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What sets the Game Developer's Convention apart?
For starters, it's smaller, more technical, more interested in analysis than announcements, and more about networking than news. Most upcoming games you're eager to see aren't playable on the floor, but every indie game you've never heard of has a line five geeks deep waiting to play. All the major meetings happen off-site. More than once, I described it as a good starter trade show to people who told me their next stop was E3.
GDC lacks 70-foot installations on the exhibition floor, and its booth babe per capita falls somewhere below Cleveland's. But if you want to learn a little something about games and gaming, GDC is your show, period.
So here's what stuck with us…the interesting, the cool, and the flat-out freaky.
Dan "Shoe" Hsu: Three second chances
I thought I was done with Halo: Reach, having moved on to Call of Duty: Black Ops for my multiplayer kicks just a few months ago. But then a couple of rounds with the upcoming Defiant map pack reminded me just how good Bungie's shooter still feels. I guess I'll be going back to Reach when the maps hit…. (My lucky, thrilling win in an eight-player Headhunter match during this pre-GDC press event probably contributed to this feel-goodness as well.)
The brilliant Dead Island trailer gave me hope — then the subsequent press release stripped it away. Forget those emotions surrounding that original video. This game's about smashing zombies up with lots of weapons, sort of like Dead Rising, which I've played a few times already. But after I saw Dead Island's actual gameplay, I became OK with that. Role-playing elements, an open-world to explore, four-player co-op play, and incredibly sharp graphics can quickly change a guy's mind.
Anybody know where the men's room is?
I used to think I didn't really need next-generation technology — diminishing returns and all that. Then I saw the Unreal Engine tech demo that showed off what graphics will be like on DirectX 11 for the PC and possibly future consoles (if developer Epic gets its way). Wow. I thought for sure I was watching a pre-rendered cinematic, but then the demonstrator stopped the movie and moved around inside the various scenes, proving it was all real-time stuff, in a full 3D world. Games with visuals normally reserved for cutscenes…it's finally coming, for real this time.
Brett Bates: GameSkunk is smell-o-vision evolved
Tucked — quite deliberately, I'm sure — into the back corner of the show floor was a product called GameSkunk, a peripheral that allows you to "smell" your games by using a variety of replaceable scents. Say you're playing a survival-horror game. A faint smell of rotting flesh becomes stronger as you make your way down a corridor. Sensing danger, you double back and find a way to flank the zombies blocking your path. Thank you, GameSkunk!
It smells like rainbows!
I'm sure the idea sounded great on paper, but it ignores the not-so-insignificant fact that people generally do not enjoy the smell of rotting flesh. In fact, I'd rank it pretty far down on my list of "Things I'd Like to Smell Today," and I can say the same thing for many potential odors in my games, like blood, B.O., burning rubber, or alien puke. So unless you're gearing up for a marathon session of Flower, you're probably going to want to pass on GameSkunk.
Rus McLaughlin: Heading for the Bastion
While I saw a great many cool things, the best two games I got hands-on with were El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (which I wrote about at length) and Bastion, an upcoming downloadable game courtesy of former Gamespot Editor-in-Chief Greg Kasavin and Supergiant Games. It's a beautiful, isometric actioner that reminded me tonally of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, though outside of a wild fantasy setting, the two have little in common.
Budget cuts hit the yellow brick road.
Beyond good looks and tight combat, Bastion's story promises to make it this year's Limbo, should Xbox Live get wise, pick it up, and promote it heavily for the next Summer of Arcade. But unlike Limbo's minimalist storytelling, Bastion benefits from a full (often contextual) narration performed by Logan Cunningham's pitch-perfect burr. The sharp script by Kasavin immediately establishes a voice, a world, a disaster, an intent, and a plight for The Kid, Bastion's silent protagonist.
No joke, it's the best narrative device and the best dialogue I've seen since Portal. Individual lines still recite themselves in my brain. I can't wait to learn the hidden intentions I'm sensing in the narrator's words and find out what his real plans for The Kid — and the Bastion — are.
Demian Linn: Cat/Mouse Foosball: The game that nearly killed Plants vs. Zombies
"In 2001 I almost quit making games forever," said Plants vs. Zombies-creator George Fan at the "Failure Workshop" talk. And it's this weird, Chu Chu Rocket-made-horrible thing that could've preemptively terminated one of the best games of 2009. Fan described it as kind of like cat/mouse foosball — mice and cats march down the screen from top to bottom, and the player has to keep the cats from catching and eating the mice via a series of sliding barriers. Fan actually had to remake the prototype for this presentation, as the original code was lost: "I was a little worried that after 10 years of game design experience I'd make it and it wouldn't suck." But he had nothing to fear — after watching a few seconds of gameplay, I can attest that it looked completely terrible.