When Shane Bettenhausen, former business development director at UTV Ignition Games, passed me the controller to sample El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron after watching him demo it for a few minutes at a long-ago NYC showcase, I noticed something–or a lack of something–that wasn’t apparent when he played: the protagonist, biblical hero Enoch, didn’t have a health bar.

New video game talk show Vs. Mode: Two Can Play pits two of the gaming industry’s top designers, developers and executives together in heated debate.

The second entry in Game Theory’s multi-part series on gaming’s reinvention sees Scott Steinberg and the field’s biggest names discussing the changes washing over the industry, and what it’ll take to survive.

You may remember Scott Steinberg from his insightful commentary on the state of 2D games, or from his classy work at Digital Trends, but he’s back with a new venture that you should also check out: Game Theory with Scott Steinberg.

It would be relatively safe to say that 2009 was the return of the 2D game. There wasn’t just a splattering of 2D titles in niche genres; it was an industry-wide renaissance.