The nation's second-biggest cable company wants to change your Internet bill in a way that may make gaming a lot more expensive. But what do key gaming companies Sony, Microsoft and OnLive think? MTV Multiplayer asked them. Read more...

The artist Baiyon ("PixelJunk Eden") told me at GDC that he'd like to see more games with graphics that look out of the ordinary. Read more...

During the Experimental Gameplay Sessions yesterday, developer Jenova Chen revealed several features that his team tried and then removed from the PS3 downloadable game "Flower."

They removed:

• Timers, which they thought might help motivate the player
• Desert terrain, which would cost any players who flew over it some petals
• Spells, which were part of a system that allowed the player to gain improved flight abilities
• Orbs, into which players were going to deposit petals in order to unlock checkpoints

Chen and the rest of the team at ThatGameCompany discovered that these traditional, video-game-style features had their players saying things like "f---" and "s--t" while they played. Those weren't the reactions he wanted to evoke. So, to ensure the game presented a rare sensation of calm and harmony, the features listed above were removed.

Something happy and gentle prevailed.

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.

I played the new "Pixel Junk Eden" expansion "Pixel Junk Eden Encore" today and learned what's new about this: five new levels. They are accessed through a portal in the standard "Eden" garden menu, which leads to an "Encore"-specific garden. The levels share the aesthetic of the original game's, but I was told by a Sony rep that they are larger and full of new ideas. The biggest idea may be the new move which will also be retroactively added to "Eden" itself when "Encore" comes out next month: Activating three seeds in one move causes all of the pollen-filled floating entities on the screen to detonate at once, releasing a massive amount of pollen.

The first level of "Encore" that I played was set up for the big new move. It presented three seeds in a vertical stack. I set them all up for activation, then triggered them in one go. The screen filled with pollen. It was clear that "Encore" is working on a larger scale than "Eden," presenting a bigger spectacle of its elements than the original. I joked that instead of being called "Encore," it should be called "Extreme." Read more...

Publishing sources told us that Sony's previously un-reported new "PlayStation Network Bandwidth Fee" is forcing them to think twice about what content they offer to PS3 gamers for download. Read more...

Word via a Sony PlayStation press invitation to reporters for Game Developers Conference today is that the next PixelJunk project from Q Games -- makers of "PixelJunk Racers," "PixelJunk Monsters," "PixelJunk Eden" and the recently-teased "PixelJunk Monsters" for PSP -- will be shown in San Francisco next week. The series' lead creator, Dylan Cuthbert, is slated to demonstrate the game to press on Thursday, March 26. We'll be there.

Sony has been talking to publishers about bringing classics from beyond the Sony console family to the PSP's download service. Read more...

"I feel it's a time where a lot of people who study games start to graduate and come into this field. It's a really good time for all these people to really push the boundaries of what games can be. With digital distribution -- PSN, Xbox Live, WiiWare, Steam -- all those [avenues]…Before, everything sold through retail. You can't even make a game that's below a million dollar budget. I think right now -- in the future, when people look back, I think it's the renaissance of video games."

-- thatgamecompany co-founder and "Flower" mastermind Jenova Chen in response to a question about the affect of digital distribution on games

The producer and writer of upcoming PSP arcade-style brawler "Unbound Saga" told me about the game's fictional history, why it's a PSN-only download and how it's different from "Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard." Read more...