GDC 2006 Reporter's Notebook March 21, 2006

Introduction

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Today the full GDC experience is set to begin and I'll be there to cover the keynotes, the awards later tonight, and various other things. Stay tuned..it will be good.

The following stuff is from a couple of personal one-on-one meetings I had during the first two days of GDC

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Nokia's Plans For Mobile Phone Games

A few years ago, Nokia released their first entry into the portable games market with the N-Gage, a device which had an almost unworkable design when it first came out (remember the taco pose when using it as a phone?) While Nokia released a much better design with the N-Gage QD less than a year later, the damage had been done. Or had it?

While the N-Gage console design is now almost a memory, Nokia itself is still a major player in the portable games market. On Monday at the Game Developers Conference, FiringSquad chatted briefly with Nokia's gaming marketing head Kamar Shah to get some more info about Nokia's new push towards the mobile game market. As Shah explained to us, they have no need to complete with the Sonys and Nintendos of the world when they have 25 million "smartphones" that can deliver games. As he told us, "We had a lot of learning from N-Gage."

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Mobile gaming (cont’d)

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So what will people be playing on these new high-powered smartphones? Shah admitted that if he knew the answer to this question things would be a lot better off for his company. However, the current best-selling mobile phone games are puzzle titles like Scrabble or Tetris, or maybe an old school first person shooter like Doom. "I'm not going to play World of Warcraft on my phone," Shah told us. However, as phones become more powerful, more game genres should open up for phones.


While the initial N-Gage didn't excite gamers or developers, Nokia is now concentrating its efforts on making its current and next-generation smartphone designs a solid choice for the mobile phone game market, and Shah seems confident that the company is now on the right track. "Nokia has the expertise to handle it," he told FiringSquad. Time will tell if he is correct.

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Discover DISCover again

Some of you may remember DISCover as a company that like Infinium Labs, tried and failed to release a PC-oriented game console that would making installing and playing PC games as easy as those on a game console. Unlike Infinium Labs however, DISCover didn't stop from trying to make PC games easier to install and play; they just decided to do it another way. During GDC on Tuesday I met up with DISCover's vice-president of marketing Mike McCullough to go over their current and future software products.

DISCover has decided to concentrate on making games more accessible via a My Games tab in the Windows Media Center OS. Windows MCE doesn't have a native My Games tab so DISCover created one with their software tools. Their efforts are being licensed by people like Hewlett Packard and Sony for use in their own Windows Media PCs. It's a growing market, according to McCullough who told us that currently 43 percent of all PCs being sold in the US have the Media Center version of Windows.

So what does having the My Games selection add? According to DISCover, with their technology you can install and play games much faster than you could with just using the regular Windows XP OS. No more having to click on tons of tabs and selections while installing a game. DISCover has special scripts written for each game that tells the Media Center PC how to install the game automatically. All you need to do is to type in the CD key to play. The interface for managing your PC games on your hard drive is much easier with DISCover's software. McCullough showed us a My Games interface with a Windows Media Center-based laptop. The menus and labels were all clear and easy to click on and handle, versus the sometimes confusing way Windows XP handles how games are displayed on the typical Start menu. McCullough admitted it was a time-consuming process to write each and every script. That means that they have concentrated on making scripts for the top 150 games for the PC in the last couple of years.

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DISCover (cont’d) and the Microsoft and CDV parties

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DISCover's goals are straightforward as McCullough told us. "We want to make installing and playing a game as easy as playing a CD or DVD," he told us. PC gamers have sometimes complained that installing games should be more like a console title and DISCover's efforts in that area could lead the way towards making that a reality for all gamers.

Parties and Parties

For some odd reason, Micosoft decided to hold a major press event showing off their new and upcoming Xbox 360 titles at San Fransisco on Tuesday night, despite the fact that a ton of reporters were in San Jose for GDC. I managed to find a way to go to the event which was held at the Supper Club. The club was set up so that people could lie down in almost a bed while playing Xbox games. In addition to newly released titles like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, a number of upcoming games were playable at the event. The highlights for me?

Nighty Nine Nights, the Japanese action title in the style of Dynasty Warriors with lots of characters on screen and lots of cool combo attack moves; Tomb Raider Legend, which looks like it will finally bring Lara Croft back to her original Tomb Raider moves; and Saints Row, THQ's answer to the Grand Theft Auto open city crime action games (but a lot better looking).

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