We wander into the world of shadowy operations in the portable version of Black Ops. When compared to the next-generation consoles, the cacophony of war may not sound quite the same on the Nintendo DS, but developer n-Space has worked on several portable Call of Duty games to get an idea of how to translate a first-person military shooter to the handheld. Call of Duty: Black Ops includes several new features in response to fan feedback; most notably is the addition of button controls, so that instead of relying on stylus controls, you are free to switch back and forth between the two--or whichever is most comfortable and will yield the fewest number of hand cramps.

Ubisoft delivers its Kinect-enabled answer to Sony’s The Fight: Lights Out. Fighting games are a pretty natural fit for motion controls, regardless of the technology involved, but Sony was first out of the gate with a fighting game that reflects a more mature sensibility for its PlayStation Move platform. Ubisoft has answered with a brutal (but not bloody) motion-controlled fighter of its own for Microsoft’s Kinect hardware, called Fighters Uncaged. As you can imagine, the whole point of Fighters Uncaged is to have the Kinect camera translate your real-life punches and kicks into in-game actions that approximate the real thing. When you throw a punch, your in-game avatar throws a punch.

The game formerly known as Project Dust takes shape and reveals more of its god game mechanics. If you saw the Project Dust--now called From Dust-- trailer at E3, you were probably left scratching your head wondering what exactly it was that you were looking at. It was evident that the game had roots in the god game genre but to what extent wasn’t exactly clear until our demo of the game at this year’s Gamescom. We’ve seen how you’ll be able to manipulate the environment by grabbing and transplanting different elements of land, water, and fire scattered across an island. We’ve seen how indigenous tribes factor into the game and how you can use your powers to help, or seemingly hinder, them. But most importantly, we’ve seen what the ultimate goal is for this downloadable god game that will be released on XBLA, PSN, and other downloadable gaming services like Steam in March 2011.