This year’s Hot Docs was a bit of a chore thanks to the Toronto Transit Commission’s decision to threaten striking throughout the whole thing. However, I did manage to get some coverage done, most of which was of the simple film listing variety, but there were a few reviews too:

Hot Tickets At Hot Docs – A preview of the festival, with some of my top picks.

Hot Docs 2008: Wesley Willis’s Holy Shadow – Reviews of Wesley Willis’ Joy Rides and Shadow of the Holy Book.

Hot Docs 2008: Vesterbro – A review of Vesterbro.

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.)

Hmm! I’d actually forgotten all about this column, but it’s a good time to bring it up, as roughly half of it discusses my unusual excitement for the announcement of Major League Power Pros, the North American localisation of the (massively popular in Japan) Powerful Pro Baseball series.

I don’t even really like baseball (certainly not as a spectator sport, although my one trip to the Skydome was alright) but I’ll probably be picking up a copy when it hits shelves this week – the same week Sin and Punishment hit the Wii Virtual Console, so it’s a good week indeed.

The rest of my article is about the furore that surrounded Manhunt 2′s ban in the UK, and how this kind of controversy can stop people from trying to make truly mature games. Any kind of censorship is bad for expression. I’m anti-censorship, but I think my opinion is a little strange (particularly in North America) in that I have no particular problem with legislation stopping adults-only games getting into the hands of children, as long as adults can still buy them freely. Of course, stores are so stupidly squeamish about selling adults-only games, a bigger problem in my mind. People really need to be able to accept that legitimate culture really can be “adults-only” and that doesn’t mean we all need to be protected from it.

Anyway, you can read the full article, in Danish, as part of the PDF found on the Game Reactor website.

I’ve made it through another festival, admittedly one in which I was felled by the foul but inevitable “festival cold” roughly a week early (I got it on the first Saturday of the festival rather than the last) and this year I chose to put all of my day-to-day work on Torontoist. That’s not to say reviews and interviews from the festival won’t appear elsewhere, of course.

TIFF 2007 Preview: Special Presentations, Real To Reel And Canada First! – A review of Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Definitely my favourite documentary of the festival and certainly one of my favourite films.

TIFF 2007 Preview: Vanguard, Short Cuts Canada – A review of Help Me Eros and a selection from the Short Cuts Canada programme. Reviewing the Canadian shorts is one of my favourite tasks of the festival each year and although I utterly despised an (otherwise highly rated) short this year the rest were pretty okay.

TIFF 2007: No Fugitive Peace From The Festival – The festival begins!

TIFF 2007: Lust, Control – Reviews of Captain Mike Across America; Control and Lust, Caution.

TIFF 2007: Heavy Metal In Toronto – An interview with Suroosh Alvi, co-founder of Vice Magazine and co-director of Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

TIFF 2007: You, The Dead – Reviews of You, The Living and Diary of the Dead.

TIFF 2007: Erik Nietzsche Into The Wild – Reviews of Juno and Erik Nietzsche The Early Years.

TIFF 2007: Pixel Projections – Coverage of the Into the Pixel exhibition, held as part of the film festival’s Future Projections programme.

TIFF 2007: Run, Filmmaker, Run – Reviews of Operation Filmmaker and Run, Fat Boy, Run.

TIFF 2007: Cassandra’s Smiley Face – A review of Smiley Face.

TIFF 2007: The Rambow Fragments – Reviews of Son of Rambow and The Tracey Fragments (two of my favourite films of the festival) and Mad Detective.

TIFF 2007: Hirsute And The “Many Martys” Theory – An interview with A.J. Bond, director of Hirsute, the best short I saw at the festival.

TIFF 2007: Sukiyaki Western Django – A review of Sukiyaki Western Django, and the festival ends!

This is the article I mentioned a little while ago in my post about my Film Friday, “King Kong Fever“.

It’s mostly about how addictive I find the Xbox 360′s Gamerscore, even though I’m well aware it’s completely pointless. You gain absolutely nothing from it other than the joy of seeing numbers go up, and yet I’ve performed some of the most obscure and ridiculous tasks just to feel that rush of endorphins that comes when I hear the “plink” of another unlocked achievement.

If only Microsoft would convert Gamerscore points to Microsoft points at a rate of 10 to 1 or something. Then I could excuse myself.

In general, though, I don’t think it’s a very good thing. It adds another layer of abstraction that reminds you that you’re playing a game, and titles have to work extra hard to capture your imagination. I was completely surprised to find that King Kong was a title that managed to capture my imagination, considering it’s most well known for being 1000 easy achievement points, but it did. And I’m rather glad I played it.

You can read the full article, in Danish, as part of the PDF found on the Game Reactor website.

Perhaps surprisingly, 52 Gaming Similes To Describe Your Relationship still gains this site a ridiculous number of daily hits, mostly thanks to Stumbleupon, a site which I wasn’t actually previously familiar with. It’s done the article a lot more good than Digg did, strangely (I always thought Digg was where the action is.) Anyway, as part of my plan for global supremacy, the first language this has (officially) been translated into is Danish for Game Reactor. You can download the PDF from the Game Reactor website, but it’s also available online at Thomas Tangaard’s blog.

Interested in translating the article for your own regional publication? Do get in touch, dears.

It’s been rather a while since I’ve written something for Plan B Magazine, but I’ve returned to its pages in fine style, with a full page interview with Tetsuya Mizuguchi about his interest in creating virtual pop stars for video games; from Ulala (for Space Channel 5) to the nameless girl featured in the Genki Rockets video for Lumines II.

I think it’s a rather interesting concept, and while, admittedly, this isn’t the most enlightening interview (it was his final interview of the Montreal Game Summit, and the jet lag was obviously getting to him) it’s still a good article.

As ever, you can purchase this issue at Plan B’s website.