Didn't make it to this year's Game Developers Conference? If you were particularly excited about attending some of Valve's various sessions, you can virtually attend through the power of the PDF. The house of Half-Life, Portal and Counter-Strike has released the slides from its four GDC presentations which cover all aspects of The Orange Box. The presentations "Integrating Narrative and Design: A Portal Post-Mortem" and "Stylization With a Purpose: The Illustrative World of Team Fortress 2" may be the most layman friendly, giving regular folk a look beyond The Orange Box's developer commentary. All four are worth a peek at the very least.

Valve Publications [Valve via GameSetWatch]

Warhawk's upcoming booster pack, Operation Broken Mirror, will feature an armored personnel carrier which can serve as a mobile spawning point and weapon producer and also create the "mother of all bubble shields," the game's producer, Dylan Jobe told me in a recent interview.

"You can roll this around a map and it's like this clean blank canvas for combat," he said. "When it's driving around it works as a mobile forward spawn point and when you spawn into it you get additional equipment."

Jobe said the APC will also be able to deploy a piece of equipment that is "like the mother of all bubble shields" and is a couple of hundred feet wide.

Let me start by saying that my love of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition comes not from the perspective of an aficionado, or someone paid to study each nuanced piece of minutia that comes out about a game as it makes its way from concept to arcade.

My experience with Street Fighter 2 CE was born entirely in my time first hanging out at arcades and then running one in the 90s in Maryland. I loved the game so much that my time spent playing it is what likely lead to me being fired from the job. I slathered more attention on our big-screen SF2 box than I did every other machine in the place, combined. I regularly replaced the cherry switches and springs on a weekly basis.

But I couldn't have told you who the game's producer was, what sort of lore was buried in the creating of such an indelible franchise or how they came about with the idea of the characters in the game.

That being said, read on.

You may think of EA's cartoon-influenced Battlefield Heroes as a poor man's Team Fortress 2. The thing is, you'd be fairly right to do so. The game will actually be free to play for anyone with a web browser and, yes, in person it looks just as much like TF2 as you'd think—but that's not a bad thing, necessarily.

During Takashi Aoyama's presentation at GDC, he told an interesting anecdote about developing the Wii. Specifically, current Nintendo president Satoru Iwata demanded that, for the Wii not to "to be seen as an enemy in the household," it should have a parental control timer that would automatically shut the console off after a period of time (sound familiar?).

Aoyama explained that a "debate raged for several weeks" until the team came up with what they felt to be a better direction, the play history list.

At last week's GDC, I had the difficult assignment of attending EA's DICE studio event. There, hanging out at some hipster nightclub, I was forced to drink free cocktails while grabbing whatever bite-sized gourmet morsels that were passing by on silver trays. While you'll hear more about the night as embargoes lift (Battlefield: Heroes and Mirror's Edge), I first want to tell you about some time I spent playing Battlefield: Bad Company multiplayer on the Xbox 360. You know, it's that Battlefield game coming for consoles that features the oft-fabled destructible environments.

How was it? Fun, but not revolutionary.

On the last day of GDC, while we didn't have a chance to actually participate in our 3-way Kotaku Street Fighter IV Tournament To The Death, we did have a chance to sit down (or more aptly put, stand up) with Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono and translator/assistant producer David Crislip. Even after hours of interviews, he was still boyishly enthused about the game and willing to answer all of Crecente's frothing fanboy questions (like, how awesome will SFIV be, kinda super awesome, or really super awesome?). I was just pleased to hear that we have the same favorite character: Dhalsim.

Over GDC I dropped in to see what was up with D3 Publishers of America and was greeted with a great surprise. They have officially announced the impending arrival of the next game in the Puzzle Quest family titled Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. This Puzzle Quest has left the realm of fantasy and entered the vastness of outer space.

I wondered how they would change the jewel matching style gameplay to make this game different from its predecessor and they certainly didn't disappoint. Besides the obvious visual differences in the interface, the style of puzzling has changed as well. The round pieces have changed to hexagonal ones and extra challenge has been added by the movement of the hexagons once you have matched up your three or more. Instead of dropping straight down, your columns slide diagonally, and depending on which piece you move, the columns will fill in either from the left or the right. Gravity will have a bearing on the various movements of the pieces as well making you have to think in several directions at once.

I got a chance to swing by the SNK Playmore Suite at GDC to check out some of their offerings. Most of what they had going on on their screens were showings of their various game anthologies including Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2, King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match, King of Fighters Collection Orochi Saga, Samurai Shodown Anthology, SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 and World Heroes Anthology. Not a whole lot new here but there were a couple of nice looking trailers for King of Fighters XII and the New Samurai Shodown.

The real treat however was a little surprise waiting on a DS in the corner, Metal Slug 7! I hot footed it over to the corner of the room and practically wrestled the girl playing it to the ground in my attempt to check out the game. It looked great, played better and had everything you could possibly want from a Metal Slug game. So if you are ready for a new Metal Slug experience, look no further than Metal Slug 7, coming soon to a DS near you.

I got a chance to check out Portal's famous credit song Still Alive today on Rock Band in the Harmonix hotel suite.

While the bass is a little bit on the easy side, the lead guitar, drums, and of course, singing are all the perfect level of challenging to make it fun. I'm already a HUGE fan of the song so playing it on Rock Band was a real treat. I can't imagine a single person with the game not wanting to pick this up when it hits the consoles.

I was a little bummed to discover that while the original singing is there and can be cranked up enough to cover your truly awful singing voice, there is no modulation for your voice while you are singing. So you can harmonize with a computer, but you can't sound like one... and we all know how awful that is.

We had a few minutes yesterday to play a bit of shoot-em-up Zauri, that fast little game shown during the Microsoft keynote. The game plays surprisingly well. The ship constantly fires and you move it around with the Zune's touch pad. To fire off bombs you click the pad. Unfortunately, the game was developed specifically for the keynote, so it's not clear if it will ever actually see the light of day.

Taku Murata, general manager of Square-Enix's research and development division, announced at today's GDC session that the company has dropped the White Engine name for its cross-platform game engine. Squenix is now pitching it as Crystal Tools, showing off a fancy new logo that extends the Final Fantasy brand even further.

While the internal, companywide development platform was originally understood to be built for PlayStation 3 development (specifically, Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy versus XIII), it is being designed with multiple platforms, including the Xbox 360 and PC, in mind. Murata also confirmed that a version is being readied for the Wii, which is still very early, but we don't expect it to kick out visuals on par with the PS3.