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If you think Unreal Engine 3 games feature too much gray and brown, laden with "pillars and girders," all being stomped around on by bald space marines, Cliff "Young Clifford" Bleszinski wants you to blame the tech. Speaking with Develop recently, the man that birthed Marcus Fenix said, "The technology of this generation just happens to be very good at rendering metals and stones and dramatic lighting." He argues that "translucent effects" are much harder to pull of with the technology given and as such, "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."

Though we'd argue that there are lots of bald men in our lives who happen to not be space marines -- CheapyD and Dr. Manhattan prime among them -- we can appreciate how Marcus Fenix may be more equipped to take down the Locust than an omnipotent blue man. Wait a minute! Interestingly, Bleszinski also notes during the interview that he's got "like five projects going on right now" -- we're counting Shadow Complex and another (still unannounced) Gears of War, which leaves three unannounced projects? Something is afoot at Epic Games. And it almost certainly involves bald space marines.

NECA had quite the Gears lineup at NYCC's Toy Fair this past weekend, and MTV Multiplayer was there to check it out. Aside from a cute Marcus Munny, attendees could also check out the new Boomer figure, as well as the Ticker, among others. Personally, this blogger is glad to finally see a Colonel Hoffman figure. It sucks not having the toy of the guy you murder countless people online with, you know?

The boys over at GayGamer.net put together a video scrapbook of serious questions they asked members of the gaming press during E3. The series features folks from several of your favorite gaming blogs, sites and magazines. There's no embed code and we referenced a couple of these during the week, but here they all are in one neat, perfectly trimmed, little package with a link to each episode:

• Part 1: Who won the E3 press conference war?
• Part 2: What character or franchise do you hope you never have to see again?
• Part 3: E3, GDC or Pax?
• Part 4: Would you rather sleep with Marcus Fenix or have your Gamerscore reset to zero?
• Part 5: Best game of the show?
• Part 6: Worst game of the show?
• Part 7: What is your E3 pet peeve?
• Part 8: Do you manscape?

GG tells us they'll be doing another video scrapbook at PAX in a couple weeks and asking the same type of hard-hitting introspective questions of random attendees. We definitely had fun with this and hope to see them do it again.

The announcement of Gears of War 2 last week during GDC was a little bit like when your drunk uncle acknowledges the growth on your aunt's face. Yes, everyone knew it was there. But now we can all finally exhale and just talk about it. That's exactly what voice actor John DiMaggio (you know, Marcus Fenix's voice box) did this week with IGN.

It's not exactly megaton-rich, but DiMaggio did let it slip that the Brumak will return, as will Franklin the head of the stranded. Also, expect some new weapons (we're hoping for a musket with hedge clippers attached to it).