Danny and I had a back-and-forth on facebook about what we liked and what we saw at the Game Developers Conference this year. It’s a talk we e-mailed each other over the span of a weekend. It’s sort of what the N’Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo do at Newsweek’s Level up.Enjoy

To Danny:
From Gieson:
Feb. 23, 11:12 a.m.
Subject: GDC

Gieson
So what do you think of GDC? This being your first time and all.

From Danny:
To Gieson:
Feb. 23, 11:17 a.m.
Re: Subject: GDC

Danny
It’s definitely not all it’s hyped up to be. Following the coverage in the past they made it out to be a show about games rather than a show about the tools to make games. There was a lot there, but very little of it was part of GDC itself.
Read the rest of this entry »

Nintendo developer Takashi Aoyama detailed the development of the Wii menu and WiiWare early, I mean real early, this morning and revealed some interesting trivia surrounding the still-hard-to-find console.

• When you buy the Wii Fit (slated for May 19), the game will create a Wii Fit channel that will be used to track your progress.
• Other games will have the ability to create their own channels, which will stay on the system even if another game is playing.
• With a new interface update, games will be able to send messages at specific times.
• There will eventually be the opportunity to open links sent through messages. It will open the Internet Channel.
• The call of the Japanese bush warbler was the inspiration for blue glow that the Wii has when it gets a message. The warbler’s call sinks perfectly with the rhythm of the glow. Weird.
• You can use your favorite photo as the icon for the Photo Channel.
• In Japan, there’s a Nintendo Channel where you can get screenshots and videos of new games. You can also rate titles as long as you record more than one hour of play time, and judging your tastes, the Nintendo computers will try to recommend you games that suit your playstyle (just like Amazon!). You can also download Nintendo DS titles. Aoyama didn’t say whether these are emulated on the Wii or sent via WiFi to the DS. The Nintendo Channel is planned for the United States and Europe.
• WiiWare is meant to be a complement to box games. There aren’t any demos, but you can take a look at the manual before you buy it.
• WiiWare (slated for May 12) will have strict size limitations.
• Add-on content for disc-based games will be through the title and not via the Wii shop.
• There are plans for Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Pay and Play program. He didn’t give a lot of details on this but the logo is the same except it’s red or maybe even pinkish and it says “Pay and Play” on the bottom.

During the presentation, Aoyama also showed off one of the WiiWare titles called Lost Winds and it was different from what I expected. I thought the WiiWare titles would be simple one-screen minigames, but this looked like a full-blown title. Players move a character with a nunchuk and use the Wii remote like a DS stylus, drawing circles around enemies and such. It kind of reminds me of Okami.

On the show floor, I got to try Wii Fit. They made you take off your shoes, and there were some fun balance games. It didn’t exactly wow me in the same way Spore: Creatures did. It had it’s moments. I liked the skiing game and the Marble Madness-ish game wasn’t so bad.

I had a chance to speak with Andy Reif, CEO and commissioner of the Championship Gaming Series, this week. With the league’s draft and combine coming up at the SXSW festival, he was gearing up for the year 2 of the fledgling e-sport. But he had some time to chat about what’s in store for fans.

First off, the league is pressing reset on the six teams that make up the North American sector. Now nearly everyone has to go back to the combine, show off their skill and get drafted. “They all have to compete again,” Reif says. But this time around, things aren’t so cut and dry. Teams get to have one franchise player who is untouchable along with four other protected players.

So that means, San Francisco Optx get to keep Dead or Alive 4 star Vanessa Arteaga. The world champion Chicago Chimera tagged Jeremy Florence, the top-ranked DOA4 player. In addition, the Los Angeles compLexity keeps Donny Mantaner; the Carolina Core hold on to DOA4 expert Ryan Ward; the New York 3D snag Matt Wood, the FIFA 07 competitor and the Dallas Venom chose to keep Emmanuel Rodriguez, its DOA4 player.

The reshuffling of players may create some drama and new rivalries among teams. I’m sure there’s going to be some tension as old friends will find themselves as rivals. It’s an interesting move when you factor in the new players trying to win spots. The make-up of each franchise can be radically changed this season. I don’t know how the redrafting process will affect the cohesiveness of each team, but we’ll see.

As for the draft, the Dallas Venom, last year’s cellar dweller, gets to pick first.

Fans of the CGS can watch the process live March 7 to 9 by heading to the ScreenBurn Arcade in Austin, Texas.

Disney Interactive announced Pure a week ago and this week, I had a chance to check it out. Jason Avent, the game director at Black Rock Studio, showed off the title. For the past couple of years, he and his team have been working on MotoGP and ATV Offroad Fury games. Both are simulation titles and wanting a change of pace, they came up with Pure, an arcadelike offroad racing game.

This time around, the focus isn’t on finding the perfect racing line; instead, the goal of the developer is to just have fun with larger-than-life tricks (I’ve seen a rider perform an air guitar during a jump.). Of course, these signature tricks will have a benefit. By doing them in midair, players build a boost meter, which allows them to perform higher boost-increasing tricks or speed up their rider.

Pure becomes a balancing act of when to do these stunts and when to open up the throttle and race. From what I’ve seen, the game has a great sense of speed and an even better sense of air. While players do these tricks hundreds of feet in the air, the camera pans around to give this sense of queezy vertigo. It’s a nice touch.

Elsewhere, you’ll still have to learn techniques like preloading a jump (it’s sort of like prepping an ollie for a trick in skateboarding) and landing on curves at the correct angle (being offroad, there’s bound to be hilly curves).

Online and offline, players will race against 16 other ATV riders, which will lead to some frenetic races as some of the maps have vicious chokepoints. The whole track layout is reminiscent of Motorstorm but more restrained. You don’t race atop cliff buttes but Wyoming mountainsides and narrow bridges are par for the course.

ATV fans (probably not Ozzy Osbourne) can pick up the title in the fall.

I have one exclusive screenshot of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The rest are more or less the things you’ve seen before. So enjoy this brand new and never-before-seen (except by me and whoever took it) frame of the highly anticipated game. It should hold you over until my extensive preview tomorrow.

Like with LEGO Indiana Jones below, I’m writing up a preview of Fracutre from my trip to LucasArts. But while you wait for me to sleep and write here are three exclusive screen shots from the game.

That’s right, exclusive.

And a render of our protagonist, Jet Brody.

My trip to LucasArts today was quite productive and I’m working on extensive, detailed previews of three (Yes, three!) games. But while I work on them feast your eyes on these screenshots from LEGO Indiana Jones, the spiritual sequel to the surprising LEGO Star Wars.

Click the pictures for bigger versions.

For a rock ‘n’ roll company, Harmonix’s sessions sure aren’t entertaining. I just sat through one this year and last year’s wasn’t exciting either. But there was some interesting news to come out of it. The game Phase for the iPod was originally a project slated for the PlayStation Portable.

But because of Rock Band work, the project was put on hold, evolved and ended up on the Apple’s money printing machine. Like Phase, the PSP title would have made your own music into the game and you would have played with the shoulder buttons at the top of the system. While you play, a city would grow around you, marking your progress. Meanwhile, the whole music as the road metaphor kicks in. Voila, awesome game.

Oh PSP, what you could have had … .

Edited to fix grammar and add more PSP details.

I got a more detailed look at Boom Blox, the new game that Steven Spielberg is making with Electronic Arts. Louis Castle, the Westwood Studio founder, gave the session and talked a little bit about the development of the game and its history.

Originally, Spielberg got the idea for the game while playing with the Wii for the first time with Shigeru Miyamoto. The childlike activity of creating something with blocks and knocking it down appealed to him and he saw some potential for family fun in it.

At first, the team at EA Los Angeles threw in a ton of ideas with working with the Wii remote (some of them included this neat bendy stick and musical blocks) but decided on a few things that worked.

The basics of gameplay would boil down to throwing, pushing, pulling and blasting. The game uses the Havok physics engine and runs on the same technology used in the Harry Potter game. Go figure.

From the look of the game, it looks a lot like a tech demo. You throw stuff at Jenga-looking structures and watch as the blocks collapse on themselves and scatter to the floor. But Castle said there was more to the game than that and he showed that some blocks explode, others are made of different material.

On top of that, there are also more than 30 character blocks that were added because Spielberg said the game felt lonely. The character blocks apparently have their own AI and cheer you on and such. Castle also mentioned an EA deal with Hasbro. Does this mean we’ll see Boom Blox toys?

Overall, there’s more than 300 different activities and each one can be changed using a level editor. That altered level can then be sent to friends, which makes me wonder if Boom Blox is the Wii’s answer to Little Big Planet. I mean the potential is there for interesting user generated content. It’s simple but addictive gameplay. It’s not as pretty, but it has that same sort of draw …

The game comes out in May, according to EB Games.

As I said before, there’s always a huge crowd around the Nintendo booth. But if crowds aren’t your thing, there’s always the download station. Attendees who bring along their DS can download some of the demos featured at the booth. That’s right, you can take a little piece of GDC with you.

I brought over my DS today to download Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. I turned on the game and played through it. It’s one level and differs from the demo on the expo floor. The one for the download station lets players control Ryu Hayabusa.

The controls resemble the ones used in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. You guide, Ryu, more or less by pointing the direction in which you want him to go. You attack by tapping at an enemy or slashing at him. Jumping is as simple as a quick swipe upward, while you hold the DS like a book.

At the expo floor, players have a different experience as the female ninja, Momiji. She controls similarly to Ryu, and she goes through some of the same levels and fights similar creatures. But she ends up getting captured by a red dragon. It looks like the exact same one that Ryu defeats in the downloadable demo.