Spore has been suspiciously complete looking for nearly six months now, in fact when we sat through a presentation at the Games Convention in Leipzig in August we were shown a Spore that seemed to have everything but the polish and a release date.

We sent a video crew over to EA's New York City event yesterday to capture how it looks today, but for those of you who missed it, click through for a take on Spore back when it was done six months ago:

The Four Stages of Grief Spore
Spore or SimSim

Shadow Monsters has been around since 2005, but the exhibit/game certainly hasn't gotten its due in the media. Game devs, take note please. There is more innovation in this one product than the entirety of next gen motion control—by a long shot.

Shadow Monsters Home [worthersoriginals]

He smiled...

I've kinda grown fond of Leipzig. Sure there's not a whole bunch to do there and having the opportunity to check out Berlin, Munich or Frankfurt every night after spending the day covering the Games Convention would be Zuuupear Koole, but there's something to be said for a town dwarfed by the show it hosts.

Games Industry reports that the only way the Games Convention could leave Leipzig is if they convention hall hosting it said it was OK. That's because the Leipziger Messe actually owns the Games Convention name and brand. And I can't imagine they'll every let that bad boy get away.

Next year? I think we'll be staying in Leipzig proper instead of "quaint" Halle.

GC likely to remain in Leipzig [Games Industry]

So much for my fantasies of snorting coke off a pair of perfectly spandexed roadie GROUPIE butt cheeks.

Mercenaries 2 is an open world game that's not just about blowing up the bad guys, but leveling every building in their entire country—where they may or may not be hiding.

As you run around the open world with, say, a rocket launcher, you become a one man wrecking crew, dropping buildings not with massive explosions, but what resembles a perfectly executed controlled demolition. The buildings fall evenly, like a tiered cake, floor by floor into a pile of dust.

Plant a few charges of C4 around a block, and you can simultaneously level entire streets of the game. It may get old, but not during the 20 minutes I spent with the demo.

Hopping into a helicopter proved to be a more difficult task. Stiff controls or a bad but intentional gameplay mechanic made it tough to float over more mountainous areas of the map. Plus, the birds eye view also showed a huge draw distance problem that is probably only because we were playing an early version of the game.

Overall, the graphics aren't the dazzling spectacle we've come to expect with the current generation, but those looking to blow up a world without scrutiny may find solace in the warm embrace of Mercenaries 2.

And it makes sense, after all Splash Damage started out as a mod group, one that landed the multiplayer aspect of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. After completing the game, which was released for free, they landed the full triple-A retail build of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

"When Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was released it proved there was a market for a pure multiplayer combat game," Wedgewood said. " Enemy Territory: Quake Wars tried to break down boundaries."

Wedgewood said the current office remains to their modding roots despite their triple-A aspirations.

"The office is still essentially a mode team culturally, though we are more efficient now," he said.

For instance, the team spent nine months "screwing up the technology " for this new game, as Wedgewood described it, before they went to John Carmack, hat in hand, to tell him they had screwed up the technology.

"He fixed it in about nine minutes," Wedgewood said.

He said that while both Quake Wars and Wolfenstein have a lot of core similarities, one is not simply a mod of the other.

The biggest difference is that Quake Wars is a much deeper game one that, while multiplayer, is still very story driven. Specifically, the map creation is all based on a pre-Quake storyline. The game will ship with 12 maps spread over four campaigns located each on different continents. Each of those maps will be based on key battles central to the storyline.

Wedgewood said he also hoped to create a game, with Quake Wars, that gave gamers an experience that was deeper than the typical shooter.

"The typical gamers' experience was that they would run around and shoot at people, and hope to hit them and then they stand by a flag for awhile," he said. "I always wanted to give experiences to games that matched what the outside of game boxes said."

In Quake Wars you can play the game and have fun without firing a bullet. You can build turrets, you can parachute from cliffs, you can drive helicopters and yes.. you can still shoot each other.

The entire is based on a strong infantry combat system, one that stripped away the complexity of the game by relying on a subtly deep interface that relied on a point and click command system.

The system automatically follows along with what's happening in the multiplayer matches to create missions for the right types of units. Telling them, for instance, when they need to take out specific targets, construct things like radar or anti-aircraft artillery or help transport someone.

But it's also not a game that nerfs the controls to the point that it isn't worth playing for serious gamers. Afterall, all of the design team, up to and including the president of the company, are hardcore gamers. Wedgewood himself was one of the original members of one of the original Quake Clans. And the team, all of the team, are constantly play-testing the game.

"They're obsessive," he said. "They'll count the number of footsteps between different points in the game."

Wedgewood showed off different maps in the game, playing, perhaps a bit more than necessary, through different classes to show that you can have fun in the game without even firing a gun. He also demonstrates, out of hand, how effortlessly good he is at wailing in the game with a gun. Wedgewood stops his play only once, after Mark and I get a little too obsessed with a mosquito buzzing the room and another Splash Damage team member flattens it with his palm.

"Hey, don't kill it, that's bad Karma. I'm a vegetarian," he explains, seemingly unaware of the irony.

I'm not a huge fan of shooters on the DS. I've found from way too many personal experiences that the handheld just doesn't have the muscle to support the sort of graphics and experience I like from my shooters.

Just last week I was playing Brothers in Arms on the DS and, while there were things I liked about the game, for the most part I felt like I was playing through the game out of more of a sense of obligation than because it was fun and I wanted to. So I was a bit reluctant when the Activision folks offered to show me their DS build for over-the-top shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

While what I saw didn't leave me thirsting to play the game, it certainly did enough things right to perk my interest. The first thing I noticed was the the game had a nice selection of skins for good guys and bad guys, it also made use of voice both in missions briefings and during firefights to call out enemy locations and important actions.

The game has been designed to play through the same missions as the PC and console versions of Call of Duty 4, but instead of playing on Captain Price's team you run support throughout the game, taking out secondary targets to pave the way for his team and providing support from the air occasionally.

The game is broken down into three types of play. You've got the standard first-person shooter levels, which is a bulk of the game; helicopter missions, which essentially plays as a rail shooter; and as a gunner in an AC-130 high altitude support plane, which plays a bit like Touch the Dead.

The shooter levels were surprisingly solid, with crisp reaction to D-pad movements and stylus aiming. Tapping the shoulder buttons fired off shots and the sounds supported the gunfire enough to make it feel a bit more real than other games I've tried. You can double tap the screen to look down the site of your gun, or use your stylus to change up weapons or select grenades. While the game still has to make the best of a platform not really designed for shooters, it does the best with a bad situation and comes off fairly fun to play.

The gunship levels were fun, cruising along gunning down bad guys and blowing up cars. The only thing I didn't like was that the ammo seemed endless and nothing, like barrel overheating, seemed to prevent me from just endlessly shooting.

The Ac-130- levels were the most different of the three. You have no control over movements, like in a rail shooter, but can zoom in and out by changing the weapon types. Selecting the different weapons changes both the zoom level and the precision of the blasts you squeeze off. The whole thing is shown in a grainy-television-screen-meets-night-vision view which is both highly realistic and a bit disturbing. A voice tells you your objectives as they change from protecting the tiny glowing white silhouettes of your team to taking down buildings or targets. To shoot you just touch the screen with your stylus.

I'm not quite ready to start anticipating DS-shooters, but I am ready, I think, to sit down and play through this one when it comes out.

SingStar is HUGE in Germany, like, Hasselhoff huge. Rock Band, Guitar Hero III? People show up, they play with the games, but SingStar draws crowds and, occasionally, a Goth who just wants to smile. Watch as this young man, whose life, I can only imagine, has been dedicated to stern looks and not smiling, finally breaks down and jams to a little YMCA... only to be caught on video. You can almost see his inner child dying at the end there when the smile freezes on his face.

Fountainhead Entertainment's Orcs & Elves DS may not be much to look at—graphically, it's not much better than id's own Doom—it's actually quite fun to play. Gameplay takes place on the top screen of the Nintendo DS with the bottom screen dedicated to the inventory or, at times, a top down map for when you get lost.

The inventory system is actually just a first-person downward look at your character's belt. In it, you'll see a map, journal, potion, sword and other items. Tapping the blue potion on your belt will bring up a menu screen with various other tonics, including buff potions, healing potions and more.

Control is very flexible. It can be controlled entirely with the d-pad and face buttons. Or you can opt to use nothing but touchscreen controls. I actually found that a combination of both was best for me, using the d-pad to move forward, backward, left and right—using the L-button to strafe—and dishing out attacks with the stylus.

Most of the game's action, based solely on my time with the demo version, was simply unlocking doors, solving puzzles and dispatches various slime beasts, anthropomorphic rats and purple spider-things. Combat is obscenely simple, requiring that one tap the all-powerful USE button over and over and over.

Battles are in real-time, making the one boss battle I experienced tougher than expected. Trying to attack the thing while keeping an eye on my health and using the touchscreen interface was too awkward (and ultimately ended my play session). It may make more sense to use the ABXY buttons for something like this, but since I foolishly passed on saving my game, I was unable to give it another shot.

Orcs & Elves may not be the best-looking DS game around, or even in the top 200 best looking DS games, but it was surprisingly fun in an old-school way.

I, as Bart (and Bartman), and Crecente, as Lisa, helped each other overcome obstacles and take down a mechanized lumber processing monster by using our special powers. Bart, armed with an electrified slingshot, took out most of the overall-clad bad guys (which happen to infinitely spawn from a port-a-potty, by the way). Lisa was given puzzle solving duties, using her Buddha palm powers to lift great tree trunks, arrange buzzsaws wedged in trees, and work out pipe puzzles with her all powerful mystical grip. Crecente looked like he was having an easy go of it, while I spent my time platforming, picking up bonus Krusty Koupons and wiping out angry workers.

The platforming aspects is where I felt The Simpsons Game fell a little short. Trying to jump tree to tree with Bartman was not as simple as it should have been. Controller response wasn't nearly tight enough for my needs, resulting in many missed landings and ultimately frustration. Crecente didn't bitch about it as much as I did, a fact he continually chalked up to just being so damn good.

The Simpsons Game's wonky camera wasn't helping matters, though. At one point, I simply had to jump from a ledge and restart my upward progress from scratch because I was unable to see the next platform. This may have been more evidently problematic because of the split-screen nature of our co-op play.

Where the game absolutely delivers is in its excellent use of the license and well executed implementation of Simpsons humor. The game is packed with jokes of the highest Simpsons caliber quality, combining the cartoon's best characters used perfectly with the best gaming cliches.

In fact, when the Comic Book Guy popped up in the middle of the action to inform us that we'd unlocked another video game cliche, I couldn't help but giggle. When Lisa was forced to play a game of Frogger by jumping her way across a river filled with logs and three-eyed alligators, I nearly lost it.

Graphically, the game is near perfect. The development team at EA has captured the cel-shaded look of the show to great effect, giving objects perfectly toned shadows. We never experienced any unusual looking line work on the characters or environment. The only minor visual niggle was a cutscene featuring a weird looking Lenny and Carl trapped on a conveyor belt at the giant lumber plant.

That Simpsons staffers are deeply involved in the game's production clearly shows. This may be the best Simpsons (period) game (period) ever. Period. Hopefully, the guys at EA are already addressing some of the gameplay quibbles we experienced at Games Convention and will deliver on an amazing, hilarious adventure game.

Here it is everyone—our promised first look at Bungie's highly anticipated Halo 3: The Ride that made its world debut this week in Leipzig. If you have any interest at all in Halo 3: The Ride, it's a worthy watch.

One of the big draw backs of Games Convention is that it is virtually impossible to get a direct flight here. To get to the Leipzig airport you pretty much have to fly to either Munich or Frankfurt. I flew into Frankfurt and then had a leisurely seven hour lay-over that I killed by blowing ungodly amounts of money on robotic roulette, reading and posting on the site.

When I finally hopped over to the gate for my flight to Leipzig I discovered a virtual whose who of game developers waiting to catch the same flight. Standing in the line were folks from the Call of Duty 4 development team; Dave Doak, Free Radical's director; and Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi. They were all sort of milling about in front of the ticket counter waiting to board the plane. A few minutes later I spotted Hideo Kojima sitting off by himself in the business lounge waiting for the call to board. I wasn't able to quite grab a recognizable picture of him with my cell, though I got one later as he stood in line in front of me. He had on some very cool Ducati shoes.

I couldn't help but think that if the plane went down it would sort of be like The Day the Music Died for gaming... and I wouldn't be around to write about it.

After sitting through a short and familiar presentation of Killzone 2 at the Games Convention last week I was finally given a chance to play the game.

Before handing over the controller, the developers explained that in the game you play as Sef, a legionnaire called in to help quell the resistance on the Helghast home world of Helghan as the regular army fights to topple the Helghast leader.

The pointed out the various filters used in the game to give the world a darker, more realistic look and talked a bit about the game's new first-person lean and peek system which allows you to stick to walls and then pop-out to shoot, without ever leaving the first-person perspective.

Killzone 2 is ever bit as visually stunning while playing it as I remembered it being while watching the E3 demonstration. The lighting is moody and atmospheric, there's a level of detail in the game that is very reminiscent of Resistance: Fall of Man. Effects, plenty of interesting effects, abound. The end of your gun, for instance, is slightly blurred. Lightning, on the level we were shown, constantly rips through the air above and none of it appears pre-canned. And that attention to detail didn't come cheap. The single level shown at the Games Convention, the same shown during E3, sucked up 2GB of space on the Blu-ray disc.

The controls were very tight. I had no trouble targeting head-shots and popping off rounds at enemy troopers and then ducking back behind columns or walls. The movements in the game also felt fairly solid, I never seemed to get stuck anywhere and was able to dance around in fire fights with no trouble at all. The death animations for the bad guys were a bit over the top, but not so bad as to be distracting.

While the game seems to have enormous potential, mostly because of it's over-the-top look and solid mechanics, I was very disappointed in Killzone 2's artificial intelligence system. The team said they knew that AI was a problem in the original Killzone, so they did a lot of work on it. They said they now operate in groups, can recognize destructible environments and respond to fire, but it didn't seem that way to me.

As I watched someone else play the game, I saw bad guys doing things like standing in the middle of an open door exchanging rapid-fire shots with the player, never bothering to move or get out of the way. Then I gave the game a hand and found enemies standing around, standing with their sides to me as I walked up to them. In one case, there were two bad guys standing next to each other. I walked up to them from the side, shot the first guy several times to kill him and then shot the second guy a single time. He didn't respond. I shot him again, nothing. So I killed him.

I asked the team what the game's difficultly was set on and they said medium to hard. After an awkward pause, one of the developers added, "but it's very early and we're still working on the AI."

I'm not saying that the game is deeply flawed, just that the AI is. Fortunately, they've got plenty of time to work on that and I suspect up until now their top priority has been graphics. Now that they've got that pretty polished I suspect they'll move on to AI.

That's it. The show's a wrap. As we walked from the convention hall (actually we were repeatedly asked to leave until, finally, two security guards hovered over for us politely waiting until we obliged them) the trash was being swept into big piles in the corners and the booth babes were streaming through the exits, their no-neck, slabs-of-meat boyfriends in tow.

The Games Convention may have wrapped up Sunday evening, but our coverage continues. Expect to see more impressions, stories, videos, cultural oddities and images from Leipzig over the remaining week. In case you missed what we've done so far I've listed our stories to date on the jump.

Tender Booth Babe Moment (Babies
More Guitar Hero III Hands-On Impressions
The Cars Of Games Convention
Playground Impressions
The Trash of Games Convention
Sony's Cheerleaders Break Hearts Everywhere
Tender Booth Babe Moment (Sleeping)
McWhertor Pwns with Princess
SingStar: So Sexy it Hurts
Hall Crawl: Hungry Like the Wolf
Hall Crawl: Rock Me Like a Hurricane
Mercenaries 2 Gel: Hair On
Hall Crawl: Boogie is a Buzzkill
BlackSite: Area 51 Impressions
Hall Crawl: Meat Lunch
The Games Convention Hall Crawl
First Look at Borderlands
LIttleBigPlanet Gets Better Acting
Kane & Lynch Pantsu
Rock Band Retail Display Revealed
Booth Babes Revenge: Nowhere to Hide
The Sony Sprint
We Have Secured Phil Harrison's Chewing Gum
Konami Whips Up Two Castlevania Mobile Games
Lara Croft Hands-On Impressions
First Look At Midnight Club Los Angeles
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue To Feature Car Damage, Improved AI, Better Physics
Spore? Or SimSim?
Missing at GC07 - Class Action Lawsuits
The Four Stages of Grief Spore
Games For Windows Live Maybe, PhysX Not So Much
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, Incredible Video Creation and Erection Hoodies
Gabe Newell Smack Talks the PC, PS3, Xbox 360 (And your Mother)
Call of Duty 4 After Hours
Sloppy Seconds - Lair
Rock Band Tour Bus
Rock (Out) Band
GC Offers EA Tats
The GC Opening Day Walk/Run
Metal Gear Solid 4 May Feature Limited Online Play, Custom Soundtracks
Kane & Lynch Hands-On Impressions
Introducing, Kotaku's Sloppy Seconds
Really New Metal Gear Solid 4 Screens
TRL Germany Live from GC07
Strippers Invade GC
Warhound Impressions
Booth Babes Strike Back: This Time It's Personal
Metal Gear Solid 4 Theme & Actresses Revealed
Play TV On PS3 Explained
Pony Friends More Mature, More Gruesome Than Originally Thought
Games Convention Is A GREAT Place To Play Wii Sports
WipEout HD Hands-On Impressions
Starcraft II, the Multiplayer Experience
Dead Island Impressions
Go!Messenger Brings Chat to PSP
Sony Turns PS3 Into DVR
Harrison Sheds LIght On US Plans PS3 DVR and PSP TV
Liveblogging the Sony Press Conference
Metal Gear Solid 4 Games Convention Trailer
New Metal Gear Solid 4 Trailer Shows Four New Bosses
Sony to Unveil PSP Download Service Today
The Booth Babes of GC
Trial of Topoq Hands-On Impresssions
The Big Three Booths of Leipzig, Judged
Scenes From The Games Convention Floor
Big UT3 Statue! Giant...Somebody Face!
Halo 3 The Ride
StarCraft II, Lich King Playable At Leipzig Games Con
Sony's UberBooth, It's "The Shit"

Fortunately, we captured some more tender booth babe moments, such as this young lady's interaction with one of the littlest Games Convention attendees.

Deep in conversation, this elfen model for Samsung turned the tables with her own chance to play some grabass, this time with a spritely, tow-headed kid who knows nothing of sexually objectifying women paid to stand near things in midriff baring get ups.

Near the end of it, however, we got a little more depressed. As she reluctantly released the adorable Crocs-wearing kid from her pseudo-mothering grip, it was clear baby lust was in her eyes. I expect she and her boyfriend talked less about Games Convention that night and more about when he was willing to get her pregnant. Poor guy.