Game Developers Conference 2008 is over and it’s time to return to the snowy North. Here are my picks for the best and worst of everything i experienced there.

Best New Game Announcement

i was pretty impressed with APB, the new multiplayer game announced at a keynote by Realtime Worlds. Realtime Worlds also developed Crackdown, one of my most favourite games from last year.

Expectations fell flat when i realized that APB was all about driving and shooting. The real hook in Crackdown was the Agility feature. You could ignore all the gangland violence like i did, and instead collect little green orbs that made you run faster and – most impressively – jump higher. Once your Agility rating was high enough, you could leap to the top of a nearby building and rain down bullety justice from above. This feature turned Crackdown into a platformer game – a sort of Super Mario Bruthas.

The game that really piqued my interest was Recoil: Retrograd by Zeitguys. Recoil is a third-person time-travelling game with a solid steampunk style. Steampunk is a “what-if” motif inspired by Jules Verne and HG Wells where steam, rather than electricity, became the dominant driving force behind technology. Steampunk style touchstones include brass goggles, wood, ornate trim, zeppelins, knobs, and wires. The high technology is always wonderfully low-tech. i’ve only seen a select few games that have achieved commercial sucecss using this style, most notably the Dark Cloud series and the huge hit Bioshock.

Neither of those games, in my opinion, went as far as possible with that style. Recoil takes it to amazing new levels; i stood staring at the demo, my mouth half-open, with the sheer volume of steamy goodness pouring out of the game. Their hype mission was helped along a little by the actors they hired to run around the expo floor in the most ass-annihilating steampunk costumes i’ve ever seen.

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

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