Major Nelson made a post in response to the uproar from the community over the possibility of more advertising on Xbox 360’s Dashboard, basically telling us all to chillax. According to Nelson, the introduction of Silverlight to the dashboard will not increase the number of ads, but is being integrated in order to enhance the ads we see.

“Silverlight will help make those ads a more organic part of the dashboard, like we’ve done with some of the NXE slots in the past,” says Major Nelson. He continues by stating that Microsoft works directly with “our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the LIVE community.”

This statement, of course, has not stemmed the tide of people comparing Xbox Live to their local cable service and MySpace.

What more can be said about Alpha Protocol, one of the year’s most anticipate titles? In addition to various videos and news announcements, we have given some eyes-on time direct from E3. It is not like we have a developer’s diary, some official box art, and a release date or anything. Oh wait…

The spy RPG, due to be released on October 6, can be seen in the above video featuring some of the developers talking about how the interactions you perform affect your character in the game. Never knowing who to trust, who is your ally, or what happens if you sex up the Russian woman, could be the cause for many restarted games.

Actually, it sounds like a page from the diary of our editor-in-chief.

Valve loves me, Valve loves me not. Valve loves me, Valve loves me not. This is what you might overhear if you were to listen in on a PS3 in a field playing with a flower trying to figure out what its relationship with Valve is. Apparently the on again off again relationship is on again. Valve’s man about town Doug Lombardi reveals that PS3 support is a matter of getting the right people. “If you look at The Orange Box — PC: 96 on Metacritic, 360: 96 on Metacritic, PS3 like… 84 or something. That’s not even close to where we are right now with the 360 and PC and the reason is people,” he explains and also reveals that Valve is looking to get the right people. “..we have to get people under our roof who are dedicated, talented PS3 guys and then all bets are off.”

This is great news for PS3 fans who don’t have other platforms to play Valve games on as it certainly looks like PS3 will eventually get supported but by Valve directly, meaning players will get more than just a crappy port. Of course this is all new developments and it’s apparent they’re still working on assembling a team but this news likely means serious support for the PS3 sometime in the future. So if you’re a skilled PS3 developer looking for work, I’m sure Valve would love to hear from you.

Perhaps answering the call of many concerned fans it appears that Valve has plans to support Left 4 Dead after all and has promised to let us know what’s going on by the summer’s end. “We plan to keep supporting Left 4 Dead 1. There will be some announcements coming before summer’s out about what’s coming there, and then we haven’t shown everything that’s in Left 4 Dead 2 yet,” explains Valve’s marketing guru Doug Lombardi.

Lombardi went on again explaining how in 6-8 months when people get to see more of Left 4 Dead 2 they won’t be so freaked out. But instead of beating that horse to death we’ll move on and tell you that Lombardi confirmed the DLC to be both PC and Xbox 360 releases. He also mentioned that there will be a demo with multiplayer for L4D2 as well as continuing the Valve tradition of free play weekends.

In order to introduce their game to the audience and create a bit of hype around it, companies usually release materials like developer diaries about their game before said game is actually released. But with ArmA II, 505 Games has chosen to do things a little bit differently and release the first video in what’s to be a series of developer diaries two weeks after the European launch of the game itself. But regardless of the timing, the diaries certainly don’t seem to be an afterthought as this first one alone clocks in at a solid nine minutes. And what’s shown and talked about here is just the basic controls and principles of the game — like the most effective ways of moving, shooting (the word “realistic” is thrown around quite a bit) — so it looks like the developers are planning on chatting about quite a few things before they’re done with the series.

It appears that despite community outrage and growing boycott of Left 4 Dead 2 some players actually do want the game. So much so that, according to Valve’s Doug Lombardi, pre-orders for the sequel have doubled what the first game held from the same place in the release cycle. “Our pre-orders are currently double what they were for Left 4 Dead 1 at this point in time away from launch, we’re like 20 weeks out or something like that,” explains Lombardi.

Lombardi also touches on the community reaction to the announcement for Left 4 Dead 2 and its potential boycott by some players. “I think there was a little bit of confusion that we created unintentionally, by announcing a sequel and not having the complete story ready: announcing it and not saying, there’s still a lot of stuff being worked on for Left 4 Dead 1, and the mod tools will work with both games. I think that, over time, folks will see what we’re up to, and there’s more of this story to be told in terms of what’s to come for both games.”

The boycotters will more than likely chalk this comment up either as a victory for them or as Valve making promises they don’t actually intend to follow through on. Either way it appears Valve has listened to at least part of the boycotter’s tantrums even if the outrage was rash and pre-mature.

I don’t like The Sims. Never have. And unless the game’s very essence is turned on its head, probably never will. I even dislike it to a point where it has become something I can actually be threatened with. But what I do like is creative advertising. And it just so happens that a new video for The Sims 3 that EA has sent out is just that, making for an odd mix of a thing I strongly dislike being shown in a light I really like. Well done EA, that’s one point for you.

You’re bored of bald guys running around grey environments. I’m bored of bald guys running around grey environments. We’re all bored of… you get the point.

According to Cliff “Giant Banana” Bleszinski, the reason for this over-used design aesthetic is Epic’s seemingly ubiquitous Unreal Engine 3. Speaking to Develop (via Joystiq), the man behind the king of bald, grey games - Gears of War - explained that the visual style simply plays to the engine’s strengths. “The technology of this generation just happens to be very good at rendering metals and stones and dramatic lighting,” said Bleszinski, continuing, “The tech is good at showing off armor and it’s not that good at doing hair… that’s why we have bald space marines.”

Bleszinski also reveals that Epic currently have “like five projects going on right now.” We know about Shadow Complex and we can presume Gears of War 3 is hiding behind cover, but the others? We don’t know. Just don’t go expecting anything with rainbow unicorns and fairy-dust… Unless, y’know, it’s metal unicorns and crumbled concrete fairy-dust.

Sadly that’s all we know. Fez, every independent gamer’s crush, has finally found itself a platform and a release date — early 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade. I already had to repeat the title. See the image above? It’s a screenshot of Polytron’s website. That’s not the image that came with the an announcement, that’s the whole article.

So what’s Fez and why should you care? Well, a long time ago Polytron showed off a 2D/3D game at the 2008 Independent Games Festival. It won some awards and made an impression. Gameplay was some kind of mixture of Super Paper Mario and Echochrome with a Katamari Damacy paint job and a pixelated art style. Imagine that kind of pedigree and try not to be excited. Even more cool, and definitely worth some indie game cred, Polytron is comprised of 3 employees. Not as impressive as that game that came out last year made by one guy, but with dev teams reaching the hundreds it’s still pretty amazing.

And now, with great elation, I get to say this. Look for Fez when it hits consoles some time early 2010 on the Xbox Live Arcade. Woo Hoo.

Dan Hsu is the guy many people credit with running EGM into the ground, which is kind of ridiculous considering it was the internet and gaming blogs (sorry!) that really did it. Still, the man is a prolific figure in the world of gaming journalism, and if you follow him now you know he is totally rocking it over at Bitmob. However, with the news that EGM is coming back he must be a little jealous that the print publication he used to call his baby is now coming from elsewhere, right?

The guys over at Crispy Gamer decided to find out while talking to Hsu about his former company and everything that went down after the magazine folded and Ziff Davis sold 1Up.com. Hsu says he’s excited the magazine is coming back, but is wary. “A lot of people were excited [about the announcement]. The biggest surprise to me was seeing comments from people saying ‘I’m already planning to be a subscriber.’ Maybe $20 doesn’t mean a lot to these people, so it’s low risk for them, but to me, I need to know what the magazine’s about and who’s working on it before I can get excited about something like that, you know what I mean? What makes EGM “EGM” are the personalities involved, the quality of writing, the features that you do. All of that really has to do with the staff that we had and the people that we had working behind the scenes,” he said.

So, will you be jumping on the new EGM bandwagon or are you just as wary as Mr. Hsu is about the whole thing? I can tell you I’ve already set aside my subscription money, so it better be good.