GDC: Gears of War 2, Gaming on the Zune

Just announced for this fall: "Gears of War 2," the follow-up to the first must-have game for the Xbox 360. Also: get ready to game, Zune owners.

News of "Gears of War 2" comes out of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, with Epic Games designer CliffyB (a.k.a. Clifford Bleszinski) dramatically taking the stage at the end of Microsoft's Xbox 360 keynote. Details on the sequel, due to hit stores in November and slated as a 360 exclusive, were typically sketchy: CliffyB says the new game will be "bigger, better, and far more bad-ass" (or at least, that's how Wired News is paraphrasing it), but beyond that, we didn't really get anything beyond the title itself.

Also on tap at this year's conference: word that the XNA Game Studio, Microsoft's game development platform, will now allow indie and third-party developers to make games for the Zune. Kotaku reports that upcoming Zune games will be pretty basic, including puzzle games like the addictive "Hexic" and 2-D scrolling shooters; still, it's a good start. The first Zune games should be available later this year.

Good stuff, but what about Netflix on the Xbox 360? Gaming blogs were abuzz with rumors that streaming movies from Netflix would debut on the console at GDC; unfortunately, it didn't happen. Still, the recent survey gauging interest in streaming Netflix videos over the PlayStation 3 and/or Xbox 360 leads me to believe that we'll see such a feature sooner rather than later.

Related:
Live Blogging: Microsoft's GDC Keynote [Wired News]
Liveblogging Microsoft's GDC Presser [Kotaku]