Twitch, the eSports broadcasting service, is entering a new phase: The premium subscription phase. Twitch Turbo lets people watch video game broadcasts ad-free for a monthly fee, but will audiences bite?

Twitch continues its 2013 expansion with Twitch Turbo, a new paid subscription service to its streaming video game television service. Subscribers to Twitch Turbo will be able to watch eSports matches free of advertising as well as receive additional perks like custom community tools (chat text colors, etc.) and priority customer service. The service will cost $8.99 per month, a relatively high price compared to other streaming entertainment services. Netflix by contrast is just $7.99 per month. Since Twitch’s audience has grown from 16 million to 23 million subscribers in the past nine months, it’s easy to understand why the company is interested in ramping up monetization.

“The average viewer watches over an hour and a half of videos each day,” explains Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, “Over two-thirds of our logged-in users chat each day. We wanted to find a way to provide the ultimate Twitch experience.”

Twitch Turbo represents the second significant expansion for the streaming eSports company. On Wednesday, Twitch announced that it had partnered with Activision Blizzard to bring its game broadcasting tools to home consoles starting with Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Xbox 360 owners have access to tools that let them upload Black Ops 2 play, commentary, and webcam footage seamlessly. The service will be available on Sony’s PlayStation 3 soon as well.

The crossover in audience between Twitch and Call of Duty is strong enough to support Activision’s decision to partner with the service, but that crossover should also give insight into the potential of Twitch Turbo. Parting that audience from its money is no easy task. While Call of Duty games like Black Ops 2 earn $1 billion in revenue within weeks of release, those players are reticent to spend more on additional services. When Activision opened the Call of Duty Elite service in 2011, 10 million players signed up but only 2 million agreed to pay the $50 per year fee. By the end of 2012, Call of Duty Elite was forced to become a free service.

Call of Duty Elite and Twitch Turbo are more similar than they first appear. Both premium subscription services were based around adding value through small perks and preferential treatment and appealed to similar audiences. At $108 per year, Twitch Turbo is a more expensive proposition than Call of Duty Elite. The service will be an interesting experiment for Twitch but it is not a guaranteed source of new growth.

Keep your new Apple iPhone 5 pristine with one of the cases from our case roundup.

If you want to keep that shiny new iPhone 5 looking pristine and sexy, then you need to grab yourself some decent protection. Whether you want something to match Apple’s stylish flagship design, something to safeguard it from accidents, or something to show off your personality, we’ve got you covered in this iPhone 5 case roundup.

When it comes to accessories, the iPhone line has always inspired some imaginative entries, and the latest release is no exception. Even before the queues start to form at Apple stores across the country, the market is already flooded with iPhone 5 cases.

We’ve got unbreakable iPhone cases, gorgeous iPhone cases, retro iPhone cases – in short, we have an iPhone 5 case to suit everyone.

If you haven’t upgraded yet then check out our best iPhone 4 and 4S cases.

Whether or not you’re a fan, the Hitman HD Trilogy isn’t an essential purchase, but it charts the series’ evolution over the past decade.

The title Hitman HD Trilogy is a bit misleading. While the newly released HD collection from Eidos Interactive and Square Enix does indeed pack together the three Hitman games for consoloes released prior to 2012, it does not qualify as a complete set since the first game in the series - Hitman: Codename 47 - continues to be exclusive to PC. It’s not fair to hold the absent PC game against this Xbox 360 and PS3-only collection, but it’s a glaring absence that deserves mentioning. If you’re looking for a fully comprehensive collection of pre-2012 Hitman games, this is not the set you’re looking for. It’s likely the best that you’re going to get, however, and that’s okay.

The Hitman HD Trilogy gathers together Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, Hitman: Contracts, and Hitman: Blood Money into a single box. Blood Money is identical to the current-gen 2006 release. It comes on its own disc, it uses the same set of Xbox 360 Achievements, and it appears to be completely unchanged in any conceivable way.  There’s just a new title image printed onto the disc. The game continues to hold up very well. It lacks the improvements introduced in last year’s Hitman: Absolution, but levels like the opera house or the Christmas party are just as memorable as they’ve ever been.

The two earlier games are lumped together on a disc of their own. The HD refresh, which also of course includes support for widescreen displays, is a welcome improvement, but it’s still impossible to ignore the fact that these are old, old games. Hitman 2 suffers the most, unsurprisingly, with a control scheme that feels awkward and poorly optimized for current-gen gamepads. It’s more a product of the game than the quality of the port; Hitman 2 certainly works in the context of what it is, but you can definitely feel the 10-year gap since its release peeking through.

Contracts fares better, with the original game’s improvements on Hitman 2 carrying over just as well here. The gamepad controls make much more sense and the addition of an easily accessible map improves the playing experience considerably. Contracts is also likely the reason that we’ll never see a properly comprehensive Hitman HD collection; many of the first game’s levels were refreshed in the 2004 release, and those same sections of Codename 47 have always suffered by comparison.

On the technical side, the two older games don’t seem to have been put through any kind of significant remastering process. The resolution is upped to 720p and widescreen displays are now supported, but the textures and character models don’t appear to have been swapped out with new ones. If any remastering work was done at all, it’s very subtle.

The only real flaw with this collection is the fact that these games, even Blood Money, are as imperfect as they’ve ever been. Hitman: Absolution is a nearly perfect execution (no pun intended) of the ideas laid out in the original game, but the titles released between Codename 47 and Absolution serves as snapshots of both the technology available at the time of their development and the evolution of the series as a whole. None of them, not even Blood Money, deliver capably on the promise of putting players in the shoes of a smooth professional killer.

Achievement and Trophy hunters will no doubt appreciate having new awards to shoot for, though Gamerscore junkies ought to note that the 1,000 points of cheevos splits evenly between Hitman 2 and Contracts. Blood Money still uses the same Achievements that it did before, but note as well that it’s a brand new release on PlayStation 3 with this collection.

Conclusion

Given all of that, newcomers to the Hitman series should probably just stick with Absolution to see what 47 can really do. There’s definitely value in revisiting these three older games, particularly the superior Blood Money, if you have fond memories of playing the originals. You also might want to take a peek if you’re freshly done with Absolution and would like to see how the series developed into last year’s release. The Hitman HD Trilogy is an artifact, however, capturing three earlier moments in video games when things weren’t quite as shiny or artificially intelligent as they are now.

Hitman HD Trilogy was reviewed using an Xbox 360 version of the game, as provided by the publisher.

The original Assassin’s Creed was supposed to let people collaborate on taking down Templars, but the technology and story kept co-op out of the game. Now it looks like Ubisoft is re-approaching the idea of cooperative Assassin’s Creed.

Ubisoft met with a fair amount of skepticism from the press when it announced in 2010 that it was brining multiplayer to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Why would a story-heavy game about stalking opponents need a multiplayer mode unless it was just a cynical attempt to satisfy market trends? The doubters were shocked to find that Ubisoft Montreal made what is still considered one of gaming’s best multiplayer modes. According to Assassin’s Creed III mission director Philippe Bergeron multiplayer was always the plan for the series, but not as it ultimately appeared in Brotherhood and later entries. The original Assassin’s Creed was supposed to have a massive co-operative mode.

“[It] just became too hard to do: The engine couldn’t support it, and then the metaphor we had above it didn’t support it. Co-op was one of those big thing at the beginning that just didn’t make sense in the end,” Bergenon told OXM in a retrospective, “For us it was really part of the single player experience, to have in-and-out co-op, and in the end we never thought it made sense in the storyline that we had for the Animus. There was no way to reconcile having multiplayer or co-op in an ancestor’s memories.”

The original Assassin’s Creed follows the story of Desmond as he explores the memories of his ancestor Altair, an assassin fighting against the Templar Order during the Crusades. Bergenon is right that a co-operative mode would have stretched the limits of narrative logic in the game even if Ubisoft’s 2007 engine could have accommodated it.

This past fall though, Ubisoft introduced a spinoff to the series that allows narrative justification for co-op. Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation for PS Vita is a wholly separate story from Desmond, positing that people can relive the lives of past assassins free of a genetic link. With those narrative shackles taken off, Ubisoft is free to explore co-op in future games and it appears that they will do so. A questionnaire sent to Assassin’s Creed fans in November suggested that Ubisoft is considering putting drop-in co-operative play in the next game. The question asked if the “possibility for a friend to join the game in order to help me at any time during the solo mode” was a “must have.”