By Adam Hartley

What with this year’s E3 being a somewhat slimmed-down affair, there is a heightened focus on this year’s Games Developers Conference, which takes place in laid-back San Francisco early next month, with some heavyweight keynote speakers including Sony’s Phil Harrison and Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto.

SPOnG will have our men on the ground nabbing interviews and hob-nobbing with many of the games development luminaries at GDC. We’ll also make sure to bring you all the latest games and tech news from the show.

Nokia is said to be announcing the N-Gage mark 2 which, well, we’ll reserve judgement on until we see it. Let’s just say, we hope the Finnish mobile phone giant has learned a few harsh lessons from the N-Gage mark 1!

In terms of key tech demos at the show, Frankfurt-based Crytek (Far Cry and the jaw-droppingly beautiful PC fps Crysis - pictured) will be offering hands-on demos with the CryENGINE 2 middleware both to the public and developers interested in licensing the technology and tools for their own use.

The guys from Epic will also be out in force, demonstrating the latest Unreal Engine 3 features (behind closed doors unfortunately, Joe Public!), as well as having its usual multiple speaker sessions, including the one and only Cliff Bleszinski talking about, yep, you guessed it, designing Gears of War.

However, if you are in search of some good honest trade show fun and frolics, you’ll be glad to know that it’s not all about the middleware, with plenty of late and (no doubt) boozy nights of networking on offer, plus some quality art exhibitions and live music entertainment, courtesy of the ‘i am 8-bit’ group art exhibition and the Video Games Live music show.

The theme for the ‘i am 8-bit’ group art exhibition is simple - over 100 artists put their old-school 80’s gaming memories to paint, ink, sculpture, plush, and other bizarre mediums all in the name of pixels! Described as “the voice of a generation that refuses to let the blips and bleeps fade away” it’s certainly worth a look in if you find yourself with a few spare minutes to kill in San Fran next month.

Finally, the ‘Video Games Live’ concert brings the GDC fun and games to a close, with performances including:

• Nintendo's Koji Kondo, of Zelda, Mario and Star Fox fame, will make a special appearance, and will perform one of his favourite melodies. Tommy Tallarico, producer, said "There is clearly no game music more recognizable around the world than the themes that Mr. Kondo has created over the years."

• Martin Leung, the incredibly talented Video Game Pianist, will debut a new arrangement that he's been working on. Leung is known for his piano takes on various gaming classics.

• A rare special acoustic performance by the original LucasArts composers performing a medley of classics including Monkey Island, Outlaws and Grim Fandango.

• Guitarist (and video game artist) Chris Kline aka "vertexguy" debuting his live synchronized Contra "Jungle Theme" rock-n-roll presentation.

It’s going to be quite a special night, but the tickets don’t come cheap priced at $38.50 to $65, so if you want in then go get them NOW from GDCconf.com!