GDC was this past week, and I spent so much time looking over what we’d be looking forward to in the world of gaming. Here are some highlights for me:

• XNA Game Studio updated to 3.1 – adding with it support for Avatars and Avatar animation in Community Games. My current game doesn’t have any need for that stuff, but maybe next time…
• OnLive – perhaps the future of gaming, where no one needs to own a machine powerful enough to run the latest games. All we need is something that can “talk” to powerful game machines out there in the interwebs, sending it controller inputs and receiving streaming video of the actual game in progress. OnLive is that something, cloud computing for video games. Will it work? Who knows? I sometimes have problems streaming Youtube, so I don’t know how I’m going to stream real-time compressed game video.
• Leaked gameplay footage of God of War III and Uncharted 2 – They’re grainy and small, but from what you can see, the animations and such, these are going to be incredible.
• Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 trailer shown – I’ve said it before, I say it again: Ninja Gaiden Sigma was a better game than Ninja Gaiden. It wasn’t just graphics that improved. Interface and level designs were also improved. So I think that even if you look past the fact that Sigma 2 has more playable characters, more weapons, more levels, and online co-op play over the 360’s Ninja Gaiden 2, Sigma 2 is going to be the better game.
• Fat Princess reemerged! – It’s a great looking game and 32 player matches sound really fun. Look for more on this one.
• Pub Fund – Apparently, Sony’s offering incentives to develop games exclusively for PSN. The Pub Fund will match every dollar a studio puts into making a game with guaranteed royalties. Sounds like an awesome deal. Burn Zombie Burn, which just came out, is the first game to take advantage of the program.
• Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time – Not really GDC related, but you know that Sony timed this announcement for this week, a new Ratchet & Clank game is coming out this Fall. First trailer was shown and it looks like the story will be pretty interesting.

Good times, and in case you missed them, here’s what I went on about this week:

Introducing Adventures in Home JP

I Xi [See] the Future of PlayStation Home

Automated Trophy Cards

I’m ramping up, so expect more next  week!

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve added a new PlayStation 3 Trophies card to the top of the blog. It’s a bit bigger, doesn’t show as much info as to what Trophies I’ve gotten recently, and I’m not from the UK, but the important thing is that, unlike the Playfire card I was using previously, this card updates my Trophies tally automatically. No more manually adding Trophies for me. That was a pain.

So why’s it show a UK flag? Well, currently, this service is only being offered through eu.playstation.com, SCEE’s PlayStation website. I’m sure that at some point SCEA will offer this service as well, but for now, at least North American PS3 owners can also login to the Euro PlayStation website and set up Trophy cards with the NA PS3 logins, as I have done.

Curiously enough, there is yet to be any support for users to be able to look at the Trophies collected by their friends on either web site. Is that coming?

This past two months have been, perhaps, the most productive gaming months I’ve ever had, seeing the completion of six games: Bioshock, Lair, Heavenly Sword, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Halo 3, and Saints Row. It got me thinking that it might be cool to have progress bars on my blog to show a percentage of how far I am into the games I’m currently playing. Trouble is, how will I know how close I am to finishing so that I can figure out a percentage? Next games up though, probably Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Tomb Raider Anniversary, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Metroid Prime 3. That’s a lot to get through before the end of the month, and I haven’t even opened half of these.

While it’s only October (and still pretty warm, until today…) the holiday season is practically upon us. This month’ll see the releases of many pretty anticipated titles. We already got Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, (well, not me. More on that later), Folklore comes out tomorrow, and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction comes in at the end of the month. Some other titles I’m looking forward to: The Simpsons Game and Clive Barker’s Jericho.

Those last two are probably a bit off the radar for most people, one being licensed and the other being just another shooter in the post Halo 3 era of really awesome multiplayer features. They were certainly off my radar until I played the demos that were released on PSN. The Simpsons Game was actually pretty solid and the humor that they’ve got is appropriately and unmistakably Simpsons brand. I’m seeing a lot of people giving the demo fives out of ten, which I suspect come from the “Everyone’s a Critic”- mentality, but if you’re a Simpsons fan, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The Jericho demo was pretty short and didn’t really let me get a good feel for what the game would be like. There is this really neat timed button presses / interactive cutscene near the end in which a hideous monster plops down on top of you and you have to hit the right buttons to block his attacks and knock him off. I think that part is probably the best indicator for the mood of the game. You can sense the fear and anexiety in your character, something that could so easily have been lost given how heavily armed your seven man team is. I think I’ll probably rent this one first to see if I can get into it.