We chat up the three big winners of the 2011 Indie Games Challenge.

Today On the Spot we take a look at This Week on XBL and PC and bust some caps with a demo of Homefront and Operation Flashpoint: Red River, and Ricardo Torres interviews winners from the Indie Game Challenge at DICE. We also sit down with Rockstar and talk L.A. Noire.

We chat with Rob Nelson of Rockstar Games about the art and technology of L.A. Noire.

EA and Criterion Games bringing three new, $7 add-ons for cops-and-robbers racer beginning February 22.

We spend some quality time with the career mode in Capcom’s more accessible take on the motorcycle sim genre.

If there were ever a sim racing game just dying to give you a hug, Moto GP 10/11 is it. The series has long been known as a destination for hardcore motorcycle enthusiasts, with its no-frills presentation and straightforward driving model. Sure, there has always been a bit of spectacle in those gaudy leathers and helmets, as well as the constant possibility of witnessing an assuredly awesome 10-bike pileup in the rain, but the racing itself has always been pretty geared toward, well, gearheads. Moto GP 10/11 can still be that game…but it doesn’t have to be.

It’s the first game in the series to offer a suite of purely optional driving assists for you to tweak and fine-tune the experience to suit your own personal racing competence. After getting my first taste back in January of how these assists affect the experience, Capcom was kind enough to send us over an updated build so we could spend a little more time with the newly hug-friendly Moto GP.

Having got a pretty good idea of how the various assists can have an impact on the experience in my last look at Moto GP 10/11, I decided to jump headfirst into career mode to see what sort of progression the game offers. The first thing I did was create a new racing team called “McShea Bikes” after GameSpot’s resident motorcycle legend Tom McShea. (OK, so Tom doesn’t really know anything about motorsports, but I did once sign him up for Truckin’ magazine as a prank.) Next up, I created custom team branding with a sweet neon green and pink color scheme on both our racing leathers and bike liveries. Needless to say, the look of McShea Bikes has been a hit in the office.

With my team fully established, it was time to start racing. I went with the default medium assist level, which enables aids such as traction control, anti-wheelie, and auto weight transfer so you need only steer into corners rather than shift your weight around as well. Assists that are left disabled on medium, however, include auto-braking and auto-tucking for when you’re gunning it on the straights. I’m by no means a motorcycle racing expert, but I was able to do pretty well with this difficulty level. I finished seventh in my first race in the Grand Prix of Qatar and then went on to nab first in my second race at Gran Premio de Espana.

Feeling confident in my results, I decided to disable a few of the assists such as anti-wheelie and auto weight transfer. Naturally, this led to a much tougher racing experience, and I spent an awful lot more time tumbling on the ground than atop the first-place podium. Fortunately, Moto GP 10/11 preserves the rewind button new to last year’s game. You can use it as much as you want, on the lower difficulty levels, though bumping the difficulty up will disable the rewind button entirely.

After settling into the groove of racing without those initial assists turned on, I went back to racking up top-level finishes and managed to acquire a pretty decent amount of cash. Like in last year’s Moto GP, you can use accrued money to fill out your team staff, including hiring PR managers. After a while, you can also nab sponsors who will pay you bonuses based on how you finish.

Another feature I tried out was the local split-screen co-op racing. The name itself is a bit misleading, as it’s actually two different people on two different bikes. Essentially, you can have a second player join you at any time during the career mode events. The player will be outfitted in your team colors, and any earnings he or she pulls in go toward your team’s overall cash pool. It’s a neat little feature that helps to occasionally alleviate the loneliness of playing a long, drawn-out offline career mode–and you can also team up surprisingly well.

That about does it for our experience with the Moto GP 10/11 career mode. If you’re eager for more, you can expect to see our review arrive around the time of the game’s release on March 15. Stay tuned!

Hot new MLB 2K11 action in this new trailer!

Check out the official trailer for Shoot Many Robots.

Perfect the art of kicking butt in this trailer.

Check out this Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit trailer highlighting the new content packs.

What was supposed to be a three-hour tour aboard a tiny ship turns into an undead nightmare when developer Techland leaves us stranded in its first-person brawler Dead Island.

It has been a while since we were last marooned on Dead Island back at the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo. Now we’re back again alongside developer Techland for another brisk outing in its zombie apocalypse, armed with a wooden boat oar and a pocketful of experience points. Our own personal hell: a tropical paradise turned tropical wasteland brimming with death and beautifully rendered in the same engine as Call of Juarez. We recently sat down to watch a demonstration of what it’s like to go face-to-face with the walking dead in this gruesome first-person brawler…armed with little more than a oar.

This massive island of death is yours to explore, but at your own peril.

Dead Island is all about getting extremely up close and personal with hordes of zombies. Your arsenal is a near-endless supply of mundane items scattered across the ravaged island, including wooden oars, machetes, and the occasional gun or two. If you’re feeling creative, you can combine certain items to make powerful new weapons, a la Dead Rising 2, provided you have the right blueprints. Once you have armed yourself with the deadliest vacation items imaginable, it’s time to take the fight to the horde. You can fight in one of two ways–we saw both styles in action with an Xbox 360 gamepad. The first, analog, uses one analog stick for movement and the other for arm control. This unique setup looks like it will take some getting used to, but it does allow you more control over the strength and arc of each swing. The second, digital, is a more-traditional setup that will be familiar to anyone who has played console action games. The analog sticks are dedicated to movement, while all the attacks are mapped to the face buttons.

The four unlucky people you will be controlling are described as a leader, a tank, an assassin, and a jack-of-all-trades. Each of these characters brings something unique to the profession of zombie killing and can be further specialized by leveling up and progressing down one of three skill trees. The leader, for instance, can be specialized to boost his party’s performance or maximize his effectiveness with the island’s limited gun supply. Techland wants to give you plenty of options for dealing with the deceased by loading up each character with plenty of active skills. These skills can then be used in concert with other player’s skills to devastating effect, such as using the tank’s ability to knock enemies prone followed by the assassin’s ability to quickly slay foes.

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