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Jesse Schell, former Disney Imagineer and current professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is what you call a forward thinker. Nearly every talk he’s given in recent years has been about where he thinks games are headed, and how they’ll influence the world around us. His talk at this year's GDC was no different. He discussed, amongst other things, what he considers to be the future of storytelling in games. In typical Schell fashion, it was compelling, it was optimistic, and best of all, it was bold.

PlayFirst, a global leader of casual family games and the creators of the popular Diner Dash franchise have announced today their hiring of Tom Hall, the industry veteran who brought us such genre smashing hits as DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D. The announcement seems to continue the ongoing trend of mobile developers scooping up some serious talent, which is certainly a good thing for all of us who own a tablet or smartphone!

Free-to-play may be a major part of our industry these days, but not everyone’s a fan. From outspoken Internet commentors to developers concerned with how it influences game design, there’s long been an undercurrent of negative backlash just below the model’s wave of success. Brenda Romero falls somewhere in the middle of all this. There are things she can’t stand about the model, and other aspects she enjoys. In her GDC talk, titled “Free-to-Play: The Morning After,” Romero provided the audience with a summary of her feelings, as well as her personal experience with free-to-play gaming.

The waiting is the hardest part of post-Kickstarter anticipations, especially when the game you’re waiting for is the spiritual successor to a series left untouched for nearly fourteen years.  Fans of Jane Jensen and her Gabriel Knight trilogy find consolation in knowing Moebius will be made, but an assured future existence does little to quell the hysteria-inducing impatience of “I want it now!”  Luckily, a brand new trailer and website should help ease your Moebius anxiety.  Or make it worse, but that’s a risk worth taking.

Few developers are capable of tripping players out like Keita Takahashi. Best known as the maestro behind the Katamari series and the equally weird Noby Noby Boy, he has a knack for designing kooky, charming, and occasionally downright crazy games. Tenya Wanya Teens, one of his latest, follows in those footsteps quite nicely, and in fact might be his oddest release yet.

If you set your WABAC machines to 54 weeks ago, you’ll arrive at a time that was very different for Zynga.  Their stock was hovering around $13 a share, and they were riding high on a wave of successful acquisitions and the prospect of a bright year ahead.  It was in this environment that Zynga made its most notable acquisition to date: the $180 million purchase of New York-based Draw Something creators OMGPOP.  As part of that purchase, Zynga retained OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter to lead the team at Zynga NY.

With a funding round of $8.5 million from an A-List of investors back in September, and the recent successful launch of Mini Golf MatchUp on both iOS and Android platforms, Scopely is clearly doing something special.  The question is, what?  Is Scopely trying to be the next big mobile publisher, platform, both?  The answer, according to CBO Andy Kleinman, is none of the above.

Touch screen controls aren't often accepting of side-scrolling platformers. The level of precision seen in games like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog is often understated. Sometimes, a game comes along and reminds us just how important tight controls can be. There's a bit of upside to Super Daddio 2, but a sloppy control scheme and other fundamental issues create a handful of problems.

Behold Studios already took us on one great geeky trip down memory lane, and the developers are getting ready to do it again. Knights of Pen & Paper: +1 Edition will recreate and expand upon the mobile homage to traditional RPGs and eight-bit graphics for a wider range of platforms thanks to publisher Paradox Interactive. And if you understand what the “+1” means without further explanation, you’re probably perfect for this game.

Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.  That’s what my grandmother always told me. But to heck with good luck!  I’d rather have good games!  And with a few hundred pennies (or in the case of our iOS picks, none at all), you can pick up some real hum dingers this weekend.

As the millions of players who have already tried World of Tanks have already discovered, blasting away at other players from your own 20^th Century war machine is a lot of fun. But taking that same experience and putting it on mobile devices? Now you’re in Gamezebo’s wheelhouse! Wargaming.net is obliging us and mobile gamers everywhere by preparing World of Tanks Blitz to roll onto iOS and Android in the near future.

Unlike most games in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Leisure Suit Larry series dared to be risqué. The creators didn’t shy away from then-taboo content like sexual humor and nudity, which is one of the reasons we still remember the series so fondly today. The other reason, of course, is that many of the games were incredibly solid point-and-click adventure titles. And with a Kickstartered remake of the first game in the series coming soon, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend a little time with it at this year’s GDC.

Frontline Commando: D-Day is the latest 3D freemium action game from Glu Mobile, the makers of a number of hugely successful games that fit that same description, like Gun Bros. and Blood & Glory. D-Day is also a spiritual successor to 2011’s Frontline Commando, which featured a much more modern setting and storyline than this World War II title. But in combining elements of traditional console games, with the fluidity and accessible nature of the mobile platform, Frontline Commando: D-Day is everything a handheld shooter should be.

If you’ve been searching for the next great action-adventure game to play on your mobile device, then look no further, because Magicka is here. Taking everything that made the PC Magicka titles so great and refining them further, the best way that I can describe Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet is that it plays like a mobile touchscreen version of games like Castle Crashers; and yes, it’s as amazing as it sounds.

With Nimble Quest, NimbleBit had nothing to prove, but a lot to gain. Earlier releases Pocket Frogs, Tiny Tower, and Pocket Planes had cemented the indie trio as masters of time management, and a studio to watch. That their next title would be a quality release was almost a foregone conclusion. And yet, from the earliest leaks to the most recent footage, this game stuck out as the biggest departure yet from the company's tried-and-true compulsion loop. A chance to show that NimbleBit wasn't a one-genre wonder. A chance I'm very glad they took. 

It seems like everyone’s favorite speedy blue hedgehog has been zooming all over the mobile scene this last year, with the well-received Sonic Dash releasing earlier this month, and Sonic Jump releasing a little while before that. And now this week at GDC, SEGA has announced that the original Sonic the Hedgehog is being remastered and headed to iOS and Android platforms this spring. 

We cover plenty of new games here at Gamezebo every week, but the number of games we’ve already covered that show up on new platforms?  It’s staggering.  This Wednesday and every Wednesday, Gamezebo is rounding up the games that aren’t quite new, but might be new to you depending on your platform of choice.  And who doesn't love new(ish) games?

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that The Room was the best iPad game to be released in 2012.  And by go out on a limb, I mean “agree with every iPad owner on the planet, as well as Gamezebo’s own Best of 2012 list).  The box within a box within a box provided more puzzlers per second than any game I’ve had the joy of encountering; the only complaint being that there isn’t more of it.

Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures that are best, like popping bubble wrap. PUK is one such game, with a simple repetitive action that turns out to be far more fun and satisfying than it has any right to be. 

The designer and producer of Ecco the Dolphin is jumping into the Kickstarter sea to fund the development of a "spiritual successor" called The Big Blue.