A Gamer's Week: 21 – 28 March

With the Game Developers Conference going on, this week saw a lot of news coming out of that reunion of game creators. This doesn't mean that all the interesting pieces of news were about designs, awards and keynotes. Here's what caught our eye these days.

On Monday, we found out that Nintendo was planning on using Mario in a series of educational games which would, amongst other things, teach small children to make their own bed. To make sure that you're not nauseated by the sudden invasion of cuteness, Electronic Arts is sending word that it plans to no longer put out any boxing titles. It plans to up the blood and gore quotient by creating some mixed martial arts titles.

Keeping up with Electronic Arts games, it seems that Shift, one of the three Need For Speed titles recently announced, is set to arrive on September 17. Speed junkies, mark that date down in your calendars! The gore quote for the day is offered by the announcement that a more cynical, bearded Max Payne will arrive in the third game in the series sometime in winter, courtesy of Rockstar Vancouver.

The big news from the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday was the fact the OnLive was set to revolutionize the way we play games. The concept relies on players only getting to send the graphics on selected titles while the game actually runs on powerful computers miles away. At the same time, Michael Patcher, a videogame analyst, announced that he believed the current console generation was the last one.

On Thursday, everyone went nuclear over the announcement that there was a trailer and a release date, November 10, for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Oh, and it seems that Blizzard is talking about bringing Diablo III on the Xbox 720 when it is released.

Friday was another Call of Duty day, with the announcement that Activision is spinning Modern Warfare off as a separate franchise, which would deal with modern day warfare. In other first person shooter news, it seems that Bungie will continue to create content for Halo 3 for at least a couple of years.

And if that's not enough news for you, then you can also check out the review we have up for Red Alert 3: Uprising and the Weekend Reading piece I have written.