Here’s something to add to all the E3 drama this week about Bungie Studios‘ canceled/postponed/hyped debut of a new game…

In an interview shot for MTV News on Tuesday, Microsoft’s head of Xbox business Don Mattrick, confirmed to me that Bungie is indeed working on a new “Halo” game of some sort for Microsoft.

I had been asking Mattrick about the lack of “Halo” news at E3. He said that Microsoft’s Monday press conference was already loaded with content and so any announcements for that series weren’t needed to get gamers excited.

I pushed him on the lack of presence for the series and asked him if we should be worried about the no-show of Ensemble Studio’s real-time-strategy game “Halo Wars.” Not only did Mattrick say not to worry and that announcements would be coming, he also said that Microsoft is working with Bungie on a “Halo” game.

I asked for clarification, wondering if Mattrick meant Bungie’s project was “Halo Wars” or the long-announced Peter Jackson “Halo” project. Neither, Mattrick said. The Bungie game is something else.

And then, not surprisingly, the topic was changed.

In the coming days, we’ll have more from the interview — covering Microsoft’s courtship of Square-Enix and the importance of exclusive content and games in the future — here at the MTV Multiplayer blog.

At 6PM Monday night Microsoft let E3 judges (I’m one of them!) play a small portion of the single player campaign of Epic Game’s November 7 Xbox 360 exclusive “Gears of War 2.” Only by making a game playable is a game made eligible to be voted for a Best of Show award. But they won’t let me cover it. I had to sign those rights away.

At 7PM or so, however, I started playing the game’s newly announced Horde multiplayer mode, and that I can cover.

Hit the jump to read how it felt to play the “Gears of War 2″ Horde mode:

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At a briefing ostensibly about Microsoft’s new dashboard and community gaming initiatives, the company’s director of Xbox 360 product management boasted that fewer and fewer former PlayStation exclusives are remaining PlayStation exclusives.

“We have a white board that lists all of the games people said we’d never get,” he told a roomful of reporters. “That list is getting smaller.”

His pride was well-placed, given that Square-Enix announced today that “Final Fantasy XIII” will be coming to the Xbox 360 when the game launches… whenever it’s coming out.

So I asked Greenberg when Microsoft would be announcing that “Metal Gear Solid 4” would be coming to the Xbox 360. It is the only major PS3 third-party game still exclusive to Sony’s system.

Greenberg laughed and said: “That’s a question for Konami.”

I was getting ready to go to Microsoft’s E3 press briefing when Nintendo decided to start raining on the Xbox 360’s parade. I got a text message from Nintendo revealing a new Wii remote add-on: The MotionPlus.

This is how the device is described at Nintendo.com:

Nintendo’s upcoming Wii MotionPlus accessory for the revolutionary Wii Remote controller again redefines game control, by more quickly and accurately reflecting motions in a 3-D space. The Wii MotionPlus accessory attaches to the end of the Wii Remote and, combined with the accelerometer and the sensor bar, allows for more comprehensive tracking of a player’s arm position and orientation, providing players with an unmatched level of precision and immersion. Every slight movement players make with their wrist or arm is rendered identically in real time on the screen, providing a true 1:1 response in their game play. The Wii MotionPlus accessory reconfirms Nintendo’s commitment to making games intuitive and accessible for everyone. Nintendo will reveal more details about the Wii MotionPlus accessory and other topics Tuesday morning at its E3 media briefing.

You know, it’s almost like Nintendo expected there to be another motion-controller announcement today that they wanted to spoil. Oh, and what game do you bet this Wii add-on comes with? A “Zelda” with more accurate sword-swinging? A music game with more accurate baton-waving?

And did Nintendo just splinter its userbase?

We’ll find out at the Nintendo E3 briefing tomorrow morning.

E3 2008 is upon us. Stephen Totilo, Tracey John and myself have all landed in sunny — and hot — Los Angeles, California to cover this year’s event.

We’ll be trying something a little different this year, too

In addition to interviewing the most important minds in the games industry, at each of the big three press conferences — Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony — Tracey and I will be updating MTV Multiplayer’s Twitter account with live coverage of the unfolding events and uploading pictures to our new Flickr account (we’ve already started!).

If you aren’t on Twitter, sign up! You can respond and engage with us as each conference goes down. You don’t need to have an account to just watch, though.

We plan to have all this occur live during each conference, barring technical snafus. For a breakdown of the conference schedule for this week, read on!

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Since the last entry I re-downloaded “N+” (more on that in another entry. And I waded through a couple more levels of “Super Smash Bros. Brawl”’s Subspace Emissary.

Waded through.

I like it for nostalgia. I don’t like it for gameplay. Is there anyone who feels differently? I enjoy bringing “Fire Emblem” heroes Ike and Marth into a team-up with Metaknight to fight… puppets? I do wish they were fighting enemies I also had nostalgia for. Anything but puppets, really. But it never gets old arming them with a “Donkey Kong” hammer or a “Metroid” screw attack.

I enjoy the Subspace Emissary until I think about what I’m doing: playing my favorite characters in something other than their best games. It’s like wearing your favorite sweater to the beach or bringing a good book to a rollercoaster. Why am I doing this again?

But I still haven’t gotten to Sonic and Snake, and I’m eager to have them team-up. I need to see that. So I will press on.

Next: I will press on. And I will face the likely disappointment of having no new handheld games to bring with me on my Sunday flight to E3.

How do you make James Bond the video game character feel like James Bond the movie character?

That was the question I posed several different ways to Garrett Young, the executive producer of this fall’s first-person game “Quantum of Solace,” during a phone interview earlier this week. For instance…

• How do you make sure he doesn’t shoot so many people that he no longer seems like a suave super-spy?
• How do you make the player feel like a ladies’ man?

Well, it starts with making sure the developers adhere to the first official Bond commandment, the first item on a four-page document that Young was shown by the series’ franchise-owners so that he could know what is Bond and what isn’t.

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We cover gaming news here. And 2008 has provided plenty of news for us to cover. But in the process of covering gaming news and providing some insight and analysis, we managed to make some of our readers angry.

(Quick! Tap X now and get this quick ‘08 flashback: Gibson Guitar lawsuits! “EA hungry for Take Two! MS Wii-mote?, Two More Best Games Ever released! “MGS 4″ review restriction controversy?).

So… instead of re-capping the news, let’s look back at the posts that made fine readers of this blog (you??) write comments such as:

“Whatever you say in response to me should be directed towards everyone else unfortunate enough to stumble upon this ludicrous brain fart of yours. Don’t even bother explaining yourself. You failed.”

Hit the jump for our randomly ranked: Ten. Most. Controversial. Posts. …and some snippets of the colorful reactions, each one part of a thread worthy of wasting a lunchbreak on.

Could we have seen the fury coming?

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Warning: “Grand Theft Auto IV” spoilers (early ones) ahead. You’ve been warned!

“GTA IV” forces players to choose life or death for some of its major supporting characters. There’s at least one choice that it seems almost everyone who has played talks about.

Which of these major supporting characters did four top non-”GTA” developers choose?

Read on and then take our poll so you can share the choices you made.

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I would like to begin this post by first thanking Kotaku’s Michael McWhertor for helping me obtain a set of Willful Assault Plate Leggings today.

I got them while playing an hour of “Too Human” co-op with the man during working hours. Since the weekend when we tried Silicon Knights‘ Xbox 360 exclusive action game — and then published hotly debated impressions — we’ve been trying to find time to link up.

I’m sure he’ll give his side of things on Kotaku (Update: he did). But I want to make clear from my vantage here at MTV is that playing “Too Human” via co-op is what I hoped it would be: better than a phone call.

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Why did Blizzard choose an art style for “Diablo III” that would anger so many fans? I got answers in Paris last weekend before people were really asking the question.

And I know of at least 14,000 people who’d like an answer. Those are the thousands of diehard “Diablo” fans who have signed a petition against the game’s new art direction (with more than 1,000 signatures added every hour).

When I asked lead producer Keith Lee about “Diablo III’”s new art style at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, he explained why Blizzard went in that direction.

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How similar are “Too Human” and “Diablo III“? Before fans of either series hurl harsh words at us, bear in mind that we didn’t make the comparison first. Both recent and early impressions of Silicon Knights’ “Too Human” have said that the upcoming Xbox 360 title’s loot, skill tree and combat systems are similar to that of past “Diablo” titles. Some previews even proclaimed that “Too Human” is “Diablo III” before the Blizzard game was even announced.

While in Paris this past weekend, I asked “Diablo III” lead producer Keith Lee what his reaction was to these comparisons to “Too Human.”

He denied having heard much about it:

“I haven’t heard much about other games being similar to ‘Diablo III,’ but what I can say is that no other company can make ‘Diablo’ the way we do, and I think you’ll be very excited to see it get released. I don’t really know too much about the other games that are being compared with ‘Diablo.’”

I haven’t had a chance to play the most recent build of “Too Human” (though Stephen Totilo has). Now that “Diablo III” is official, what do you think? Is “Too Human” trying to fill “Diablo”’s shoes on consoles? Could it be better than “Diablo III”? Or is there no comparison?