It is great to see all of the cool toys and the biggest, most eye-catching were the Alienware and Nvidia booths. Eye-catching was exactly what they were here to do. Nvidia was displaying their 3-D glasses. What better a game to set off with 3-D than Left for Dead? Of course, there was some nice head-to-head action at the Alienware booth with Guitar Hero and the new Call of Duty. The genesis of 3-D technologies for computers has seen a long road. I was the guy getting sick looking at red and blue in the late 80's. These were amazing. I get First Person Shooter Sickness (FPSS), which is caused by the same mechanism that allows people to get car or sea sick. I was fully expecting to get a similar nausea. It took a few seconds to get used to the motion, but it was very smooth sailing after that. If head-to-head against amateurs wasn't your style, and you thought you needed to run with the big dogs, then Miss Alyson Craghead would own you at Halo 3. Everyone had their opportunity thanks to Critical Mass Interactive to win a beautiful guitar. All you had to do to win was beat Alyson in a game to five on Halo 3. Alas, noone in Austin was up to the challenge. Now she is by no means new at this. The former Frag Doll is very much at home dropping newbs.
Yeah, a little head-to-head was fun and all, but the better competition had been brewing longer that the few days the arcade was running. This year was the first annual game design competition. There were two main categories; casual and AAA. The winners were decided by both a live jury and crowd input. There were many great applicants, but in the end, there can only be two. Where there may have been one winner in each category, the school that showed up big was the Savannah School of Art and Design, as both winners were representing their school. So for casual games, we had Sloppy Ice from Gwen Murray, and for AAA we had Project Z.E.U.S. from Seth Smith as our two big winners.
There were several local schools present to talk to people about getting into game development. There were also other various vendors showing of their gaming wares. You can find a complete list at the SXSW website. My kudos have to go out to the designer of the Mountain Dew booth. Their gaming room interpretation was a spectacular stroll down memory lane. They had accurately created game areas that were representative to their era. Old school Nintendo played on a giant CRT with table legs, all the way to the 360 on a nice HDTV. A lot of work went into matching the decor for each period.
There were tons of great games and competitions. There is a lot of information to be gained from the actual panels set up for ScreenBurn, but they are not free to the public like the arcade. Next year will be even sweeter. I cannot wait. Now that I see how the competition works, I think it is time to get to work on my submission for next year. Wish me luck.
