I took a look at the virtual pumpkin carving sim not too long before Halloween and liked what I saw. So I'm glad to see its done well enough for itself to make the top 10 purchased Indie Games on Xbox Live.

In total, three Halloween-themed games made top slots on the Indie list. Besides Pumpkin Chop, Halloween HD made the cut at number eight and I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 held the number two spot. With a name like that, I can understand how it did so well — I don't even need to play it.

Sadly, though, Halloween is over. So I won't expect to see Pumpkin Chop on anyone's top 10 'til next year at least. But if you've got a copy, I guess you could practice your design skills for next year's Kotaku Pumpkin Patch.

LIVE Activity for week of Oct. 26th [Major Nelson]

This year about 400,000 people from all over Southern California converged in costume to walk around and have a good time. As always, the Nintendo love was ever-present.

Eric doesn't pull off any flaming NBA Jam-style dunks in his Flickr photo gallery, but he does have some stunning and surreal photos of the big head mode mask. In both wearable action and creation, rarely have I been so jealous of someone's Halloween idea.

Of course, Eric's got the right resume for modeling polygonal heads, having worked for EA, Black Box and Deep Fried Entertainment, modeling characters for games like Def Jam Vendetta, Need for Speed, NBA Live and much much more.

More photos at Eric's Flickr, with a little "making of" technical detail at his personal site.

In it she argued that girls who play games are not rare, but girl gamers are.

Tonight she sent along this pic of her dressed as Harley Quinn with a special message to Kotaku readers. Happy belated Halloween everyone.

If anybody else has got gamer-themed costumes they want to share, throw 'em in the comments field. I would say email 'em to me — but given that I'm still receiving pumpkin pics even now in November, I doubt they'd get to me in time to be relevant. So comment away!

P.S. Sorry, guys. I wound up not going as Peach this year because I couldn't find anybody to be my Mario.

P.P.S. Check back at 5AM for a very special Batman: Arkham Asylum costume. It's so spiffy, this boss is giving it its own post.

These are actually colleagues of mine who posted their group costume to Facebook. I re-posted here so you could compare this Zoe to the Drag Zoe in the next three pictures.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

So the blow-out post will be done in piece work and you're only going to get a spoonful of awesome today to make up for all of the brokenness I just inflicted on Kotaku.

Oh, and I'm really sorry to everybody whose not getting called out by name for your super awesome pumpkins. But rest assured even the fugly one are super awesome in my book.

I suppose the characters could be living in some sort of nightmare world, where traditional games are bypassed in favorite of name-driven racing games. Where Ryu from the Shenmue series can drive a motorcycle and a forklift, yet still can't break out of this hellish existence into some sort of Shenmue 3. When I think about it that way I get chills. Someone hold me.

Thanks for sharing, Dave Brown, Jonathan Barrett, Adam Olson and gyophry (who did both Brütal Legend and Final Fantasy VII).

Today through November 2nd, Valve invites the spirits of the dead into Team Fortress 2 in the form of terrifying paper bag hats. The masks are unlocked via five new update-specific achievements, with names like "Candy Coroner" and "Attack O' Lantern," the latter of which might have something to do with the exploding pumpkins added in the update.

The update also brings a new KOTH map called Harvest, through which wanders the restless spirit of Zepheniah Mann. Crossing his path will cause you to freeze with terror, leaving you open to all sorts of deadly Halloween mischief. On top of that, "the mangled corpses of the recently deceased will plague the living… with candy!" I have no idea what that means, and I'm a little scared to find out.

Team Fortress 2 Pumpkin Patch [Team Fortress 2]

Master Chief is cute because it's carved from a green pumpkin. Akuma is cute because it's a dad's contribution to his family's pumpkin count, which is about to get bigger by one. And the Spy could potentially be cute, if you ever got that mask off him.

The "mystery game" is actually an iPhone game called Sneezies sent my way by an enterprising iPhone dev who apparently knows how to carve a pumpkin.

Mad pumpkin respect to Jacob Hemphill, Jordan Rubow, Jimmy LeBlanc, Easy Tiger, Joe V. and Gavin Bowman!

As a long-time MMO player, I love the way developers tend to go slightly crazy when it comes to Halloween events. I used to get all giddy back in the day, when Everquest first started running huge, multi-zone treasure hunts during the holiday, and to this day I always look forward to seeing what the creator's of my favorite MMO titles come up with to celebrate the 31st of October. It looks like Cryptic doesn't plan to disappoint.

The Dragon Age: Origins entry comes from Cameron Vetter's girlfriend (and man has she got some skills). The second Left 4 Dead pumpkin we've seen so far comes our way from Kotaku reader Necrothug. And lastly, we've got a rare white pumpkin entry from Alex Fortuno.

Fortuno says: "This is supposed to be the Bass icon from Beatles Rock Band. It's also carved on a white pumpkin. The idea was much better in my head."

But don't be too hard on him — he had the ingenious idea to keep the whole thing together with toothpicks. I've got to try that on my Bubs pumpkin. My cat sort of ruined his teeth...

The degree of help Sega's website can give is relatively minimal, unfortunately. Suggestions include wearing a skin-tight cat suit, crafting butterfly wings so you can pretend you are always jumping, and making sure you get the attitude right, or no one will believe you are the witchy heroine of the upcoming game the website is actually an advertisement for. Here's an example of a helpful hint:

When it comes to defining characteristics, you'll be hard pressed to find another action heroine whose eyewear alone could be used to identify her. While you can't buy the butterfly-adorned sides of her frames over the counter, thin rectangular black rimmed glasses should do the trick.

Thin, rectangular black glasses? I've got those! Now all I need is the cat suit, some weapons, an attitude, and Crecente's hair and I am all set to scare the living hell out of children who dare knock on my door Saturday night. Thanks, Sega!

Sega's Make-A-Witch Foundation [Sega]

The Half-Life pumpkin was carved last year by Gerard "OriginalGman." Ghostbusters comes our way from Cameron Leatham, Joe Greene and his wife contributed Strong Bad pumpkins. Sean Lefebvre handled Mario and Bowser. And Borderlands was done by Dennis Cwik.

Here's how some of the experts got it done:

Ghostbusters:
"I used one of those [store-bought pumpkin carving] sets, and I also have this hobby knife kit that had some useful blades in it. The U-shaped chisel thing (not sure what the actual name is) was particularly useful for removing the skin. I think I'm going to pick up a light bulb base and use that to light it up, though. It has to be completely dark to see the effect, and my camera still had trouble picking it up. I had to crank the brightness up on that picture."

Borderlands:
"Being cheap, I used what I had. Bagsofcrap shows my Masterchef Duracut set going for $10 one day (http://www.bagsofcrap.com/woot.html.php?id=2556), and so I only used one of the steak knifes on the left side of the picture (as that was the sharpest knife I could find in the entire set). The luxurious and ergonomic plastic handle handle did give a nice cracking sound as I tried to remove the top to scoop the guts too, but it held together like a champ.