Nick Lee is one of the artists who worked on Trino, but he perks up like a designer when he chats about mechanics. This comes in handy when you want to talk about a shooter that undermines its most fundamental genre convention. Check the full interview for what makes a a shooter a puzzle game, Trino’s history, and some hints about the team’s future plans.

When 2D gaming was king, the streets ran red with brawlers. You couldn’t swing a sharp stick without hitting a musclebound high-schooler out to save his kidnapped girlfriend from local gangs of unreasonably skilled martial artists. Then 2D gaming went dormant, and notable brawlers all but ceased to be, with only God of War to mark their passing. Now that the rise of casual gamers has emphasized portable systems and downloadable content, tiny games are big again, and brawlers like The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai have returned to wreak their bloody vengeance on our thumbs. Despite the superficial similarities to erstwhile brawlers, The Dishwasher inherits more from God of War than Double Dragon, and is all the better for it.

Underperforming Live Arcade titles can breathe a collective sigh of relief today because they’ll live to see another day. In response to complaints that it’s just too difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, Microsoft had earlier promised to cull underperforming games from its download service.

Microsoft has conditionally rescinded the threat, releasing that they have developed a list of exclusion criteria and are content with that for now. This announcement comes in advance of an Xbox Dashboard update intended in part to improve the accessibility of Live Arcade. However, uncharitable analysts have no doubt noticed that the company now has a gun to the heads of some of its developers.

Longtime readers may recall a post bemoaning that cooperative multiplayer is hard to come by and harder to do right. Schizoid disagrees. It’s a top-down two-player game where each player controls either a red or a blue avatar. Enemies are color-coded too, and colliding with like-colored baddies destroys them while other colors destroy you instead. You arguably could control both avatars (and there’s a game mode called Überschizoid that lets you try just that: one analog stick per avatar), but it’s not recommended unless your corpus callosum has been severed.

Schizoid is presently available on XBox Live, though the XBLA strictures on demos don’t allow multiplayer. Still, you can fake it by grabbing a significant other and snuggling together to share one controller on Überschizoid, so give it a shot anyway.

We talked to Schizoid’s Richard Garfield about the game’s roots, cooperative gaming in general, and digital distribution. Hit the jump for the details.

Mike Henry of Twisted Pixel Games was on hand to tell us about his adorable purple people eater, The Maw. The game is a third-person action adventure that you’d get if Jak and Daxter crossbred with Ico, and the baby was a craven purple eating machine (and adorable to boot). The player actually controls Frank, a blue alien with a high-tech leash that in turn controls the Maw. You direct the little predator to eat and grow and do all the heavy lifting that requires no courage at all. Frank gets stuck with everything else.

The Maw doesn’t have a scheduled release date yet, but you can check out the trailer at the official site to get a sense of what to expect when it hits XBLA. In the meantime, click the jump to find out more about Frank, how the Maw got so cute, and how feasible it is to make a lot from a little as a developer.