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(04/29/03 12:00pm)
Plane tickets to San Jose, California: $300.
Admission to the 2003 Game Developers Conference: $ 2,000.
Drinks on Bill Gates: Priceless.
Think the video game industry is a "niche" industry? The members of the game development community don't. They turned out in record numbers to attend the annual program.
This year, 10,000 developers convened at the San Jose Convention center for the Game Developers Conference (GDC), a weeklong program of intense tutorials and classes, spectacular expos and sponsored parties (aka free food and drinks).
Video games don't make themselves. It takes thousands of dedicated men and women to drive the $10 billion interactive entertainment industry. Without the contributions of these talented programmers, artists and designers, there would be no video game industry.
Unlike most business conferences, the GDC combines elements of an arcade, a college, a traditional business conference and your favorite pub.
The textbooks (Game Design Perspectives, edited by Francois-Dominic Laramie), the tutorials ("2-Day Design Tutorial" and "All Stories Great and Small") and the classes ("Halo: Development Evolved," advanced documentation techniques, among others others) provided the most stimulating education. Just imagine a class where every word the professor is saying is interesting. Now imagine a room full of people who think the same way. That should give a rough approximation of the thrill students felt at the GDC.
The expo floor was a carnival of new technologies and free things. Amazing innovations such as NVidia's new graphics engine featuring an amazingly crafted nymph, SpeedTree, an engine that renders entire beautiful forests while requiring minimal system performance and Nokia's hybrid phone/game platform, the N-Gage, made the expo one to remember.
Another great part of the expo floor is the amazing amount of free stuff various companies gave out. These included stress balls from LucasArts, beer jackets from Midway and cool pens from everyone throughout the three-day expo. However, what made the expo a college student's dream was the annual booth crawl, which featured free beer at strategic points around the room. That's right, free beer.
After the booth crawl, the majority of the GDC attendees filed across the street to the conference's two award shows: the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers' Choice Awards. While game developers spend most of the conference trying to better themselves, their companies or their organizations via education and networking, the awards shows were all about showing support for the accomplishments of other game developers.
The Independent Games Festival is an awards show dedicated to "rewarding innovation in independent games." Conference attendees get to play all of the finalist's games on expo floor and winners are announced right before the Game Developer's Choice Awards.
This year's big winner was "Wild Earth," which took home the awards for Innovation in Game Design, Innovation in Visual Art and The Seamus McNally Grand Price, awarded every year to the best independent game.
Based on the idea that there is no greater honor than to be recognized by one's peers, The Game Developers' Choice Awards notes excellence in the video game industry. Game of the Year went to Retro Studio's "Metroid Prime."
The First Penguin Award, which recognizes innovation in the industry, went to the founders of Activision. The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented posthumously to Gunpei Yokoi. His family accepted the award for him, as Yokoi was killed in a 1997 car crash in Japan.
GDC started in 1987 as a 25 person party in the living room of a "notable" game designer. GDC 2003 saw 10,000 attendees, 300 lectures and classes, 200 expo booths and two award shows. GDC 2004 will be bigger and better, louder and more amazing in its technological advances.
(04/15/03 12:00pm)
The American college experience is steeped in many traditions that make it the magnificent endeavor that it is today. One of those traditions is the sport of Beirut, commonly referred to as beer pong. While I could write enough for a thesis paper on the sport of Beirut, this is neither the time nor the place. However, I can review a number of fun and free Web sites that feature Beirut video games.
While you may laugh and disregard these simple games as a dorm geek's fantasy gone wrong, think about them the next time you are stuck with the topic "What U.S. History Has Taught Me" for your 20-page history paper.
We will start with a high profile Beirut game, hosted by PlayBeirut.net. It features a Flash game where you can play arcade style, tournament style or madness. In arcade style, the ultimate in antisocial drinking games, you compete against yourself to score the highest points possible in one game. Statistics include points based on cups sunk, air balls and a time penalty, as well as the longest streak of cups made and missed. The tournament and madness modes, as well as weekly, monthly and all-time high score lists, are available to paying members - however, $12.95 is getting harder and harder to come by these days.
Overall, PlayBeirut.net's game is the most complete, but you have to pay to unlock the goodies. If $12.95 is roughly half of your bank account, it might not be prudent, but if you can find enough spare change in the couch of your favorite frat house, it might be a worthy investment.
With intuitive game play and a relatively advanced game altogether, PlayBeirut.net gets my nod for best overall game plus a bonus nod for developing an online head-to-head game. However, PlayBeirut.net gets a disapproving head shake for charging people $12.95 to play a game that most of the Computer Science majors at the College could probably make in half an hour.
Next, we have two beer pong games hosted by TerrapinTables.com. These guys are hardcore. Not only do they have a 2D arcade style game similar to that on PlayBeirut.net, they also have a 3D Beirut simulator available for download. The 2D game features narration by the most amazing man in television history - the one and only Homer Simpson - and uses a classic arcade-style set of controls to simulate the difficulty of combining physics and alcohol. Interesting features include customizable game options and realistic physics, like PlayBeirut.net. However, the game lacks the depth and nice flash graphics of PlayBeirut.net.
The 3D game is truly something else. q Looking more like an army ordinance-training simulator than a simple Beirut game, the 3D game provides an insight into the physics of beer pong that you just do not get from your average game of six cup. With user-adjustable power, angle, hand location and azimuth, as well as an AI capable of some amazing trick shots, TerrapinTable.com's Beirut game is actually pretty fun, especially for those of you that get aroused by matrices and inverted sine waves. The one drawback, however, is that you may not be able be able to download the program, whereas with PlayBeirut.net's game, you can play on any flash-equipped machine.
Finally, on Beer.com's Game Break Web Site, we have Peer Pong, which combines two beer bottles and the classic game of Pong to provide the player with minutes of sheer entertainment. While the game's not very amazing, the bottles make a cool noise when the cap hits them.
Also found on Beer.com are a number of great free games including a fantastic German one where you race tiny RC cars around a track in competition with a chicken. Ah, those Germans, what will they think of next?
Beirut will never be truly represented in a video game. There is just no substitute for a night of falling down grimy house stairs, waiting in line for a cup of crappy beer and then waiting for hours at the table to finally see the look on the host's face when you nail redemption on his hiney. However, these three games all bring fun elements to the table and each one is worth a try. Just don't forget to drink a big glass of water when you are done.
(04/08/03 12:00pm)
This is the worst game I've ever played.
That was the beginning of the first draft of my review for Majesco/Terminal Reality's "BloodRayne," a game that pits a sultry half-vampire sadist against the pre-Nazi army. At the end of a six-hour marathon playing of the game, I had concluded that BloodRayne was just a typical action game, featuring nothing more than crude humor, lots of blood and a half-vampire with a well-endowed chest.
However, as I put the controller down and went to class, I found myself strangely drawn back to my couch, and suddenly, the controller was in my hands once again. Was Agent BloodRayne using her vampiric power to sway my actions? Or was it the alluring jiggle of leather and lace that accompanied the beginning of every cut-scene?
Unsure of what was happening, I played another hour or three of the game and finally understood that decent gameplay and excellent graphics made this game altogether better than bad. In fact, they made it good.
At first, BloodRayne's campy style and Twisted-Metal-meets-Max-Payne artwork screams lame carbon copy. However, the player soon becomes immersed in the gothic world of vampires, swamp things and then, *poof* you're in a 1960s B-flick!
The cheesy, overdone dialogue and excessive blood and gore match the classic titles of a lost era of filmmaking a la "A Taste of Blood," "Kiss of the Vampire" and the original "Dracula." The ridiculous characters and outrageous situations blend into the background as the Terminal Reality staff truly takes this one over the edge.
The gameplay also seems very poor in the beginning. The physics engine has a very jittery, twitchy feel to it. This leads to a great deal of walking into walls, falling into water traps and an overall poor experience as the genuinely boring first level grinds along. However, as the player adjusts to the pace of the game and starts to master the various moves and controls, the gameplay becomes very fast-paced, exciting and immersive. Spinning air attacks and frenetic melee combat combines great graphics with intuitive controls.
BloodRayne can target multiple enemies with a weapon in each hand, as well as shoot while performing flips, tumbles and other impressive acrobatics. Camera effects allow the player to enhance BloodRayne's vision sensitivity, slow down time and go into a state of bloodlust, where BloodRayne can use special moves and superhuman strength.
New moves, powers and weapons are unlocked throughout the game and the awesome animations of these special moves and powers are requisite eye candy. Backwards flips, acrobatic kicks and savage dual-slicing attacks all link fairly seamlessly into each other and, of course, BloodRayne can suck the blood of her enemies. While feeding, she can use her meal as a human shield and fire her own weapon at incoming enemies.
If you ever saw a B-movie with vampires and liked it, go buy this game. If you have any taste or class at all, go buy it anyway, but you'll probably regret it the morning after.
