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Every so often there is an innovation that comes around in gaming that changes how we play our games.  Bringing the arcade experience into the homes through consoles, the first hand held system, Nintendo’s Wii motion controller and now today Microsoft claimed to be providing the next.  They were the first of the big three to have their E3 keynote address, and did they ever deliver.  Today they announced Left 4 Dead 2, a Metal Gear solid game, a new Halo game, and a new Forza.  In the last few years that would have been enough, for example take a look to last year, their big reveal was Final Fantasy is coming to the xbox (previously a sony exclusive).  Not this year, it had been rumored that they were preparing a motion controller to rival the Wii, well today they did that, but without a controller.

What they appear to have done is turned you into the controller, and if it works half as good as the video, than I am impressed.  With menu navigation similar to the Minority Report, voice recognition, and Peter Molyneux presenting an AI that if it is 25% of what he claims, is really impressive (as he really doesn’t have the best track of delivering up to his promises).  If that wasn’t all enough, they have now integrated facebook, and twitter into Xbox Live, setup High Def streaming service, the ability to buy old 360 titles via an On Demand solution.  Oh and they happened to have the Beatles stop by to open things up.

Nintendo and Sony execs must be scrambling to out do Microsoft this year, cause if all Nintendo has is a new Mario game and Sony announcing a price cut than both are in big trouble.  It should be an interested few days ahead as we see where E3 goes from here.

See below for videos on the AI and the motion sensor.

I’ve now worked in the game industry for over a year and right now the annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing.  For those of you who don’t know what GDC is, it’s when all the worlds developers get together to discuss what they’ve learned with others in the hope that someone doesn’t repeat the same mistakes they did in developing something.  New products get announced here as well.  I have followed the GDC for the last couple years, and this year is no different.

One trend I’m following is the discussion around the iPhone and the games made for it.  Right now I believe the company I work for Sculpin QA is the premiere testing studio for iPhone games.  We’ve worked on such hits as Rolando, Super Monkey Ball, Topple, and Diner Dash and learned a lot in the process.  One year ago no one was talking about the iPhone as a legit gaming platform, now indy devs are making $600,000 creating games in their basement.  Just a couple weeks ago, Apple announced OS 3.0 where they will be integrating in app purchases, peripherals, bluetooth, P2P, cut and paste, and a ton more other features.  Their SDK has opened the doors for some crazy ideas, and it’s not going to stop, according Neil Young of ngmoco 148 apps a day are being released on the store.  There are some issues with the store at the moment, but that is an entirely different discussion.  Google is releasing a competing operating system called Android with an app store, but I just don’t think it’s going to be as big as the iPhone.. but that remains to be seen, perhaps i’ll be blogging about that in a year.

In addition this year Twitter has now exploded and a lot of the tech savvy crowed at GDC is twittering most of the events going on.  So by following the stream of things tagged with #GDC, I’m getting access to the latest news without having scour the internet for a good article here or there, it just gets fed right to my feedwatcher.

So, within the next few weeks at Sculpin we will be getting very busy.  I’ve learned a lot in the last year about the difference of between White and Black box testing, assumption that should never be made, questions that should always be asked and how to test to a calculator program

If you are looking for some high quality game testing, or some good discussion on technology and where it’s taking us… look me up. filsinger@gmail.com