Margaret Robertson

One More Go: Why Halo makes me want to lay down and die

There are those who say that when any door closes another one opens. These people have clearly never queued for the ladies toilet in St Pancras Station. Conceptually, though, they have a point. Endings are often beginnings.

The biggest ending of all, however, has long had me beat. As a wet-humanist, I have no big expectations for life after death. A bit of rotting. General blankness. The absence of everything is a prospect I've always found more soothing than daunting. The concept of heaven has always troubled me far more. What would it be like? What would I want it to be like?

For a while I thought my answer to those questions was Phantasy Star Online. Perfect sunsets, nice greenery, good clothes, the company of friends. There was a timelessness on Ragol which would clearly have been compatible with eternity.

Today though, thanks to the slightly underwhelming reminders of ODST, I think I'd like to go to Silent Cartographer when I die. What could be better? It's beautiful, for a start. The moon hanging fat in the sky, and the Halo stretching like spun silver around the horizon. Waves lap on the golden shore, shaded paths climb to airy peaks.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Why I'm going to Indiecade (and you probably should, too): Pt. 3

For my final entry this week on why I've decided to go to LA for the Oct. 1-4th Indiecade conference/festival (and why you should come, too): a quick and dirty run down of all the games that have been selected as finalists for this year's show runs below, and continues below the fold.

All of these games will be playable every day from 10am to 7pm at three Culver City locations: Wonderful World of Art Gallery, Culver Hotel Mezzanine and Gregg Fleishman Gallery.

See my earlier entries (pt. 1 and pt. 2) for more information on the star-studded keynotes and sessions that will make up the main Indiecade conference, and see the official Indiecade site for information on attending.

On to the list:

Aether (pictured at top), Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel

Akrasia, Team Aha!

ClassicNight, Akarolls

Cogs, Lazy 8 Studios

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Touch me I'm slick: Daniel Johnston rolls toward Laurie in Hi How Are You

There's a certain segment of the population that'll will need no introduction to Daniel Johnston -- whether they came to him via the recently released Devil And... documentary, or (more likely) through the Kurt Cobain-sported T-shirt that broke Johnston further into the public consciousness, or -- for the true-blood Texans -- simply the local lore and hometown pride Austin still holds for its long-troubled and simple-souled singer/songwriter.

And if you don't need that introduction¹, then you probably will have by now had the same reaction I had several months back when I heard whisperings that Peter 'Dr. Fun Fun' Franco and Steve 'Smashing Studios' Broumley -- former art and technical director, respectively, at the now-defunct Austin branch of Midway -- were working on a game featuring Johnston's art and music: I've more or less been waiting for this day since the early 90s.

Hi How Are You [App Store] isn't the game I imagined it would be. There's no Punching Joe boxing, there's no tilt-to-Walk-the-Cow, there isn't a single speeding motorcycle to be found. Instead, the game lands somewhere between a Mario 64 challenge level and Q-bert, where you tilt one of four characters across free-floating platforms to flip all floor tiles green.

Meanwhile, you'll be working against the clock (to gain higher level trophies and achievements), dodging any number of Johnston's demons (like his floating devil's eyeballs) and platforming your way through the alternately whimsically-innocent and hellishly-dark landscapes trying to rescue Laurie, the real-life love and muse of Johnston's early adulthood.

On reflection, these abstractions are probably for the best: what Smashing/Fun have given us is Johnston's lore injected into a game, rather than basing a game directly on one of his icons. It's probably a more tactful solution, and one that starts to work as a (very light) metaphor for his own life-long struggles.

Best of all, what it does is serve as an accessible entry point to discovering his art: Johnston's music has been licensed for use throughout the game, and each earned achievement unlocks a scale- and pan-able version of one of his illustration from throughout the years.

While it won't quite reach (and was obviously never meant to) the cultural-rocking level of the playable documentary that is The Beatles: Rock Band, it's exactly the kind of cross-media crossovers we need more of, is as loving a tribute to an artist as I've seen from a game, and if it helps introduce just one more person to Daniel, couldn't rightfully be called anything but a success.

Hi How Are You [App Store link, Dr. Fun Fun/Smashing Studios]

1. ^ [If you do, start with Johnston's Wikipedia entry, move on to his homepage, track down the aforementioned documentary sooner than later, and then move on to his Continued Story/Hi, How Are You and Yip/Jump Music CDs, or ease yourself in with the Beck, Tom Waits, Death Cab, TV on the Radio, etc. etc. covers on Discovered Covered -- use Yip Eye Tunes if you just want the MP3s.]

Brandon Boyer

Gimme Indie Game: the psycho/schizo puzzling of McMillen/Good/Karpel's Time Fcuk

I knew Time Fcuk was after my one true heart on hearing the first few melancholic melodica triplets in its title screen theme, which are nothing if not lovingly lifted from Carter Burwell's score for the Coen Bros.' Fargo, and perfectly peg the pathos that begins to unfold as you start your cyclical descent into the game's world.

Created by No Quarter, Super Meat Boy, and Aether designer Edmund McMillen, programmer William Good and musician Justin Karpel -- and described only via cryptically impenetrable blurbs -- at its core, Time Fcuk is a fairly straightforward game to describe: it's a block/switch/key puzzler with a twist of inter-dimensional-spatial-chronological tearing that rips you through layers of the same room you occupy.

What sets it apart, though, is the tone McMillen has set via an in-game one-way communicator that sees an unidentified narrator constantly interrupting your thought processes with ranting inanities, cries for help, and, eventually, more deeply unsettling and I.D.-confusing asides. And there's this matter of the small growth coming from the back of your head...

The effect, if that narrator is you -- and it certainly looks like you -- echoes movies like the previously big-upped Timecrimes or basically pick any of your favorite schizo-persona David Lynch movies from Twin Peaks to Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive.

By being forced into "the box" from which you spend the game trying to escape (which you were pushed into by someone who claims to be you from some 20 minutes in the future) you come to realize that the interruptions more likely are echoes of every iteration of a loop in which you're stuck: 'you's that have been through multiple times and no longer fear your surroundings, newer 'you's that haven't yet figured out what's happening. In the meantime, you -- the you that's playing -- are acting out that transition from confusion to confidence by learning the puzzle-tricks that get you from one room to the next.

All of this is subtle subtext, and that's precisely what makes Time Fcuk so affecting. Add to that its expertly devised level editor -- which takes a page from Echochome's book and gives players a 20-level loop of random player-creations to rate for difficulty and fun, so that essentially no puzzle goes un-played -- and the gang of three have created what is easily one of the best Flash games of the year thus far.

Brandon Boyer

Offworld Gallery: Say Hello to Hello Games

Less than a week away from announcing their first game, a little introduction to Hello Games: you may have spotted -- especially if you were on the GDC Austin show floor -- Hello's recent appearance in Edge Magazine, where they talked about their decision to leave gainful employment elsewhere to set up shop for themselves and prepare their debut PC-, 360- and PS3-bound title.

If so, you may also have spotted (though only in print) the accompanying concept sketches by Hello artist Grant Duncan, which was basically all I needed to see to realize that the team was laser-targeting my one true heart (particularly with the cube-head at top) with whatever they had in store.

The dev team at Hello is made up of (from L to R) creative director David Ream (formerly of Kuju, where he helped expand the Geometry Wars universe with Galaxies), managing director Sean Murray (former Criterion tech lead on Burnout 3 and Black), artist Duncan (formerly artist on Sega/Sumo's Virtua Tennis 3 and Sega Superstars Tennis), and programmer Ryan Doyle (also of Kuju, where he was lead programmer on the aforementioned Galaxies), and while none of the art sketches give too much away on the group's debut game, it does give a distinct (and ultra-sweet) flavor of the direction they're heading.

Below the fold then, four pages from Duncan's sketchbook to let you get to know Hello. After you've taken it in, visit Hello's website to read more (see esp.: this post, in which each of the team have been morphed into collectible diorama characters of their respective top games).

READ THE REST

Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Game Research, Ghost Stories, Alan Moore, and Academia: The Far Reaches of Edutainment

Academia has thrown up a bunch of interesting game projects over the past few years. As more gamers get into positions of academic usefulness, so that trend grows. Of course university and research groups have long been creating games with educational purposes in mind, but they're now handling increasingly hefty budgets.

One of the most high-profile projects (and most obvious recent failures) was Indiana University's Arden: The World Of William Shakespeare, which reportedly had a grant of $250,000. It was an experimental MMO which came about via the work of Professor Ed Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds. Castronova wondered whether the creation of a genuinely educational MMO was possible, and set up the student development project to find out. Having spent thousands of dollars on Arden it was shut down. Castronova cited "a lack of fun".

But I don't suppose that was the only reason. Games don't necessarily have to be fun to be engaging. Indeed "fun" seems like a trite expression in the face of some contemporary projects: games can provoke more than simple enjoyment. Look at the terrifying crypts of Stalker, or the strange sadness of Shadow of the Colossus. To realise that games ride on more than fun only takes a quick glance at the bigger picture.

One game researcher for whom "fun" seems inappropriate is the academically oriented team The Chinese Room, who are games researchers working for the University Of Portsmouth in the UK. Their medium, for now at least, is the Half-Life 2 mod, and the experiences they've created are peculiar investigations into the emotive possibilities of game design. They've realised that 3D games, with their claustrophobia and their immersive properties, can be spooky, scary and deeply evocative.

READ THE REST

Margaret Robertson

Of Words and Wool: The Making of Denki's XBLA word-battler Quarrel

I have a favourite new gaming peripheral. It's 16 bits of mounting card, 48 four-square bits of Lego, the men from 14 games of Ludo, 100 tiddly-winks, three marker pens, some wipe-clean grids, a laptop, 280 pounds of human flesh and a roll of kitchen towel.

This peripheral is otherwise known as 'playing the board-game prototype of Quarrel with Gary and David from Denki'. Denki you ought to know from the majestic Denki Blocks, and Gary Penn and David Thomson (pictured top, L to R) lead the team there who are currently turning that prototype into the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade version of the same, which you may well have first read about on this fine website.

The most reductive way to explain it is as a cross between Dice Wars and Scrabble: up to four players compete to dominate a map divided into a dozen or so different territories. Each player's men are randomly scattered in squads across the map, occupying a share of the territories. Each turn, a player can have a squad attack any adjacent territory, triggering a two-player battle - against the clock - to find the highest scoring word within the same eight-letter anagram.

What makes this harder is that the total number of letters you can use is the number of men you have on that territory: so if you've had your squad of four attack a neighbouring squad of six, your opponent has two more letters and hundreds of thousands of more potential words to play with. It's a highly narcotic mix of sleek strategy and good wordplay, as I found out when I spent a very happy day doing a spot of consultancy on it at the Denki studio last week.

But although I was supposed to be spending the day thinking about Quarrel, I ended up spending a lot of it thinking about the value of physical prototyping. On one of my own projects at the moment - a two-player online co-op confection - we're at the paper prototyping stage. Paper prototyping online co-op, I can exclusively reveal, involves a great deal of running up and down corridors with post-it notes stuck to your chest. So arriving at Denki and discovering they had board-game prototyped Quarrel got me thinking, and rapidly got us playing.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Offworld gallery: When Indies Invade Austin

Now basically fully recovered from the week of Indie Insanity that took place during and after this year's debut GDC Austin Indie Games Summit, I present (below the fold) a longer look inside the Summit with photos courtesy official Offworld photographer Rebekah Saltsman.

As I somewhat made mention of during this year's main GDC, the Indie Summit is quickly becoming an essential part of the convention, perhaps less so for the material covered (which is still nearly always incisive and inspiring), but for the opportunity to meet the people behind the games, and to experience the deep sense of community that's taken root and strengthened over the past several years.

In any industry, even outside games, it's hard to find a quarter so uncompetitive, so supportive, and so bound by a sense of collective creative drive under the quite literal strains of basic survival without otherwise gainful employment, and it's hard to come away without feeling like it's something that the world could use more of.

So, all that said, behind the fold you'll find photos of the people behind nearly all the Indie Summit talks, with more available directly from Saltsman's official Flickr stream -- though none un/fortunately, from our Saturday trip to Austin's Eagle Peak firing range, where Cortex Command creator Dan Tabar led an expedition to give what must have looked like the motliest of indoor-kid crews their first-ish non-digital/simulated rounds on a variety of handguns and assault rifles. Maybe we'll save that one for another day.

READ THE REST

Brandon Boyer

Nintendo's Holiday/2010 Wii/DS lineup: the Offworld View

Following the last roundup of Nintendo's first and third party lineup earlier this year, the company has sent out a list of its Wii/DS retail and downloadable games coming through the rest of 2009 and well into next year: here's the Offworld view of where you should be focused.

Wii:

In addition to long-followed favorites like A Boy and His Blob and New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Nintendo's console will see its own ports of big-buddget upcoming Activision releases, and its own sequel version of Drawn to Life: the original "draw your own platformer" from Scribblenauts developer 5th Cell.

Activision - DJ Hero - Oct. 27
Activision - Tony Hawk: RIDE - Nov. 17
Electronic Arts - Spore Hero - Oct. 6
LucasArts - LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues - Fall
Majesco - A Boy and His Blob - Oct. 13
Nintendo - Wii Fit Plus - Oct. 4
Nintendo - New Super Mario Bros. Wii - Holiday
THQ - Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter - Oct. 27
Warner Bros. - LEGO Rock Band - Holiday

WiiWare:

The downloadable front should look fairly familiar to long-time readers: only a WiiWare version of Castlevania, Archon: Classic (a port of the iPhone version), and the entirely unknown Eco Shooter are surprise additions -- that is, if you don't count the announcement that three more games in the Bit.Trip series are due before Spring of 2010.

Aksys - BIT.TRIP VOID - Q3
Aksys - BIT.TRIP series (3 additional titles) - Q4, Q1
Broken Rules - And Yet It Moves - Q4
Frontier - LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias - Q4
Konami - Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth - Q3
Nicalis - Cave Story - Q3
Nicalis - Night Game - Q1
Nicalis - La Mulana - Q1
Nintendo - You, Me, and the Cubes - Q3
Nintendo - Eco Shooter: Plant 530 - Q4
Nintendo - Pokémon Rumble - Q4
Press Play - Max & the Magic Marker - Q4
React Games - Archon: Classic - Q1
Team Meat - Super Meat Boy - Q1

Nintendo DSi:

Few surprises here either, but good news for Space Invaders Extreme fans, and those long-awaiting Platinum Games' space opera epic Infinite Space (formerly Infinite Line).

Electronic Arts - Spore Hero Arena - Oct. 6
Konami - WireWay - November
LucasArts - LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues - Fall
Nintendo - The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks - Dec. 7
PopCap - Bookworm - Dec. 1
SEGA - Infinite Space - Spring
Square Enix - Space Invaders Extreme 2 - Oct. 20
THQ - Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter - Oct. 27
Warner Bros. - Scribblenauts - Sept. 15
Warner Bros. - LEGO Rock Band - Holiday

It's DSiWare that gets the most surprises with a port of GBA art games series 'bit Generations' DigiDrive (above) -- one of the best overall puzzle games of the series, from PixelJunk creators Q-games. Also, Nintendo's confirmed that it'll be bringing the entirety of Toshio Iwai's Electroplankton to the West as individual downloads (as it just did in Japan), Subatomic brings its iPhone (and PSP) tower defense game Fieldrunners to the handheld, and Boy and his Blob re-makers WayForward announce a new game in the Shantae series, the cult hit platformer that debuted on Game Boy Color and promptly fell off the map entirely.

Nintendo - Art Style: DIGIDRIVE - Q4
Nintendo - Electroplankton (10 titles total) - Q4
Subatomic - Fieldrunners - Q4
WayForward - Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Q4

Brandon Boyer

Austin Indie Summit: The successful construction of Fantastic Contraption

Watching Fantastic Contraption creator Colin Northway speak, you get the sense that he's discovered the magic formula, and despite the confidence that his undeniable success allows (he's converted, he figures, about 0.5% of the 3.1 million players he'd gained by the end of October 2008 into $10 paying customers [basically: cut those millions in half, move the decimal point one to the left, and put a dollar sign in front]), you get the sense that that success came as a surprise to him as much as anyone.

In what was easily the most entertaining session of the first day of GDC Austin's Indie Games Summit, Northway guided his audience through the rise and rise of the construction-puzzle game's development and near-instant user-crush in the form of a literally-bug-squashing timeline platformer, with his own mutton-chopped mug perfectly pixelated by I Wish I Were The Moon/Today I Die's Daniel Benmergui, and offered a number of guidelines for other developers hoping to mirror his accolades.

1.) Make your game in Flash

Northway draws a fine distinction between 'Flash games' (games where you "launch kitties into a spiky thing") and 'games written in Flash', but he's an evangelist for the platform more than anything because "the content discovery problem has been solved" compared to consoles, the iPhone, etc. Forums, emails, all pre-existing internet communities will do the work of keeping your game's name in front of other people, whereas, say, with the iPhone, "making money is hard to do if Apple doesn't spray the money hose on you."

2.) Make your game "live online"

All of those user good graces will be short lived, though, if your game doesn't make it easy for them to spread. Northway repeatedly conjured the idea of letting your game "live on the internet", something he's done by keeping user-made creations in a database accessible by a friendly URL, rather than 10-line encoded data URLs, that can be passed easily from player to player in emails and forum posts. But also, he notes, you get "no grace from people on Flash, versus a downloaded game" -- because they have no time invested in your game other than loading it in their browser, you need to "spoon feed them for the first five minutes" to ensure they don't leave as soon as they've arrived. "Take people who hate you and put them in front of your game," he said, "and write [those first five minutes] specifically to them."

3.) Leverage "pride based marketing"

Here's where Northway's advice gets more genre specific, or perhaps where it can urge designers to expand their designs to capitalize on what he's found: because Contraption lets users pass their intricately built puzzle solutions to each other, and because he's made that easier with his advice above, his players are "really keen on sharing something they've built". Using this "pride based marketing" to your advantage will "pay off so well for you in the way your game spreads."

4.) Make a free game that gives players 'a tote bag' if they pay

While Contraption asks for money as soon as you hit its home screen, the game's spread more easily because it's always been reviewed as a free game, with some 10 hours of play given away. What Northway does is give players a thing when they buy it -- in this case, access to level editors and its library of 40,000 user-made levels for that $10 fee (likening it to a PBS model of watching 9 hours of Red Dwarf, but getting spurred on to pay for that content by getting a tote bag). And while he has only converted that 0.5%, that's not far off from piracy numbers he's heard quoted elsewhere. Surprisingly, only five percent of the people who've paid have gone on to actually use the level editor, even once.

Northway saw his game go from release (with zero spent or expended in the way of PR or press outreach) to 20,000 users in his first weekend (spent lazing around on the couch) to 1.1 million in its first month (spent still working at his 'real' job, watching the first PayPal emails dinging in and saying "some human being thinks you're worth $10") to that 3.1 million before publisher inXile (also currently operating similarly viral web-diversion Line Rider) assumed control of the operation.

There seem to be other factors he doesn't mention that have aided in its success (taking something as daunting as physics-heavy construction kits and making it friendly with its flat, bubbly thick-vector interface), but, as was echoed by a number of indie devs following the session, Northway's model and story seems to be precisely the way that indie development should, as in, is meant to work.

Brandon Boyer

Austin Indie Summit: my show and tell of the New Indie Hottness

This was the surprisingly large, warm and receptive crowd that turned out for my early-morning session at the opening day of GDC Austin's debut Indie Game Summit, and the reason they're all smiling will be clear by the time you reach the end of this post.

My task for the session was to give the attendees here a snapshot of the best of what indie gaming's currently got to offer: some old and unmissable, some never before seen, and some seen, but never before played live. Here's the run down -- for reference and further research and download -- of everything I showed off.

1.) Spelunky

By far the most widely played and important indie game of the past several years (even in prelude to its upcoming Xbox Live Arcade port), I found out quickly just how hard it is to play live and talk in front of an audience, in a quasi-Game Center CX series of embarrassing failures.

2.) Glum Buster

Too few people have still taken a trip through Austin-native Justin 'CosMind' Leingang's fantastically surreal world -- hopefully playing it live gave everyone an even more compelling reason to.

3.) Alpinist

Even just the tiny shred of a teaser for Craig 'SUPERBROTHERS' Adams' indie debut was enough to impress, with his inimitable graphic style, and the promise of its simulated grueling mountain ascension.

4.) Time Donkey

The inherent charm of Flashbang's latest made it one of the most popular playthroughs of the session, judging by audience reaction. I very regretfully haven't had the time yet to do it justice here, but will surely do when GDC Austin madness dies back down.

5.) Captain Forever

As I said before, this will probably end up topping a lot of best-of-2009 lists when word reaches out further, and a round of applause rose as soon as the name was dropped. Creator Farbs was kind enough to drop off a debug build of the game for the session, which meant that I could cheat my way into demonstrating the jaw-dropping muted disco-dance-rain-of-destruction that you're ultimately fighting to build toward. Expect much more on this game here soon.

6.) Tuning

The first surprise of the show was the latest game from oft-mentioned Offworld favorite Cactus, with a rare sneak preview of his previously blogged and yet to be released "game about killing everything you love", now titled Tuning. Even with early warnings from Cactus about playing through it ahead of time to be sure I could do it justice live (which I did, I swear, and I got so far), with its constant, progressively more sadistically perception-warping, it was the second time of the morning that proved how embarrassing public play can be.

7.) Fez

And the session's biggest surprise: Polytron's Phil Fish made a guest appearance to give the first live demonstration of what the studio's been cooking up for the past few years.

The game's grown even more rich and complex than I'd expected since I last saw its 2007 Indie Games Festival debut, and impressed the crowd enough (see: the photo at top) that we cut well into the planned coffee break to hang on main star Gomez's every dimensional shift.

Thanks to everyone for coming out and putting up with what I can only imagine was a rambling, too-early, caffeine-addled, ranty awkward set of playthroughs!

Brandon Boyer

The Offworld Guide to the 2009 Austin Game Developers Conference

With GDC Austin coming to down next Tuesday to Friday, now seems as good a time as any to do a quick guide to what you should see, and why, if you still haven't registered (with the early registration discount still running through today), you probably should.

1.) The debut of AGDC's Indie and iPhone Game Summits.

This year marks the Austin debut of the two Summits that have always brought some of the most dedicated crowds at the main GDC (many of the Indie Summit sessions this year playing to at-capacity audiences), and -- though I might be a bit biased as one of the Indie Summit's advisors -- the lineup here turned out quite good.

Yours truly will actually be speaking this year early Tuesday morning at 10 for a "New Indie Hotness" session that'll highlight (goes the description) "games and experiments that enchant or confound" -- that is, a number of the games you'll probably be familiar with from Offworld coverage, including some live demos of a few that haven't been played in front of an audience before.

But you shouldn't (and won't, probably) come just for that: the Indie Summit also includes the makers of the Bit.Trip games, World of Goo, Splosion Man, A Kingdom for Keflings, Fantastic Contraption, Minotaur China Shop, And Yet It Moves, Aquaria and Marian, Bunni, Canabalt, and Penny Arcade Adventures, and you honestly can't do too much better than that. See the full lineup and schedule at GDC's official Indie Summit page.

On the iPhone side, most notably, Tiger Style Games will be presenting an hour long look at the making of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (running alongside my own session -- even I can't help you choose there), with other talks by the makers of Reflexion, Booyah Society, Enigmo, FaceFighter, Words/Chess With Friends and World War Robot, and handfuls more, seen at its own Summit schedule page.

2.) The keynotes and main lineup.

Doing a full breakdown of the main conference sessions is almost too arduous to consider, but the keynotes will include Frank Pearce and J. Allen Brack talking about the Universe of World of Warcraft, Crazy Planets/Pet Society dev PlayFish's Sebastien de Halleux talking social games, Sony Online's John Smedley talking about free to play MMOs, with sessions including the writers behind Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge, Infamous, Fallout 3... check the full session lineup or the full speaker lineup to see everyone that's coming.

3.) The parties, game movies at The Alamo

And then also there's the real reason you're all coming: the drunken hob-knobbing, which this year will most notably be taking place at IGDA Austin's 128-bit party (with 'Gangsta-Style Rock Band' [?!]) -- GDC's got the full list of after-hour parties here .

Also new for 2009, AMODA and local-treasure theater chain Alamo Drafthouse will be hosting two nights of game movies: Tuesday at 10:15 pm they'll be screening the previously-blogged German TV special that brought together Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford, and Thursday at 10:20 pm they'll be showing the documentary TILT: the Battle to Save Pinball. Both of these are open to the public, so even if you aren't making it to the conference proper, you should come say hello there, and drink beer and eat excellent food.

I'll be doing my damndest throughout the four days to bring you as much coverage of the conference as I can -- look for that all throughout next week.

Official GDC Austin site [Think Services]