Microsoft will release "Gears of War 3" on Sept. 20. Hopefully today's media event in San Francisco will shed a little more light on what's in store for the Xbox 360 in 2011.

Starting around  around noon today, I’ll be attending a pair of media preview events in San Francisco where Microsoft is going to be showing off a bunch of upcoming gaming-related stuff for the Xbox 360, Games for Windows and Windows 7 phones. I’m expecting I’ll get some hands-on time with “Gears of War 3” and some other titles, as well as hear a bunch of cool announcements, including some Kinect stuff. (At a similar event last year, I got to play around with unreleased games like “Alan Wake” and “Dead Rising 2,” plus watch presentations on “Halo: Reach,” “Fable III” and “Crackdown 2.”)

I’m expecting the events to be fairly crowded, so while I’ll be bringing a laptop with me on the off chance that I have time to write anything up on site, I’ll expect I’ll be tweeting about what I see and play throughout the day, then writing up my thoughts late Thursday night and early Friday morning. For real-time reporting, you can follow along via the Twitter box on the right side of my blog’s main page, or right on my Twitter page. If you have any questions or games you want me to track down, please post them as comments here or tweet them to me @gamewit, and I’ll do my best to find an answer.

While I love my smart phone, it does have relatively short battery life. If I suddenly go dark for a bit, it’s probably because I’m out of juice. I’ll be sure to recharge between events and check in whenever possible.