Have you ever wondered what really goes on at game conferences? Sure, you read the previews hurriedly put up by the major game sites, but what about the show itself? What stories are hidden there?
A year ago, I was just another guy who loved games. Now, after rising through the ranks from community member to staff member at Bitmob, I got to attend the 2010 Game Developers Conference -- my first conference ever as press. Read on for my tale of life behind the velvet rope.
Behind the Velvet Rope: My First Game Conference as Press (Part 1)
Behind the Velvet Rope: My First Game Conference as Press (Part 2) -- You are here
Day 3
The show floor -- the mecca of any game convention. The place where anything goes as long as it draws attention to a product...booth babes taking photos with clammy nerds, fistfuls of tchotchkes shoved in your face at every opportunity, or, in the case of the Game Developers Conference, showing off a giant virtual reality hamster ball.
I happened upon the hamster ball just as Kotaku's Stephen Totilo stepped inside. He donned a massive pair of goggles -- about the size, shape, and color of a Virtual Boy -- hefted a plastic machine gun, and stepped into a metal ball that wouldn't look out of place in a Mad Max movie. The ball was set on rollers, so that when Totilo "walked," the ball would rotate in that direction and the rollers would translate the movements onscreen. Two large screens sat In front of the ball and projected what Totilo saw.
And what he saw was something straight out of 1993. In fact, I'm pretty sure I played a version of this at a mall arcade back then. The game was basically a VR shooting gallery in the guise of a first-person shooter. Laughably outdated polygon aliens popped up, Totilo pointed and shot, and the aliens went down. The framerate for the entire demo hovered at around 15fps. If this is the future of gaming, count me out.
Elsewhere, Sony displayed their own ideas about the future of gaming. In addition to kiosks set up demonstrating the Move motion controls, they had two TVs showing off what the mind-bending third dimension will add to Super Stardust HD and MLB 10: The Show. While some of the 3D effects looked pretty damn cool -- Super Stardust's explosions in particular shot out of the screen like beautiful, destructive fireworks -- I still can't imagine playing a game in 3D for an extended period of time. Forget about all-day marathons: my eyes hurt after 15 minutes.
Massaging my strained eyeballs, I decided to check out something that didn't require staring at a big screen: the bizarre augmented reality of the AR.Drone. Surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling mesh curtain, players piloted the AR.Drone -- a small helicopter-like ship -- via their iPhone. As they moved the ship through physical space, enemy ships appeared on their iPhone screen. They'd then maneuver the corporeal ship in order to blast the virtual ships onscreen. While the very fact that this actually worked elicits a certain amount of awe, do people really want to jump through all of these hoops just to play a simple shooter? Somehow, I don't see this game lighting up the App Store.
Reentering the world of boring, unaugmented reality, I breezed past the job recruitment stations and booths promoting entire countries (who knew Iceland contained so many game development studios?) and headed toward the most popular area of the show floor: the Independent Games Festival.
On display at IGF were some of the most creative and fun games put out by any developer in the past year -- and I mean any developer. The care lovingly laid on these games by their small teams rivals anything the major studios put out on XBLA or PSN.
Take, for example, Super Meat Boy, a platformer whose precise jumping mechanic matches Mario's hop for hop. Or Shank, a gorgeously animated brawler that feels like controlling an interactive cartoon -- and a gloriously bloody one at that. Or Monaco, winner of the IGF Grand Prize, whose simple graphics belie a fiendishly fun cooperative heist game.
Thankfully, the big boys have taken notice. Publishers have been gobbling up these titles to release on digital platforms much in the way the major movie studios embraced the independent film scene in the late 1990s. Look for all three of these games to appear on XBLA, PSN, or WiiWare soon.
(Read on for Day 4)
