Battlefield 1943 is the next game in the acclaimed multiplayer shooter series, and I travelled to Sweden to be the first person in the world to play it. It will be downloadable-only on Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and PC.

Start/Select this week focusses on DICE, the development team behind the incredibly successful Battlefield series and the recent Mirror’s Edge. The offices is one of the most lavishly-designed development centres in the world, and we were given full access.

For the GameSpot UK Podcast, we invited the writers behind The Guinness Book of World Records Gamer’s Edition onto the show They tell us about writing their second annual compendium, while CNET UK’s Nate Lanxon joins us to talk about completing Gears of War 2 on insane.

Returning the favour, I also appeared on the CNET UK Podcast to talk to the team about taxing the internet, Gears of War PC problems, and all the other big news from the tech world. The CNET UK Podcast is well worth listening to anyway, so subscribe in iTunes to get it delivered to you every Friday.

On the preview side, I also attended a Sega event to speak to Sonic creator Yuki Naka and see his new game Let’s Tap, as well as Hearts of Iron 3 from Paradox. This week, I’ll be talking to the composer behind Killzone 2 in central London, and reviewing PlayStation Network title Flower.

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I also captured a bunch of HD footage on the game and posted it to YouTube in HD, some of which are available below.

Here’s one I also took in-game and then uploaded to the FIFA servers. The upload process is painfully slow, and doesn’t seem to have worked out right for me, but it’s a nifty little feature nonetheless.

We managed to see how the Buzz! team is currently expanding on the first PS3 game with PlayStation Eye features, allowing people to take photos as they beat people around the world. Then it was 100m down the road to Black Rock, with their very impressive new racing game Pure. As a fan of stunt-based racers like Motorcross Madness, I can’t wait to play more of this incredibly polished racer.

Aside from the seeing the games, it was great to spend the day hanging out in a game-making environment. Relentless and Black Rock may be close enough to see into each other’s windows, but they’re very different companies too. Relentless has enjoyed massive success making casual games, and perhaps reflecting this emerging market, the studio imposes a strict 9-5 working day for its employees. Black Rock, personally selected by Disney head Robert Iger to push the company further into the videogame market, has a more traditional feel but still retains an element of fun. There’s free ice cream on hand, toys in the meeting rooms, and Black Rock-branded sweets in the form of…well, black sticks of rock. They are in Brighton, after all.

What both teams had in common though was a genuine sense of passion and energy for their respective titles–these are definitely places we could have spent longer at. Finally, it was great to see GameSpot user WillMorkai join us for the Relentless visit, who won after entering a competition on our forums. Relentless spent time explaining game development to Will, and they seemed to be genuinely interested in discovering his opinions about the games market. As a potential games programmer, I wouldn’t be surprised if young Will finds himself at Relentless Software again sometime in the future.

In short, it’s days like these that make you glad you’re working in the games industry. Our Brighton special edition of Start/Select will be up on Friday, so stay tuned for our full interviews with these two leading studios. In the meantime, here are some photos I took of the day.