GDC Information, Interesting Links, and an Important Announcement
First the announcement (which has nothing to do with GDC): One of the tech newsletters I subscribe to has a short editorial at the top of every one before the reviews and other articles. The editorial in question here is this one which talks about AOL’s Terms of Service Agreement that everyone using AIM has agreed to accept. I highly recommend reading it (only 5-6 paragraphs), but the short version is essentially that anything you say or send across the AOL network can be used by AOL in any way that they want. If you use AOL/AIM, be careful what you say to other people if you have any intent on wanting to keep that information private.
Now, on to what I found important that occured at GDC this week. By far I found the most interesting thing to be the keynote speech by Nintendo. 3 huge things were announced: 1) Nintendo is launching its plans to take the DS online within the year via any wireless hotspot, 2) “Revolution” will have built in Wi-Fi for online gaming (theoretically) at the beginning of it’s life and will also be backwards compatible with all Gamecube games, and 3) a new trailer for the Gamecube Legend of Zelda was shown. As far as I can tell, Nintendo knows that they did somet hings wrong this generation to compete with Sony and Microsoft and plans on coming back full force.
Microsoft’s keynote also provided a bunch of hints about “Xenon”. First off, Microsoft is making a huge push for HDTVs in the fact that the native resolution will be a widescreen aspect ratio (likely 16:9). Whether or not this will speed up the adoption of HDTVs or simply reduce the sale numbers of Xenon because fewer people with regular TVs decide to buy it is yet to be seen. A new UI is being developed that will allow for better Live integration across all games and also will provide for custom soundtracks in every game. Xbox hasn;t been my favorite console this generation and Xenon probably won’t jump to the top of my list, but Microsoft definitely has some interesting ideas as far as their next console goes.
The non-game related news is the new technology that Dolby has developed for playing 5.1 audio over any set of stereo headphones. Don’t believe me? Here’s the link to Dolby’s site and their interactive demo. The great part about this is that it’s software based so games being developed for existing platforms (although generally handheld) will be able to take advantage of it, very important seeing as how the DS and PSP have just launched within the past 6 months.
Finally, an interesting link I found: del.icio.us — I would have never thought of making a URL into a word. In reality, the site has nothing to do with being delicious, but is a “social bookmark” manager so you can keep track of and categorize your bookmarks online and even see who else has bookmarked the same sites (via a URL hashing method). I personally haven’t tried it out yet, but I liked the idea so I figured that I might as well include it.