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.

However, according to a PDF of an earlier version of the designer's session, the version "sent for speech approval rather than the version that I actually showed at GDC," according to Teasdale himself, LEGO Rock Band was planned to be announced prior to this year's Game Developers Conference. Teasdale's slides show that the game, rumored to be in development by LEGO video game development house Traveller's Tales, will hit in 2009.

One of Teasdale's slides — which, when shown at GDC did not feature the "Lego" title on the time line — shows the game may be expected to hit between the release of Rock Band Unplugged for the PSP and The Beatles: Rock Band.

A later slide, on the page following brief details on Rock Band Unplugged, a placeholder image for a "project to be announced before or at 9 AM Friday" is featured, which we're assuming to be LEGO Rock Band. Teasdale's notes on that slide read: "There's a project that I'll be talking about here, but it hasn't been announced yet. BUT - I will be showing it at GDC!"

As you can see, Teasdale also lists a few Guitar Hero titles schedule to be in development, including what may be the oft-rumored Guitar Hero: Van Halen title and what appears to be Guitar Hero: Band Hero. Whether Teasdale's in a position to know Activision's publishing schedule isn't perfectly clear. What is clear is that Activision has plenty of Guitar Hero exploitation planned for 2009.

We attended the Rock Band design session, but Teasdale made absolutely no mention of the LEGO branded version of the game. Promise — we would have told you.

Kotaku has reached out to Harmonix and MTV Games public relations reps seeking comment. We have not yet heard back.

Many thanks to Stephen for the tip! [Image credit]

As good as Mega 64's Metal Gear Solid spoof? That all depends on your point of view. Particularly if you're a fan of indie gaming.

The first, "Topher Great Payens 'The GDC,'" spins a romantic musical yarn that transports the viewer to the ancient "Time of Gamings" and sings of the glory that is indie game development. The hair is fabulous and the tonguing is copious. If you don't "get it," brush up on your internet.

The second, "IF YOU'RE NOT INDIE, F**K YOU," combines the hilarity of unsuspecting people being socked in the face with a cameo from The Behemoth's Dan Paladin with the work "fuck."

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.

Double Fine's ability to craft a world out of the imagery of heavy metal helps the game transcend it's genre and potentially deliver an experience that will be as unique as it is memorable.

What glimpses I saw of Brütal Legend brought to mind the sort of worlds I explored in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine in the 70s. Heavy metal, the music, isn't just a cheap backdrop for this game, it's its essence.

Double Fine's Tim Schafer said that Brütal Legend came out of his desire to make a game that played off the feeling and images of heavy metal music and to create a unique fantasy world.

"I always wanted to make a fantasy world that wasn't straight up fantasy and Tolkenesque," he said.

His creation certainly fits the bill.

Game lead Eddie Riggs, voiced by Jack Black, is a roadie. The greatest roadie of all time for the worst heavy metal band of all time.

During the course of his job, Riggs manages to cut himself and spill some blood on his belt buckle, which also happens to be an evil talisman. The talisman awakens the fire beast Ormagöden and sends Riggs back in time.

When Riggs first arrives he doesn't realize he's actually gone anywhere because the new world looks just like the set of the show he was setting up. But then he's attacked and uses an axe to kill off his demonic druid attackers.

Shortly after clearing a few rooms of the druids, Riggs stumbles upon Ophelia, who is in the temple to try and take down the demons.

After taking down some more demons, and freakishly tall evil nuns, Riggs solves and puzzle and plays a riff on his guitar to summon up a hot rod named The Deuce, AKA the Druid Plow.

"It's like your horse Trigger," Schafer said.

One of the few things that Schafer didn't show us during the demo was what he described as an "extended guitar playing mechanic" one that, he assured us, wouldn't use a plastic instrument but added a spell casting element to the game.

After taking out the demon druids, summoning The Deuce and surviving both a maniacal driving course and an impressively large boss battle, Riggs and Lita drive off to meet Lita's brother, leader of the resistance.

Lars Hartford is the epitome of a heavy metal lead singer and leader of men, but he is woefully unsuited to the grunt work required to get his show on the road, that's where Riggs comes in.

Lars tells Riggs that the world's humans have been enslaved by Doviculus and his demon army, The Tainted Coil.

The real first mission of the game is for Riggs to go and free the local humans and raise an army to take on Doviculus' General Lionwhyte. Lionwhyte, a glam metal rocker, is voiced by Judas Priests' Rob Halford, and, Schafer tells us with particular glee, he attacks people with a screaming attack.

Early on, watching the developers, play through the game, it appears to be a straight up action brawler. Riggs rampages through waves of evil druids using his trusty broad axe, The Separator, to tear apart his enemy. He can also use his guitar, Clementine, for ranged attacks.

The addition of The Deuce adds a nice element to the gameplay, but still leaves Brutal Legend safely in the realm of action, button masher. But once Riggs arrives at the mines to start freeing the enslaved humans, things change.

In the mines Riggs comes upon a crew of head bangers, broad-shouldered, long-haired, no-necked humans who literally band their heads into the mine's walls to break rocks.

After hearing some of Rigg's powerful metal chords on Clementine they decide to rise up against Doviculus, but a few resist and a battle breaks out.

Once you recruit some of these head bangers you can start to control them like an army, using the d-pad to issue commands in the thick of battle.

"They'll go completely nut shit on whatever I point at," he said.

Eventually the army you control can grow to 30 people, Schafer said.

The landscape we saw, which is 64-square kilometers of fully explorable space, looked like the sort of scenery and backdrops you might see on the cover of a 70s heavy metal album. The voices in the game, too, lean heavily on the world of heavy metal. Besides the voices of Black and Halford, Schafer says that the game will include Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, Lita Ford and others.

Through-out the game, players can discover lighter tributes, which can be used at The Motorforge to upgrade Riggs' weapons. You can also unlock new weapons, combos, guitars and t-shirts.

The world of Brütal Legend is a surreal blend of fantasy and iconic heavy metal images: V8 engines and chrome mufflers rise from the ground, guitar necks and amps form mountains. It's pretty bad ass.

While driving through this living album art you can turn on the car's radio, the mouth of metal, and listen to music, a soundtrack, of course, made up of metal. Schafer asked us not to repeat which songs were playing as he cruised the landscape because the developer hadn't yet inked the deal for any of the music.

The game has 23 primary missions and Schafer promises that it also has a lot of open world "stuff" and "30-ish" side missions like races.

The game's multiplayer is versus mode, a battle of the band scenario, but battle of the bands with axes where you kill each other to death. These multiplayer battles can feature armies of 40 on each side, he said.

While there are plenty of things to do in the open world, the story is really about Riggs' unifying all metal music together. And while the plot and look of the game may sound corny at times, it works. There's also the bonus of a script written by Schafer and voiced by Black.

"I had a lot of fun writing this stuff," Schafer said. "There are a lot of little nuggets and references to heavy metal.

"I wrote the script, but Jack Black did a lot of improvisation. He's a lot of fun to work with."

Schafer said he first pitched the game before the original Guitar Hero came out and that there was initially a lot of pressure to change the game, but by the time it made its way to Electronic Arts the look and feel of the game was fairly well established.

Schafer said the game will have a fully licensed soundtrack that will tap into all elements and styles of heavy metal, but Brütal Legend isn't necessarily a game for metal fans.

"It's just a way to have a consistent world with heroes and villains," he said.

What most surprised me about the game was it's ability to so cohesively present a world of heavy metal. Everything, from the voice acting, to the attacks, to the plot and landscape, is metal, but it's done in a way that manages in its seeming absurdity to appear almost subtle.

Brütal Legend appears to have enormous potential, here's hoping that gamers feel the same way when this latest Schafer title is released.

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.

It was packed with opportunities to sit down and talk with the people behind some of the greatest games, past, present and future. This year, though, it was also quite loaded up with the chance to play soon-to-be-released games. Sure, most were under embargo, but by now almost all of those embargoes have been lifted.

Here's a run down of what games we previewed at the big show:

Dexter iPhone Does Interesting Things
Wolfenstein Preview: Into the Veil
Excitebots Trick Racing Preview: Excite Trucks Gets a Make Over
Section 8 Preview: Death From Above
Punch-Out!! Preview: Slick, Punchy Design
Boom Blox Bash Party Preview: Slingshots Ahoy
Terminator Salvation Preview: Please Don't Come Back
Batman Arkham Asylum Preview: The Challenge Modes
America's Army 3 Preview: Army of One... Plus Two

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.