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Next week's launch of the DSi is set to also be the launch of a steady flow of DSiWare games. Read more...

Game designer Peter Molyneux and I talked about death in video games last week, and the failed experiments that led to the unusual lack of player death in "Fable II." Read more...

Something bizarre has appeared in my apartment: a pile -- not one, but a pile -- of Wii games I want to play. Read more...

Along with our corporate pals at GameTrailers.com, we've got the world's first look at the new "G.I. Joe" video game in action. Check out the debut trailer of the old-school shoot-em-up that's based on the upcoming "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" movie. For more coverage, check out our recent impressions of the game. It comes this summer for all major platforms.

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Our GDC 2009 coverage is over for this week, but we've got some great material lined up for next week. That includes the rest of my Reggie Fils-Aime interview, a chat with Peter Molyneux and -- I kid you not -- the revelation of what color underwear a famous game designer was wearing when he spoke to me this week.

For all of our GDC2009 coverage, click here.

During one of the final panels of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, two developers from BioWare showed some clips that demonstrate the "Mass Effect 2" team's level design process. Read more...

I had a brief chat with OnLive founder Steve Perlman yesterday as we both waiting to be interviewed by USA Today. Perlman said that response to OnLive, the cloud-computing console competitor announced earlier this week, has been strong.

I asked him how he's been handling all of the doubters. His response, he told me, is that major video game publishers don't sign up for a project that isn't going to work. The confidence those publishers have should bolster people's faith in OnLive being able to deliver what both Perlman has promised and what has worked in test situations like the one I played through with the service earlier this month.

He said that people who have told him that what he's doing is technologically impossible just aren't privy to the breakthroughs they've made. We were just beginning to talk about his claim to this blog that "to make OnLive work involved fundamental work in psychophysical science," but I got pulled away.

While eating ice cream with my colleague Josh Horowitz to somehow hype the release of his new movie "12 Rounds," WWE star John Cena started dropping names of games he loves. These include "Super Mario Bros." Okay. And "Ikari Warriors." Interesting. And "RollerCoaster Tycoon." Seriously?

Cena also pleads for gamers to look him up online and let him beat you at "Red Alert" on the PC. I'm not sure which "Command & Conquer: Red Alert" he has in mind, but maybe you can track him down by his gamer name, which seems to be "RichardHammerbush33". (When you're done watching the above clip, watch Cena rap-battle Josh.)

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At a presentation about the visual technology behind the development of "Dead Rising 2," the game's character art lead, Izmeth Siddeek, said that the development team at Blue Castle games is preparing for players to encounter an unprecedented zombie horde. "'Dead Rising 2' deal[s] with the rendering of the greatest number of characters ever seen in a video game," he said. "Everything else needed to be subordinated to this requirement."

His presentation focused on how software called Mental Mill enabled Blue Castle to efficiently render many characters in visually distinct ways. The software is helping the makers of this zombies-in-a-casino action game to present a large number of characters without losing graphical quality and without having to take shortcuts that would put the game's zombies in a small number of outfits.

In a postscript to the presentation, Laura Scholl, product manager for Mental Mill, said that Siddeek said that the "Dead Rising 2" development team is preparing to have as many as 6000 characters on the screen. Siddeek did not say whether that figure was accurate.