Like momma always said, if you're gonna effect change, the best place to be is on the inside. Avni Yerli, managing director and co-founder of Crytek, has joined the GDC Europe advisory board, where together with existing members he hopes to "create a conference that will hit the industry's nerve."

GDC Europe's Frank Sliwka put it another way, offering hope that Yerli's membership will "elevate the conference to a whole new level." Let's just hope the board's processors can handle the stress without -- dare we say it -- crying.

The trouble stems from the continuing row between Think Services, owner of the "GDC" trademark and organizer of Game Developers Conference, and Howell Expo, which is allegedly using the GDC trademark illegally for its China GDC event. You see, Think Services is also planning an "official" Game Developers Conference for China to take place in October. Howell's China GDC event is scheduled for July.

Think Services has been placing legal pressure on its GDC partner companies, discouraging them from attending or otherwise promoting what it sees as a fraudulent and competing China GDC. We'd suggest that our readers, at least for the time being, refrain from organizing any sort of summit, conference or gathering that could be shortened to "GDC," such as the "Gnome Dating Conference," "Gnu Dance Competition" or "Greatest Dumpling Challenge." Trust us, it's for your own good.

If you thoroughly enjoyed Mega64's video shenanigans at last year's Independent Games Festival Awards show, brace yourselves for round two. This year's IGF Awards featured a pair of clips from the comedic quartet, both of which you can find posted after the jump.

The first video is aptly titled IF YOU'RE NOT INDIE, F**K YOU, and features a bunch of people getting punched in the face, except The Behemoth co-founder Dan Paladin, who is, as legend tells us, unpunchable. The second video, Topher Great Payens: "The GDC" (an homage to the equally unsettling Shine on Me by renowned musician Chris Dane Owens) is, well, extremely bizarre. Or extremely arousing. We haven't decided yet.

Guha Bala, president and co-founder of Vicarious Visions, took us through several levels of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, showing off the new features that will be available in this sequel. Most notable among these is the "Power Fusion" function where two heroes can combine their powers for great justice.

You can check out the new images from the game below, and a new Iron Fist video and highlights after the break.

You didn't think that was it, right? Following up on part 1 of our interview with sounds-too-good-to-be-true cloud gaming platform OnLive's Steve Perlman from yesterday comes ... part 2! In our final installment, we ask about bandwidth caps, cable box integration, DLC, server cost, privacy concerns, second-hand sales, classic games, and more! Don't believe us? We know, Steve Perlman wants you to be skeptical, but read on!

Joystiq: So you're working with developers. Say you're working with Ubisoft on Prince of Persia, is that Prince of Persia the same exact Prince of Persia that would be on the PC? Are they changing parts of the game and if so what are they changing? What are the differences?

Steve Perlman: It's the exact same Prince of Persia and the only things that are being changed are really externalities like, you know, if you pick up a controller we've got to recognize the buttons the right away. For example, you can't change the resolution to anything other than HD, but even if OnLive figures out that your speed or your connection is too low and they've got to make it small screen, it still runs in HD and anybody who's spectated you sees you in HD; or if you do a Brag clip it saves in HD. So, we don't want you to changing the resolution. So, there's a couple of switches to turn off. We don't want you to bring up the Windows dialogue box for saving games. I don't know about that particular game, but some games, it actually shows the Windows so that you can navigate through the hierarchy for saving games. You know, we've to disable those kinds of things. The actual gameplay is the same.

Then you were talking about something like FIOS for example, that really improves the experience?

It doesn't improve the experience; it just lets you go further away from the service center.

Early last week, a new gaming startup was announced, kicking off GDC with an immense focus on "cloud computing" and, specifically, "cloud gaming." Everywhere you turned, people were talking about OnLive. "Can it be done?" or "Sounds too good to be true." You may have heard some of this debate on our podcast or in the comments on our announcement post. We gathered up a lot of that skepticism and barged into Steve Perlman's office (read: the OnLive booth) and demanded answers. The interview was quite long, so we'll be bringing it to you over three days, beginning ... now:

Joystiq: So OnLive ...

Steve Perlman: Yeah!

First, congrats on the launch ...

Thank you.

Everybody's asking, "What's going on at GDC? What's the thing this year?" You know, it's not LittleBigPlanet this year and it's not Gears of War 2. I think the biggest thing at the show, in terms of buzz, in terms of coverage, has to be OnLive. So, congratulations on that.

Thanks.

But there's a second side to that buzz story. Everyone's talking about it, but they're all saying the same thing: "Yeah, it sounds really good, but ... it also sounds like magic."

Uh-huh.

Little Mac is definitely back, and he brought Doc Louis with him. He's also hauling a heck of a lot more pixels this time around, and we're happy to report that Punch-Out!! is indeed still fun to play. The Nintendo booth (the largest and lone major gaming publisher on the show floor) was showing off Punch-Out!! on a few stations, although sadly without the Balance Board functionality that's coming to the game.

It did show off four of the thirteen total fighters, including Glass Joe, Von Kaiser, King Hippo, and the newcomer, Disco Kid. He looks like what you'd get if you crossed Mike Tyson with Ric Flair, and pulled him through a Disney movie animation wringer. He likes to primp, check himself out in a mirror, and pose for the crowd. Little Mac learned the lesson about the dangers of vanity long ago, so there's no such worry. Head after the break and start training, Punch-Out!! comes out on the Wii this May.

Game designer Stone Librande works at EA/Maxis as a game designer, and we mean he designs games quite literally. Whenever developers run into problems, they'll bring Stone in to create paper versions of the project in order to solutioneer a fix. He worked on Spore in the early days of the Cell Stage development, and had so much stuff rattling around in his head that he created a cell level game on the side of his refrigerator. For free.

He said they might not always turn out to be fun, but they do aid as a tool in the development process, especially since it's hard to get everyone to gather around a computer screen to check a problem out... but they'll actually come out of hiding to check out paper gaming pieces. We want to design a board game to fix issues at Joystiq, and then fight over who controls the pewter Justin McElroy gamepiece. Check out his "Aperture Science meets Left 4 Dead" board game above, and a gallery of more of his creations below. Just imagine what his board game collection must look like.

There's definitely been a steep drop in the amount of booth babes over the past few years at GDC, and the lone holdout seems to be N-Gage. They have a lot of silver jumpsuit-clad babes, complete with space-age utility belts around their waists, urging people to come into their mobile space. One girl was actually clapping loudly to try and lure in the shuffling hordes of developers, not to much avail.

We still salute you, oh valiant babes of the booth. In a very non-sexist manner.

Hey game devs – got any great ideas? How about a dual-stick shooter set in the late twenty-first century? Or maybe a first-person shooter about a super soldier fighting a religious war on a ring-shaped planet? Hey, those are both great ideas!

... but don't tell us, tell game designers Eugene Jarvis and Alex Seropian at the DePaul GDC Design Challenge booth. If you're the big winner, you'll net a PS3 and, of course, the admiration of your peers. We'll stop by the booth to find out the winning pitch, today at 4:30pm PT.

Like Naughty Dog before it, Sucker Punch is attempting to transform its success as a cartoonish platformer developer into a mature, (dare we say) realism-based game designer. The leap from Sly Cooper into the open-world inFamous is a giant one, but Sucker Punch's inaugural PS3 effort is shaping up to be one of those games that justifies your shiny, black console.

One of the levels on hand at GDC was "Food Drop," as Sucker Punch calls it. Our mission began on Cole McGrath's rooftop shanty retreat where his fat buddy Zeke was lounging on a couch, reading a graphic novel. Cole, hard-working bike messenger and the game's protagonist, is already aware of his electrifying power, but hasn't quite realized the full extent of this "great responsibility." Cue: Zeke wanting to watch television; predicament: the batteries aren't charged. You can guess what happens next ... training! Hold L1 to charge up your inner-electricity, and press L2 to fire it. TV ON!

Well, yet another Konami event without any peep of MGS4 on Xbox 360 and, if you follow Kojima's chart of Metal Gear progression, it doesn't sound like it's ever happening. Next up is a new project -- "the next MGS" -- coupling Western development techniques, with an advance in hardware and game design to hopefully create Kojima's apparently-still-unfulfilled goal of bringing us "the ultimate stealth game." Maybe then, Kojima will be able to finally leave the Metal Gear series behind.

Head past the break for complete coverage of the Kojima keynote (updated from bottom to top).

During GDC's "Braving the Stormy Waters of XBLA and PSN: Smaller is NOT Easier" panel, Mike Mika of Backbone Entertainment spotted some of his former ngmoco coworkers in the audience and said, "Hey! It's good to see some ngmofos out there!" What's the slang term for Joystiq employees?

Hey game makers, we're writing this post just for you. That's right, regular people, you can tune right out starting now. Just turn it off. Zone out. Do whatever it is common people do.

Are we alone? Alright, here's the deal: this summer Microsoft will be releasing a new blue-tinted Xbox 360 XDK Development Kit for developers, which not only adds some cool blue styling to the extra-tall dev profile, but doubles the console's memory to 1GB (a just-for-devs feature, of course). Until you can totally get one of your own in a couple months, stare at some more images in the gallery below ... since you're a developer ... since everyone else stopped reading, just like we asked.