“Replacing David Jaffe’s Game Career Seminar keynote “From Grunt to God to Startup” was Exigent outsourcing firm co-founder Paul Steed (formerly of id, where he somewhat infamously created the ‘Crackwhore’ in-game skin, as well as Origin).

He pitched in to give an entertaining (if heavily digressionary) session on his trip throughout the industry: including revealing stories about working with Chris Roberts and John Carmack.”

I do not think Paul Steed is going to thank me for this write-up.

Wait, what am I talking about? He said everything in a room that was packed with people! He knew what he was saying, and fair dos to him for that. I’ll admit that I found his digression on being best mates with the local police department pretty unbearable (notice I didn’t write that bit up) but the rest was pretty entertaining.

Anyway, I can never forgive American McGee for the travesty that was Bad Day LA, so yeah. Screw that guy.

“The Other Boleyn Girl, then! The only film this week to star two actresses that basically no one can remember being good in anything* but still coo over because they’re, like, totally hot, Wilner says, “The Other Boleyn Girl wants to be both a royal power fantasy and a bodice-ripping yarn, and succeeds as neither.” Come on! We’d all have accepted just a bodice ripper, eh lads? Eh? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, etc.”

People are trying to think of films they have been good in in the comments. I’m still not convinced (though I do admit they’ve both been good on SNL.)

“Despite holding a session in a room full of clearly die-hard Portal fans, Wolpaw and Swift opened by warning for ‘spoilers’ and expected the audience to query: ‘Why should we care about Portal?’”

Due to the huge amount of GDC related content we produced on Gamasutra during the conference, a lot of the session coverage got bumped to later, including all of my coverage from the final day of the conference (though I’m not complaining.)

This was actually the final talk I went to at GDC, and really was packed with Portal fans.

I recently had a chat with someone who thought I had no soul because I only thought Portal was “okay.”

Before you too put me on your enemies list, let me explain. I liked it! I really did! I just didn’t love it. I enjoyed the dialogue, but it wasn’t the greatest thing I ever heard. It was cute, but I felt that the plot just lay on top of the game design rather than was tightly integrated (though they claimed rather different in the session.) I mean, the weighted companion cube? I burned that mother without a second thought.

I challenged Erik Wolpaw at the end of the session with the question: considering that when he was at Old Man Murray he’d have hated something as contrived as a convenient furnace in the final boss’ room, what excuse did he have?

His excuse was alright, I suppose (that the idea was that the creators of GLaDOS thought she might go insane, so put a handy furnace there to destroy her if required) but it was still only an excuse.

(Yes, I have no soul.)

GDC: The Future of Story In Game Design – See what I mean about one of the main themes being story? I wasn’t complaining – this was another entertaining session. I’m really pleased to see how many comments this story got, too!

GDC: Radical Talks ‘More Is Better’ For Prototype – This session blew me away. It was obviously hotly anticipated (the room was packed in a very not-legal seeming way, and I tripped, oh, 86 people with my laptop cable) but I hadn’t even heard of Prototype before I went (feel free to pillory me for this if you wish.)

Most people obviously came just to see the game in action, and it did look amazing, particularly for the amazing fluidity and freedom of the main character – like a cross between Assassin’s Creed’s Altair and Crackdown’s nameless agent. Wasn’t a fan of the gore, though. There had better be a decent explanation for it – I’m not against violence, but it’s actually one of the few games I’ve seen where I thought “man, this seems gratuitous.”

What actually impressed me most about the session was the speakers’ clear understanding of their game design tenants: that the fun of open world games comes from the variety of systems in the world interacting. A mistake the developers of Assassin’s Creed made was to produce a game full of systems that didn’t interact, and I’ve wanted to write about that concept for a while now.

GDC: The Inter-Species Game Design Challenge – What a great day for sessions! This was really wacky – particularly Alexey Pajitnov’s Dolphin Ride concept, which largely involved electrocuting dolphins (or shooting them with paintballs.) I was very impressed with Brenda Braithwaite’s One Hundred Dogs, though. If I ever signed up for Facebook (and if I ever get a dog) I’d play it for sure. It should have won!

If I thought my problems were over when GDC Mobile ended, well, was I in for a surprise. It managed to get busier and crazier once the main conference began.

GDC 2008: The Crysis Of Audio – Maybe not the most obviously exciting way to kick off one of the main events in the gaming calendar, but considering that both the development of game audio and the game Crysis have barely grazed my consciousness, this was… Sort of interesting?

GDC: Deconstructing The Best Interactive Storytelling – This was a great session. If we’re going to talk “trends” pretty much the major trend of this year’s GDC was storytelling; how to make it good, how to integrate it with gameplay, and so on. This was just a fun panel on games that some famous developers liked, including Loom and Planescape: Torment (which even I have yet to finish.)

I was supposed to write up three sessions on the 20th, but apparently Jesse Alexander (co-executive producer and writer on Heroes) decided to cancel his session weeks previous and somehow no one knew. Thanks for nothing, Jesse.

Still! The IGF Awards that evening were so great it kind of made up for it (even if they made the IGF Mobile Awards look positively tiny by comparison) with some brilliant skits from the Mega 64 crew (and The Behemoth‘s Dan Paladin.) I think Mega 64′s Rocco was kind of pissed that I compared the opening skit to the opening of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie, but considering that’s probably my favourite opening to anything ever, I thought it was a nice thing to say. In retrospect I realize I was dumb.

Later, Jason Rubin mumbled his way through his script at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards with all of the style and panache of a bronzed porcelain bird, but he made up for that by mistakenly calling Crackdown “Cracktime.” We laughed about that for the rest of the week.

Day 2 of GDC Mobile was a special day for me, as it formed the culmination of over half a year’s work: the IGF Mobile Awards ceremony. Of course, before I could take part in that I had to cover the morning keynote…

GDC Mobile 2008: Anssi Vanjoki’s New Paradigm Of Gameplay – Nokia get a lot of stick for their attempts to get into the gaming industry, but, you know, I don’t mind them. In many ways they’re misguided and as a company they’re a slow-moving behemoth, but people like Nokia’s Executive Vice President Anssi Vanjoki are so relentlessly positive about the industry it’s almost rather nice.

IGF Mobile Award Winners Announced – I kind of hope Vanjoki stuck around for the IGF Mobile Awards ceremony, as it did happen right after his keynote. While it was a little hard to wrangle all of the finalists, this was a great event that I was really pleased with. All of the finalists were happy just to have taken part, and the winners were ecstatic. I think it’ll go even better next year, too!

GDC Mobile 2008: The Rise and Fall of the Carrier Deck? – A major trend of GDC Mobile was definitely the struggle with the carriers as part of the growing pains of the mobile games industry. Frankly, the general feeing was that the carriers, and their demands, are choking the industry to death, and unless they loosen their grip a little the end is nigh.

GDC Mobile 2008: A Crazy Time To Start A Mobile Studio? – This kind of talk is a perfect example of both how hard it is to work with the carriers and, also, how difficult it was to run an Independent Games Festival for mobile games. It’s nearly impossible to run a small, independent mobile games studio these days, and I have a great respect for the people out there who do, and manage to produce games which are genuinely good, like the finalists of the IGF Mobile (who I really can’t talk up enough.)

Well, I managed to survive my trip to San Francisco for GDC this year, and so I guess it’s time to start linking everything I wrote during the conference! The first day was GDC Mobile, and as I’m the editor of Games On Deck this was one of the busiest days for me (though, to be honest, it never got any less busy.)

GDC Mobile 2008: Gameloft’s Guillemot On “Fast Life, Fast Media” – The opening keynote of GDC Mobile. I covered 20 sessions during the week, so I think it’s absolutely excusable that I have no recollection of this session at all.

GDC Mobile 2008: Embracing Mobile Constraints – Admittedly, I can’t really remember anything about this one either.

GDC Mobile 2008: Creativity Techniques in Game Design – Ah! Now this one I do remember, because it was quite “out there” (if you know what I mean.)

“A few weeks ago, roughly seconds after I got an invite to Metanet Software’s N+ launch party at the Gladstone Hotel (which I immediately promised to go to, as I missed an earlier PR event arranged by Microsoft) I received both an IM from Simon Carless (our benevolent overlord) and an e-mail from Brandon Sheffield (Insert Credit’s not-even-vaguely benevolent overlord) asking me to go and cover it. In what capacity, I wondered? ‘I don’t know,’ was the response (from one or the other) ‘Just write 300 words or something on it.’”

It’s been ages since I’ve got to use the GameSetWatch tag!

This is a silly little piece on the (slightly early) launch party for N+ (which is completely great and I recommend you all run out and buy it) at which I had a grand old time. Even with a couple of unnamed (but very obvious) developers flashing me…

“We managed to see Cloverfield a few weeks ago, and with the release of Diary of the Dead this week, we have to say it’s rather timely to discuss our opinion of it. As tired as this quote is, there’s really no better way to describe Cloverfield than to take from Macbeth’s famous soliloquy: ‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”

It must be the film reviewers’ burden that they wish to reference that soliloquy constantly. Well, I would. I guess I’ve used it once now. Can’t use it again for, ooh, at least another few months.

“Hello, and welcome to another installment of everyone’s favourite film column in which the writer makes up their opinions on the weeks films largely based on what trailers they’ve seen on TV.”

This is completely unrelated, but I can’t stop listening to Dethklok’s Dethalbum. It may be the best metal album I’ve ever heard, and I’m not even joking.