Munroe is a Canadian Sci-Fi author who designs video games in his spare time. I'm not familiar with him, but anybody who stands up to Rupert Murdoch by starting his own indie publishing company is okay in my book.

This game is a text adventure only in that it looks like a text adventure. According to Munroe and based on my own encounter with the game, it's more like card game where you need to be dealt the right cards to win. You play as a game developer turned loose in the massive Moscone Center complex with a group of other developers you don't really know but have to interact with to get the right "hand."

I may be a journalist and therefore limited in my GDC exposure to mostly press-related stuff (coffee, wireless routers, etc.), but Munroe's descriptions of the convention center and his recreations of the complex vernacular that is developer-speak are spot on. So spot on, I actually had a flashback to standing on an escalator with another journalist, talking about Street Fighter IV only to have a self-proclaimed developer interrupt our conversation and then hijack it to talk about his upcoming debut game. It was one of those times where we let the social faux pas happen because I thought the other journalist knew the guy and the other journalist thought I knew the guy.

It took 20 minutes to sort this out. Hopefully the awkward situations you encounter in GDC: The Game will take you less time.

P.S. Get the latest Java update; it sounds like the Parchment version of the game isn't running as quickly as of this post.

Special: Introducing Jim Munroe's 'GDC: The Game' [GameSetWatch]

Raven Software senior producer Jeff Poffenbarger wants to be crystal clear on that before we get started. The game was well under development before talk of tying it to the movie kicked off.

"We finished up work on Marvel Ultimate Alliance and wanted to get away from group games, we wanted to concentrate on a single player experience," he said last week during a presentation in a hotel suite. "A Wolverine game was a no-brainer because in a lot of other video games he has been watered down."

So two-and-a-half years ago the developers sat down and started talking about what would make a Wolverine game stand out, what elements needed to be included in the title for it to feel real.

"His combat, we wanted Wolverine to have razor sharp claws that actually cut through people," he said. "We wanted to show his mutant regeneration healing."

So they made sure their Wolverine model had four layers of graphics: clothing, skin, muscle and skeleton. And that weapons would eventually chew through all of them.

"We didn't just want to nail him as a character. Wanted to nail him as a bad ass."

And after spending perhaps too much time with the game, it seems that Raven has succeeded.

It succeeds on two levels:

Visually, the game is surprisingly raw.

When Wolverine attacks his claws slip through flesh, muscle and bone leaving severed limbs, heads and punctured bodies. When attacked, bullets tear off chunks of Wolverine's clothing, punch holes in his flesh, eventually expose muscle or vertebrae. Slowly those injuries rewind, becoming flesh wounds and then disappearing. His shirt only reappears when he levels up.

The settings are thick with detail and the battles often crowd the screen.

Controls are also raw, allowing gamers to tear through enemies quickly, like an animal. Wolverine leaps from target to target before enemies can get off shots or, at least in my mind, register in their AI programming the oncoming blur of blades and muscle.

Punching a button or two allows for a string of bloody attacks, and a lock-on option gets Wolverine to leap across the screen, smacking into attackers with his claws.

While I didn't get a chance to play through any of the game's cinematics, Poffenbarger shows me a few. In the interactive cut scenes, Wolverine has to fight his way along an exploding bridge or up the falling body of a Sentinel.

I didn't have enough time to fully preview the title, but what I played of X-Men:Origins: Wolverine gave me quite high expectations.

The game is due out on May 1 for the DS, PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii and Xbox 360.

When Ngmoco founder Neil Young handed over a playable build of LiveFire to me during GDC, he was sure to point out that the game was in the very early stages of development.

Later, when I asked a developer if it was beta, or alpha, he told me it wasn't anything yet. Too early even to be slotted into a specific stage.

The game uses virtual, and invisible, controllers. Players hold the iPhone sideways and glide their left thumb around that side of the screen to move. The right thumb is used to aim or look. Flicking the phone toward you makes the player jump. Double tapping the left side of the screen zooms in and double tapping the right side fires your weapon.

Running around in an empty level, the movements were surprisingly fluid and I was able to hit just about everything I aimed at despite the lack of a targeting reticule. (Something that could be added at a later date.)

Because the game had no targeting reticule, the screen was relatively clutter free, with only the gun taking up screen space.

I was able to check out both the chaingun and rocket launcher, both were problem free and I even managed to try and blast myself into the air with the rocket launcher... I failed.

The only issue I ran into with the game was using the flick movement to jump, which seemed to work only some times and also mad it impossible to see what was going on for a half second or so.

The big test, though, will be when the game is playable against other players. The graphics are rather bland, and weapons not unique, so the only thing that can sell this game at this point is robust multiplayer support. Something it promises to deliver.

"We wanted to create something new, and we followed that creative vision for several years," said developer Mathieu Girard.

R.U.S.E. development for the PC—it is also coming out on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360—was focused on three very specific prongs: Dimension, Depth and Deception.

To add dimension to the game, the title uses a special graphics engine that allows gamers to zoom in to the single unit level or zoom out so far that the world becomes a flat board, with the units represented as pieces and chips, resting on a table in a slightly out-of-focus room.

The focus on depth is a bit harder to define, but Girard says it means that the game isn't a click fest, but rather a title that focuses on strategy and skill.

The most noticeable twist in the strategy game is the focus on deception. At the start of every match players are given randomly selected Ruses.

The ruses are broken down into three categories: hide information, plant false information or steal information.

For instance, a player can use a ruse to make their units invisible on the map until they are encountered, or they can use a ruse to create fake units that wont disappear until they are attacked. A third ruse shown during the demonstration allows a player to see the orders being given by their opponent as they occur, with the orders showing up as arrows and troop moments on the map.

The addition of these ruses in a strategy game force players to rely more on craft and deception than on brute strength to win an encounter. The game will ship with ten different ruses.

After walking me through the basic concepts of the game, Girard played through a quick level.

The demo kicked off with a briefing explaining the tactics that would be used to take the town of Montecassino, explaining that the player would have to approach the left flank of hostile units to take the town.

Girard used the Radio Silence ruse, picking a specific sector to activate it in, to make his units invisible.

As his tanks rolled into position, Girard zoomed all the way in to show me the details of the battle. I could see ships at see launching a secondary attack, planes fighting above and tanks ski

High level of detail, can zoom in and out, watch ships launch attacks, plans fighting above, tanks skirmishing. As the battle raged below, the sky filled with paratroopers, each person rendered individually.

Girard tells me that if you add everything going on on screen you have 1 billion polygons.

The game also does a nice job of assisting players as they develop strategy in real time. For instance when you highlight a target it tells you whether it is an easy or hard target for your unit to attack.

Another interesting element to the game is the use of supply roads. In R.U.S.E. you gather resources by building plants. Those plants than follow supply roads back to your base to supply you with a constant infusion of cash. And these supply roads, not just the units or bases, can be attacked to disrupt a player's income.

The game uses the environment in other ways as well, directly impacting the effectiveness of a unit's attack.

The game, due out this winter, will feature 200 units types and six factions, U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Germany and the U.S.S.R., and while the single player campaign will have you take on the roll of the allied factions, the developers promise that they have built in some "nice tricks" to let you play the other units as well.

Each of the units include detailed damaging, they added. When a unit I hit it will start smoking and eventually catch on fire before exploding. If they retreat in time they will auto heal.

R.U.S.E. also features robust multiplayer support that will include skirmishes pitting as many as four players against four players. There are also a number of different AI personalities gamers can go up against, if they'd rather.

In the story mode, which should run at least 10 hours, the game uses the major theater of World War II, but in a way rarely seen in WWII strategy titles.

"We're not out to remake a boring historical lesson," Girard said. "World War II was a war of information, of deception.

"The inspiration was poker, because it is a game of bluffing."

The game features both a U.S. And Japanese campaign in the game, both built around historically authentic archived missions.

"Authenticity and historical accuracy we take quite seriously, for the U.S. campaign that's fine and well, but for the Japanese campaign we didn't want the player to lose no mater how well they do," said Alastair Cornish, a designer working on the game for Eidos. "So they based the Japanese campaign on the real war plans, but with Japan winning."

The developers also had to figure out how best to illustrate the briefings. Each of the U.S. missions kick off with a bit of actual historical footage from the engagement players are about to take place in.

"With the Japanese briefings we had to pick historical footage that shows similar engagements," he said.

The Japanese campaign of Battlestations: Pacific starts with the country's attack on Pearl Harbor and finishes with the "conclusion of the war for Japan."

Cornish declined to say how specifically the campaign ends for Japan.

The U.S. campaign starts with the conclusion of the Battle of Midway to the conclusion of the war. Players will be able to play either campaign first or jump between them as much as they want to at checkpoints.

Cornish said the game doesn't have intersecting missions between the two campaigns.

"We wanted to avoid intersecting missions," he said. "It's the wrong approach to have the same 14 missions played from the different sides. It would feel like reused content. Every mission is completely distinct."

The characters included in the game were selected because they are returning favorites from the first title, they are core to the Civil War story line or just because the developers wanted to make sure they were in the game, said Guha Bala, president and co-founder of Vicarious Visions.

The game's story is inspired by the Marvel Civil War story line, a tale that examines the balance of security and liberty.

"The game has a different narrative style than the classic comic book romp," he said. "This is more real, a bit grittier. It's a look at a pretty compelling debate."

The two sides are represented by the archetypes of Iron Man and Captain America. Gamers will have a chance to play both sides of the struggle.

The game starts off with an attack of Dr. Doom's Latveria led by Nick Fury assisted by Iron Man, Wolverine and Spiderman, and then leads into the Civil War storyline.

While the game has some tweaks to gameplay and a new, lower camera angle, the biggest change to the game is the inclusion of new Powerfusion attacks.

These attacks allow players to combine the powers of two heroes to create a unique new attack.

All of these fusion attacks require active gameplay, Bala said, and is "particularly cool" when your playing in coop mode. While in coop, when a player tries to activate a fusion attack the other player receives a fusion invitation.

The game supports four player coop played either locally or online.

Far from it – BioWare showed off a couple Mass Effect 2 videos with combat and cut scenes; two journalists I admire almost got in a fight about the illicit recording of said videos; and I got to use the panel as a case study to present to my ethics professor. Long story short: there was drama; and until the drama died down, I was hesitant to do the write-up.

But it's dead now, so here's the rundown of the last GDC panel I attended:

Unlike the development of the first Mass Effect, BioWare has changed tactics to identify problems (like long elevator rides) earlier in the development process. To pull this off, the devs make sure each level they design is always playable throughout the creation cycle.

Playable, not pretty. That first video we saw starts off with nothing but an ME1 character model dropped into a white room with lines marking where stuff should go. This looks like what other developers call a "white box" level – except this is way more detailed with actual pop-up dialogue boxes to tell the player what plot points are going on where.

Most of the level changing goes on during this phase and then they move on to phase two where they add collision and combat and even music (because to BioWare, music relates to fun and if you can't see the fun by phase two, it's time to go back to the drawing board). They also do a first pass of dialogue to screen for cheesiness and text errors.

Phases three and four are all about making it fun. Combat is upgraded to "silver" and then "gold" such that you could actually kill somebody and it would look right. The dialogue gets sent off for voice recording and when it's all in place, they move on to stage five, which is: "Can you feel the awesome?"

By keeping the levels playable at all times in development, BioWare saved themselves a lot of pain and suffering in the long run. They even sent the entire ME2 team home with a playable build over their Christmas break so they could play through it on their holiday. That extra step alone showed them that their endgame was boring; they chucked it when they came back from the break and started over.

The last video shown at the panel was a cut scene from phases one to four (it sounds like phase five hasn't been completed on any of the levels yet). In this cinematic, Serena drops you off on a bridge and explains that you've got to go to the second tower and cross to the penthouse to kill… somebody. The whole thing was out of context, but it sounds like there's actually two separate baddies Shepard has to deal with: somebody called Nassans (not sure on the spelling – I was sitting way too far back to read the subtitles) and this assassin person who may or may not be in the penthouse.

The lesson GDC goers were supposed to leave the panel with was this: Do only the work that you have to do and do it in the right order.

Then they talked about business models for developers – and that part was definitely boring. But it looks like Mass Effect 2 will be anything but.

Matt Corso, art and creative director at High Voltage, walked me through the options, which not only rival, but may surpass the level of customization found in most PC shooters.

By default, the game's controls are pretty straight forward for a Wii shooter. You move around with the thumbstick and aim and shoot with the remote. A button lets you lock onto a target for strafing, and a swing of the remote triggers a melee attack.

But you can go into customization and switch to any of three presets, or you can just create your own. Every button and action is mappable. Yes, including the motion control. While you can't completely ditch the single motion control in the game, Corso said you could always map it to something you will almost never use if it bugs you.

That's not all though, not by a long shot.

By hopping into the Remote Sensitivity settings you can manually adjust everything, everything. That means turning speed, cursor sensitivity, horizontal and vertical views, thrust sensitivity, nunchuk shake sensitivity.

You can also adjust the size of the deadzone window. The deadzone window is the invisible box that determines when the game sees your remote pointing as aiming and when it sees it as looking. If you want the game to play like a PC mouse and keyboard title just shrink that box to its smallest size. If you want it to be more like Metroid, stretch out the horizontal but keep the vertical thin. The customization is endless.

The game also lets you switch between the five difficulty settings for gameplay on the fly, so you can pause at any time and make it easier or harder.

Finally, the game's HUD is adjustable. When you drop into the settings you can click and drag the bits and pieces of the HUD to wherever you'd like to. You can also tweak the HUD's transparency.

"None of this was really hard to do," said Corso. "I felt there were these old arguments about that's not the way it's
done in console games so we shouldn't do it.

"But we decided to just giving you all of these options and settings," he said. "You can even adjust default run speeds."

And don't worry, you can't use them to make the game unplayable.

"All of the settings work well in the game, so we don't feel you can actually break it."

Ideally, Origins is supposed to be a "new" kind of fantasy that does away with Zeschuk's dreaded "elves sashaying through the countryside" and brings to the fore real human drama (but with non-humans). To create that kind of fantasy, BioWare had to find a spectrum of existing fantasy to measure their game by.

"At one end we have Tolkien's [Lord of the Rings trilogy]," Muzyka explained,"and for dark, low fantasy, we're using [George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series]."

This confused me, because Martin's epic fantasy series is labeled as high fantasy, whereas low fantasy would be more like Conan the Barbarian. Either BioWare is cutting the scale short so they can stay focused, or they've confused Martin with Robert E. Howard.

"When you read [Martin's] stuff, it's not at all like Tolkien's stuff," said Zeschuk. "It doesn't have the traditional elements [of high fantasy]. The brutality of the world he created is extreme."

I object about the elements of traditional fantasy (c'mon — those books have knights and princesses and dragons and stuff), but I'll give the brutality argument to him:

*Ice and Fire spoilers* In the first book alone, a seven-year-old gets chucked out of a window in, like, chapter five and the main character has his head chopped off at the very end.*End spoilers*

That's the kind of brutality that struck a chord with Muzyka: "I was like, 'Wow, he just took away a character I really started to care about. Wow, that was emotionally impactful [sic]'." And that reaction is ultimately what makes him identify the Song of Ice and Fire as low fantasy.

Gaider, on the other hand, thinks that his bosses' definitions of high and low fantasy are "funny" at best. To him, high fantasy has to have "obvious magic" and technically Martin does. But "it's very, very subtle," so he could see where his bosses got the idea to label it low even if he doesn't agree with them.

There's a flaw in Gaider's argument, too, though. If magic has to be obvious in order for the fantasy to be "high," the The Witcher is high fantasy, surely?

Rather than talk his way out of that one, Gaider side-stepped. The skew between Martin and Tolkien still works for Origins, he said, even if it's not a clear example of the divide between high and low fantasy: "Martin's stories are character driven. The characters and their flaws drives the plot, where Tolkien is plot-driven. In that respect, [Origins is] leaning more towards the Martin side, where it's a human tale told within the context of these epic events."

"Dragon Age has elements of [Martin's brutality]," said Muzyka, "and has elements of the Tolkien-esque kind of fantasy as well. Which is why we're presenting it is something that's quite different."

Will Origins be a brilliant alchemy of fantasy sub-genres, or genre crisis in the making? The fact that the lead writer and the creators of the game can't exactly agree on what low fantasy is has me worried. The fact that Muzyka and Zeschuk think George RR Martin's series is low fantasy just because it's dark also has me worried. But what really bugs me is the thought that games can never not be low fantasy because it seems to sell way better than elves sashaying through the countryside.

P.S. That picture is from a scene in Song of Ice and Fire, drawn by Mike S. Miller — if you want Dragon Age: Origins pics, check out this post.

There is no way EA would let a licensed game near the chopping block — not if a little-known new IP like Dead Space could be canceled first to free up resources.

"Dead Space doesn't have much stuff in it compared to what we thought we were going to make," Art Director Ian Milham explained. "We thought, let's not get fancy with the art direction. Our risk tolerance was pretty maxed out from the start."

For his panel on "Creating Horror and Immersion with the Art of Dead Space (which could be canceled any minute)," Milham discussed the myriad things stolen inspirations that led to EA's only horror title ever created (at least until Dead Space 2 comes out).

A big one was David Fincher films. Milham explained that the colors in movies like Se7en and Fight Club "feel hopeless and decayed – while still varying up the color so you don't have the next-gen brown that everybody gets raked over the coals for."

Colors like Fincher's are consistent within one frame — but varied throughout the whole project, which is definitely what happens in Dead Space. Go back and play the Leviathan boss fight again and you'll see what Milham was talking about: it starts out blue and warms to red as the boss comes closer and closer toward Isaac.

Next up was Gothic architecture for the actual innards of the Planet Cracker ship, Ishimura. I won't bore you with specifics, but if you think to yourself "Gee, the inside of this place looks like a rib cage," there's a reason for that. Bonus if you can find circles with ribbing on them — Milham is fond of those.

Lastly, Dead Space drew from dentists offices to create the lighting concept for the game. The point of that, said Milham, was both to cut down on the troubles of deferred lighting and to make the player feel constantly uncomfortable. "You sort of feel interrogated," he said, showing a slide of a room dotted with dentist lights. "A lot of our lighting is on arms like that. We wanted no indirect light."

The result, along with a lot more borrowing from Sci-Fi Horror classics like Alien, was this:

Not everything in the game was cribbed, to be fair — sometimes the things that we saw are the direct result of the dev team applying some of Kojima's problem-solving skills. For example, the game was never meant to include heads-up displays, maps, or helpful terminals that tell you where to go. Everything has to be communicated visually — from Isaac's health bar to whether or not a door is open.

The art team rose to the challenge, coming up with the Japanese subway-style signs above doors and a landmark system using the lurid advertisement posters throughout the ship. The result is something that looks a like like other stuff, but still scares you just the same. Even anachronistic things like fire extinguishers (which you'd think would have evolved a little in a hundred years) were choices made by the art team that drew you into the world and made it truly scary when you finally saw an alien.

But you wanna know what's really scary? The they might have canceled Dead Space to make this.

One of the things the first two iterations of the game taught the developers is that they need to make the game as easy to find, download and install as possible, said Marsha Berry, America Army senior executive producer.

The new game, due out sometime this year, will also consolidate the account system to a single sign on and allow players to create multiple soldiers on that one account.

Other tweaks to the game include the ability to quickly jump back and forth between gameplay and training, breaking training down into much smaller easier to digest units, and a lot more unit customization.

"One of the big things we heard was that players like customization," Berry said. "We have a lot of customization on how you can load down your character."

If you're interested in reading up on how the game plays and some of it's amazing features, like tactical sound, realistic ricochet and how gravity effects the bullets your fire, make sure to check out our hands on with the game.

Last year's GDC drew in record numbers, with more than 18,000 members of the gaming industry making the pilgrimage to San Francisco for the annual event. This year's 17,000 represents a slight drop in numbers over the last, which can probably be chalked up to the economy somewhere down the line.

Still, 17,000 is a rather large number. To put that in perspective, attendance at my apartment during the week of GDC was three, except for about 15 minutes on Thursday when my brother stopped over to borrow Street Fighter IV, and two of those were cats. It is unknown how many attendees to the actual conference were cats.

Despite the slight dip, GDC is still on for next year, returning to the Moscone Center on March 9th through the 13th, 2010.

In Bound in Blood players take on the roles of the McCall brothers. The story opens with the two deserting the confederate army and becoming outlaws. It ends, we were told, with a confrontation between the brothers.

"It's a story about the ties between brothers and how they can be destroyed," said producer Romain de Waubert de Genlis. "It's a very dramatic story, mature, adult."

When they set out to make the sequel, the team decided to concentrate on several key features.

They wanted to create a visceral shooter, de Waubert de Genlis said, getting back to the sense of the shooter, something action oriented with the focus on shooting.

The team added slow motion modes, concentration modes, for each brother to help gamers feel more like gunslingers in the game.

They also wanted to make sure to build iconic wild west moments into the game, so you get to rob a bank, attack a train and see plenty of wide landscape in Arizona.

The biggest focus, though, seems to be on the cooperative gameplay of the brothers. At the beginning of each level gamers get to choose which brother they want to play as. Each has a distinct style.

Ray is strong, skilled in close combat and is a more brutal character. Thomas is the smart one, using long rang weapons. He also can use a lasso to climb to higher vantage points.

The developers dropped into the game, about two-thirds in, to give me a chance to check out gameplay, though I wasn't allowed to actually play, just watch.

The level opened in a native American village with the colonel of the unit you deserted attacking. The colonel, they tell me, is the game's arch enemy, chasing you throughout the game.

The player runs up to find some cover and then uses a mode to slow down time and quickly paints a number of rebs with a targeting reticule. When time resumes, the character unleashes a flurry of bullets from his six shooter, killing all of them.

This special mode is activated once you get six kills, an icon shows you it's available, but you have to use it within sixty seconds or lose it.

Next he switches to two six-shooters, aiming and killing men as they run up to attack. Once he empties his guns he finds cover to methodically load each chamber of the gun before attacking again.

I also get a chance to see some horseback riding, with one of the characters shooting as he rides around the area. The game also features roping, which uses the thumbstick to sort of simulate the movements of trying to lasso an object.

Later, in another section, the developers show me a different special mode attack. In this mode you have to fan the thumbstick as if it's the hammer of the six shooter to take out multiple enemies.

The game will also have the occasional duel. In this mode you character takes up a large section of the screen, with the camera focus on the player's hip, hand and gun. You can also see the other character standing with his hand ready to draw.

Players will have to use one thumbstick to try and keep their character's hand as close to the gun as possible without touching it, and the other thumbstick to try and keep the enemy centered in the screen. When you hear a bell ring you slap the thumbstick toward your gun and your character draws. Then you have to pull the trigger as the targeting reticule automatically zips up from the ground, making sure to hit your target.

Without trying it myself, I can't tell how well it will work, but it looks like the type of experience that will be both fun and, in some ways, authentic feeling.

Bound in Blood's multiplayer is meant to be a gaming version of cops and robbers, with one side playing as the sheriff and his posse and the other playing as the robbers. While I didn't see multiplayer demonstrated, they told me that it will include a bounty system which increases the pay off for killing a player the better they are doing. The bounty earned in mulitplayer can be used to unlock classes.

Multiplayer will also include a wanted mode, with a team trying to take out the single wanted player and his protection.

As the presentation wrapped up I asked de Waubert de Genlis why he thinks previous western shooters haven't done so well and why he thinks this one will be different.

"There are a lot of reasons for that," he said. "There are trends. The sad reality is that because of what's going on in the world modern warfare has become more popular. Awhile ago it was World War II games.

"And I don't think there have been that many good western games with high production value. This is a fast-paced shooter, a very polished experience."

The developers went through all of the forums for Battlestations: Midway and got all of the fan feedback for this sequel, said Alastair Cornish, a designer at Eidos.

"We have a very vocal, articulate group of fans," he said. "We were able to take into account most fan feedback. THat ranges from smaller things like the inclusion of a cockpit view, which fans really wanted, to larger things like skirmish mode. And everything in between."

In Pacific's skirmish mode, players can access the multiplayer maps for singleplayer gaming.

Gamers will have five different modes to choose from, each with eight scenarios.

In Escort players have to protect or attack a unit or squadron. In Siege, players assist a landing operation or a fleet defense. In Competitive, players try to achieve the highest score by attacking hostile units. Duel is essentially a unit-specific deathmatch. And Island Capture has players fighting for control of a large area with different bases and outposts.

And all of the skirmish modes mirror the mulitplayer functions, Cornish said. so you can turn on or off AI bots, you can chance the difficulty settings for each. You can tweak the weather.

Cornish said you can even set it up so that a team of players take on an AI-controlled team.

The original Wolfenstein 3D popularized, if not defined first-person shooters. Return to Castle Wolfenstein's multiplayer introduced some of the most popular features of multiplayer gaming to the PC.

What will Wolfenstein deliver?

What It Is
Wolfenstein is the latest first-person shooter in id's popular franchise. This time around Raven Software continues the story of 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein with B.J. Blazkowicz using a mystic amulet to find the source of supernatural power that Nazis are tapping into.

What We Saw
I played through a chunk of a single level using some of the amulets abilities.

How Far Along Is it?
The game, due out this summer, was in pre-beta when I played it.

What Needs Improvement?
AI: The enemy artificial intelligence didn't seem to sharp, not always getting behind cover or reacting to your sudden appearance on the scene. The developers said they've spent a lot of time working on AI and that the enemies react better and communicate with one another, so let's hope it was just a pre-beta issue I ran into.

Dialog: Increasingly, I expect a bit more depth to my dialog. In the build of Wolfenstein I played I was hearing the same phrases way too much for my liking.

Those Hats: I made a joke yesterday about how, when disintegrated, the Nazis' hats remained fully intact, falling to the ground where once an enemy stood. It's a neat effect once or twice, but seen over and over again, starts to look a little silly. I'd lose it.

What Needs to Stay the Same?
Details: The game is meticulously detailed. For instance, I noticed that some of the enemies I shot left a spray of blood on the nearby wall. Very nice touch.

Gravity Wells: Early in the game an explosion causes the mystical veil to go haywire, creating these pockets of fluctuating gravity. Enemies didn't just float in them, they flipped and tried to find their balance. It was a spectacular effect that I hope the game doesn't skimp on.

Weapons: Despite the hats, the disintegration effect of the particle cannon is fairly stunning to behold. It was the only veil weapon I used, but I hope that Raven includes a nice selection of similarly interesting guns.

The Veil: Sure alternate realities in a game have been done to death, and I have to admit I was slightly disappointed to see it rear its head in Wolfenstein. But, once I started playing I started to like how it was used. I've only seen two effects in the veil so far, so I'm hoping the other powers will add new facets to the concept.

Controls: It's not surprising that Raven nailed the game's controls, id wouldn't have it any other way.

Final Thoughts
I was pretty excited when id announced Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it was a surprising, for me at least, return to a franchise I loved. This time around my expectations are not nearly as high.

It could be that the recent glut of shooters have jaded me, but what I've heard and seen so far doesn't seem to offer anything new for the genre.

Wolfenstein will be a solid shooter, but I'm still not convinced it will be the sort of seminal experience that Return to Castle Wolfenstein offered.

Yes, the game is still bloody (and bloody good) with gibs of cel-shaded warriors splattered about the battlefield when sliced in half by a Warrior or exploded into oblivion by a Worker's bomb. Sure, Titan Studios—which is owned by Epic Games China—is giving PlayStation 3 owners a chance to play as male or female characters in Fat Princess, but with custom hairstyles with names like "Prison Handles" for pigtails, someone's bound to have their nerves rubbed the wrong way.

We got to take a look at the game's character customization, which includes quaint skin coloring options like "zombie" and "vomit" as well as more tame ones that add variety to Fat Princess's lily white default lineup. For hair options, expect to see things like "Scottish" and "programmer," the latter of which conjures images of id Software employees during their ponytail-sporting days.

"Fat Princess' art style fits the humor and cheekiness of the game," said Titan Studios lead designer Craig Leigh, noting that the game's gore and carnage should invoke thoughts of Itchy & Scratchy. They're going for humor, as evidenced by the game's copious pop culture references, not something darker or "mature."

The game's unexpected bloodiness should be lessened by its cutesy character designs and brightly colored stages, with names like Sugar Cove, Coco Cliffs and Black Forest, just a few of the eight maps the Titan Studios team plans to ship with.

While visually attractive, the Fat Princess devs look to have added plenty of gameplay depth, with five character classes, each with a two-tier upgrade system and multiple attacks, as well as upgradeable buildings and strategic structures.

Perhaps most appealing for the multiplayer focused strategy game is the PlayStation Network game's host migration, which will ensure that even if the session host drops out, one of the other players, up to 32 of 'em, will pick up hosting duty slack. We'll write more about our hands-on impressions soon.

The new addition to the third PixelJunk brand game feels like a natural fit, both comfortable and innovative, not unlike the trio of downloadable games we've seen Q-Games deliver on the PlayStation Network. The newest Encore, which adds five new gardens and two new gameplay modes—the other being a "zero G" modifier—was in response to Eden's "general popularity."

We asked Cuthbert about the success of Eden and what we should expect from the next entries, tentatively titled PixelJunk 4 and PixelJunk Dungeons.

Cuthbert said that the PixelJunk series was originally "meant to be quite esoteric."

"We weren't expecting much in the way of sales," Cuthbert noted. "But sales have definitely surpassed our expectations." Perhaps so much so that Eden visual artist and musician Baiyon is now "more in-demand." Expect to hear more about Baiyon's other game endeavors in the near future, but don't expect them to be PixelJunk related.

After PixelJunk Eden Encore ships, we may finally hear more about the fourth game in the series that strives for a balance of old-school gameplay with modern day, "true HD" visuals running at 60 frames per second.

That fourth game won't be the previously hinted PixelJunk Dungeons that Cuthbert name-dropped at GDC last year.

It will, however, tap the PlayStation 3 hardware more so than any other previous game, with PixelJunk 4 taking advantage of the Cell's multi-SPU architecture. Expect to see Q-Games start teasing the game closer to release, a strategy different from the pre-release campaign of Eden.

"This time, we want to have more of a gap," Cuthbert said of the game's reveal. He wants PixelJunk fans to hold off from setting their expectations about what 4 will be.

As for Dungeons, we might know even less about the game than we thought we did. That's because the Q-Games founder says the game might not be called PixelJunk Dungeons at all. And it's not necessarily a dungeon crawler, re-imagined in the PixelJunk style.

"We want to make sure we can make a game that's different from what people expect," he said.

"It wouldn't work if we just followed what was presented in the movie, which is an origins film, to have a fun gameplay you want to get right in and start blasting away at Cobras," said Jason Enos, senior product manager for the game.

So the game, slated to hit a day or two before the Aug. 7 movie, will start off where the movie ends.

Players will take on the roll of one of the dozen Joe characters playable in the game and, because G.I. Joe is all about teamwork, the game will always have two characters on screen at a time. With two-player drop-in coop, it can be a single player or multiplayer game.

But, Enos said, there won't be support for online coop.

The game plays from an odd angle, with the characters seen from a quasi-isometric view, and typically playing up, almost into the screen. Movement is done with the left thumbstick and targeting with the right.

The controller's right trigger shoots, the X button is a melee attack. Special attacks are performed with the B button and you strafe with the left trigger.

Auto-targeting reticules show who is aiming at who. An enemy has either a green or orange reticule on them if they are targeted. If they have a yellow reticule, than both players are targeting the enemy.

The game also has features the accelerator suits from the movie which temporarily make the characters invincible. The suits also can shoot missiles, rail guns and give characters boosts of speed.

You can swap characters as you play, by finding and getting into a swap chamber during the mission, but all 12 characters are not unlocked initially.

The game's characters are broken into three types, heavy, combat and commando, each of which have some special abilities needed to get into certain areas, much like what was seen in the LEGO games.

G.I. Joe features 20 missions, four PSAs and 75 file cards hidden throughout the game. At one point you will also switch over to the side of Cobra to play some missions. The game can also be replayed as some of the Cobra characters.

The game has three modes, casual, advance and hardcore. When played in casual you have infinite lives. In advance, lives work a bit like Left 4 Dead, with characters returning after you hit a check point. In Hardcore, once you're dead, you're dead.

The game is due out on the DS, mobile, PSP, PS2, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360. The Wii version, Enos said, will include some motion controls. For instance, the game will say "Yo, Joe" when you hold the remote in the air and some of Snake Eyes attacks will be performed by slashing with the remote.

The studio that brought us Black & White and the Fable games has a creative process called "experiments" where anybody in the company can take a stab at developing a game mechanic or a piece of technology to be used in a future Lionhead game. The process sounds a bit more rigorous than Bungie pre-Halo 3; but it yields some pretty interesting results.

Molyneux showed off some of these experiments — ones that worked and ones that didn't quite pan out. We saw two prototypes of the dog from Fable II: the first was a rewards system where you could pet the dog a la Nintendogs (which Lionhead eventually chucked; and the second was a mechanic of having the dog run ahead of the player instead of following behind (the status quo in the final game).

We also saw a host of technical developments — like an aging system that applies a layer of wear and tear to everything in the world (murderizes the rendering rates), and a one-button combat system where the computer decides how the character attacks based on proximity to a target (which sort of made it into Fable II).

But the most interesting thing was a "tech demo" called "The Room" — made with love by Alex, Mark and Dave. As in Mark Healey, Alex Evans, Dave Smith — three out of the four guys that formed Media Molecule which went on to make LittleBigPlanet.

You could see a lot of proto-LBP things in "The Room" — from the textures on the fabrics and wallpaper to the concept of "empowering player creativity" by letting them design their own items to fill the room , everything just screams "Make me into an award-winning game."

But Lionhead didn't. They shelved it.

"This is one that didn't work terribly well," said Molyneux. "They worked on this for quite some time... and they had some really, really cool ideas. All of this was enormously, massively exciting... Each time we looked at it, our jaws dropped every single time. But – at the end of the day, even though this looks really cool and inspired us massively, it wasn't an experiment that really went anywhere."

You're right, sir. Four Game Developers Choice awards, a BAFTA and tons of Game of the Year nominations and wins is nowhere.

But, before you can cry "sour grapes," Internet — you should know that Molyneux said, "Media Molecule [are] some of the smartest people in the world."

Apparently, smarter than him, even.

But a developer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel to make a game fun and a new enough experience to warrant a buy. But does Excitebots do the trick?

What It Is
Excitebots: Trick Racing pits wheeled robotic insects and animals against on another in a series of off road races and mini-games.

What We Saw
I played through a couple of races, but missed out on the sandwich-making, clown-pieing mini-games.

How Far Along Is it?
The game appears to be finished or close to it, as it should be with an April 20 release date.

What Needs Improvement?
Tracks: Granted I didn't see them all, but they were a bit too similar looking to the ones featured in 2006's Excite Truck for my tastes.

Vertical Bars: There are times in the game when you want to try and hook a bar with your bot to spin around it and shoot off ahead of the pack. The horizontal bars worked flawlessly, but the vertical bars required an odd motion that didn't seem to fit the on-screen action.

What Needs to Stay the Same?
The Controls: The racing controls felt relatively sharp, and certainly responsive enough to make tearing around the tracks fun. And motion controls weren't just about steering. You also use the remote to tweak the tilt during a glide and to interact with things, like those boost bars.

Drive, Fly, Walk: The racing is fun, but soaring over the track, controlling your glide is even better. The best, being whammied and forced to hoof it on stick-like robot legs by pumping the controller up and down.

Diversity: I only saw a few of the bots, a frog, a beetle, a bat, but there are a dozen in the game, each with their own special abilities. The frog I controlled, for instance, performed massive jumps when hitting a hill.l

Final Thoughts
Excite Truck was a fun, though little-played game in our house. I think that's because after a few races it all felt too similar. Excitebots looks like Nintendo recognized that and blended the best of Excite Truck with just a touch of Mario Kart.

The question is, is it enough Mario Kart.