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.

But the entry in the series that Street Fighter IV is largely modeled after, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, was the one that I actually spent the least amount of time with.

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.

Let me start by saying that my love of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition comes not from the perspective of an aficionado, or someone paid to study each nuanced piece of minutia that comes out about a game as it makes its way from concept to arcade.

My experience with Street Fighter 2 CE was born entirely in my time first hanging out at arcades and then running one in the 90s in Maryland. I loved the game so much that my time spent playing it is what likely lead to me being fired from the job. I slathered more attention on our big-screen SF2 box than I did every other machine in the place, combined. I regularly replaced the cherry switches and springs on a weekly basis.

But I couldn't have told you who the game's producer was, what sort of lore was buried in the creating of such an indelible franchise or how they came about with the idea of the characters in the game.

That being said, read on.

While Crecente and McWhertor will be flooding your consciousnesses with Street Fighter gameplay impressions later, I wanted to start things off with an amuse-bouche and just focus on one thing: just how freaking gorgeous SFIV is in person.

Because while I was initially skeptical about the 2.5D art direction, now I'm a total convert. SFIV's graphics dropped my jaw in a way that hasn't happened with a fighter since the original Virtual Fighter. Even when you don't have the pleasure of actually playing, the game is pure eye candy high fructose corn syrup concentrate.

For those who didn't attend GDC last week, there's another chance to catch the Game Developers Choice Awards/Independent Games Festival Awards megashow. Condensed to a 30-minute segment for an X-Play time slot, to catch the event, set your DVRs for G4 at 8pm (eastern) tonight. (You could watch it in real time, but we were pretending you had plans or something.)

Not only is this the first developer-powered award show to make it to mainstream television, but everyone who attended was entertained by some extremely funny acceptance speeches. Tune in and enjoy.

G4 To Show Game Developers Choice Awards Tonight [Gamasutra]

The 2008 Game Developer's Conference saw an all-time high in attendance numbers, as the GDC team has announced that over 18,000 people walked through the convention hall's doors. The five day event featured 400 sessions, 300 exhibitors, and enough Force Unleashed coverage to keep Tori happy (okay, the GDC team didn't announce that, but it's still true).

Whiling away the time between sessions of Street Fighter IV ass-kickery (mine, not anyone elses) and my interview with Yoshinori Ono, I accidentally made eye-contact with a Capcom flak. The handler, notice my lack of doing anything, was quick to thrust a 360 controller into my hands and point me toward a screen showing off Bionic Commando ReArmed.

Ugh, I wasn't really a huge fan of the original and didn't really have a whole lot of interest in checking it out... but after Tarzaning across a level and using my bionic claw to toss barrels at people and people at barrels, I quickly changed my mind.

During Takashi Aoyama's presentation at GDC, he told an interesting anecdote about developing the Wii. Specifically, current Nintendo president Satoru Iwata demanded that, for the Wii not to "to be seen as an enemy in the household," it should have a parental control timer that would automatically shut the console off after a period of time (sound familiar?).

Aoyama explained that a "debate raged for several weeks" until the team came up with what they felt to be a better direction, the play history list.

Over GDC I dropped in to see what was up with D3 Publishers of America and was greeted with a great surprise. They have officially announced the impending arrival of the next game in the Puzzle Quest family titled Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. This Puzzle Quest has left the realm of fantasy and entered the vastness of outer space.

I wondered how they would change the jewel matching style gameplay to make this game different from its predecessor and they certainly didn't disappoint. Besides the obvious visual differences in the interface, the style of puzzling has changed as well. The round pieces have changed to hexagonal ones and extra challenge has been added by the movement of the hexagons once you have matched up your three or more. Instead of dropping straight down, your columns slide diagonally, and depending on which piece you move, the columns will fill in either from the left or the right. Gravity will have a bearing on the various movements of the pieces as well making you have to think in several directions at once.

So a funny thing happened at last week's Valve party.

As I'm sure you're all aware Valve threw a little party during last week's big show (We weren't invited. I blame our butchering of their song.) and during the tail end of it they brought up Jonathan Coulton to play a set. At the end of his last song he invited the Rock Band folks up on the stage to play Still Alive on their game, a really neat way to announce that the song was coming to the game.

We tried, at this year's GDC, to have a quiet sit down with a number of different developers. And for a number of different reasons, many of them fell through, but I was able to beg 2K into giving me 15 minutes with one of the developers who probably most adversely effected my college career: Sid Meier. If it weren't for Civilization it probably wouldn't have taken me six years to get my two bachelors degrees... OK, that's probably not true, but I did spend a shocking amount of time playing his games in college.

In this 15 minute chat we talk about the death of the PC gaming market, how GDC has evolved and what type of character he plays in WoW... among other things.

I got a chance to swing by the SNK Playmore Suite at GDC to check out some of their offerings. Most of what they had going on on their screens were showings of their various game anthologies including Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2, King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match, King of Fighters Collection Orochi Saga, Samurai Shodown Anthology, SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 and World Heroes Anthology. Not a whole lot new here but there were a couple of nice looking trailers for King of Fighters XII and the New Samurai Shodown.

The real treat however was a little surprise waiting on a DS in the corner, Metal Slug 7! I hot footed it over to the corner of the room and practically wrestled the girl playing it to the ground in my attempt to check out the game. It looked great, played better and had everything you could possibly want from a Metal Slug game. So if you are ready for a new Metal Slug experience, look no further than Metal Slug 7, coming soon to a DS near you.

President and CEO of Double Fusion, Jonathan Epstein put all the other GDC rock gods to shame this week at IBM's Guitar Hero Competition. Epstein won the $1,500 grand prize with his face melting rendition of Eric Johnson's White Cliffs of Dover. According tho the short press release, you can challenge Epstein to an epic battle of the bands by going to Double Fusion's website. I went there myself and didn't really see a place to sign up per se, but I suppose an email will do nicely. Just don't count on wrestling that $1,500 from him. I think the title will be the best you can hope for.

For the last part of my three part coverage of the Lucas Arts presentation, we'll talk a little about LEGO Indiana Jones. The portion we saw dealt with the iconic scenes from the beginning of the first movie: running from giant boulders, stealing golden idol heads and the like. We were also introduced to some of the game mechanics. Indy will of course make much use of his whip to destroy things, grab objects and swing his way through his adventures. He will also have an ally who will help him through each of the various levels of the game and each ally will have a special skill such as excavation that will come in handy. These helpers can also be controlled by another player in the co-op mode. Players can look forward to Lego versions of all their favorite characters including Dr. Henry Jones Sr., Sala and everyone's favorite little screaming Asian kid, Short Round. Each characters phobias, such as Indy's famus aversion to snakes will come into play as you progress through the game. As in the other LEGO Star Wars titles, humor plays a huge part in the game and the few little cut scenes we saw were quite funny and had the gathered crowd laughing aloud quite a bit. We even got a special appearance by the golden head of a certain Star Wars robot that was used to great effect. All three movies will be covered in the game with each film being made up of six levels.

The DS version will be making use of the microphone to solve puzzles by blowing out torches and also included will be a cooking mini-game featuring the infamous monkey brains scene. Something tells me you won't be seeing THAT in Cooking Mama 3.

With all it's various in-jokes and trademark LEGO humor, I think that LEGO Indiana Jones will be a sure fire hit with fans of the genre and kids alike. I wasn't really on the LEGO Star Wars tip when it came out, but there is no doubt that LEGO Indy will be a permanent part of my game collection when it comes out this summer.

I got a chance to check out Portal's famous credit song Still Alive today on Rock Band in the Harmonix hotel suite.

While the bass is a little bit on the easy side, the lead guitar, drums, and of course, singing are all the perfect level of challenging to make it fun. I'm already a HUGE fan of the song so playing it on Rock Band was a real treat. I can't imagine a single person with the game not wanting to pick this up when it hits the consoles.

I was a little bummed to discover that while the original singing is there and can be cranked up enough to cover your truly awful singing voice, there is no modulation for your voice while you are singing. So you can harmonize with a computer, but you can't sound like one... and we all know how awful that is.

Taku Murata, general manager of Square-Enix's research and development division, announced at today's GDC session that the company has dropped the White Engine name for its cross-platform game engine. Squenix is now pitching it as Crystal Tools, showing off a fancy new logo that extends the Final Fantasy brand even further.

While the internal, companywide development platform was originally understood to be built for PlayStation 3 development (specifically, Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy versus XIII), it is being designed with multiple platforms, including the Xbox 360 and PC, in mind. Murata also confirmed that a version is being readied for the Wii, which is still very early, but we don't expect it to kick out visuals on par with the PS3.

Dave Jones of Realtime Worlds wowed GDC audiences this week with his presentation "My First MMO", debuting the successor to the award winning Crackdown known as APB. APB, Jones explained, is a massively multiplayer online game without the grind, one that draws inspiration from Counter-Strike more than it does from Ultima Online, EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Why Counter-Strike? "There's no persistence, no progression, no customization, its just damn fun," Jones said.

APB does have persistence and progression, if done a bit non-traditionally. But customization is one feature that APB has in spades.

No word yet on exactly how widely distributed Capcom's latest Street Fighter will be to U.S. arcades, but a Capcom source told us yesterday it's definitely coming to the U.S.

A number of specialty arcades and stores, we were told, have already ordered the arcade machine from importers directly. Unfortunately, Capcom is still trying to find a distributor with the reach to get it into arcade. The big hang-up, it seems, is that nowadays most U.S. arcade distributors deal almost only with redemption ticket games.

Earlier this morning we ran a well-sourced rumor about Microsoft halving the royalties they pay to indie developers for the games they create for the Xbox Live Arcade.

Microsoft just responded to our request for comment with this statement:

Xbox LIVE Arcade has long been known as the premier destination for digitally distributed original and classic games - making it a very appealing platform for game developers. We don't disclose details on our business contracts, but what we can tell you is that we work closely with all of our partners to provide the Xbox 360 community with the best entertainment possible while making publishing a title on XBLA an attractive prospect.

While not really a confirmation nor a denial, it does sound as if they are reacting to what our multiple indie developer sources told us was fact. We will be meeting with some of the XBLA indie development folks with Microsoft later today and will make sure to follow up with them about this issue.

Stay tuned.

Microsoft Cuts Indie Royalties in Half [Kotaku]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl director, similarly famous for his work on the Kirby series, is speaking at the Game Developers Conference this morning to talk about the creation of the Wii fighter. His talk, "Building Characters: The SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL Postmortem," is about to get underway, if just a few minutes late. We've been warned that Nintendo has restricted video and still photos of the talk, so you'll have to imagine what's going on with the combined power of your imagination and Kotaku-style liveblogging. We've also been promised exclusive, confidential information about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so it should be worth your while to make the jump and F5 like mad.

It's on! Masahiro Sakurai takes the stage.

"One thing that stands in my mind...we got an inquiry from the Wall Street journal asking about succinctly captured tax policy," Sid Meier relates to a packed audience of GDC attendees, referring to the most surprising response to his games. "It's just a slider."

Huge laughs from the audience. Damn there are a lot of dorks in the audience...present company included. Through the hour-long interview, Meier divulged all sorts of not-so-secret secrets, admitting his geek fetish of still programming his own titles. Here were some of our favorite things he said, organized for your easy digestion...