Today's requisite knowledge is this: Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia. You've done been school'd!

News Blips:

The Bratislava Game Expo will have new, exclusive information about Mass Effect 3. While EA will be showing off several of their big games at the European exposition, the biggest get has to be anything new about Bioware's space opera. No details yet about what the information will be, but this will certainly get some buzz going around the comparatively small BGE show. The event runs from March 18-20 and is €12.90 to attend. Bratislava was good to me when I was there a few years ago, so I really hope this show takes off and becomes Europe's version of PAX -- it would give me a reason to return to Partyslava!

Brink will have several different pre-set control schemes ripped directly from your favorite shooters. Anyone who plays a lot of first-person shooters knows that trying to go from Halo to Call of Duty can lead to a lot of reloading when you meant to throw a grenade. Our brains get hard-wired to one method, and then it takes hours of practice to rewire. Instead of trying to force players to adapt to their design choices, however, Brink-developer Splash damage decided to include multiple setups that players should recognize. Here are the names of the schemes and the game that each is lifted from:

"Duty Calls" -- Call of Duty
"Green Marine Chief" -- Halo
"Zone of Killing" -- Killzone
"Oh My Gears" -- Gears of War
"Field of Battle" -- Battlefield
"Zombie Killer" -- Left 4 Dead

Bethesda announces that Prey 2 is in development for a 2012 release. Human Head Studios is working on the sequel and is using the id Tech 5 engine. This may be more exciting because this is only the third known game to be created using the updated graphical suite powering Rage and Doom 4. This will be Human Head Studio's first game since 2006's Prey, which begs the question: Have they been living sweet on all that Prey 1 money this whole time?

PAX East 2011 attendance outpaces its west coast brother. Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade ended last year's PAX East with the promise that they would be back the following year in a bigger venue. They followed through on that by cramming thousands upon thousands of nerds into the Boston Convention and Expo Center. The official attendance count for this year's PAX East totaled 69,500. In comparison, that is more than PAX Prime 2010's record of 67,600 and the first PAX East's 52,290. It makes me wonder if diseases put out news blips like these to say that they infected a record number of people after an event like this.

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