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I just played the new Wii game "Excitebots: Trick Racing" for 10 minutes. It's one of Nintendo's oddest games yet. Impressions below: Read more...

Nintendo wrapped Satoru Iwata's keynote with the debut trailer for a new cel-shaded DS "Zelda" slated for release this year. The game, tentatively titled: "The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks," puts Link on a locomotive instead of the boat he was using in "Wind Waker" and appears to offer the familiar mix of exploration and dungeon crawling. The game is set for a 2009 release. Check out more images we snapped of the game in action below. Read more...

"Your games will no longer be competing for space in the system memory," Nintendo of America's Bill Trinen announced today. During Satoru Iwata's keynote at GDC Trinen revealed the features of Wii System Menu 4.0, which is going live today.

According to Trinen:

-A single SD card can now hold up to 240 titles.

-The Wii can now handle high-capacity SD cards, up to 32GB,

-Content will be downloadable directly from the Wii shop channel to the SD card. The game scan be launched from the SD card with, according to Trinen, "A short loading time." (To launch NES game "The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link" took about four seconds during Trinen's demonstration)

According to Satoru Iwata at today's GDC keynote, Shigeru MIyamoto is known to pull random Nintendo developers into side rooms to try games other members of Nintendo is working on. Miyamoto forbids the kidnapped developer to be given any tips. Miyamoto has never been arrested for this, Iwata joked. "Where the kidnapped developer is happy, the team has succeeded." (ONE MORE CRAZY IMAGE OF THIS BELOW) Read more...

At his GDC keynote today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata walked through designer Shigeru Miyamoto's design process. Miyamoto doesn't write design documents. He shares his ideas with a small group of developers who then make a prototype. Iwata said the developers may spend as many as two years making prototypes. He showed this example: the prototype for "Wii Sports" boxing. Good prototypes get greenlit for production. Iwata siad he tries to avoid asking Miyamoto how things are going, so as to keep the development team from cutting corners.

To kick off his Game Developers Conference keynote in San Francisco, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced that the Wii has now shipped 50 million units. He said that makes the Wii the fastest-selling game console of all time.

Capcom has just issued a press release that indicates that the company's PS3 and XBox 360 versions of "Bionic Commando" will ship on May 19, with the PC version shipping "shortly after console release." The company also indicated that "more details surrounding the PC version will be following in the coming months."

The comic company behind Spider-Man and the X-Men tells us more about Marvel's two upcoming massively multiplayer online games and why they are for. Read more...

I only played three games yesterday at Game Developers Conference, all of them in the PlayStation Bloggers' Lounge. I tried "PixelJunk Eden Encore," which I wrote about it already. I played "Infamous," which I'll be writing about soon. And I played "Fat Princess," which ran more smoothly than it did when I first touched it at E3 last July.

"Fat Princess" at GDC exhibited no gameplay revision. It still pits two teams of players and computer-controlled warriors against each other in a capture-the-flag contest. The flag is a princess hoping not to be kidnapped from her castle and carried to the other team's. The princess' own team can prevent this by donning hats that turn them into warriors, woodchoppers, archers or magicians. They can also prevent her capture by feeding her lots of cake, fattening her up so she is too much of a burden to be spirited away.

When last I played the game it had a framerate problem. At GDC it's main problem is that players need to exercise teamwork. Going solo is death, as there are at least a dozen enemies always clustered between your spawn points and the enemy castle. Coordinated strategy will be more fun, but coordination is rare at gaming events, where every reporter is fumbling and it's too noisy to shout tactics.

The game is set for summer release as a downloadable title for the PS3's PlayStation Network.

Here at GDC in San Francisco, I'm not playing many games. I'm too busy talking to game developers and eating free food. But I brought a lot of games: a fistful of DS cartridges in a Ziploc bag. These were for airplane gaming, although I didn't do much of that when I flew in. What's distinct about handheld games is that I sometimes think I've lost them. I'm always confident where my console games are. They're on my shelf at home or on my desk at work. But my portable games are easy to lose. Yesterday morning I found my DS in my bag but couldn't find the Ziploc. I discovered late in the evening that the bag was in my hotel room. But for several hours, I had envisioned my "Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars" cartridge, carrying my 13 hours of progress, sitting in a gutter. I imagined a stranger fiddling with my copy of "Zubo." I resigned myself to never playing "Avalon Code." Scary, scary thoughts.