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Kim "excited" about unannounced games

And says Alan Wake and Halo Wars are fine.

Shane Kim, Microsoft's vice president of winding up the internet, has said the company still has some tricks up its sleeve and that people shouldn't worry about the absence of Halo Wars and Alan Wake from last week's showcase event.

"There are other things in the pipeline that we are not talking about yet that I'm pretty excited about as well," he told assembled press when asked about the duo's absence. "So it definitely gives us the opportunity not to have to rush things."

Although the showcase event, held in San Francisco, was understood to be a roundup of more or less all the company's 2008 titles - including previously unannounced Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts - Kim's comments are likely to rekindle curiosity about rumours like the Wii remote equivalent ahead of E3 2008, where the company is likely to have a significant presence.

On the subject of Halo Wars and Alan Wake, Kim said the upcoming games weren't ready to be shown, adding that "it is very hard to recover" after a poor press demonstration - suggesting that Microsoft is keen to avoid a repeat of Too Human's poor reception at E3 2006. He also said he was "excited about the progress" being made on Halo Wars, although didn't elaborate on Wake's status.

Halo Wars, in development at Ensemble Studios, is a 360-exclusive strategy game first announced at Microsoft's X06 event and built around the Halo fiction, species and vehicles. Alan Wake is a psychological action-adventure from Max Payne developer Remedy and is due out on 360 and PC.