This year's gathering of first-person shooter diehards at Quakecon will feature more than just id Software's Quake, Doom and Rage. Bethesda's showing up too, armed with Brink. More surprising is an appearance by the former heads of Infinity Ward.

Jason West and Vince Zampella, who went on to form Respawn Entertainment after getting canned from Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, will make the trip to Dallas, Texas to talk about video games. They'll be sitting on the ‘Building Blockbusters' panel, joined by id's Tim Willits and Bethesda's Todd Howard to talk shop. That could be very interesting.

Former NCsoft developer and Lord British himself, Richard Garriott, will also be there. He'll join id's John Carmack for a little "Rocket Talk" where they'll "share their passion for Rockets and space travel in this special QuakeCon presentation."

QuakeCon happens August 12 through 15 and is free and open to the public, if you'd like to go. Kotaku will be there in the form of Stephen Totilo, who will host the ‘Building Immersive Worlds and Stories' Panel that you see in the schedule below.

Thursday

‘The World of Design' Panel
12.30pm in the Cortez Room
Joel Burgess, Bethesda Game Studios
Matt Hooper, id Software
Neil Alphonso, Splash Damage
Todd Alderman, Respawn Entertainment

QuakeCon Kick Off
2:30pm in the Grand Ballroom
Todd Hollenshead will welcome attendees to QuakeCon 2010

Keynote
2:30pm in the Grand Ballroom
John Carmack's Annual Keynote address to QuakeCon attendees

"Rocket Talk"
5:30pm in the Grand Ballroom
John Carmack and Richard Garriott share their passion for Rockets and space travel in this special QuakeCon presentation

Friday

‘Building Blockbusters' Panel
11:00am in the Grand Ballroom
Jason West, Respawn Entertainment
Tim Willits, id Software
Todd Howard, Bethesda Game Studios
Vince Zampella, Respawn Entertainment

‘Building Immersive Worlds and Stories' Panel
1:00pm in the Cortez Room
Chris Rhinehart from Human Head
Emil Pagliarulo from Bethesda Game Studios
Harvey Smith, Arkane Studios
Raphael Colantonio, Arkane Studios

Special RAGE Presentation
2:00pm in the Grand Ballroom
Tim Willits and Matt Hooper Present RAGE

‘Let There Be Sound' Panel
4:00pm in the Cortez Room
Chris Sweetman, Splash Damage
Christian Antkow, id Software
Mark Lampert, Bethesda Game Studios
Zack Quarles, id Software

‘The Art of the Game' Panel
4:00pm in the Cortez Room
Matt Carofano, Bethesda Game Studios
Olivier Leonardi, Splash Damage
Stephan Martine, id Software
Viktor Antonov, Arkane Studios

Saturday

Special Brink Presentation
11:00am in the Grand Ballroom
Paul Wedgwood, CEO of Splash Damage and Game Director of Brink will be on hand to share a presentation of the game with QuakeCon attendees.

Responding to vociferous reaction from its hardcore community, Madden NFL 11 will patch in original pre-snap adjustment controls that countermand the new "Strategy Pad," design, but not before a month after the game releases.

Ian Cummings, the series' creative director, announced the decision earlier today after a blog post explaining the original design change. For Madden hardcore fans, they can expect to return to the old shoulder-button/Y (or triangle) command set by the first week of the NFL season, which begins Sept. 9.

Madden lifers exploded with outrage on Tuesday when they discovered, in the game's demo, that pre-snap adjustments had been completely reconfigured, after several years under a control set that also is similar to NCAA Football 11's. Essentially, commands that were triggered by shoulder or faceplate buttons were moved entirely to the D-pad, disrupting the muscle memory and thought processes of many.

Cummings, in defending the original switch, quoted EA Sports telemetry that said last year players called more than a billion incorrect defensive hot routes in Madden NFL 10, largely due to mistaken face-button nomenclature. This is why they sought to simplify the command structure on the D-pad.

For me, though, this quote is telling:

"Any longtime Madden gamer could probably change the route of two receivers, pinch slide protection, and keep a back into block within a second."

I can do better than that on offense. I could slide protect left, streak both split ends, drag the tight end and call blocking assignments for both backs out of the shotgun and snap the ball, coming to the line with ten seconds on the play clock.

To me, that's beyond a Peyton Manning-esque level of audibles. I don't know if this actually happens in most real-life NFL snaps, but it's a lot of management that completely remakes the play you've called and what you're showing an opponent. Given that you can bark specific orders to ten players in the heat of the moment, maybe EA Sports also felt that line-of-scrimmage adjustments were exploiting the game in ways you don't see on a real Sunday, which has always been the game's guiding design principle.

Whatever the case, both methods of pre-snap commands will be available in your game when the real-life NFL regular season kicks off, which is Minnesota at New Orleans on Sept. 9.

GameFlow and The Strategy Pad [Madden NFL Blog]

If you thought Darius Burst's transition from PSP game to old-school super widescreen arcade cabinet was an odd choice, Sega's arcade return to old school might blow your mind. That is if you've ever heard of Pengo before.

Of all the arcade properties to revisit, Pengo is perhaps the least expected. The arcade game, released by Sega in 1982 and later ported to gobs of other platforms, is getting an 8 player competitive update for a Japanese arcade release. Play as an ice block-pushing penguin, crush enemies and outscore your opponents to win.

Graphically, it looks identical to the Z80-based arcade original that ran at a blistering 3 MHz. It's running on Sega's new Ringwide system and will likely see limited release outside of Japan.

Pengo Returns to Arcades with 8 Player Combat [Andriasang]

Do you love computer adventure games? You know, Zork, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or anything that falls under the "interactive fiction" description or bears the Infocom label. Then get Get Lamp, a long-in-the-making documentary.

Jason Scott, who you may know from his BBS documentary, has been slaving away on this thing since 2005, interviewing adventure game luminaries and lovers of interactive fiction from Steve Meretzky to John Romero to others that only the most hardcore text adventure fan will know. I highly doubt you'll see a more interesting documentary about the meeting of computer games and literature this year, or maybe even ever.

Get Lamp: A Documentary About Adventures in Text spans two DVDs worth of "second person thinker" game history. It comes with a fancy commemorative coin and is 100% spoiler-free.

Get Lamp [Official Site]

The Cincinnati Bengals receiver scoured the used bin at his local GameStop today. I'll never again doubt his gamer bonafides. Seen via Twitter.

To: Ashcraft
From: Totilo
Re: TWO WEEKS, I HAVE MADE IT!!

Today was the day I was wondering if the PC Gaming Alliance had lost, been zapped by whatever Death Star they are fighting. Today was the day I wondered if the Games for Windows team are a bunch of sadists. Today was the day I was reminded that to visit the shores of high-end PC gaming is to step on the sea urchins of possible graphics-card incompatibility and to sweat under the sun of not knowing if, maybe, it's the drivers that are the problem?

My experience trying to get some new games to run well on my Windows gaming laptop today made me feel like the guy with the busted engine, pulled over to the left of the passing lane, the engine dead for who knows what reason. I guess PC gaming also made me think in metaphors today. At least that's a perk!

I despise the confusion of PC gaming and the need to constantly keep up with it in order to understand it. Earlier today, StarCraft II didn't recognize my graphics card. Really, StarCraft II?

My Nvidia GeForce 9800 appears to be well beyond the minimum spec for that game. It didn't recognize it, so it asked me to guess which settings would be best for running the game. My graphics card and my entire Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2.26Ghz, 4GB Ram laptop is two years old, and I haven't played a high-end PC game all the way through on it since Spore of two Septembers ago. I ran a little bit of Dragon Age on it without trouble last year, I think, but today I learned my drivers are two years out of date. Was it easy to get new ones? Only after I downloaded the wrong Nvidia updater (nope, I don't want the 9800 updater, but the 9800 mobile updater) — and after I downloaded the wrong one a second time (nope, I'm on 64-bit Windows Vista, not 32-bit).

Thanks to another high-end PC game I was trying to run, I also thought today that I needed to upgrade to DirectX 11. Nope, DirectX 10 would be fine. The good people of Twitter even helped me find the right program to ensure my DirectX 10 was up to date (I had to download two programs to update it and confirm that it was okay). These Twitter people made more sense than the results of the various searches I made today in Google. Thank you, Twitter!

I'm sure it is a sign of how powerful and manually-directed PC gaming is, but why today did I have to run a program called DXdiag to see what's going on in my PC, and why did it not make any sense? What was the point of Windows reacting to a crash in a new game I was trying to run by telling me: "Fault Module Name:d3dx9_42.dll" and not offering a solution?

To the people who make PC games and systems, I ask... why is this stuff not automated? Why does my hardware not keep itself up to date? Are there really that many variables in PC gaming set-ups that no computer can determine what it needs to run and then fetch that stuff from the Internet? If my computer can run Crysis, why can't it do that? If iTunes can update itself, why not Direct X?

I love playing independent games on my PC. Every year I play dozens of them as I judge them for the Independent Games Festival. I would be thrilled to play more games on this laptop of mine. But the confusion and stress I had of getting Sim Tower or Apache whatever-it-was-called to run on my 486 way back when I was a teenager is just as severe when I try to run new games on my computer today. Where's the improvement?

Ash, this is a long way of saying that if you want to make Mrs. Bashcraft's day, update her drivers.

What You May Have Missed
LittleBigPlanet Does Limbo
StarCraft II Takes A Shot At Apple
Forget Limbo, LittleBigPlanet 2 Might Be Able To Do Shadow Complex (And More)
Chinatown Arcade, An Unlikely Place For Tolerance
Madden NFL Doritos Impressions: Saltier. Cheesier. Orange-ier.

The creator of Half-Life, Team Fortress and Portal has a plan to increase the number of Mac games that are available through its digital distribution service, Steam. Valve plans on giving away* "some" of its Mac-specific game code to developers.

*The only real catch here is that Valve will be helping out those game creators who also sign on for Steamworks integration, the company's social networking, matchmaking and dev tools software.

The gratis graphics code that Valve plans on sharing with other is, Valve's Jason Holtman tells GamesIndustry.biz, "the real hard work in a making a Mac version."

Valve began shipping Mac OS X versions of its games in May, with Portal, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Day of Defeat now available for Apple hardware.

Valve to release Mac graphics code to developers [GamesIndustry.biz]

Madden NFL 11 strives to make your football video game experience "simpler, quicker, deeper." Not sure what dedicated Dorito support can add to this - maybe "more stoned?" - but two flavors "inspired" by the game have hit store shelves.

As the clear market leader with an exclusive license, Frito-Lay is dogged by knee-jerk consumer criticism that it has no incentive to innovate and simply releases a $3.99 ingredient update each year. Plus everyone knows Tim's Cascade Style Steak & Onion Potato Chips got like a 107 on Metacritic before it was discontinued.

The fact remains, this is the only EA Sports-licensed snack chip available, and by virtue of that it's guaranteed to sell every year. Does that still mean it's worth your money? Or should you just wait and pick up a used bag two months from now at GameStop?

Hated

(Secretly Loved)
Stadium Nacho: I was intrigued by what Frito-Lay intended to do with this because Doritos already has a nacho flavor - the good old red bag you've been cramming your hand into for the past 46 years. Give the devil his due, Stadium Nacho does capture that weird creaminess of cheese sludge that looks like it was melted down from about 24 pairs of polyester slacks. The watery jalapeno notes also are spot-on in their disinterested lack of heat. Plus, the whole thing's already on a corn chip, albeit more crisp than those final flaccid wedges buried under the orange goo. If this isn't snack foods' first virtuoso recreation of an actual dish, it's one of a few, but it's not like Frito-Lay was shooting for the sautéed sea bass at Chez Panisse. Rating: Orange.

Tailgater BBQ: Kansas City fans barbecue beef; Carolina fans barbecue pork. Many others just grill hot dogs or hamburgers. This chip flavor is so generic it invokes really the only thing that 32 tailgates have in common, which is a charcoal briquette and tailpipe exhaust. There's plenty of smoke that's vaguely mesquitelike, hustled by an evasive sweetness carrying notes either of honey or the backwash from a Smirnoff Ice. That, or they just took a sheet of corn and spray-insulated it with the flavor dust from barbecue Ruffles. Rating: Unleaded.

Not many know this but at the nadir of one of my many periods of unemployment I interviewed for a PR gig with Pepsico, the folks who run the Frito factory. It was more awkward than a blind date with your Sunday School teacher. But I got some free chips and the "good for you/better for you/fun for you," breakdown of how they position snacks.

These Madden chips are definitely in the latter but the fun wears off before it begins. You're looking at 23 percent of your daily fat intake in a 2.125-ounce bag. Ouch. And you know how it is with any food item within reach of a gamer - Doritos, popcorn, chicken cordon bleu, it's all getting mindlessly inhaled. So the smaller configurations are advisable.

The big inducement here is a nine-digit code printed on the bag to redeem exclusive cards for Madden Ultimate team, which is included free in Madden NFL 11. You also get a $3 discount coupon to buy the game through the EA Store. So there's that. But as is the case with all gaming-themed foodstuffs, these don't rise above the regret of eating the whole thing.

Doritos Stadium Nacho Inspired By EA Sports Madden NFL 11 and Doritos Tailgater BBQ Inspired By EA Sports Madden NFL 11 were developed by Frito-Lay and distributed by a nice man who drives a colorful truck. Retails for between $3.99 and $0.99 USD. Bags of the snacks were found in a box shipped to us Friday by EA Sports. A police report has been filed. Ate both modes but did not complete the singleplayer career.

Confused by this review? Join the club.

How did developer Realtime Worlds go from creating violent free-roaming shooters like APB and Crackdown to working on the massive social gaming undertaking Project: MyWorld? They don't. It was the other way around.

Realtime Worlds' debut of the ambitious Project: MyWorld on Wednesday took a lot of people by surprise. Known for violent shooting games like APB and the original Crackdown, the concept of a project that seeks to recreate the entire planet as a virtual playground for social networking and social gaming seems slightly odd.

Project: MyWorld design director Sean Dugan explains how Project: MyWorld came about.

Realtime Worlds was founded with the dream of someday delivering on the promise that Project: MyWorld represents. Along the way, separate teams were created to make Crackdown and APB with technologies developed on Project: MyWorld. But while the Crackdown and APB teams worked in the broad light of day, the Project: MyWorld team of developers churned away as a top-secret skunkworks project for years.

So while on the surface APB and Crackdown are very different animals than Project: MyWorld, deep down inside they're all the same.

What Crackdown, APB and Project: MyWorld all do is they create a vast open world and put power into the hands of the player. They allow players to be creative within the boundaries of the game and discover interesting interactions.

Is Realtime Worlds totally schizophrenic? [Project: MyWorld]

We haven't had a year without an Insomniac Games-developed release since 2001, but this year is looking to be both Resistance and Ratchet & Clank-free. At least we have an Insomniac Games announcement to look forward to very soon.

The developer says it will be announcing its next game "sometime between now and the Penny-Arcade Expo over Labor Day weekend." That's good news for fans of the studio behind the Resistance and Ratchet & Clank series, but much better news for anyone going to PAX 2010.

"We're bringing our new game to a very special Penny-Arcade Expo panel on Saturday evening (September 4th), at 6:30pm in the Serpent Theatre," the developer writes. "G4TV's Adam Sessler will moderate a panel with key creative talent from Insomniac Games as we discuss (and demo!) our upcoming PlayStation 3 project."

Could that PlayStation 3 project be Resistance 3, as possibly outed by (of all things) a billboard spotted during the filming of Columbia Pictures' Battle: Los Angeles? Seems like a safe bet.

Insomniac Games is also working on a new franchise set in an all-new universe, one set to be published by EA Partners on multiple platforms. With multiple teams plugging away on multiple projects, Insomniac's dry spell appears to be almost over.