New games highlighted at conference
Updated on 28 March 2009
At the Game Developers Conference, the annual convention of game designers, programmers and executives, several impresarios were interested in pushing the limits of the interactive medium with their ideas.
The industry's most innovative creations were showcased at the eighth annual Experimental Gameplay Sessions.
Developers demonstrated several prototypes, such as Ian Dallas' The Unfinished Swan - in the black-and-white game, players track down a swan within a blank white environment by splattering black paint to reveal pathways, walls, lakes and more.
"This is, I think, the most consistent collection of designs that are doing what I describe as pushing the boundaries of game design in the most interesting and consistently thoughtful ways," said Jonathan Blow, the panel's organiser and the independent designer behind the time-bending puzzle platformer 'Braid' (which is available for Xbox Live Arcade and PC).
Several of the featured games dabbled with dimension. Flashbang Studios' puzzler Shadow Physics casts players as a shadow who can interact with 3-D objects in different rooms, while Marc Ten Bosch's Miegakure takes place in 4-D.
Hazardous Software unveiled Achron, a strategy game 10 years in the making that has a time-travel twist. It allows players to build up their own armies then travel around the timeline, as well as send their troops back to the future to prevent their enemies from further progressing.
Other games on display included Derek Yu's Spelunky, a side scroller inspired by the 1980 game Rouge where the levels are randomly generated each time the game is played, and Daniel Benmergui's Today I Die, a melodic game in which players swap words in a poem to transform the graphics on screen.
Experimental Gameplay Sessions organiser Blow noted that such quirky, minimalist endeavours have dramatically increased in popularity over the past few years because of the proliferation of downloadable platforms.
The expansion of digital delivery was the buzz of this year's conference. OnLive and Zeebo, new technologies that rely on digital delivery, were announced at the convention, and Nintendo President Satoru Iwata spent much of his keynote speech discussing the online capabilities of the popular Wii gaming console and the forthcoming DSi handheld system.
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