Rovio, well known for its popular Angry Birds franchise, released its newest iPhone and iPad game, Amazing Alex, on Thursday. The game lets users build contraptions out of whatever Alex can find to perform tasks and achieve goals.

Sol Deo Gloria Productions released Marathon Infinity for the iPad on Thursday, bringing the final installment to the Marathon trilogy to the multimedia tablet. Marathon was first released for the Mac in 1994 and changed the first person shooter genre with its graphics, game play, and intelligent enemies.

Finnish game maker Rovio Entertainment Ltd., creator of the highly popular Angry Birds games, distributed over 648 million copies of its games across all platforms and booked revenue of over US$106 million for 2011, the company revealed in its 2011 financial results Monday. Based on its strong results, the company may soon consider going public.

What’s in a word? A high score if you play it right. Vern Seward takes a look at Scramble With Friends, Scrabble, and Word Fu in this week’s installment of Free on iTunes.

Diablo III, the long-awaited and highly anticipated fantasy action role-playing game, will be available for all Mac and PC fans to test out during a free “open beta” weekend, starting today at 3 p.m. EDT (12 p.m. PDT), Blizzard, the game’s developer, announced late Thursday. Interested gamers need only have a free Battle.net account, Blizzard’s online gaming service, to play.

In an apparent correction of Monday’s rumor that Apple CEO Tim Cook visited game maker and distributor Valve last week, gaming site Kotaku now claims to have an excerpt from an unreleased podcast in which Valve Co-Founder and Managing Director Gabe Newell states that Mr. Cook never visited the company.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was spotted at gaming giant Valve’s headquarters in Washington State late last week, an event that has sparked much speculation and claims from unnamed sources. The former include the idea that Apple is interested in buying Valve, while the latter includes the claim that Apple is working with Valve to reinvent living room gaming.

Rovio released Angry Birds in Space on Thursday, adding a new twist to the popular bird shooting, pig smashing game.

Virtual Programming announced on Tuesday that the company is looking for beta testers for its Mac games. The company is offering free games for your feedback, making it a great way to both lower your own personal productivity while helping out the Mac gaming industry at the same time.

Iconic game developer Atari has laid a heavy hand on the App Store and cleared it of apps it believes infringe on its intellectual property. This is a new tactic for the company and one that flies in the face of a 2010 proclamation that it would work with game developers.