If you’ll be in the Los Angeles area on March 13th and have some spare blood lying around, stop by Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 Blood Drive to exchange plasma for prizes.

Capcom is hosting an official Resident Evil 5 Blood Drive on March 13th, the day the game launches in North America and Europe. Folks who stop by and give some of their life-juice to the American Red Cross will be able to get their hands on posters, pins, and bumper stickers, as well as a chance to win copies of the game and limited edition Red Xbox 360 Resident Evil 5 bundles. Capcom will have kiosks set up with the game running, for those of you too woozy to make it to the store afterwards.

Besides, even if you don’t win a prize, giving blood is an excellent way to give back to society while scoring Nutter Butters and orange Hi-C.

The Resident Evil 5 Blood Drive is taking place at the World of Wonder Gallery on March 13th, from 11am to 5pm. Hit up the link to RSVP, and try to reserve an appointment for when your blood is at its tastiest.

Give Resident Evil 5 A Shot – Win a Red Xbox Bundle [Capcom Unity]

The two day long festival will feature a wide variety of famed video game movie director Uwe Boll’s greatest hits, culminating in the world premier of Boll’s Far Cry movie, with a pre-showing Q&A session with the man himself. Not only will you get to see his video game fare in the form of In the Name of the King and Alone in the Dark, you’ll also get a look at his revenge pictures Seed and Heart of America. As if this wasn’t enough motivation, the Downtown Independent will also be premiering Uwe Boll’s Tunnel Rats on Friday – soon to be a majorly bad video game!

Hit the link for the full details. We’d attend ourselves, but we have about 20,000 other things we have to get done on our Things to Do list before we hit “Attend Uwe Boll Film Festival”.

Uwe Boll Film Festival [Downtown Independent - Thanks John]

“We started the in-house development team a couple of months ago and we’re starting with downloadable content because the team is still small,” explained the studio’s US president John Yamamoto. “All formats – Xbox Live, WiiWare, PlayStation Network – are all viable formats for us”

The LA studio will also be investigating middleware solutions, after successfully using the Unreal Engine 3 for The Last Remnant. “I want to [...] evaluate lots of middleware,” said Yamamoto, “because western middleware is much more advanced compared to Japanese middleware. So we will study and feed back information to Square Enix in Japan.”

Square Enix LA studio to focus on digital titles [GamesIndustry.biz]

Apparently Park City, Utah may be progressive enough to hold an indie film festival, but they’re not quite forward-thinking enough to hold an indie game festival. I personally think that’s crap, an excuse made up by the organizers to some how mitigate their responsibility for last year’s fiasco, but if it means they’re going to start showing a little backbone than I suppose letting them save face is fine.

The Guerrilla Gamemaker folks announced that this year’s festival will instead be held in Los Angeles during the “spring/summer”.

With the growth of independent games, and the issues facing the medium, Slamdance has decided to separate the Games Festival from the Film Festival, while still focusing on bringing independent artists together.

No mention is made in the press release of the competitions decision last year to first nominate and then kick Super Columbine Massacre RPG from the show. I think the venue isn’t the only thing that needs to be changed before indie game makers start to take this competition seriously again.

News: Slamdance Games leaves Park City, UT [Arthouse Games]