GDC: Miyamoto, Mario, Molyneux, and More

Yesteday there was somewhat of an uproar over Maxis developer Chris Hecker calling the Wii a “piece of shit” and “two gamecubes duct taped together” and implied that Nintendo doesn’t care about games as art.
Here is Super Mario Galaxy, shown today.

Now Hecker apologizes. Does a Mario game need to look any better than that? I mean, thats beyond all my wildest expectations for Mario! Really delivers on Wii being more than just a funny controller.

Miyamoto owned the day of course with a heavily watched keynote about expanding expectations and the audiences for games. He spoke of converting his wife into a gamer, getting his daughter to play Ocarina Of Time, and how the industry has changed in the past decade. 1up, Kotaku, and Destructoid covered pretty much all of it. The big news is that Mario Galaxy is definitely coming out this year (but not this summer…) and that there will be a new Mii channel for users to put their creations up to be voted on and rated. Some people are kinda disappointed he didn’t drop some “megaton” announcement, but this is GDC, not E3. His keynote was on the money for this type of show.

Peter Molyneux anxiously showed off some Fable 2 stuff, well aware that some were already taking his concepts to task. He had some mighty big talk about stuff in the first Fable, and not all of it made it in to the game, and a lot of people were kind of mad about that. Keeping that in mind, he showed off Fable 2’s killer app; THE DOG. I know some people are again going “Whu? why?” but given how cool Nintendogs is on its own, an all AI dog that is your constant companion in a long game like Fable sounds to me like a pretty neat innovation and does more to customize and personalize your character than new tunic or hat.

The Behemoth also showed more Castle Crashers, the follow up to Alien Hominid. Since this is a 360 game from the ground up, the experience looks a lot more rich and will offer 4 player co-op online!

Sony release screens of the PS3 Ratchet & Clank, but no video yet. Come on, Insomniac is one of your best in-house developers! You can’t get people to buy a PS3 with a Second Life knock off!

Oh, here’s Phantom Hourglass, which debuted at last year’s GDC.

This has one of my favorite Zelda themes, and even includes a giant enemy crab.