You met J. Allen Williams yesterday. He's the guy up there second from the left, standing with Mystery Science Theatre alums -- from left to right -- Frank Conniff, Joel Hodgson, and Beez McKeever.

Today, find out some very specific stuff about Darkstar, the game he's been creating for the past ten years. Very specific stuff. Maybe too specific. And while you may know that the cast of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is involved, the celebrity name dropping doesn't stop there.

The long strange saga of Darkstar continues after the jump.

This is lovely, and not just because it seems to end the same as every game I play against the Protoss: "Hey, look, I've won! Oh, no I haven't..."

Of course, now I want to see the Zerg done in Legos. Is that even possible?

One of my favorite games so far this year is Din's Curse, the action RPG with dungeons that aren't content to wait patiently for you to clear them out whenever the heck you feel like it (review here). A new patch (get it here) adds a visual effect that gives the world a more 3D appearance. It's a simple trick of perspective, but it works nicely. Also added are new shadows from the dungeon walls that make the lighting even more eerie. The harder modes are a little harder, and treasure is slightly less common and therefore more like actual treasure.

Developer Steven Peeler also posted some examples of weird things he's had to fix over the game's history. For instance, overzealous allies:

We had lots of issues during the beta where summoned creatures were extremely aggressive. By aggressive I mean they would attack things like lifestones just because you had them selected. Obviously if you had it selected it must be an enemy to be destroyed. This same idea worked when you had yourself or an NPC selected also.

J. Allen Williams (above left), who goes by Jeff, will be the first one to tell you that Darkstar isn't really a videogame. Even though, yeah, it kind of is. But Williams isn't necessarily hip to what constitutes a videogame. He considers it a point of pride that he hasn't played one in ten years, and it shows. His description of Darkstar sounds a lot like the interactive movies that fell out favor in the 90s. Could Darkstar be a renaissance for that medium? Can cinematic games be a creative middle ground and distribution channel for aspiring filmmakers? Or is Williams a throwback to a Myst clone mentality in a YouTube/Hulu era?

I don't have the answer. And, really, no one will until Darkstar comes out. But I can say talking to Williams was a fascinating look at the sort of guy who not only refuses to play by the rules, but willfully ignores them. I got a very Mark Borchardt vibe from Williams, and I don't mean that to be condescending. The guy feels passionately about what he's created, he's completely invested in it, and he knows full well he's working outside the system.

Beyond Williams' conviction, the notable thing about Darkstar is that it involves talent you can't simply ignore. In fact, if I didn't know about the involvement of various Mystery Science Theatre veterans, Peter Graves, and Rush, I probably wouldn't have tracked Williams down for the following interview, which will be posted in installments over the next few days.

Up first, how Darkstar evolved from an interactive lung simulation into 29 ways to die.

I'm about half way through the single-player campaign in Starcraft II and I'm already bored out of my skull. This is pretty much exactly like every other real time strategy game that thought, hey, let's tell a story! Real time strategy games are a terrible format for telling stories, because the stories exist almost entirely in the gaps between the gameplay. Starcraft II proves that making the gaps huge and elaborately produced doesn't really help matters.

However, after the jump, there's at least one reason you need to play the single-player campaign.

Star Trek Online's Season Two update is now live. It adds a whole mess of stuff -- read about it all here -- but what caught my eye was the scanning minigame add a sci-fi vibe when you're essentially just opening a chest. It used to be that when you found an anomaly, you clicked on it and got treasure. Here's how it works now:

When you interact with a harvestable item, on ground or in space, you'll see a new window. This will show you two waveforms, one blue (the target) and one red (the current). Click the on-screen buttons or the keyboard arrow keys to change the frequency and amplitude of the red waveform to match the blue one. Be quick! You need to do this before the ambient noise becomes too great! If you match the two waveforms, you will get more (and sometimes better!) items.

Check out that new table for Zen Pinball on the Playstation 3. Sexy! I haven't played it yet, but based on that video, I'd almost venture that it's sexier than the Excalibur and Earth Defense tables. It's available now on the Playstation Store for two bucks.

Here are your Martian missions, should you choose to accept them:

Dock the spaceship and activate the magnetic crane to collect space samples
Land with the space spider to analyze the ancient Martian symbols
Call in the satellite to scan distant galaxies, calibrate its solar collector and activate its electromagnetic fields to lock three balls
Restore the Mysterious Pyramid, then deactivate its defense system
Spell out MARS to activate the secret portal of lights
Repair the artificial gravity reactor to stabilize gravity on MARS

Remember Alan Wake? I think it came out sometime last year. So you might not remember that you got a little download code included in the game that did bupkis. Well, now it actually does something. Enter it into Xbox Live and you'll be able to download The Signal, which picks up where the game left off.

See if you can cull any meaningful information from this official description, which also applies to the game even if you don't download The Signal.

In "The Signal," Alan finds himself facing a threat unlike anything he has encountered before - and yet, the nightmarish mysteries feel intimately familiar for our favorite writer. Ravaged by dark forces and longing for his wife, Alan is lost and in danger of losing his mind. His only hope for survival lies with the mysterious Diver, Thomas Zane...The Game Add-on delves into the twisted world of the author's subconscious and invites you to dive into the depths of darkness. Explore the boundaries of reality in the next chapter of "Alan Wake" as Alan's nightmares are coming to life.

Gallery: The Signal downloadable content stirs Alan Wake (5 images)   view full gallery

The Dancing Zombie (pictured) in Plants vs. Zombies is about to beat it. Popcap will be retiring the guy to appease Michael Jackson's estate, which apparently can't read the bit about similarities to persons living or dead.

The Estate of Michael Jackson objected to our use of the 'dancing zombie' in PLANTS vs. ZOMBIES based on its view that the zombie too closely resembled Michael Jackson. After receiving this objection, PopCap made a business decision to retire the original 'dancing zombie' and replace it with a different 'dancing zombie' character for future builds of PLANTS vs.ZOMBIES on all platforms. The phase-out and replacement process is underway.

Ah, so that's what Blizzard is doing with the single player campaign in Starcraft II. They're taking their Warhammer inspired universe and giving it a touch of Firefly. From the white trash redneck Terrans in the original Starcraft, the theme this time around is more Western and less country. Our hero Jim Raynor goes from being a tiny picture of a biker to a full-blown elaborately animated cowboy. In fact, a dead ringer for John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. He's tattooed, bearded, cigarillo smoking, hard drinking, and accompanied by a slide guitar. He's got the build of a character from Gears of War and he apparently never can read the ladies, or so his even more Gears-built buddy tells him. Perhaps it's just that he's pining over Kerrigan, staring forlornly at her picture. Pre-Zerg transformation picture, of course. "They were...close once," says the clean-shaven forthright ship's captain about Raynor and Kerrigan.

The glimpses of Kerrigan, the psionic warrior converted into an alien queen in the original game, are tantalizing and the story is obviously heading towards some sort of showdown between her and our leading cowboy (wait, isn't that what happened in the Brood Wars expansion pack?). But since Blizzard has split the Starcraft II saga into three separate games, I'm worried there isn't going to be any sort of meaningful resolution. It's space opera verging on soap opera. Tune in next year to find out what happens.

It's going to be so frustrating if there's no payoff, because Blizzard's storytelling is poured on thick. So thick. It practically reeks of money paid to artists and animators, building as best they can into wide gaps between the actual missions, which are so far your typical single-player RTS missions, sadly upstaged by production values shoe-horned into every conceivable corner. It's almost cluttered, almost overwhelming. An arcade machine running a playable scrolling shmup, and a "funny" newscast that would feel right at home in a Ratchet & Clank game, and clickable trophies and pictures on the wall, and a bunch of crew conversations, and screens to choose my upgrades and mercenaries and research, and a juke box with selectable songs that include "Sweet Home Alabama". It's just a cover band, but if you listen closely, you'll later catch a reference to a refugee ship called the Skynard.

All these incidentals make Starcraft II a 12-gigabyte install. Not because of the game. If you pare away all this stuff, you'll find a single-player campaign very much like Dawn of War 2. But unlike Dawn of War 2 developer Relic, Blizzard isn't content with the RTS nerds who are already sold on their game. They want everyone else. And they're going to trap them with thick layers of cowboy soap opera. About 10 gigabyte's worth. It's almost exhausting to those of us who thought we were getting an RTS.

But then I get to the zombie mission and all is forgiven. Yes, a bona fide self-aware zombie mission about a quarter of the way through the storyline.

Tomorrow: They mostly come out at night.

The groundwork is laid for the above Two Worlds II promotional video in episode one, but the comedic talent is obvious even if you come in blind. What makes the video work so well is a combination of being self-deprecating, using clever writing, finding humor even in the editing, and hiring a fantastically funny actress like Suzanne Krull. And you can't very well not give credit to the wonderfully ridiculous Sordohon suit, which was pulled out of a closet where it had been sitting since it was made to promote the original game a few years ago.

I'm predicting this will be the videogame equivalent of the Old Spice Guy campaign. The ongoing series was produced by Two World publisher Southpeak Interactive in collaboration with a comedian named Ian Bagg. Expect at least two more weekly installments. South Peak tells me they've been so pleased with the reaction that they're looking to extend the series beyond the few episodes remaining. Also available soon: "Gandohar calling" ring tones. No joke.

If you played the original Natural Selection, the multiplayer shooter/strategy hybrid that pits a team of marines against a team of aliens, you know that the following bullet points for Natural Selection 2 aren't just hype:

* Truly unique sides. Whether you play as one of the elite marine Frontiersmen or the vicious alien Kharaa, you must use unique strategies and your abilities to win. Marines form persistent squads to find and destroy alien hives. Aliens can choose a wall-running Skulk, pudgy Gorge, flying Lerk, murderous Fade or gigantic Onos that can smash through doors.

* Real-time strategy. Commanders play from overhead to lead their team to victory. Build structures anywhere, collect resources and research upgrades. Marines buy weapons at an Armory or build sentry turrets and siege cannons to assault the enemy. Aliens build chambers, evolve special abilities and plant traps.

* Dynamic environments. Spreading alien infestation deforms hallways and causes space station power failure, turning off lights and shutting down marine powered structures. Use a flamethrower to clear infestation or weld a bulkhead shut for a last defense. Every game is different.

* Unlimited variations. WYSIWYG graphical tools and powerful scripting allow you to create new weapons, scenarios or entirely new games. You'll get all our tools and Lua source code we're using to build NS2. Ongoing automatic updates keep the game fresh by adding new maps, weapons and abilities.

On his blog, David Jaffe lets slip that they're doing live action cinematics for Twisted Metal, the grim but only T-rated driving game for the Playstation 3 that will be the first Twisted Metal since the M-rated Twisted Metal Black.

In case you're like me and worried that live action will look cheesy, Jaffe knows how to get around that.

A good 85% of the shots will be dream like slow motion with Twisted Metal:Black style voice overs. To be 100% frank, that helps reduce the cheese that can sometimes creep into these sorts of game flicks. Some scenes that we showed for comic con may end up feeling too cheese for our taste and so our secret weapon is to slow it down, add the voice over while still seeing the actors talking but no longer hearing the cheese dialogue. Again, most of the slow mo shots were planned way in advance but just so you know: we're looking out for the cheese and if it creeps in, we have a way to eradicate it!

Okay, there's some complicated math involved here, but I'm pretty sure that everyone in MAG, the Playstation 3's fantastic online shooter, gets a new map. To enjoy your new map, you don't have to do anything. Just join a sabotage game -- that's the one where you grab control points in sequence -- and you'll eventually see someplace you've never seen before.

The reason for this is that the rules for maps have changed. Previously, each of the game's three factions has a map that pits it against one of the other factions. While this is cool, it means that you will never see the map fought over by the two factions that aren't yours. This was an incentive to max our your character's level, which made him eligible to switch factions.

But last week, developer Zipper Interactive announced that the sabotage game mode would be "faction neutral" from now on, which meant everyone would be eligible for the map his faction would never seen. According to Zipper's community manager in the article's comments section, there are plans for the same change to at least one other mode as well. Which means another new map is on the way.

UPDATE: Everything you just read is pretty much completely wrong. It turns out that the only thing faction neutrality affects is where you spawn on maps. So you don't get new maps. Instead, you'll just see what the old maps look like from the other side. In other words, factions used to be hard-coded to attacking or defending on certain maps. This is no longer the case.

PC Gamer has posted some rather obvious information about how to use the console to switch Alien Swarm from an overhead view to a first person view. But more importantly, they've discovered that it still plays well, and they've even posted the above video. The only thing missing is a roof!

Pretty nifty, but I'm attached to being able to see what's behind me. You can't always trust the other three players to watch your back. In fact, I think I'd rather play Left 4 Dead from an overhead perspective. What's the console command for that?

Yeah, yeah, Starcraft II. I'll see you in line at a midnight sale. What time should we get there? Should we bring our DSs? Collector's Edition, or just the regular one?

In case sci-fi isn't your thing, Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a historical RTS. It's the follow-up to East India Company, presumably based on addressing some shortcomings of that game. Such as not being set in someplace that matters to dumb Americans (being a dumb American myself, I can say this).

Of course, the real event this week is at long last the release of Clash of the Titans (pictured). Now you can finally play the game of the Sam Worthington movie. Clever marketing strategy. Let the movie bomb and then release the game once the stink of failure has cleared a bit.

There's also an RPG for the Wii called Arc Rise Fantasia. Publisher Ignition sent along a cover letter than included the following advice:

**To avoid spoilers in any planned coverage, we respectfully ask that reviews avoid any and all plot points and narrative twists that occur approximately 30 hours into the game.**

After using her panties to evade the CIA, Angelina Jolie makes a rocket launcher out of a fire extinguisher and cleaning products. But the movie takes an unrealistic turn when she has escaped onto a ledge with her dog and sees through a window a little girl listening to music on a PSP.

Who listens to music on a PSP? People in movies distributed by Columbia Pictures, a division of Sony. That's who.

In case you missed Foxtrot this weekend, click here. Creator Bill Amend is definitely hip to videogaming.

It takes a while to reinstall a copy of Bioshock 2, mainly because there are so many ways the Games for Windows Live part of the reinstall can go wrong. For instance, the above message repeatedly showing up when you try to start the game, even after going to the link to download and install the latest version of Games for Windows Live.

I understand there's a little RTS called Starcraft II coming out next week. In case you're unfamiliar with the story so far, you can see the whole thing on YouTube without having to play a ten-year-old game with a dated graphics engine and horrible interface.

Above is the original game's opening cinematic, but if you go here, it'll page through each bit of the story in sequence. Keep in mind, however, it's not all cutscenes. A lot of the Starcraft story is told in mission briefings and dialog during gameplay. And it's all in these videos.

(Thanks Vesper!)