On the final day of E3, Kotaku intern Michael Epstein and I were running on fumes. I couldn't hold a camera still and he couldn't z-target. Nevertheless, we endeavored to play all three parts of the E3 2011 demo for this year's big Wii game, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Please forgive the shakes; I think the game looks quite nice despite them.

Publisher Electronic Arts is making a big move in the online retail space, revealing its new digital distribution effort and Steam competitor Origin earlier this month. But the company still believes in brick and mortar—enough to open up its own retail stores, one of which will launch later this year.

Chris Erb, VP of brand marketing at EA Sports, tells Forbes that the Madden NFL publisher will follow in the footsteps of Apple and Microsoft, opening up three dedicated EA Sports stores over the next year. The first is planned to launch this fall in a Charlotte, North Carolina airport.

"It is the first of what we hope to be at least three new retail stores to open in the next year, and it's a place people will be able to interact and buy their favorite EA Sports games," Erb says, explaining the store as an "offline component to acquiring new customers."

"As we look to expand the overall sports game audience, it's important for us to create environments for people to get their hands on our products and experience how much interactive sports experiences have evolved over the past few years," Erb says.

A render of the EA Sports retail store shows demo kiosks for video games, plus apparel and accessories featuring NFL and Electronic Arts brands.

EA SPORTS Shares Facebook Learning and Announces Retail Stores [Forbes via Gamasutra]

Starting today, Valve's digital distribution service, Steam, supports Free to Play games (Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online, etc.) with in-game purchases through Steam's microtransaction system. Players who download the games through Steam will receive exclusive content this week. [Valve]

The unusual competitive multiplayer mode that was introduced in last year's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood will be changed for Assassin's Creed: Revelations.

They're not turning it into Call of Duty or like anything in any other major multiplayer game. It wil still be an assassination game that rewards stealthy players. But the there will be tweaks.

The head of the game's multiplayer development team walked me through them at E3 last week. Ready?

The basic gameplay remains the same. Each player in a competitive match has at least one assassination target and is the target of at least one other player. There are, as before, many characters in the level who look just like you—others who look like each of your fellow players—so the goal is to figure out who the human-controlled characters are and to assassinate any that have been marked as your prey.

Damien Kieken of Ubisoft Annecy walked me through a multiplayer "manhunt" match that was set in Rhodes. He pointed out some minor changes, improvements to the clarity of the interface that more clearly show players how to switch assassination targets or see that they're being rewarded if they hide in groups.

One big change is that players who are attacked can defend themselves a little more successfully this time. In ACB, a player who was being pounced upon by their would-be assassin, could try to block that attack… and then run away in the rare event that they were successful. This time, they can strive for an "honorable death." That is, if they fail to block successfully, they still might have been fast enough to commit this new action, which gives the victim the same number of points that the attacker gets for the kill plus wounds the attacker and renders them briefly incapable of attack. (Kieken didn't want to leave the impression that attacker and defender arre now even. He stressed that AC multiplayer is still intentionally "asymmetrical.")

A second significant change is that stealthy players will get improved rewards for killing from the shadows. In ACB, the main byproduct of a stealthy approach to a kill was the higher point total received for that artful murder. You still get more points for tougher, stealthier kills. But you'll also find that you are a more potent killer if you've been skulking around. Kieken pointed to an arced meter in the upper-right corner of the TV and said that it would fill up if a player was moving around in a stealthy manner. Should that meter indicate that they've been sneaky, the attacking player will find that their assassination attempts animate more impressively and… more quickly. The impression I got is that the stealthy assassin will be tougher than ever to fend off.

Other changes to the multiplayer mode include a "friends hub" that tracks friends' statistical performances in the game—a friends' leaderboard for various challenges, basically—as well as more elaborate character-customization system that will let players use in-game currency to purchase various accoutrements for their characters.

Multiplayer will also have more of a story this time. But that story, which casts the player as an Abstergo Industries recruit of some sort, experiencing the multiplayer mode in one of the series' Animus Device, is still mostly a mystery. (Technically, the last game showed what seemed to be a similar story, but didn't do much more than establish that narrative with an opening cut scene.)

Assassin's Creed Revelations is set to launch later this year. I'll have more impressions of the game's single-player mode tomorrow.

Somewhat thankfully, it is not another Super Mario Bros. movie. Instead, Disney's upcoming Wreck-It Ralph is "the story of an arcade game Bad Guy determined to prove he can be a Good Guy." Better still, it has some promising talent lined up.

The 8-bit video game-inspired Wreck-It Ralph, a movie formerly known as Reboot Ralph, is being directed by Rich Moore, an animation director whose credits include The Simpsons (during its better years), Futurama and The Critic, among others.

"I love the idea of a very simple 8-bit video game character struggling with the complex question: ‘isn't there more to life than the role I've been assigned?'" Moore is quote in a Disney press release. "In his quest for the answer, we journey with our hero through three visually distinct video game worlds. It's unlike anything anyone's seen before, and I'm thrilled to be to creating it here at Walt Disney Animation Studios."

Funny people are lending their vocal talents too, including John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer and Jane Lynch. Reilly plays the bad guy Wreck-It Ralph, foil to McBrayer's good guy Fix-It Felix, struggling to become a hero. Here's the plot, straight from Disney, which sounds like a genre-hopping mix of Super Mario Bros., Call of Duty and Mario Kart.

...when a modern, first-person shooter game arrives featuring tough-as-nails Sergeant Calhoun (voice of Lynch), Ralph sees it as his ticket to heroism and happiness. He sneaks into the game with a simple plan—win a medal—but soon wrecks everything, and [accidentally] unleashes a deadly enemy that threatens every game in the arcade. Ralph's only hope? Vanellope von Schweetz (voice of Silverman), a young troublemaking "glitch" from a candy-coated cart racing game who might just be the one to teach Ralph what it means to be a Good Guy. But will he realize he is good enough to become a hero before it's "Game Over" for the entire arcade?

Sound interesting? Better than Disney's other game universe effort Tron, maybe? We'll find out late next year. Wreck-It Ralph is dated for a November 2, 2012 release.

Last week I had a chance to talk to the Bohemia Interactive bossman, Marek Spanel. As one of the brains behind the original Operation Flashpoint, and then the three Arma games that followed, he is one PC gaming's most ambitious developers. He's now embarking on a huge project of developing three games across three studios at the same time: Arma 3, Take On Helicopters, and Carrier Command. I had a chance to talk to him about this bold undertaking.

RPS: How did you guys come to be remaking Carrier Command?

Spanel: It really begins in my childhood when Carrier Command was a game my older brother Ondrej (he's the lead engineer at Bohemia) brought this game home on Atari ST. I think I was like twelve years old, and he became really addicted to that game. I wasn't very good! But I watched him playing a great deal, and this game had a big influence upon us. Many years later and our colleagues from our simulation office in Australia met some of the original developers of this game, and they got the idea to recreate the game. And so we became part of that. I said: "Let's do it!" It's a game that is part of us, and it is still fairly unique, so let's try to give it new life.

RPS: So who is working on that? Is it Black Element? How does that work?

Spanel: Yeah, so our company has grown, and we have expanded in the Czech Republic, bought various studios. We are now three development studios in the Czech Republic, and it's a dedicated studio for Carrier Command. Development on the game is not always as simple as we hoped, for various reasons, but basically our goal is to make it fun for a modern audience, and true to its original depth. Of course there have been attempts to remake the Carrier Command style gameplay in the past, but what I am interest in is the open world game. We want to make a very large game world. We are going for thirty two islands, and you freely roam in that environment, and it is up to your strategy how you play – what islands you take, what you build on the islands, how you fight with the enemy carrier. In the hands-on build you have this aspect is only somewhat visible in the strategy part of the game, but in the full game this is what I consider the essence of the game.

The campaign mode is very streamlined. It does give you freedom, but gradually. You start on one island, no carrier, nothing. You have to fight your way to the carrier and get it, and you have to first repair it, and then you can explore just three islands. On those islands you get your first Manta and you then gather resources. The game world is designed in such a way that you open options gradually – an island, three islands, fifteen islands. You can of course play the strategy game on the full scale of the game from the beginning. The campaign is, in a sense, a long introduction to the gameplay. There is almost too much you can do, so the campaign is designed as a training mode, in a way.

RPS: And the strategy game is a broad strokes sort of sandbox?

Spanel: Absolutely open. It is up to you to decide the balance of power, to decide how many islands you own, how many the enemy carrier owns, and how much is untaken. You can also set an economy multiplier, which will make it easier or harder for you depending on the setting.

RPS: But you also have an action game? Is that like the original action game, or something different?

Spanel: This is an excerpt of missions. It is something we have done to make the game instantly playable by anyone. But the full game offers two main modes. One is the campaign, which is more preset, more staged, with some story as well – we have an Austrian writer writing the campaign for us – but it is basically about introducing the options. As you start you have to seize the carrier, which is damaged and in very bad shape, and you gradually build that to introduce the features of it. You have to fix it to travel to the next island, and you explore the environment there and discover blueprints to get the next thing, and that gradually unlocks all the options. Plus you have the full open strategy game.

RPS: How much can you play from the map screen? Can you rely on your AI units to fight?

Spanel: First of all each island has automatic defences. You only control troops from the carrier. But we try to tune the AI as much as possible for it to be up to you to choose how you play. From our feedback so far there are several players who try to play it as strategy only, and others who play it as action only. Mostly though people combine the two. We will be tweaking to focus on that.

RPS: So is this the Arma 2 engine?

Spanel: This is pretty much a new engine because it is a multi-platform technology, which Arma 2 was never designed to be. It is not easy to bring Arma 2 technology to consoles, it is very complex, and just too big. So this is more focused and a new technology. It's built from scratch, but of course we can reuse some technologies – vegetation is using the same techniques. Generally speaking though this is new for this game.

RPS: And it is just single player?

Spanel: Yes, it is just single player for now. We hope that we can eventually expand the game to multiplayer, but not now. We are focused on the single-player game.

RPS: And will the PC version have mod support?

Spanel: Yes, but it will be nothing like that of the Arma 2 technology. We want to support modification, but there will be some compromise. We cannot support the same infrastructure that we do for Arma 2. Our priority here is to make this work across multiple platforms, unlike Arma 2 which is the hardcore PC-platform crazy thing!

RPS: Ok, let's talk about Take On Helicopter, what can you tell me about that?

Spanel: So here is a story. Out of the blue someone contacted us last Friday – I will not name him – but it was a guy who had been in touch in 1999, and he was an advisor to us back then, and he says to us "I am running a start-up helicopter business in Seattle!" And he offered his services with testing the game. Such a funny coincidence! He is basically doing what we are doing within the game – running a helicopter business in Seattle. The circle has closed!

RPS: Weird!

Spanel: But it seems logical to do a commercial flight simulation game. We wanted, however, to do something more focused. There are many good flight sims, many helicopter combat games, but there isn't a complete civilian helicopter game on the market. We feel that there is a hole and we want to fill it in. It's also really refreshing to focus on something very specific! Unlike Arma where we do too many things, and it is difficult to make it as detailed as possible, here we focus. It's still very complex, but it's a different approach to development. Here we will make helicopter simulation as authentic an experience as possible.

RPS: So what's the basic experience of the game?

Spanel: It's a large, open game with full mod support. It's based on Arma 2, but it is a heavily upgraded and improved version of our helicopter experience. We felt that the terrain detail and terrain size of Arma 2 worked well with helicopters, so it was logical to use it for this game. So players in Take On have a variety of options to play. In the centre of the game will be the campaign mode where you will play a narrative-driven experience of a helicopter business where two brothers take a struggling helicopter business in Seattle and make money. That is part of the fun – getting contracts, making money, and upgrading helicopters. There is a story where you find yourself in competition, and there are eventually some more dangerous missions in South East Asia. There are some tutorials of course and also a free-flight mode, where you can freely fly helicopters. There's a mission editor, of course, and we hope there will be a community of people creating new helicopters and new scenarios. We hope to design it so seriously that this game could last for years. It will be an authentic flight model on a completely new level compared to what we had on previous titles.

RPS: Let's move on to Arma 3. What's the big idea for that?

Spanel: There are several things that I think of, randomly. I don't know what is most important! One of the interesting aspects is that we are designing a game environment that is based on one real island. In previous games we always designed environments that were nearly real, or semi-authentic, but this time it really is one-to-one. This is a big challenge for us, because we have to be more accurate with the terrain development than ever before. We are trying to address various technology limitations that our userbase was not happy with in Arma 2, and that means we are heavily pushing engine development as well. We are addressing things like physics simulation and animations – two things we feel our userbase is not happy with in the last game.
At the heart of the new game there is a story-driven campaign where this time it is a bit more player-centric. We have created a scenario which is near-future, and which is more logical for the player to start as a lone-warrior on this island, fighting for survival of civilisation. We want to make this quite believable, and so we set it in not-so-distant future, which allows us some creative freedom compared to our previous games. As well as the spectrum of units and vehicles, we have some freedom to experiment. We have some people who design modern weapon systems trying to figure out what weapons systems will look like in the near future. We do the same thing in house, we take the next twenty years and try to extrapolate. We will make it as real as possible.

RPS: Has the series of expansions you released for Arma 2 been a success for you? Is that the sort of direction you will continue in?

Spanel: Arma 3 is a big long term venture, and so we will want to support it. I can't say if we will support that via smaller DLC or standalone expansions, but we will be doing something like this, and so yes it has been a success for Arma 2, and it was a good move. Our userbase reacted well to it.

RPS: Anything like that for Carrier Command?

Spanel: Yes, we hope so, but right now we need to sort out the release. We are only really a PC developer, although we do a few mobile games now, so this is important for us in terms of taking on an all-platforms release. Once we done with it we will see the potential for additional content for the title.

RPS: It's funny how we've gone from maybe downloading some patches and add on to a game you bought on disc, to downloading whole games, and now downloading the game then adding to it over time. Digital distribution really is everything for PC now, isn't it?

Spanel: Yes. If it were not for digital distribution we would no longer be doing PC games. It's as simple as this.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

Minecraft creator Notch announced via Twitter that the new screenshots from Minecraft beta 1.7 contain hidden information about the upcoming update. While Notch referenced only two screen shots and the changelog, Notch posted five pictures total. One picture was said to be a correction of a previously posted image, one a screenshot taken during daytime to compare lighting. Could these extra images be part of the clue? There's only one way to find out...

This is the original image containing the "error." Note the yellow mark on the left edge of the picture.

"Fixed version"

Daytime shot for comparison

The censored change list. It is rumored that the bottom line reads "- Removed Herobrine," the roaming ghost-like character said to haunt minecraft's single-player game. This could mean the removal of Herobrine from the game even though Notch has declined that he ever existed. Is Minecraft's favorite ghost story coming to and end? Is it just beginning? Or is Notch just stirring up the rumor mill for the hell of it?

According to their Twitter updates, LulzSec has launched DDoS attacks—either on purpose or as a side effect of a mass hack attempt—that has taken down EVE Online, Escapist magazine, and Minecraft, proving conclusively that they hate everyone equally.

I didn't give Brooks Brown, Lucast Arts community manager, much time to dig into the Kinect-enabled Star Wars game before I began peppering him with questions.

"Is this the entire game?" I asked.

Turns out what we saw on stage, two guys controlling (or trying to control) jedi as they work their way through a factory's worth of bots, isn't all Kinect Star Wars has in it. It is what Brown called the "Jedi Mode" a mode that has "hours of gameplay in it."

That particular mode will also support the ability to play through with a friend, who can join you at any time by literally joining you at any time. They just need to stand next to you in front of the Kinect camera.

That mode will also have plenty of other playable characters and other options, but it's not the entire game, just what they are showing of it at E3 this year.

It sounds like it isn't even the chief mode. This is when things got a bit squirrely. Brown couldn't, or wouldn't, tell me how many other modes there were, just that the game is an "assortment of modes." He did lead me to believe that Jedi Mode wasn't the majority of the game, but he also said that the game wasn't really an assortment of mini games either.

After getting that sorted out I stood alongside Brown and tried playing the game. It didn't seem to completely track what I was doing. At some moments I started to doubt which of the characters on the screen I was meant to be controlling.

Brown told me that Jedi, and the players that control them, are meant to move with a sort of gravitas, an air of seriousness that translates into slow, methodical movements. Coincidentally, that would also, I suspect, make it easier for Kinect to see what you're doing and turn it into something resembling a light saber slash or force grab.

So, following orders, I slowed my movements down. Instead of whipping my arm across my body, I traced it across my body, as if drawing a line on a chalkboard rather than slicing through metal with a fantasy light blade. That worked, at least on some level.

The light saber movements in battle, and the force grabs actually weren't that bad. They may have skipped some of the things I did or wanted to do with my light saber, but they got the idea across that by swinging my arms around I was killing stuff.

What didn't work, though, were the movements. In particular the ability to essentially direct your camera. The game, Brown told me, "directs your attention" to specific enemies in a battle. That's a fancy way of saying it essentially locks you on a target. You should be able to turn your shoulders and hips to get the camera to move to a different target, say the one over to your left, off camera. But I couldn't seem to get that to work. The game held my lock-on so firmly that it began to feel like the worst in an on-the-rails shooter.

Moving forward, something you can only do by jumping or bounding, seemed to work, but it just moved me closer to that target already selected.

Kinect doesn't seem able, or maybe it's the game, to track me the way I want to be tracked to play a game like this. I don't want Kinect Star Wars to teach me the proper way to swing a light saber, I want it to make me feel like I've already mastered one.

We've been playing the same old Wii since 2006, which makes the calls for Nintendo to create a new Wii—Wii HD! Wii 2? Wii-As-Powerful-As-The-Xbox-360!?!—about... four years old. As recently as last November, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime was telling Kotaku that it wasn't time to talk about a new Wii yet.

Now, it is time to talk about a new Wii.

We've got a Wii U coming, a machine we finally saw and played at E3 last week. It's an odd, intriguing system with unspecified horsepower and a controller that contains a screen. Why was it finally time to show off this new Wii and plan it for a 2012 release? Fils-Aime and one of Nintendo's top creators don't cite the slowing sales of the 86-million-selling Wii. They have other reasons.

"The way we approach hardware development," Fils-Aime told me last week, "is that, when there are experiences that our internal development teams bring to bear that can't be executed with the current systems, that's a signal to us that it's time for exploration of new systems. And, Stephen, specifically in this case, our development teams were bringing forward two-screen ideas, two-separate-screen ideas. Ideas that leveraged the big 10-feet-away interface and the one-foot-away smaller-screen interface. That was the signal for not only a new system but one that took advantage of two separate screens."

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shows an image of the Wii U running a prototype of a graphically-advanced scene from a Zelda game.

In the abstract, that does sound like the way Nintendo does things, always trying to zig when other people are zagging. That explanation skips the business concerns, of course, but it begs the question of what the creative people at Nintendo were cooking up and what kind of push they were giving Nintendo's powers-that-be that produced not just a more powerful Wii but something so, well, odd.

Longtime Animal Crossing developer Katsuya Eguchi, a Nintendo veteran and producer on upcoming Wii U projects, told me that prettier graphics were one of the pushes.

"More and more people have access to high definition televisions, so the timing is right for a next-generation Wii that takes advantage of that technology and the access to it," he said. The 2006 Wii could send a 480p signal to a TV, at best. The new one can run games in 1080p, the same high-def standard hit by the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. "The Wii only supported SD and, at that time, HD was not as common and readily available. But now, as more people have access to HD, we think the time is right to release an HD version of the Wii."

Nintendo creators sometimes create beautiful games. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, for example, has a timeless cartoony style. But they're not known for pushing graphics to the technical limit, of rendering their Zeldas and Marios with the graphical fidelity of a Gears of War or LittleBigPlanet. Of course, they never had a machine powerful enough to do that stuff.

Would the graphical prowess of the Wii U enable a Mario that was so graphically advanced that it would show the wrinkles in Mario's clothes and the sweat on his brow? "With the Wii U, while we certainly will have that ability," Eguchi said. "Whether or not we take advantage of it or whether we see the sweat on Mario's brow, that's kind of [Mario creator] Mr. Miyamoto's call. The bottom line is that it's always our goal to make the best experience for the player... The New Super Mario Bros. Mii [Wii U prototype], that takes advantage of HD and detailed graphics in that, when you're playing, you'll know exactly which Mii is you, because of the detail that's presented. There are many possibilities with the HD that we can take advantage of."

Eguchi said Nintendo has no aversion to doing technically-advanced graphics. "Now that we have a Wii in HD—the Wii U—there are games like Zelda or Metroid or Star Fox, that definitely will benefit from the ability to display those detailed graphics. But there [are] games like Mario and even Animal Crossing where those details might take away from that experience. We have to explore our options."

This Wii U Mario demo used HD to help distinguish Mii character details, Nintendo says.

That's the graphics, but here's Eguchi's surprising explanation for why Nintendo is going with a screen-based controller:

"When we first came out with the Wii, our goal was to have the Wii on all the time," Eguchi said, almost losing me from the start. "The goal was to have users interacting with the hardware all the time. But the reality is most people only have one TV in their living room. Because of that, we had to share time. People might be watching a DVD or watching TV and when that was happening they couldn't interact with the game.

"So we needed a solution.

"We needed an idea that would alleviate that problem. And that solution was including a screen that was a part of the console and allowing people to interact not just with the TV screen but also on the screen that comes with the console."

One of the Wii U's more compelling features is indeed the ability for the console to stream high-end games to the controller screen when the TV isn't available, but I told Eguchi that I was surprised this was such a high priority for Nintendo. I hadn't expected Nintendo's driving goal to be for consumers to keep their console running at all times, though in retrospect, that helps explain initiatives like Wii Connect 24, a service that encouraged Wii owners to keep their system in sleep mode, always prepared to automatically download new content.

"The idea of having people interact with [the console] all the time," Eguchi said, "came from [the fact] that people buy the game and they play it. Once they're done with the game, they tend to put it aside and set the Wii aside. In order to prevent that from happening, the goal was to make sure people always had something fun to do on their console...so that that the feeling associated with that hardware was that, 'if I turn this on and interact with it I'm going to experience something good.'"

The Wii U may not have a Wii-style blue light in its disc drive that illuminates when there's a new reason to turn it on—Eguchi said that omission isn't necessarily final—but Nintendo does plan to let people power on their screen-based Wii U controller and check it for updates (status reports of what their friends are playing, for example) even without turning their TV on.

Why the Wii U and why now?

1) HD Graphics.
2) A console that can always be on.

Those are some of the reasons.