Few people would say that Sucker Punch's InFamous was a bad game, but that didn't stop the developers from really looking hard at what worked and what didn't when they sat down to craft the game's sequel. The answer they came up with was to improve on the experience of being a superhero, and if the demo shown to a small gathering of journalists at a break-out session in E3 is anything to go by, it looks like the development team is off to a strong start.

Telltale Games is well known for creating certain type of games—humorous, episodic point and click adventure series like Tales Of Monkey Island and Sam & Max. But with two new series in the works based on Jurassic Park and Back To The Future, the developer won't necessarily be sticking to the formula that fans are used to.

"In the case of Jurassic Park, we've wanted to kind of step out and do something that's cinematically much more serious than the kind of... you know, we feel like we're getting pigeonholed a little bit as a company that makes funny cartoon games about talking animals, whereas really what we think of ourselves as is a company that makes games about cinema," Telltale's Dave Grossman told Joystiq. "And so we want to explore some different territory. How is the gameplay supporting the tension of the scene, and what kind of tension is it? How is the game paced? And so you're going to find all of that stuff in the Jurassic Park series."

Grossman didn't go into specifics regarding how the gameplay will actually be different, but he did say that players can expect more tension and less "hanging around and solving thinky puzzles at your own pace."

The first season of Back To The Future is expected to launch sometime this winter, while the Jurassic Park series will follow at a later date.

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Tilt to Live for the iPhone is one of the most entertaining games I've played on any platform in quite some time. The premise is simple, the gameplay is simple, the graphics are simple, the controls are simple... and the experience is full of awesome.

In this top-down shooter, you pilot a single aircraft through a backdrop of psychedelic shapes and arrows circling around the screen, tasked to destroy as many red dots as possible before they destroy you. Your ship is controlled using the iPhone or iPod touch accelerometer, and while you might cringe at the thought of this, you shouldn't; the controls feel accurate and even a little forgiving.

The developers have included three pre-configured settings for motion control: regular, top down, and sleepy. A custom setting allows users to independently adjust sensitivity and the angle at which they would like to play. The more you tilt, the faster your ship goes—it’s really that simple.

Unfortunately for you (but fortunately for gameplay), your ship has no onboard weapons to fight the swarms of oncoming dots. Instead, weapons spawn in random places and at random times around the screen. Each weapon is indicated by an orb of a particular color with a small logo on it. An orange orb with a nuclear sign acts as a nuke blast. When you barrel your ship into it, it destroys all dots within a small radius. Another weapon isn’t a weapon at all, but instead a power-up that provides a shield around your vessel. This is particularly useful as the game is "one hit and you're done," so the shield gives you one extra strike.

Some dots will follow you around the screen, while others float about randomly. The dots you really need to watch out for are the ones that have a set path and work together, moving across the screen like some sort of maniacal steamroller.

Dots will also meld together to make large objects like arrows that fly toward you at high speeds, or the paddles and ball from a game of Pong.

Tilt to Live has three game modes: Classic mode, where you try to kill as many dots as possible; a Gauntlet mode where there are no weapons and you must dodge through wave after wave of dots; and a Code Red mode which is like Classic mode, but you die pretty much instantly (your life span may vary based upon skill level).

Depending on your skill level, games take anywhere from one to five minutes, making the game perfect for a quick pick-up and play.

The game has an achievement system that allows you to unlock new weapons, and it features an online leaderboard which makes use of AGON Online. Once you sign up, the system allows you to see friends' scores, global high scores, and even nearby high scores.

Performance on my first generation iPod touch is good; however, with a large number of dots on the screen being annihilated all at once, things can get a little choppy. On my iPad, I have had zero performance issues, although having to play an iPhone game on an iPad is always a bit sad.

To put it frankly, this game is awesome. You will get a sore neck, your forearms will fatigue, and you will have a great time. This one comes with a hearty "buy" recommendation.

Name: Tilt to Live (iTunes Link)
Publisher: One Man Left Studios
Price: $1.99

Platform: iPhone

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Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT's Spacewar! circa 1962.

We wondered, given the gaming nature of most of the software being preserved, why the venture is calling itself the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. So we called up the project's coordinator, Jerome McDonough, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, to ask him about the name.

Natal outed as Kinect while 360 slim rumor gains speed: On the eve of the E3 conference, Microsoft's official name of its Natal control system has been outed as Kinect. On a similar token, the Xbox 360 "slim" rumor is starting to look more and more credible by the hour. Then the Xbox 360 redesign became official. Finally, We got our hands on the 360 250GB "Slim."

How many times can you expand and stretch the finite amount of time between the end of Star Wars' godawful prequel trilogy and the beginning of A New Hope? If Lucasarts has anything to say about it, the answer is many times. Case in point: The Force Unleashed II, which brings Darth Vader's secret apprentice Jedi Starkiller back for another go. Although Starkiller appeared to have died so that his rebel friends could escape at the end of the first game, he is alive and in captivity at the opening of Force Unleashed II. Vader orders a couple of hapless stormtroopers to take care of him and leaves. Of course, Starkiller isn't about to go down without a fight, and after a lengthy (and awesome) cutscene involving lots of death and lightsaber dismemberment, Starkiller is on the loose again.

Lucasarts has certainly upped the production values with Force Unleashed II, which becomes clear the second the first level begins. Attempting departure from the planet Kamino, the game starts you in a pretty impressive freefall, with Starkiller attempting to escape a cloning facility on the planet Kamino. As he flies through the air towards the bottom of the facility, Force Unleashed II's effects power is in full... force, replete with breaking glass, explosions and twisted metal. Starkiller can also target and take down enemy TIEs, which start to swarm before he reaches the bottom. Although the free falling scene is clearly a set piece, Lucasarts reps treated it as a new game mechanic. Whether or not you'll be seeing a lot of free falls throughout the game remains unclear.

When Starkiller hits the ground, the game becomes business as usual. Waves of Imperial troops try to stop your advance, but none even come close—Force Unleashed II is very obviously a sequel, if for no other reason than the dev team decided to have Starkiller dual-wield lightsabers, and he behaves accordingly. Is this a good thing, or a disappointment? Maybe a little of both. 

As a sequel, of course, most aspects are improved. The graphics are better than the first game, Starkiller has more moves than before, and force powers have been tweaked. Some new moves, like Starkiller's new grapples and finishing move flourishes are pretty cool, and the dismemberment is also a welcome addition to the game's design vocabulary. 

Despite these improvements, the game, at least in the unfinished state it was being shown in, feels like it's missing something. The effects, for example, seem a little uneven, and at times lack the punch of the opening set piece. The use of Euphoria and other physics engines makes environmental destruction and character physics most impressive, though.

Ultimately, Force Unleashed II appears to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, new force powers, dismemberment and new, smarter enemy types (the demo featured an armored carbonite-spewing combat droid) sound promising, but Starkiller's escape from Kamino left me a little underwhelmed. The game obviously still has a few months of polish to undergo before its October release (and really, polish is probably all it needs) and you can't always judge a game by its first level. Members of the dev team said they felt like Force Unleashed II is their Empire; let's hope they can live up to those expectations.

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It has been a good while since we've seen anything from Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami—in fact, when he last directed a game he still worked for Capcom (rather than his current position as a part of the Japanese dream team developer Platinum). His newest game, Vanquish, was something of a wild card; aesthetically, the game looks like a cross between Gears and Halo—if Microsoft brought in a Japanese R&D team to beef everything up with tons of explosions and ridiculous anime influences.

At the point of Vanquish's inception, things could have gone either way. It was initially announced as a third-person shooter with a cover system (with a splash of Mikami's own P.N.03), which, considering the broad design strokes of that particular genre, raised a few red flags. Mikami had been AWOL without a project of his own (more or less), for years, after all. Fortunately for us, some things are worth the wait.