Lee Hammock, lead game designer for Fallen Earth sat down with X-Play's Adam Sessler at GDC '09 to give everyone a preview of what the game is all about.

Fallen Earth utilizes a unique first-person shooter based combat system that allows you to attack in 1st or 3rd person but the amount of damage caused is based on an RPG-like determination system. Couple that with an extensive crafting system for building weapons and items and you might just have yourself a nifty little MMO experience.

Fallen Earth is a self-published, post-apocalyptic MMO for your PC system and is set to be released in late Q2, which translates to June, 2009.

Sony is stepping up their game and tempting indie developers with cash incentives if they're willing to make exclusive PlayStation Network titles.

The announcement only currently promises to cover development costs through a "royalties" payment system but all PSN titles remain the property of the developer and the game maker determines a price, so… your budget could conceivably be inflated to cover other costs like Cheetos and new 360 games.

So, if you yourself are a burgeoning developer with free time due to maybe being laid off recently, this might be a good way to get back in the game and get compensated for it along the way.

Gotta start somehwere, eh?

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It's good to make a list. You know, so you don't forget stuff, you can prioritize all that. But it's really great to make a list when it means someone else has put you on it because it means people are thinking of you. Even better when the list is the top ten hottest celebrity nerds.

That's why we are pleased to congratulate three of G4's hosts for making just such a list. Kristin Adams, Morgan Webb, and Olivia Munn can count themselves among the hottest nerd celebrities up there with the likes of Alyson Hannigan and Kristen Bell. Check out the rest of the list at the Manofest site.

Steamworks is set to deliver a new set of features for developers and publishers that will render DRM obsolete and it's about friggin' time.

The most interesting is the Customer Executable Generation or CEG feature which compliments the anti-piracy solutions already used by Steamworks. CEG actually makes unique copies of games for individual users to use on multiple machines without having to install root kits on their PC.

There's also new support for creating and offering in-game DLC and matchmaking that uses the same lobby framework that Left 4 Dead utilizes. The Steamworks developer's kit is offered free of charge to developers and publishers globally and is a great way to get into making games once you've mastered making LittleBigPlanet levels.

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Layla Kayleigh said goodbye to G4 today. She's pursuing other things and we want to wish her the best. After bringing us TheFeed and other various things for the past few years here at G4, we can only hope that she finds as much joy in her new endeavours as she has brought to us.

Here's her goodbye from today's Attack of the Show and pop the jump for a bonus Layla video: 

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Take a trip through the treacherous terrain of Alaska as our 44th president avoiding lobbyists and lipsticked pigs, and do it all for free courtesy of ZenSoft, the game's creators. You can also look forward to new levels on the way including Arizona and Illinois.

Play Super Obama World

The Winter Olympics are coming to Vancouver in 2010 but long before that happens you'll be able to enjoy this heart-pounding trailer presented by SEGA, the makers of Vancouver 2010.

Vancouver 2010 is a winter sports simulation game (duh) developed by Eurocom and published by SEGA for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Macintosh, and wireless platforms.

Captain Dynamic is bursting onto the scene in the new City of Heroes trailer, the third in a series, that shows just how diabolical his arch nemeses can get in the form of TheGr8Face. City of Heroes is developed by Cryptic Studios and distributed by NCSoft.

Enjoy the trailer below, if you dare.

YES! Stalin is here to dance the night away in promotion for his real-time war strategy game, 'Stalin vs. Martians.' Looks like rhythm isn't the only dancer around.

Go Josef! Go Josef! Go Josef!

There is no release date for this Mezmer developed PC game. But stay ye tuned.

Some maps have surfaced that are giving the FCC more justification for delaying the transition into digital TV broadcast. The move to digital was scheduled to have already happened, but pushed to June 12 when the economy crashed. It was clear that the public was not properly educated on what was going to happen when the feds flipped the big switch.

The maps demonstrate that if the change occured on the original date, 92,381 households would have lost a channel -- something they could get previously in analog within the Cincinnati area, among many others sampled.

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We weren't sure if it was ever going to happen, or even necessarily why, but Braid is finally coming to the PC, without any apparent changes from the original XBox Arcade version. Indie developer Jonathon Blow has worked out a deal with Impulse which will distribute the game through various portals like Valve's Steam at a slightly more expensive $19.95.

Some think this game, while great, has come and gone and it's time for Blow to release his next masterwork. So, what do you think? Is it too late for a PC port for this independant developer success story?

Need a refresher? Here's X-Play's segment imploring you to download Braid over XBox Live last August:

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A new study has confirmed what New Age grannies have been saying for years: color effects your mood and your ability to get work done. The study, published in Science Magazine, gave participants a series of tasks for things like proofreading, memorizing, designing a toy, as well as figuring out uses for a brick.

The researchers would use either a blue or a red background to determine that the red background caused the subjects to complete more tasks of a less creative nature, while the blue background encouraged people to be a bit more free in their thought and less productive in a tangible, measured way.

What's the upshot here? If you're looking to get your creativity going, chill in a blue room. Howver, when it comes time to figure out how to apply for the patent, go to a red one. Experts surmise, perhaps prematurely, that these differences come from how the colors are used in society by way of learned associations. Red is generally used to help people avoid danger, while blue has a softer feel and might remind one of the sky and open water where exploration and freedom are in abundance.

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Ian Bogost, Founding Partner of Persuasive Games was kind enough to give us a few moments of his time to chat about their newest iPhone game Jetset, a Game for Airports that's steadily climbing the App Store charts.

Ty Colfax: So what made you want to create a game about airport security?
Ian Bogost: Well, we’ve been interested in airport security at the studio for a long time.  I think what it comes down to is, I travel a lot for business, and so, I’m always at an airport.  And there’s that old adage about writing what you know, and we sort of apply that to game design. The whole idea of the kind of arbitrariness of security policy as it relates to safety, and then the inconvenience that you experience as a traveler – that was something that we were interested in doing. I wanted to take that idea and update it, and in fact one of the most hilarious things between our web game and our iPhone game, is that on the web game we made up a bunch of absurd to stuff to kind of highlight the arbitrariness of it all and with the iPhone game, every single item is taken out of a real story from airport security in the last two years.  So, truth is stranger than fiction as usual.

TC: In the approval process with Apple, did they censor the game at all?
IB: Well, the thing you need to understand about the App Store, is that Apple can do anything they want, right?  So when you sign up, you are not guaranteed to have anything put on sale at the App Store.  They’ve got complete control, and there’s no way to negotiate on that point, of course.  But the approval process is daunting in that it’s very slow, and very opaque, and it’s hard to get feedback.  Their first gripe was about what they claimed was offensive sexual content in the game, which amounted to a couple things that we had included based on these stories.

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Olivia loves pie more than life itself and that is why she has dedicated this week and in fact has sacrificed her body in order to get Congress' attention regarding her Pie Week Petition. Won't you watch her public service announcement on why January should have its own Pie Week?

Try to forget that veterans, Jesus, and Martin Luther King, Jr. only get one day and think about how the more signatures we get, the more unclothed Olivia gets. Oh also, think of the pie.

If the petition gets 50,000 signatures, which right now is totally a possibility, Ms. Munn will go from the already promised french maid costume to a sexier, skimpier version for her dive into a giant pie, and in fact, into giant pie history.

Sign that petition!

Living in Los Angeles has its perks, most of them superficial and insignificant. For instance, the time I saw David Hasselhoff walking through a lobby was a pretty big rush. It didn't quite compare to seeing The Nature Boy, Ric Flair, with his years of compacted impact injuries from wrestling and a broken back laboring through a cubicle farm mumbling to personal assistants. Seeing someone famous has an initial shine that eventually dulls to a feeling of unexpected hollowness. I guess it's from a built-up expectation that comes crashing back to reality once the larger-than-life figure is proven to just be normal size, although the Hoff was taller than I expected.

Because of this, I was very excited to see a spray-painted Trans-Am from the late 70s with a hoodscoop and a beat up vanity plate labeled "GNRL ZOD" the other night in my neighborhood. Seeing the car itself brought back a lot of childhood memories, but once I saw the license plate, I knew I had to wait around to meet the guy who would dare to be so awesome. I snapped a couple pictures and sat on a bench.

Much like a cross-country booty call that sounds great at first, but soon turns into a personal mind game given the hours of time it takes to travel and think, I began to regret waiting to meet this person as time wore on. 10 minutes, 20 minutes, what the hell was I doing? I had important Facebook status updates to read at home.

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