GDC08 Highlights: Baldur, Big Daddy and cake
Playing (and being) Too Human
Elsewhere that day, Silicon Knights' boastful Denis Dyack held a press conference showing off the latest build of Too Human (photos) and, lo and behold, the framerate was consistent and the game looked much improved from previous demonstrations. Our hands-on impressions were decidedly mixed, however; as one commenter aptly put it, "the controls hindered Baldur's gait."
Besides Microsoft, the other keynote of the conference was futurist Ray Kurzweil who, among other mind-blowing points, confirmed that by 2023 we will be injecting ourselves with plasmids. Speaking of which ...
BioShockTacular!
One of the Big Daddies of the conference (yes folks, plenty more puns to come!) was BioShock, with total rock star Ken Levine drawing quite a crowd. Levine et al. showed off early footage of the game, advised to keep story simple, talked Steamworks and even sent a splicer to check up on us.
GDCA and IGF Awards
BioShock was a major winner at the Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA), walking away with honors for audio, visuals and writing (Ayn Rand woke from the dead to claim the writing award). Also announced that night were the Independent Games Festival awards, with World of Goo winning three nods and Crayon Physics Deluxe earning the Seamus McNally award. Cheer up, World of Goo fans, they already have a distribution deal for the Nintendo Wii. The best part of the award presentations were probably Mega64 and Zero Punctuation's hilarious videos.
Despite three accolades, BioShock didn't win Best Game. That award went to Portal along with design and innovation nods.
Portal: This was a Triumph
Remember last year when Portal was just a bullet point during the Experimental Games session? A lot has changed since GDC 2007, with almost everyone singing the game's praises. The night of their GDCA win, Valve revealed that Jonathan Coulton's Portal song "Still Alive" would be featured in Rock Band. Though we missed that performance (Coulton only hit 95% on vocals), we did happen to catch his concert on Friday where he, along with Leo LaPorte and Mahalo Daily's Veronica Belmont, managed to fail the song live on stage (video).
As one of the last sessions of the conference, designer Kim Swift and writer Erik Wolpaw delivered a Portal post-mortem (photos) for an overpacked crowd (did you see the line to get in?). Among other little details, the duo talked about the origins of the Weighted Companion Cube and the various final levels they tested.
