GDC- The Mostly Bad Key

J gave a nice keynote speech today at GDC. MajorNelson was nice enough to put out the thing in a nice MP3 and .wav file format for us all to hear.

However, nothing "huge" was reveild. But some "bad" things were.

Games seem to be changing from "How do we do this new" to "how do I make the most money off of this". I know it's bussiness and they have to eat too, but I think they are starting to lose the creativity in favor of corpral settings.

Jay's highlight was the new XBL features. One of them bing renewed support for PDLC. Really, thats all there was. Hello, we alreadly have this. They just want to make it smaller, like only one car, or one tire. I geuss this is the reaction fro the XBL Arcade deal...what a reversal.

Other highlightes were more universal connections...it seems that all Xenon (Jay did use this term...so now, little annoying kids that feel the need to correct all the differant terms like Xbox 2, Xenon or Xbox 360....eat it) games will have a univeral dashboard to play custom music and access freinds. All this seems so, 2002-ish. That was cool back then...but now, gamers have more important things they want...like better online infustracture, more patches, and new ways to play online.

I was majorly disappointed with the speech. He speaks of the HD Era. Thats cool. I don't have an HDTV...but I geuss 1,000 of attendes do now.

I hope E3 goes better...something jsut seems old about Xenon...where was anything new? Maybe it's because,as a gamer, I care more about actual games than avatars and freind's lsit. Their cool...but it comes down to the quality of the actual games, not all the extras, when I stand at Circuit City. In a lot of ways...Xenon looks less "hardcore" and more "universal". If thats the case, it's a sad, sad day.

Before the Storm

The Xbox keynote is tomorrow. MN is over there, blogging away about everything over at his personal blog, www.majornelson.com .

Wha I expect to happen is a lot of hints, teasers, little screen shots, if you will, of the Xbox Next's power. I don't expect anything close to a full reveil, more like a cinematic teaser of whats sure to come at E3.

XNA, as it is a developer's tool, and this is GDC (Developers, remember), will take a big chunck of the future of Xbox and gaming in general. I have a feeling we are going to get a lot of "in general"s tomorrow.

Also, I think universal encorporation-like a media center-will take the primary focus of the entire conferance. The next-gen (Now thats Next Gen III) will do more than play games...at least I geuss thats what the population wants.

I probably won't blog the results...as I'm sure all the others will do a better, quicker job of that. I might give my reaction, f anything big happens.