Naughty Dog will give five different lectures related to Uncharted 2 and its production; In one, director Bruce Straley and co-lead designer Neil Druckmann will discuss story and gameplay integration.

Double Fine, the studio behind Brütal Legend, will send lead programmer Peter Demoreuille and artist Drew Skillman to discuss visual design for that game.

The conference will be March 9 to 13 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Naughty Dog, Double Fine to Present at GDC 2010 [CinemaBlend]

Yes, Marc Ecko – that Marc Ecko – has expanded his efforts from rhinoceros-branded jackets and hats into iPhone games. Dexter for the iPhone isn't exactly his game label's first effort at it, but it may be the only one you've ever heard of. Ecko hopes to "scale up" Dexter to the Wii and later Xbox 360/PlayStation 3, which will be the first instance of reverse game development that I've ever seen if it happens.

What Is It?
Dexter for the iPhone is an adventure game that can be played in the first or third person. You play as the title character, a guy who runs around "solving" crimes as part of the police department and then takes justice into his own hands by offing the suspected criminal and storing a sample of their blood in his air conditioning unit.

What We Saw
In the midst of GDC chaos, I found myself in the awkward position of having to run eight blocks through downtown San Francisco with about 11 pounds of journalistic equipment on my back to make it to the 30th story of a posh hotel to spend exactly 20 minutes with the title before running another two blocks to go sit through this.

How Far Along Is it?
If there were such a thing as pre-pre-Alpha, the build I saw of Dexter would be it. I'm giving Ecko the benefit of the doubt, since his games label hasn't had much experience in development – but I couldn't stop myself from wincing when my demo master said the game was 20% done and then proceeded to show me a level with no collision and no objective, purely so I could walk Dexter around and… well, just walk him around. You could call fake levels like this proto-tutorial, but I call it a waste of time for a games journalist to see.

What Needs Improvement?
Lose the Accelerometer: There are several different ways you control motion in Dexter. The default is a set of two buttons that turn Dexter's body or the camera one way or the other, while the accelerometer (tilting the iPhone) actually controls his walking or running. It works in that Dexter does move when you tilt the iPhone, but it's broken in that it makes no sense to move the character like that. My demo master sure seemed to have the hang of it, but I don't think I've ever played any game with a less intuitive control system than if my keyboard had been dipped in concrete and then thrown down a well.

Improve the User Interface: The only UI you see throughout the game is a Mask score, which is a meter that determines how unsuspicious of Dexter the world is. The rest of the time, you don't have a map, an objective arrow or even a noise detector during the sneaking missions to help you out. The game is pre-pre-Alpha, so I'm hoping this will come together. But for now, it's definitely one of the things that needs the most work.

"Use the iPhone in a sawing motion" What?: Not even blowing into the DS mic will embarrass you as badly as Dexter if you happen to be playing the game in public. A crucial portion of the game requires Dexter to off his victims in various ways. My demo master was fond of the bone saw, and when killing time came, the game asked him to turn the phone on its side and actually make a sawing motion with it while the screams of the victim blared out of the speakers. Can you picture doing this on an airplane?!

Integrate the Mini Games: Dexter has a lot of potential to work in mini games. It's not that Ecko hasn't thought about them, it just seems like they haven't figured out which ones are the most important. For example, there are requisite sneaking missions that play out like mini games (get to the end of the hallway without this guy seeing you), but the actual mini game of identifying murder weapons via blood splatter patterns doesn't seem to be required or even integrated into the main game. For the record, that blood splatter game was way more fun than the sneaking – and doesn't Dexter have to do some work for the police to keep the façade up?

What Should Stay The Same?
The virtual joystick: Some of the testers on the game complained about the accelerometer controls, so Ecko included a secondary control scheme where a virtual joystick appears in the lower left hand corner of the phone (when it's turned on its side). This felt way more intuitive to me than the default controls and I'm even tempted to say they should add a second virtual joystick on the right hand side so that we finally have a handheld system that does what we wanted all along: controls almost one-to-one like a console game.

The fidelity to the show: I've got to hand it to Ecko; they aren't creating an utter bastardization of a show just to make a quick buck (sheesh, quick? This is an iPhone game that's been in development for more than a year and they're still in pre-alpha…). It sounds like they're working closely with Michael C. Hall to get the characterization down and the cut scenes for the game were crafted by one of the show's writers.

Final Thoughts.
I'm skeptical, but I see some good ideas going on here. The virtual joystick alone is a moment of "eureka!" for iPhone games. But trying to cram a console game's worth of stuff into one game sounds a little ambitious, not to mention ominous for your iPhone's batter life. Ecko plans to split the game up into three installments for the iPhone which would then be merged into one game for the move to console – if they make it that far. It may be that the clothing designer has bitten off more than he can chew both with the Dexter franchise and with the nature of iPhone gaming.

"The game will share some fundamental designs with the console version," said Nick Pavlich, associate producer on the game. "In the DS version you only control one character, there's a slight RPG element — you can level up, get new weapons and new outfits."

The game will include six playable G.I. Joe characters and five Cobra characters. Gamers will move with the D-pad and shoot with the B button.

A secondary weapon will be tied to the Y button, with dodge on the A button, melee on the X and a special move on the right trigger and reload on the left trigger.

All of the action takes place on the top screen with the bottom screen used for the map and to list objectives. The game won't include touch support because that didn't really work well with the-down arcade feel of the game, they said.

There will be 21 levels in the single-player campaign and three modes in multiplayer: Joe Versus Cobra, Warhead and Defend the Base. Mutitplayer will be multi-card local wireless only and includes four maps for up to four players.

The footage seems to have been shot by some Italian kids. As you can see, there's shooting. There's rolling. There's climbing. Just like the first one, only in a new place. Which really, is all we're asking for!

In a talk today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Blizzard have revealed that, when WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King shipped earlier this year, it quietly introduced a new system for determining how often players would receive quest items from downed enemies.

Blizzard's Jeffrey Kaplan explains:

We found that [originally we] had a lot of problems where players would run into streaks, and they only remembered the shitty streaks. So what we decided to do was we took a page out of Warcraft 3, which had a very elegant design which they referred to as 'progressive percentages.

So what we did recently with Wrath of the Lich King, and it's something we've never really talked about before, but in Lich King, every creature that is part of the collection quest has the item 100% of the time. But we do a progressive system where we up the chance the player [gets the item] each time he kills it.

In other words, the percentages will eventually work in your favour. Just kill and kill again, and no matter how bad your luck is, eventually you'll get it. Whatever "it" is.

Blizzard Details Secret World of Warcraft 'Progressive Percentage' Item Drop Mechanic [Shacknews]

First and foremost, Kojima is best known for creating stealth series Metal Gear Solid. That doesn't mean you should pigeonhole him as an action guy. In a GDC interview, he states:

Well, to give you maybe a surprise, people might think I love action games and I love shoot 'em ups and I kill people all the time, but that's not it. I really like other [genre like] romance... I do, of course, like the comedy... Of course, there is no comedy genre right now, and I'm always wondering how I should re-present this — which I don't have a specific idea yet, but I'm always thinking about that as a new genre.

Whew, got that cleared up. Okay, now on to the announcement. At the end of the interview, Hideo Kojima announces that he will be making an announcement at E3. That's right, he announced an announcement. This really caught us off guard, and we wish he would've given us a heads up — you know, announced that he was going to announce that he will be making an announcement.

Hideo Kojima Interview [GameSpot]

Star Defense is a classic tower defense game set on a series of planets. Instead of defending your base from a line of encroaching enemies from a top-down perspective, though, the game plays in 3D.

The game will feature seven or so worlds that you unlock as you go and three difficulty settings. The locations I saw included a comet-like planet and a square Borgish cube. In both levels enemies spawned from an alien ship and then marched along a trail that wrapped around the planet or cube until arriving at your station.

The 3D perspective could be turned or zoomed into using the touch interface.

As of my playing the game has five levels, all upgradable. When placing when of these structures it shows the area it can shoot into with by shading the map. The game currently has a 30 tower per-a-level cap as well.

The high production value of the game and the interesting LittleBigPlanet aesthetic for the settings, seem to make the game different enough to warrant a buy, even from hard-core Fieldrunner fans.

The recently announced development studio, already hard at work on Seven Haunted Seas, has a serious catalog of fantasy and sci-fi properties, almost all of them full of nearly-naked space travelers, to capitalize upon. The deal will almost assuredly put the "tit" in Titmouse.

The first project to come from the collaboration with Heavy Metal is Fistful of Blood, described as "an over-the-top action game about an Alien Bounty Huntress who comes to earth in search of the creature that killed her father, only to find herself caught in a blood feud between rival gangs of Vampires and Zombies."

The official announcement promises "in-your-face content." What it doesn't promise are games packed full of sexy chicks. Oh wait, it does.

"We want to start Titmouse Games off right, and I can't think of a better way than to pack enough aliens, zombies, vampires, guns, blood, gore, vengeance, and sexy chicks in a game to take down a stampeding elephant," says Aaron Habibipour, Creative Director for Titmouse Games.

As Titmouse has designs to "'keep-it-real' through the digital distribution of original content," we're guessing that its Heavy Metal licensed titles will be of the downloadable variety.

For those of you that have never played Guitar Hero III Mobile, Guitar Hero III: Backstage Pass Mobile or Guitar Hero World Tour Mobile, it might come as a shock that you can play the game without a plastic guitar (or plastic drums). Developer Hands-On got their heads around that early on in GHIII's development and were able to keep it sexy by dropping the fret count from five to three. They also were able to hang on to original song content and score master tracks by approaching music rights holders on their own, instead of waiting around for Activision to do it.

"Most of the R&D went into making the audio sound as good as possible," said Lechleiter. They got around the challenges of only having a single audio channel on most cell phones by having a third party develop an audio mixer that could supply four channels for separate sounds (guitar, drums, crowd noises, etc.), and by focusing on all the different audio types that mobile phones support (MP3, AMR, AAC, MIDI, etc.).

"Everyone wants MPS3 quality," he said. "MIDI I think is acceptable as a lowest common denominator – but that's what people are looking for, the true experience"

The game's quality isn't just about sound, though. By introducing head-to-head multiplayer that works across all different kinds of cell phone, World Tour is like a breakthrough for mobile gaming. Players can either do drums or guitar and the server does the rest in terms of matchmaking and providing four common songs between competitors. Hands-On provides a website where people can look at their stats and the stats of competitors, and the developer makes a habit of releasing one new song a month for free.

This puts their three mobile titles at something like 4 million purchases with other over 250,000 songs downloaded a day, says Lechleiter.

I think World Tour is an example of a mobile developer being aware of a platform's limits instead of blithely assuming quality doesn't matter. Hopefully, other developers will follow their lead.

"We're kind of in the infancy of music games right now," Lechleiter said. "I'm happy with [World Tour] and I'm excited to see what people can do [in the future]."

The G-Force action title is set to hit on July 21, a few days before the Jerry Bruckheimer-Disney CGI live action film of the same name scurries onto screens.

In both the game and the movie, the story follows a team of guinea pigs who have secret lives as spies trying to prevent a billionaire drunk on power and money, trying to take over the world by turning household appliances into killer robots. You know, that old chestnut.

Despite the, to put it kindly, fanciful concept, the action game looks like it could be a relatively pleasing title for younger gamers. In it, players control Darwin, a guinea pig packing an array of neat gizmos. He has thermal vision for solving puzzles and fighting in the dark, an electric whip for melee attacks, a jet pack for flying and turning his four-on-the floor waddle into a sprint. He also can purchase eight weapons including guns that freeze, act like shotguns, rifles and even a gun that lets him hack into evil appliances and get them to attack one another. Darwin can also climb pipes.

While the game is based on the movie and it's appliance army, their are about 80 percent more enemies in the game than in the movie, said Disney Interactive Studios Ben Weitz.

The game's 30 or so enemies include walking irons that shoot fireballs, flying CPU coolers, weaponized toasters, alarm clocks, waffle makers and electric shavers.

Darawin also has a device that can weaponize appliances, instantly turning them into enemies, but also letting him use them to solve puzzles, like using their attack to blow open a door or get him around barriers.

Finally, Darwin can call on the help of a house fly named Mooch. Mooch has to stay within a certain distance of Darwin and can only be used for a set time before returning to the guinea pig, but he's got some specific talents useful for puzzle solving.

He doesn't die, he can use a laser to throw switches, he can fly and he can temporarily slow down time.

All said the game, which is being developed for the PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 2, Wii and Xbox 360, will run about eight to ten hours long. Separate DS and PSP versions are being developed by Keen.

Weitz said that the studio is also looking at releasing a free and paid version of the game for the iPhone. Something more along the lines of the iPhone based on Bolt and meant to work hand-in-hand with the marketing campaign for the movie.

While the movie features the voice work of Nicholas Cage, Tracy Morgan and Penélope Cruz, there's no word yet on who may do work for the game.

That's because cable network G4 will be airing the awards on Friday, April 10 at 6:30 PM PST. Yes, the awards ceremony is next Wednesday, so you'll likely have the winners and losers committed to memory by the time it airs. However, our liveblogging likely won't be able to capture the expert delivery and nuance of Double Fine funnyman Tim Schafer, sure to bring the house down with a cutting remark or two.

Of course, we'll be covering the awards show next Wednesday night, so if you want to see which nominee walks away with trophy in hand, stay tuned to your internet.

The 9th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards may be your only chance to see dozens of telegenic video game developers being handed awards then giving awesome acceptance speeches. How could you possibly miss it?

G4 To Broadcast 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards [Gamasutra]

The design challenge will have Steve Meretzky, VP of Game Design, YouPlus; Kim Swift, Level Designer, Valve; and Sulka Haro, Lead Designer, Sulake pitching games that tackle two themes: sex and autobiography.

Yikes, that should pack the room. If you're around and want to watch, the presentation will be March 25 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. pacific, at the Game Developers Conference.

The Game Design Challenge: My First Time

It's not the "something wonderful is about to happy!" message that has people talking, it's the tiny green A button stuck in the bottom right corner of the speech box.

Could it mean that the game is soon to appear on the Xbox 360's arcade? With the Game Developers Conference right around the corner, I imagine we won't have long to find out.

SOMETHING AWESOME THIS WAY COMES [Polytron, via infinite lives]

A panel of industry judges has narrowed down a list of 226 entries to 15 of the best independent games of last year, and now they want your votes to determine which of them goes home with the Audience Award at the 11th annual Independent Games Festival, held in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference laster this month in San Francisco. This year features quite a lovely selection of titles, with entries coming from Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Community Games, and the PlayStation Network, along with the usual PC suspects.

But who to vote for? Do you choose the charming platforming of Twisted Pixel's The Maw? Perhaps the simple complexity of Q-Games' PixelJunk Eden? I am leaning towards You Have To Burn the Rope from Kian Bashiri, but there are quite a few games on the list I've not tried yet. Luckily the official voting page contains links to download and try most of them out, so even if you have no opinion you suddenly have a slew of new games to try out.

2009 Independent Games Festival Games: Main Competition Audience Award [IGF]

Each year the Game Developers Choice Awards single out one member of the gaming industry whose contributions helped shape what video games are today, awarding them the highest honor they can bestow - the Lifetime Achievement Award. This year, Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima joins past winners such as Richard Garriott, Sid Meier, Will Wright, and Shigeru Miyamoto as the latest in a long line of rightfully celebrated gaming luminaries.

"For years, Hideo Kojima's contributions to game development have broken new ground and inspired the community to think about creating games in never-before-imagined ways," said Meggan Scavio, event director of the Game Developers Conference. "From giving birth to the stealth action game genre to showing game makers how to interact with their players by breaking the ‘fourth wall,' Kojima's achievements make him an obvious choice..."

Congratulations, Hideo Kojima. They may single you out as the Metal Gear creator, but you'll always be the producer on the Zone of the Enders series to me.

As reported previously, Kojima will also be on hand at the Game Developers Conference to deliver a keynote on creative game design challenges, showing off the creative mind that earned him the award.

The 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards will take place on March 25th in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall of San Francisco's Moscone Center. If Kotaku isn't on hand for the event, something will have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

2009 Game Developers Choice Awards Honor Kojima For Lifetime Achievement [Game Set Watch]

Solid Game Design: Making the Impossible Possible, will be Kojima's first appearance at the Game Developers Conference.

"The Game Developers Conference has invited Hideo Kojima to keynote every year for as long as I can remember, so we couldn't be more excited that, at long last, he feels that it is time for him to address the game development community," said Meggan Scavio, event director of the GDC. "The anticipation is already huge to see how one of the community's most revered and elusive creators will inspire attendees to further push the limits of game development."

Kojima's keynote will be delivered on Thursday, March 26 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

Metal Gear Solid Creator Kojima To Keynote GDC 2009

As usual, the finalists include some interesting titles like City Rain, a blend of Tetris and SimCity, and Zeit Squared, a shoot-em-up that allows you to go back in time to assist yourself through the game.

All ten finalists receive a $500 stipend to help them travel to this year's Game Developers Conference and the winner will be awards a trophy and $2,500 cash money.

The finalists:

Tag: The Power Of Paint (DigiPen Institute Of Technology, Seattle)
Feist (Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland)
Winds Of Orbis (Carnegie Mellon - Entertainment Technology Center, Pittsburgh)
Dish Washington (The National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment, Denmark)
The Unfinished Swan (University of Southern California)
Where Is My Heart? (Universität Ulm, Germany)
The Color Of Doom (The Guildhall at SMU, Texas)
City Rain - Building Sustainability (Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil)
Kid The World Saver (University Of Southern California)
Zeit Squared (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

Student Finalists [IGF]

Michiel van der Leeuw and Michal Valient from Guerilla Games will walk attendees through an overview of the rendering techniques they used in creating the Playstation 3 shooter, including a focus on lighting and shadowing and dealing with anti-aliasing.

In the Brutal Art of Brutal Legend, Double Fine Studios art director Lee Petty talks about creating the art for the Jack Black-voiced original game. Petty will also talk about how the independent studio has "evolved".

Other sessions detailed in the latest Game Developers Conference update include a postmortem of Fable II, and a look at the narrative of Far Cry 2.

Bosslady Blog: Welcome To 2009! [GDC]

So it's worth checking out which games have piqued the interest of the judges for this year's festival. The list of finalists includes five games that I've already played a bit of and 17 others that I can't wait to sink my teeth into as a judge.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize
* Blueberry Garden
* CarneyVale Showtime
* Dyson
* Night Game
* Osmos

Excellence in Visual Art
* Cletus Clay
* FEIST
* Machinarium
* PixelJunk Eden
* Zeno Clash

Excellence in Audio
* Blueberry Garden
* BrainPipe
* Musaic Box
* PixelJunk Eden
* Retro/Grade

Excellence in Design
* Musaic Box
* Night Game
* Osmos
* Retro/Grade
* Snapshot

Innovation Award
* Between
* Coil
* The Graveyard
* Mightier
* You Have To Burn The Rope

Technical Excellence
* Cortex Command
* IncrediBots
* The Maw
* Osmos
* PixelJunk Eden

Full descriptions and links to the games can be found over on the Independent Games Festival site. Congratulations to all of the finalists.

The Finalists [IGF]

A true indie developer, Purho only entered his whimsical game in the Independent Games Festival so he could get a free pass to the Game Developers Conference.

Now Purho is taking pre-orders for the title, which runs about $20, on his website.

Cryaon Physics Deluxe