Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox360 and PC.

Spinning a film or TV series into a video game, or vice versa, is nothing new. But producers say "Defiance" is the first to weave both game and show together at the same time. The video game alone took some five years to create.