GDC 2009 - Day 4
GDC 2009 is over, long live GDC! Its been a great week and I've thoroughly enjoyed myself along with learning quite a lot. Today was a great ending to it with a bit more information and a chance to check out a couple more games that I hadn't had a chance to earlier.
The first is the new Wolfenstein game coming out. I got a chance to see it in action and it doesn't look bad. It has the feel of the previous Wolfenstein game though the AI seemed a bit better from what I could tell. The UI was nice with the amount of damage you had taken shown by the amount of blood on the corners of the screen. It definitely felt like an alternate universe WWII. I wish I could show you pics but it was another "no photos/videos area."
Halo Wars was another I got to try. Graphically I knew it was amazing already but the control scheme was what I wanted to check out. Amazingly it actually works well. The controls were context sensitive and very responsive. I was able to select and move units with ease and ordering attacks was not a problem at all. I may download the demo on Live when I get back and play it some. If I still like it I may buy it. Who would have thought an RTS on a console would work without using something like Endwar's voice commands? I'm impressed.
I ran into one of the head guys for Entropia Universe as well. This is the first and really only MMO that has a real-world economy. They just got approved by Sweden to be an actual bank so the money and time you invest in the game can actually really pay off! Its on my list of things to try out when I get back to a stable and faster internet connection. It makes what people have accomplished in Second Life much more accessible as real world funds with about the same effort. I'll give a review once I've played it.
I also saw a preview of the new Metallica expansion for Guitar Hero. It looked pretty much the same as previous expansions just with the new songs and some new playable characters. Expect more of the same, and no that isn't always a bad thing in the case of something like this.
Overall it was a good end to the week as a whole! I was impressed with the whole conference even though it didn't seem quite as grand as last year's. Expect to see me back at the Game Developers' Conference in 2010 (hopefully representing a company!)!
Gerry