Among Capcom's E3 titles was a somewhat mysterious downloadable title called Flock, erroneously pegged early on as a "sheep herding simulator". I got to have the title demoed for me by Proper Games design lead Geoff Gunning, a cheerful Scotsman, and had the mystery cleared up.

It's not a sheep-herding sim, but there is sheep herding. There is herding of adorable cotton ball sheep who live in a fluffy, stuffed-toy looking world, grazing peacefully in a patchwork meadow. The stitch-edged, pastoral aesthetic is sweet, gentle, and just a little offbeat, in the context of the quirky and sometimes hilariously grim gameplay.

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I hung at Sony's swanky booth (there were blue lights and white shag carpets, ooh!) to take a look at the just-announced Resistance: Retribution for PSP, coming in Autumn 2009. They let me look, but not touch; nonetheless, I still got to pick the brain of assistant producer Caley Roberts to find out more about the title.

Nathan Hale doesn't feature in Retribution at all — instead, we've got a new character named James Grayson, a Private in the British forces.

Backstory on the game is that Grayson's brother, an RAF pilot, gets shot down, and Grayson goes in to look for him — and finds him on a table, the Chimera's newest conversion project. This means, of course, that Grayson's got to kill his own bro, and this makes him into a vengeful Chimera-slaughtering machine. He goes AWOL on a rampage, gets bagged for treason, and that's where the game starts.

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Got to check out Spore running on iPhone at EA's E3 booth, a version of the game that focuses exclusively on the "Cell" phase. You're essentially a little blob swimming through the primordial soup, snapping up smaller amoebas as you go and avoiding the large, ugly spikier ones. Your objective? Make it to the sandy shore, where hopefully you can stand on two feet like a real freak of nature.

The recent launch of iPhone games has demonstrated that the phone has the potential to be a great-looking game platform graphically, and Spore is no exception. In fact, it looks fantastic — it's colour-rich, featuring numerous mesmerizing layers of parallax that give glimpses of the next layer's challenges slipping by in the distance on your way up through the ooze.

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