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GDC 07: Super Paper Mario meta...preview? [update 1]
The RPG-turned-platformer, Gamecube-turned-Wii title Super Paper Mario was on display on the show floor, and it continues to delight hippies gamers everywhere. Several sources have posted impressions of the title, lauding the innovative puzzle mechanic of perspective-swapping and the bright, trippy graphical style. Game|Life's impressions 1up's impressions IGN's impressions But what impressions could be more important than ours? That's right. God's. But that's it. So, stay tuned for impressions of pretty much every Nintendo game you've ever wanted to play but couldn't because you're not at GDC, including yon Super Paper Mario. Word.[Update 1: Thought of a classier post title.]
GDC 07: Twilight Princess, Wii Sports take awards
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/GDC_07_Twilight_Princess_Wii_Sports_take_awards'; The awards continue to pile up for Nintendo. Both Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Wii Sports have taken awards at the GDC Choice Awards. Twilight Princess nabbed an award for Best Writing, beating out top contenders like Sam & Max, Oblivion, Dreamfall and Bully.Wii Sports picked up the award for Best Game Design, beating other hopefuls, such as Okami and Viva Pinata. The Best Game award, however, went to Microsoft Game Studios' Gears of War, proving that sometimes, graphics do make a game better.
Gears of War takes best game at GDCA, Aquaria wins IGF best game prize
At tonight's Game Developers Choice Awards, Epic Games' Gears of War took home three awards: best technology, visual arts, and the coveted Game of the Year award. On the independent side of things, Bit Blot's Aquaria won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize from the Independent Games Festival.Okami picked up a win in one of the four categories it was nominated in (take that, AIAS). Unfortunately, Loco Roco did not pick up any awards despite two nominations (character design and audio). Independent game Everyday Shooter won two awards and a distribution deal from GameTap.View the full list winners and nominees from both events below.
Cute gets serious with De Blob
Serious games are all the rage at GDC this year and nothing could possibly be more serious than an adorable jelly-thing lighting up the town. Found at the Student Showcase area of the expo floor, De Blob began life as a project to show what the station region of Utrecht, Netherlands, could look like 10 years from now. Taking their simulation and tossing in a few simple mechanics, De Blob plays like a cross between Katamari Damacy and Mario Paint. Although it's more of a sandbox title than anything, there are still a few objectives to be found while rolling about the virtual recreation of Utecht. The most prominent of which being the colorization of the city, done by swallowing up tiny, color coded people and slamming headlong into any and all objects. There are also hidden coins to be found that can be as hard to find as they are hard to reach. You too can check out De Blob in both English and Dutch at their GameDev site.
GDC 07: Koji Kondo and the art of interactive music
Koji Kondo, famed composer for Nintendo, spoke to a packed auditorium at this year's Game Developer's Conference. Before the session began, giddy members of the audience snuck up to Kondo-san, a copy of Zelda or Mario in hand, asking for an autograph. To answer the question, "what are the main points of game music?," Kondo-san showcased the retro NES favorite Super Mario Brothers. By looking at how Mario jumped, and ran, Kondo-san was able to think about the rhythm intrinsic to the game playing experience. The length of Mario's jump can be exemplified by a eighth note: when a composer thinks of these kinds of attributes, music becomes part of the gameplay itself. If a game's soundtrack doesn't bother coordinating to the rhythm of game, Kondo explained, the game's soundtrack might as well come from an unrelated room next door. A second element to good game music is balance: thinking about left and right stereo balance is certainly one thing, but thinking about the game as a whole is crucial. Music can tell a story, especially when referencing familiar themes: when Mario picks up the Metal Hat in Super Mario 64, the music will play homage to the original invincibility theme from the NES Super Mario Bros. Through music alone, players will be able to understand how powerful Mario has become.
GDC 07: The making of Ouendan & Elite Beat Agents
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/The_making_of_Ouendan_and_Elite_Beat_agents_Keiichi_Yano_speaks_at_GDC'; The gaming community has embraced iNiS' incredible DS music games, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and Elite Beat Agents, much to the surprise of game designer Keiichi Yano. His panel at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco featured an incredible large audience that filled the presentation room. All kinds of people, from gamers, to developers, to prominent members of the gaming press, all attended the session to show their support of this small development team. Yano-san went into incredible detail about the inspirations behind the game, the process of working with Nintendo, and gave us some delicious images from the upcoming sequel.
GDC 07: Even Reggie's limo driver is famous!
Over at Joystiq, they snapped the above picture outside of the Phil Harrison (he's some Sony guy or something) keynote speech today. It's funny on multiple levels; not only was Reggie at the PS3 keynote (he must own one of them suckers), but his limo driver looks like he spent the majority of his time outside the keynote pounding beers. Maybe he doubles as Reggie's body guard? He looks like a grizzled war vet ...
XNA Challenge: Dungeon Quest
When most programmers are faced with developing a game from the ground up in four days, they go for a simple concept like a 2D shoot-'em-up or platformer. When Benjamin Nietschke and Cristoph Rienacker make a game in four days, they go for broke, aiming for a 3D, first-person multiplayer dungeon crawl that would take most people weeks if not months to develop. "When we heard about a four-day development competition, we thought we could do something simple, but that wouldn't be as cool," Nitschke explained.Nitschke has some experience doing big games quickly. Last year, he built an entire racing game in a month just because they "wanted to prove we could do it." With Reinacker handling the art and Nitschke handling the heavy coding, Dungeon Quest is already showing some impressive texture and lighting effects in a fully navigable, if empty, world after just a day and a half of work.By Thursday the pair hopes to add monsters with artificial intelligence and a split-screen two-player mode, but they admitted that the focus would be more on the graphics than the gameplay. "We don't care much about the competition," Nietschke said. "We just want to get it finished." Click on to see what they've got so far after the jump.
Ray finds her first line in a GDC women's restroom
Today game developer and pro-girl consultant Sheri Graner Ray encountered something she'd never seen before in all her years at GDC: a line in a women's bathroom. Ray says when she first started coming to the conference, women only made up 3% of attendants. Now there are enough of us skirt-lovers to fill at least a dozen bathroom stalls.Her potty experiences aside, Ray was part of today's panel on the future of women in the games industry. Unsurprisingly, panelist predicted more female gamers, more female industry members, and more all around gender-y goodness in times to come. And for the first time since Monday, I was actually in a room with more than five other girls. Now let's just hope we don't all run for the bathroom.
Fils-Aime? Do I have a Reginald Fils-Aime?
Apparently Reggie was in the audience at Phil Harrison's Sony keynote this morning, because waiting for him outside was this dark, important-looking vehicle and a driver who wasn't so pleased to have his picture taken. That guy's hardcore.My question is, does that driver know what Reggie looks like? Could I be Fils-Aime? And where would I get to go? The Joystiq team considering hijacking the car for a tour around San Francisco ... Reggie wouldn't mind, right?
Sony's 'Home' sex haven in disguise (perhaps?)
That Sony's new social channel "Home" looks suspiciously like Second Life is hardly news to anyone who's seen the footage from Harrison's keynote. What I couldn't help giggling about the whole time he showed off the world, though, was just how much sex is going to happen in Home. Realistic avatars? Private spaces? Customization? Think about Second Life. So. Much. Sex. If there was any doubt, just remember Harrison's sample character who was supposed to say "Hi" but said "Ho."Of course, sexy gamers are bound to have questions. Can avatars take their clothes off? (Probably not.) Will the system support user-generated content that animates sex, like pose balls? (I wouldn't bet on it.) But if MMOs and social networking have taught us anything, it's that people will always find a way to get it on. Just pimp out your pad with downloaded gear, maybe get some porn streaming on your walls, and let the Home sex begin.
GDC 07: Band of Bugs hands on
Sitting right next to Castle Crashers was a game not nearly as publicized, NinjaBee's Band of Bugs. We managed to wrangle a Band of Bugs interview a while back, and we were pleased to see the game at GDC (Band of Bugs is part of the Independent Games Festival) and speak with Steve Taylor, president of Wahoo Studios (NinjaBee's parent company). We spent a lot of time looking at Band of Bugs. We got a chance to learn about the level editor and even got a little time to play the game itself. Read on for first hand impressions of this unique Xbox Live Arcade title.
Overheard at GDC: "Don't you feel like you're in Doom?"
"They need to do an augmented reality game in here. I mean, don't you feel like you're in Doom already?- A random GDC attendee talking about the labyrinthine, ExpoSuite corridors of Moscone West (pictured above, totally unaltered.)
Spore developer rants on Wii
Chris Hecker didn't pull any punches at GDC's "Game Publisher's Rant" session. The Maxis developer began his "Fear of a Wii Planet" diatribe by declaring, "The Wii is a piece of sh*t."He went on to describe the console as being vastly underpowered, citing low graphical standards and an inability to process complicated AI. According to Hecker's exaggerations, "The way you manufacture a Wii is you take two GameCubes and duct tape." As if that wasn't already enough to break a fanboy's heart, he called on Nintendo to "make a console that doesn't suck ass." His complaints weren't limited to hardware gripes -- he also criticized Nintendo for not pushing games as an art form. Maybe he hasn't seen Electroplankton or the bit Generations games?Hecker's rants from previous years were just as brutally harsh on Sony and Microsoft, but we're sure that will do little to tame the wrath of offended gamers. Bringing Spore to the DS might have earned him enough good will to make it out of the session unharmed, but he might want to avoid walking around GDC alone at night until this cools down.
Jackson's Halo project will be episodic
During Microsoft's annual Blogger Breakfast at GDC (which Richard will be writing about soon), our Joystiq blogging army received some interesting news. During the breakfast, Shane Kim revealed that Peter Jackson is currently in the pre-production phases of two episodic games for the Xbox 360, with one being based on the (previously announced) Halo universe. When hearing the news, everyone jumped at the chance to pry more information from Shane's lips, but he refused stating "I may have said too much already". So there you have it folks, two episodic games coming from Peter Jackson. Anyone want to speculate to why Jackson chose to go with episodic content rather than a stand alone game? So many questions and so much waiting ...
Indie developers refuse to turn the other cheek
Analogies are a great way to convey information, especially if they involve naughty bits of the human anatomy. Today's Independent Games Summit brought a panel of indie game developers together to discuss the future of the industry. Early on, Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games referred to the indie scene as a "pimple on the game industry's ass." Whether that's a good thing or a bad depends on how much you like pimples, but Bit Blot co-founder Derek Yu didn't think it was a fitting analogy. Independent games are one cheek, Yu said, while the mainstream is the other. It's hard to walk with just one cheek.That may be true, but the problem is that most people aren't aware of the flabby left cheek, and indie game developers don't have the financial muscle to make it stand out. Ironically, shovelware is a major issue in independent gaming, just like in the mainstream. Anyone with a computer and free time can make a game -- and the results are usually frightening. Your average gamer doesn't know where to find and download the "Good Games®." Game Tunnel and Game Trove, two of the better-known indie information portals, do a fair amount of sorting but are far from comprehensive. Would a little business oomph threaten the charm of the independent gaming scene?
Clowns falling down stairs: the ultimate physics game
Yesterday, in his talk at the Independent Games Summit, Matthew Wegner beat up clowns. To be specific, he showed a physics sim clip of a dozen full-costumed clown ragdolls tumbling helplessly down a spiral staircase. Wegner, head of the physics game site Fun-Motion, called clowns falling down stairs "the ultimate physics game." Why? Because it's a lot easier to identify with clowns in peril then, let's say, a bunch of shapes. Besides, it's just hilarious. Later on, Wegner also showed a sim of a few hundred cows falling through a mess of painful looking barriers. Also very excellent.The thing that Wegner didn't mention though is what's up with all this sadism? Physics games are definitely fun, but what's most fun is destroying stuff--clowns, cows, ragdoll fighters, whatever. So why the connection? Regardless, if I were a clown at GDC right now, I would probably be in hiding.
GDC 07: Castle Crashers hands on
We heard the rumblings. We smelled the awesome. We knew that Castle Crashers was somewhere at GDC. It was just a matter of finding it. After what seemed like days of searching, we found the title in the Independent Games Festival pit, loaded up on an HD screen with some pumping speakers, Castle Crashers was ready and raring to go.
XNA Challenge: Simian Escape
Jonathon Stevens and Patrick Glanville did not take what you'd call the traditional path into game development. After 12 or 13 years software tools for business, the pair decided it was time for a change. Luckily, the community at Garage Games helped them transfer their skills from business development to game development. When Microsoft tapped the pair to compete in the XNA Challenge, there was no question in their minds. "A trip to San Francisco and Microsoft's covering the bill? I'm there," Glanville said.Glanville said it wasn't that hard transferring his skills in business programming to the game development environment in XNA. "In the past you had to be a hardcore, C++ techie to be a game programmer. Now that's not so true anymore," he said. Still, he admitted there are limits to what XNA can do. "This won't let you replicate everything you see on the Xbox 360. It's not there yet -- you can't build Gears of War -- but Microsoft wants to get there, so maybe in the future..."Glanville describes his game, Simian Escape, as a standard escape-predators-and-a-meteor-that's-threatening-to-destroy-the-earth platformer. There was a lot of work still to be done on the early build I saw on Tuesday, but with some support form their friends at Garage Games, Glanville seemed confident they'd have a functional prototype when the contest ended on Thursday. Click through for some rough footage after the break. See also: Other XNA Challenge games
Crytek engine licensed to Avatar Reality, Inc. for online virtual world
Crytek's latest engine, CryENGINE2, will be licensed to upstart developer Avatar Reality, Inc. for use in a massively multiplayer virtual world, according to a press release from today. The game, currently untitled, is best described as a Second Life on Mars. From the PR: "Set in Terraformed Mars, Avatar Reality's MMVW will allow players to live their fantasy lives by creating personalized characters, or avatars, in a beautiful environment." According to a brief chat we had with Crytek's Avatar Reality, Inc., whose advisory panel it notes features Father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov and former Nintendo of America President Minoru Arakawa, was formed by "Mastermind" Henk Rogers, chairman of Tetris Online, Inc. It is based out of the oh-so desolate city of Honolulu and will be managed by industry vets Kazuyuki Hashimoto and Li-han Chen. More information can be found at their website.The first public presentation of CryENGINE 2 is expected today at GDC.
