Between scads of game demos to play, a mandatory social hour and the opening speeches, it almost feels like a mini Game Developers Conference. Only, it's all Konami all the time.

This year's offerings included a lot of lesser-known and possibly mundane DS games, a few Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network titles that might be worth attention, and tantalizing glimpses of games yet to come.

Here's what we came away with:
Insurgents Contributed To Development Of Six Days In Fallujah
Saw Preview: Condemned or Dragon's Lair?
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories – A Makeover Not A Remake
Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment Preview: Fails To Spark Interest
Ant Nation DS Preview: Baby's First Strategy Game
Konami Warns Of Zombie Apocalypse On XBLA, PSN

Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment is actually a prequel to the original Vandal Hearts, coming to Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. With multiple endings and player characters that supposedly adapt to the user's style of gameplay, Flames of Judgment won't have to suffer the test of nostalgia. But it will have to live up to modern expectations of SRPGs instead of the ones that we judged the original Vandal Hearts by.

What Is It?
Flames of Judgment is a strategy RPG that serves as a prequel to the original PlayStation SRPG Vandal Hearts. It's an Xbox Live/PlayStation Network downloadable game, which is not all that common for the gameplay genre. The story follows stereotypically plucky youth, Tobias, and his friends as they fight for the peace in the land of Sostegaria.

What We Saw
The demo level takes place in a haunted battlefield in a forest area where the hero's party gets jumped by skeletons and wolves. I watched one journo play through the level and win, which took about half an hour. When it was my turn, I played through the level and tried to lose by getting the main character killed. I managed it in only 15 minutes, but that didn't result in a demo fail and the power went out on that side of the venue before I could get all five party members killed.

How Far Along Is It?
The demo build didn't look too rough and certainly wasn't buggy, but the game won't be out ‘til September.

What Needs Improvement?
Not Enough Nostalgia Appeal: It's been a long time since Vandal Hearts and I'm not sure that it has the cult following that would demand that changes to gameplay be kept to the minimum. Even if it did, why not remake the game completely to capitalize on that fanbase?

Slow: According to the press release, the classic combat of Vandal Hearts has been streamlined so that it "combines the speedy RPG pace of the original […] with improved user mechanics" – but I didn't really get that feeling from the demo. There were only about three menus to navigate through during a turn phase (four, if you're changing weapons) to move a character and then have them attack or cast a spell, but the characters moved so slowly, the combat phase didn't really feel as fast as other SRPGs of the day.

No Flanking Bonus: One of the things I like best about newer RPGs is the concept of a flanking bonus. If I manage to get all my units surrounding an enemy, I should get a major damage bonus when attacking that enemy. Because Flames of Judgment isn't a remake, there is no excuse for failing to include this and perhaps some other updates that the SRPG genre has adopted over the years.

What Should Stay The Same?
It's On Console: The absolute biggest gripe of many SRPG fans is that you can only get your fix on a handheld device. This is doubly bad because many SRPGs don't have the hang of quicksaves, so the games don't necessarily work very well on handhelds despite always being made for or ported to handhelds.

It's On XBLA And PSN: The game deserves a tiny bit of street cred for being different in terms of distribution if not for being innovative on other fronts.

It's Pretty – Kind Of: The characters lack the cutesy appeal of many portable SRPGs, but the colors are rich and vibrant. So at least you have something to look at while your character takes a bit too long to cross all those squares before attacking.

Final Thoughts
Honestly, I'm having trouble putting this game in context, especially since the power failed during the demo and the information provided in the press packet (see below) doesn't really give many details about what makes Flames of Judgment special or awesome. I don't even know if there's any kind of multiplayer or plans for DLC support.

I do know that SRPGs are a genre that either you love or hate. The fact that Flames of Judgment is a prequel to a classic won't change that; it'll just draw in a few of the gamers who loved the original Vandal Hearts. I have a feeling they're going to be disappointed.

A good makeover doesn't slap a layer of polish on an already finished product; it doesn't cram a bunch of new features onto an already complete face. Instead, it enhances what's already there while inspiring reinvention of the inner self (or whatever it was I read on that bottle of liquid foundation).

Even if that metaphor is lame, "enhancement" and "reinvention" seem to be the tactic developer Climax and publisher Konami are taking toward Shattered Memories, based on what journalists saw at the Konami Gamers Night event.

The demo opened with a familiar scene: Harry Mason crashing into a ditch in the middle of the night and waking up to find his daughter, Cheryl, gone. The next scene we know: policewoman Cybil Bennett encounters and tries to talk sense into a confused Harry. Only this Cybil looks very different from the more buttoned-up blonde in the original.

The demo jumped then to several different sections of gameplay footage where Harry wandered through the snowy Silent Hill armed with only a flashlight and a cell phone. The flashlight serves as the classic mood-setting tool of the series – light and the lack thereof was and still is a very big component of survival horror entertainment. The cell phone, on the other hand, serves as an immersion too by replacing all heads-up displays and menus you'd otherwise see in a video game.

The goal, said producer Tom Hulett, is to "destroy the barrier between living room and game" by removing things that would take you out of the experience. To that end, there are no loading screens in the game and both the flashlight and the cell phone are mapped to the Wii Remote in ways that make the controller feel like the object it's representing.

"We learned a lot of what not to do [with flashlights on the Wii] from Alone in the Dark," Lead Designer Sam Barlow said. "They took a lot of gamey functions and just replaced them with kind of excessively complicated gestures. What we've done here is the opposite. This flashlight control scheme we have is this really beautiful, seamless."

The Wii Remote also transmits many audio cues the game will rely on during puzzle solving – including the old, scary radio static Silent Hill gamers are all too familiar with.

Take for example, a key-in-a-can puzzle, which takes place in what looks like an abandoned carnival. Harry comes to a locked door; instead of pop-up text telling him to go find a key, Harry actually says to himself, "I should look for a key." Whoever was steering the demo turned Harry around and walked past a truck that appeared to have three soda cans in the truck bed. Once Harry was close to the cans, the camera zoomed in on the cans and changed the Wii Remote mapping from flashlight to hand-shaped targeting reticule. Using the Wii Remote, the demo master appears to grab the cans and shake them. When one made a jingling noise, the reticule hand appeared to lift up and turn over the can up and out came a key. Puzzle solved.

Hulett says that gamers can expect more puzzles like the can puzzle from Shattered Memories.

"What other games may have done less effectively is replace that button press with a nunchuk shake," he said. "In our game, not only is there no HUD, nothing to distract you or remind you that you're playing a game, but you're reaching in as you saw in the demo… You're not highlighting the can and clicking a button and having the game go 'Oops! didn't have the key in it!' You're picking those cans up, you're shaking them around. When you find the one, your Wii remote jingles like there's a key inside of it, you turn it upside down - you're doing all the actions. It's not just ‘I figured out what the puzzle is, so I'm going to highlight this.' You figure out what the puzzle is and then you do that thing."

The Wii Remote will also be part of grasping and turning doorknobs and part of a back-story collection method that's pretty spooky. In the demo, Harry came to a broken swing set. The player activated the cell phone function of the Wii Remote and selected "camera" from the phone's menu. Snapping a shot of the swing set activated a short scene where the ghost of a girl (maybe Cheryl?) appeared on the swing. An accompanying audio snippet played with the image (also through the Wii Remote), adding the plaintive whine of "Daddy, where are you?" to the haunting image.

It all looked very spiffy, except for a series of clips where Harry was running away from monsters. I'm sure it would have been more scary and exciting in context – but the way it was juxtaposed with the puzzle solving gameplay made it look like players get to spend a significant portion of Shattered Memories fleeing.

"This is a game that's 50% action," said Barlow. He didn't say how much of that action was fleeing. But Hulett felt the need to address concerns he'd seen on the Internet about combat in general:

"We didn't take a normal Silent Hill game, pick up combat and throw it away, and then expect you to play the exact same game but without combat. This has been designed the way this is from the ground up. So the nightmare world [of Shattered Memories] is designed around the way the fleeing works."

Even if that doesn't sit well with Silent Hill purists, it is still the right direction for a Wii game to go. And – back to that girly metaphor of the makeover – the bottom line for reinventing an experience and making it truly beauty is having a high level of accessibility. Shattered Memories will prove itself in how well it does both with fans of the original and with gamers not at all familiar with Silent Hill beyond that bothersome movie version.

"[Shattered Memories] really illustrates the difference between a remake and a re-imagining," Hulett said. "Because it's a re-imagining, it's a brand new story. If you have played it, we know you have – we've changed things and we know you're going to react to that." But, "whether or not you played the original, Shattered Memories has something for you."

That would be a great tagline for a perfume. Just saying.

And I'm not just saying that because the Saw video game is based on the Saw movie franchise. Many of the major elements in the game – the setting, hunting down and killing other people – are also the major elements of other survival horror games like Condemned or Manhunt.

But the insta-death? I haven't seen something that harsh since the first level of arcade classic Dragon's Lair – where if you didn't duck in the first five seconds, you could kiss all the quarters in your pocket goodbye.

What Is It?
Saw is the game that Brash Entertainment was going to publish before they went belly up. It's coming out on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360; and will supposedly fill in a lot of the plot gaps between the two films.

What We Saw
Konami's Gamers Night included a massive screening of three minutes' worth of a demo made from pre-alpha code that may not actually be a real level in the final game. Following the presentation, I got to play the full demo on the PS3 which clocked in at six minutes, counting both times I died during the get-the-bear-trap-off-your-head sequence.

How Far Along Is It?
The demo build was pre-alpha. The game is slated for an October 2009 release.

What Needs Improvement?
Visual Cues: Like the movie, all the "clues" you need to solve a death puzzle are in the room with you. But thanks to pre-alpha code, not all the necessary visual cues were in place. For example, during the opening bear-trap challenge, there is an icon onscreen that tells the user to rotate the left stick to wind part of the trap. But other other part of the puzzle is subtler – there's a red light on the device that supposedly looks like the B button the 360. But because I was playing on PS3, not only did I not immediately notice the visual cue, but when I did the second time, I pressed X and not Circle, because really – how the hell was I supposed to know which button they meant?

Flashbacks: Currently, there is no explanation whatsoever for the parts of the game where you see something like a torture chair and suddenly experience a flashback to someone else getting tortured. Is the main character psychic? Did he actually witness the act and have legitimate memories to flashback to? Right now, it just looks like they desperately want to freak you out and they don't care about continuity to pull it off.

Visual Fatigue: I know the game is supposed to be scary, I know the movies are incredibly gory – but if I'm going to slog through 8-10 hours or more of a linear game, I'm going to need a visual break from the visceral horror once in a while or else it will all get stale and headache-inducing.

What Should Stay The Same?
Think Fast!: If they nail the visual cues thing, I don't actually have a problem with the insta-death. For example, part of the demo involves going through a booby-trapped door. You've already been warned about it (because they want you to finish the demo, not fling cans of soda at it), but not explicitly told how to deal with it. Because I'm a natural pansy, I got it on the first go by opening the door and not immediately mashing forward on the analog stick. By just standing there, I had plenty of time to watch the pulley part of the trap go upwards – spotting the big Triangle button in time to actually press the button and avert the shotgun blast to the head.

The Element of Surprise: I don't know that a game couldn't really stay scary if you had to go through the same insta-death puzzles over and over again; but a developer John Williams told me in an interview that many of the puzzles in the game are randomly generated at each encounter and that some of death traps actually won't be instant. For example, the shotgun-rigged door won't always kill you – just royally mess you up once in a while. Little uncertainties like these make the game that much more interesting than your average movie licensed game.

Final Thoughts
I'm on the fence about the other people in the asylum with your character. Over and over again during the demo, the developer (and villain Jigsaw) stress that you shouldn't trust anyone and that there will be characters throughout the game that are either trying to kill you, manipulate you or beg you for help to kill someone else. This dynamic could be interesting – if there were someone you really want to help. If not and you should trust no one, it'll get a little boring when the next horribly maimed person runs away from you in a darkened, blood-stained corridor.

But, if we see more movie games striving to be more like other games such as Condemned or Manhunt instead of trying to be entirely faithful to the movie, I call that a win and salute Saw.

The game was made with contributions from the insurgents that fought Marines during the second battle of Fallujah (otherwise known as Operation Phantom Fury), according to Atomic Games' President Peter Tamte.

"It's important for us to say that there are actually three communities that are very affected by the battle for Fallujah," Tamte said. "Certainly the Marines, certainly the Iraqi civilians within Fallujah, and the insurgents as well. We are actually getting contributions from all three of those communities so that we can get the kind of insight we're trying to get."

Tamte wouldn't say exactly what "contributions" Atomic Games received, nor would he state whether or not anyone on the development team had spoken to insurgents. He did say the insurgents were "involved in the creation of the game," and that the developer knows that people "would just like this to be a recreation and we can't recreate [Operation Phantom Fury] without getting the perspectives of all the people who were involved."

"We recreate the events as factually and as accurately as we possibly can," Creative Director Juan Benito said added.

Atomic Games seems to be very aware that their game raises some questions and concerns for pretty much everyone – even people who probably won't play the game. Benito said, "There will be a broad range of reactions and opinions on the experience itself. And for some, they may have fun. People I think will have their own individual reactions to it and those will be across the board. And that's what we want. We want people to experience something that's going to challenge them, that's going to make them think and provide an unprecedented level of insight into a great military significance."

While Atomic Games say talked to all sides involved for their game, the story will be focused on the surviving marines, Tamte said.

"What we're trying to do is recreate the stories of the Marines that we've spoken with and that are involved in the creation," he said. "And we're telling those stories of those particular Marines."

There was no playable version of the game available to press during the event, instead we were shown a short snippet of pre-alpha gameplay footage that provided some insight into what we can expect from Six Days:

In this footage, solders take positions in a street littered with burnt-out cars and debris. A man - obviously of Middle Eastern ethnicity – comes running out of a house, hands in the air. The NPC chatter says something like "He's unarmed – wait…" The man ducks behind a car and pops back out with an RPG. Immediately the NPC soldiers open fire as more armed people pour out of surrounding houses.

Like any other war game we're used to seeing, the main character takes a couple of hits and the screen begins to gray as he loses health. The soldier ducks behind a car and slowly the screen regains color. A heads-up display menu appears onscreen, letting the player (and we're aware now of being a player because of the HUD) choose an explosive. Then it's back to this-is-a-documentary mode as the HUD disappears and the soldier approaches a wall to the right of the street where the firefight still rages. He sets the charge and the wall caves in when it blows. The soldier then steps into what appears to be a house and shoots the first man he sees, gaining access into a room beyond which looks out onto the street where the insurgents are still shooting at the soldiers. From inside the house, the lone soldier flanks and then gets behind the insurgents, shooting three in the back.

Then the demo ends.

After presenting the demo to journalists, Tamte spoke for a few minutes about the mechanics of the game – such as the engine they had to build from the ground up to handle the sheer amount of destructible environments the game hopes to include. He also talked about how insurgents and Iraqi citizens contributed to the game's development, referred to the game as "a communications tool" and then closed with a statement that he echoed later in our interview:

"As we've watched the dialog that's taken place about the game, there is definitely one point that we want people to understand about the game," he said. "And that is, it's not about the politics of whether the US should have been there or not. It is really about the stories of the Marines who were in Fallujah and the question, the debate about [the politics], that is something for the politicians to worry about. We're focused now on what actually happened on the ground."

Which brings us right back to the big question that nobody – not even the developer – can really seem to answer: What is Six Days trying to accomplish beyond provoking a reaction? Is it a game, a communications tool, or propaganda?

While there are no definitive answers as yet, it seems significant that the developer calls the game a communications tool but is asking gamers to pay money for it. And it bothers me in a way I can't quite explain that the Marines that were in Operation Phantom Fury will be in the game as NPCs you can interact with; like the licensed characters you see in sports or movie games.

Here's the worst part, though: we cannot say without playing the game what would make Six Days in Fallujah better. Would it be better to have total realism if Atomic Games had spoken directly to insurgents, included scenes where you could watch the Marines killed in action die exactly how they were killed in real life (even if it were from friendly fire) and showed the use of white phosphorus during the operation? Or would it be better to have it be "just a video game" with regenerating health, HUDs and a certain casual – if tactless – distance from the events via unrealistic depictions of the battle?

The irony here is, once those questions are answered and all can weigh in on those complex issues, the game will already be out and any damage may already be done.