GDC attendance up from last year.

via GameSpot
It seems that in the aftermath of the downsizing and splintering of E3, that all of the other video game conferences are getting bigger. The Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco last week saw an increase of over two thousand attendees from last year. The Tokyo Game Show, Leipzig Game [...]

Behold the illness that is FEZ

This won the 2008 Independent Games Festival Award for Excellence in Visual Art at the Game Developers Conference last week. And rightfully so! You can’t go wrong with the pixel art style. The gameplay appears to be very similar to Super Paper Mario and Echochrome.
It’s being developed by [...]

Emotiv, play with your BRAIN!!

While I was walking the expo floor at GDC 2008 last week, I came across something truly fascinating.

Picture by Ethan Schur of TDVisor Corp.

This is the Emotiv EPOC headset. It allows you to control video games with your mind! Well, anything that’s been developed for it that is. It’s pretty rad, it’s able [...]

Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw close GDC 2008 with packed house

The final session at the 2008 Game Developer’s Conference was also arguably the dopest.

It was a post-mortem on the last October’s break out hit, Portal. The talk was headed by lead designer Kim Swift and head writer Erik Wolpaw (who you may remember from his work on Psychonauts and the now defunct website OldManMurray.com, [...]

BUY THIS NOW!! The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai

I came upon some awesomeness at the Microsoft booth on Friday.

This is The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, winner of the Dream-Build-Play game development contest in 2007 held by Microsoft.  It was designed entirely by a young man named James Silva.
This game is freaking awesome.  The art style is amazing and as far as gameplay goes, it’s [...]

Valve, “Source may be possible on Wii”

via GoNintendo
During an interview at the Game Developer’s Conference this week, Valve’s Doug Lombardi remarked how the scalability of the Source Engine could allow for possible development on Wii. He also mentioned that Valve is interested in developing for the platform.
This would be pretty sweet. I love Valve’s games, and they have one [...]

Sakurai nerds out to packed audience of Smash fans.

I grabbed a better seat for the Smash Bros. Brawl presentation, led by lead designer Masahiro Sakurai. I saw Bill Trinen sitting a couple of chairs aways from me so I jumped over and shook his hand, told him I liked his work [I'm a big fan of Nintendo's localization team, they're amazing], and [...]

Nintendo announces WFC Pay Play, not much else.

I attended the two Nintendo sessions this morning.

Here I am with the trusty translator do-hickey. Nintendo wouldn’t let me take any more pictures, so this goofyness is all you get. Sorry.
The first one was lead by Takashi Aoyama, the Project lead for Wii’s functionality. The second one consisted of Masahiro Sakurai [...]

“STILL ALIVE” Rock Band DLC Confirmed!

via Kotaku
At Valve’s GDC shindig Wednesday night, nerdrock superstar Jonathan Coulton and Rock Band developer Harmonix made a special announcement: Still Alive, the smash hit end song from the critically acclaimed Valve release Portal, is going to be made available for download for play in Rock Band!
The way they did it was super awesome as [...]

GDC 2008 Day 4, or My brush with greatness.

Today was freaking awesome.
And loooong.
But don’t worry though, as per advice from one of my colleagues, I will keep this [fairly] brief.

I started the day off with the Ray Kurtzweil’s Keynote, The Next 20 Years of Gaming. It was very fascinating, although really he was talked about the future of technology in general and not [...]