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For those of you that missed out on GDC and Cliffy B's epic entrance (see what I did there?) you can now experience the magic for yourselves on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. In two separate videos (available for free), Epic Games President Mike Capps and Lead Designer Cliff Bleszinski tell you all about what you can expect from the fllow up to one of the biggest games of 2006. Also available is a video documenting the technical aspects and features of the updates Unreal 3 engine by Epic Games CEO and Technical Director Tim Sweeney. All three clips are available now for your downloading and viewing pleasure.

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Along with a slew of other updates, the latest patch for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 version of Rock Band includes a new in-game music store. The music store will let you preview and purchase songs from inside the game by selecting the option from the main menu.

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

Valve Publications [Valve via GameSetWatch]

With so much controversy around the sexuality in Mass Effect, I'm kind of surprised it was so long before Bioware provided their thoughts on the matter. But at GDC 08, BioWare's General Manager Ray Muzyka gave his opinion on how proud he was of the team at BioWare, and the game they've created.

We're proud of the mature plots that we build into our games. They're really appropriate for the type of story we're trying to convey. And romance is part of that. It's part of life. It's part of an interaction -- a healthy relationship with other people.

Bioware Talks Video Game Romance In The Post-'SeXbox' Era [MTV Multiplayer]

Auran is still alive and so is its MMO Fury, despite its parent company Auran Developments throwing in the towel late last year. Even with this setback, Auran was able to produce a hefty content update, Age of the Chosen, that it believed would rectify most of the original criticisms of the game, including its steep learning curve and dodgy performance. For good measure, it removed the subscription fee.

Shortly after the release of Age of the Chosen, Auran was able to confirm that it had even more updates in the pipeline, but surely, three months on, what developers are left have to be operating on two cornflakes and half a can of Red Bull?

Apparently not. MMORPG.COM managed to get a hold of Auran's CEO Tony Hilliam at GDC 2008, and Hilliam was able to reassure the site that the 13-year old company is committed to Fury. Yet, my eyebrows couldn't help but elevate at a few of Hilliam's comments:

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One of the numerous panel discussions at GDC last month did things a little bit differently, setting up a panel of video game journalists, lead by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, to answer some of the questions game industry professionals have for those that write about them and their work. The panel consisted of 1UP's Garnett Lee, MTV's Stephen Totilo, Game Informer's Andy McNamara, Geoff Keighly of GameTrailers.tv, and our very own Brian Crecente.

The group covers a variety of topics, including the responsibility of a game journalist, the role of the reporter versus that of a critic, the impact that the emerging casual game market is having on game journalism, and one question from an anonymous contributor about the pay structure of gaming sites. One of the most interesting discussions, though, surrounded the influence giving a score to a game has on not only the game, but whether people will read the article:

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Adrian Crook had an interesting presentation at the GDC Worlds In Motion Summit on the issue of free to play games - where they've been, where they're heading, good things, bad things .... He's put up the slides and speech over at his website, and while the narrative redux is apparently not as zippy as the original presentation, it is an interesting listen.

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Two days prior to my hands-on experience with Street Fighter IV, we held an impromptu Street Fighter III: Third Strike tournament at the offices of Massive Black. My Elena versus Crecente's Ryu wasn't so much a contest as it was a total bloodletting. (Ultimately, though, the Massive Black guys made the three Kotaku editors look like scrubs.) In Crecente's defense, he was more transfixed with Street Fighter II Champion Edition and largely ended his love affair there. I, on the other hand, latched on to every arcade release, through Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alphas I-III and all three iterations of Street Fighter III. Hell, I was even pretty competitive in Super Gem Fighter: Mini Mix for a while there.

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

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

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

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