Tuesday, March 06, 2007

GDC 2007: Day 2 ...

Today, the Independent Game Summit is in full swing, and it looks like there were some good sessions on "Prototyping for Indie Developers", and thoughts from "Gatekeepers" for indepent distribution -- Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), Sony's download service, GameTap, and "one of these things is not like the other" Manifesto Games (who is thankfully pushing the emotive envelope for games) -- I wonder where Valve / Steam was?

There was also a crash course from The Behemoth (Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers) that must have been a gift to attend (fortunately, the highlights are available online).

And I'm excited that a verison of Every Extend Extra (Every Extend Extra Extreme) is coming to XBLA. The game is from Q Entertainment (Tetsuya Mizuguchi, behind (Lumines and Meteos), and looks to be pretty sweet.

As a matter of fact, despite my rantings a couple of weeks ago, XBLA quality is looking up. I still have my concerns for indie opportunities (Microsoft Kim Pallister's remarks about XBLA criteria being "self-funding" and "track record" certainly leaves a lot of folks out), but from a gamer's perspective, there are some good things on the horizon. To some degree, all of the following games have got me grinning: Boom Boom Rocket (Electronic Arts), Jetpac Refuelled (Rare), Schizoid (Torpex Games), Eets Chowdown, Worms, Pinball FX, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Ubisoft), etc.

And the announcement of "a 'YouTube for games' that Microsoft is working on to develop and share XNA games" might mitigate my other concern.

To get caught up, check out the updating GDC summaries below (and if you know of more / better ones, let me know):

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