Digital Blend: The new iPad, GDC 2012 and a sequel for Flight Control

Welcome to the GDC 2012 edition of Digital Blend! I’ll be looking at mobile games, digital marketplace content available through your favorite gaming consoles and handhelds, downloadable content packs, and indie PC releases. There’s a wide world of gaming out there that isn’t being propped up on GameStop shelves week after week, and we want to make sure you know about what’s hot.

Please keep on tweeting any feedback or suggestions my way @geminibros, or share them in the comments below. We want this to grow and evolve every week to suit what you all want, so please feel free to share your thoughts.

Making headlines…

* Firemint is returning to its mobile hit Flight Control later this month with the release of the sequel, Flight Control Rocket. I got to take a look at the game and even take it for a spin earlier this week. In addition to moving the action to outer space, Rocket adds persistent features like unlockable perk-like bots and a new story mode to complement the basic “land everything until you fail.” Also new: three lives before you get a game over!

* Mark Rein showed off the significant advances that have been made with Unreal Engine 3 at Epic’s annual GDC press conference on Wednesday. The engine is now fully compatible with Flash, as we saw firsthand with browser-based versions of Dungeon Defenders and, even more remarkably, Unreal Tournament III.

* While Mark Rein was talking up the advances made with Unreal Engine, Epic president Mike Capps took the stage a few blocks away to reveal the coming of Infinity Blade: Dungeons. The game will leave behind the series’ standard touch-based Punch-Out!!-style RPG gameplay and instead use an isometric perspective in a hack-and-slash RPG reminiscent of Diablo.

* The Infinity Blade reveal was part of a larger event the same day at which Apple at long last revealed… the new iPad. You can read all about it in our round-up, but the basic specs are pretty much what was expected: 2048×1536 resolution, quad-core graphics and an upgraded camera.

I’ll be back next week with the full Digital Blend, complete with some cool recommendations. To tide you over for this week, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita owners should give MotorStorm RC a look. The PS3/Vita cross-compatible RC car racing game is free for a limited time thanks to a partnership with Scion.