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Portal and Bioshock dominated the eighth annual Game Developers
Choice Awards as video gamemakers heaped laurels on the action
puzzle and morality-probing shooter titles.
Portal was voted the best video game, and took
home awards for innovation and design excellence at the awards late
Wednesday.
"Holy crap," Portal designer Kim Swift
of game studio Valve said as she accepted one of the awards.
"We were just a bunch of students a couple of years ago."
Portal was created by DigiPen Institute of
Technology students in 2005 and released as an independent game.
Portal players must solve a series of puzzles by
transporting their characters through a maze-like network via
"portals" made with a "portal gun."
The game's makers said they crafted inside jokes
into the game and are "happy you got them too."
Portal was snatched up by Valve and is
distributed by gaming giant Electronic Arts, with versions tailored
for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 video game
consoles.
The game can also be played on personal
computers.
Bioshock is the brainchild of Ken Levine,
creative director of the Boston 2K studio that teamed with a 2K
studio in Australia to build the game.
Levine told AFP that inspirations for the game's
dystopic storyline came from many places, including the films
"Citizen Kane" and "The Fight Club" and the work
of author Ayn Rand.
"I wanted to challenge people a little
bit," Levine said of his game, which has been lauded for its
play and potentially disturbing moral choices.
One of the enemies in Bioshock is a girl with a
hypodermic needle for an arm. Players must choose between saving her
and "harvesting" her for enhanced abilities.
"If you want to go in and just shoot things
up you can, but if you want to dig a little deeper it is a great
detective story," Levine said of his game, set in an under-sea
city fallen to ruin amid scientific chaos.
"People get it. This is a great time for
us."
Bioshock won top honors for story writing,
visual arts, and audio.
Urban action game Crackdown, made by a creator
of the infamous Grand Theft Auto title, was voted the best game to
debut in the past year.
Flash software-based Flow, which features a
worm-like organism devouring other organisms to evolve, won in the
newly-created Best Downloadable Game category.
Science-fiction first-person shooter game Crysis
was honored for having the best technology. The award for Best
Handheld Game of 2007 went to "Legend of Zelda: Phantom
Hourglass" by Japanese game maker Nintendo.
"It's pretty incredible," said Ralph
Baer, who built the first home video game console ever brought to
market.
"The talent curve in game making is going
straight up to heaven. There is no telling what we are going to see
in five years."
Baer, 86, recounted making a prototype game in
1968 that was marketed a decade later as the Magnavox Odyssey, a
home video game system with joystick controllers and simple games
such as ping pong and hockey.
Baer was met with a standing ovation from the
packed house when he was called to the stage to receive the GDC's
first-ever Pioneer Award for being "the father of video
games."
"It felt natural to bestow that award on
the man who established our entire industry," said GDC
executive director Jamil Moledina. "Ralph is an inspiration to
all who attend our conference."
"If I listened to all those people 40 years
ago telling me to stop the nonsense, I wouldn't be here," Baer
told an audience full of game developers. "I'm still cranking
out stuff."
Baer told AFP he is inspired by the simplicity
of Nintendo's motion-sensing controllers for the Wii video game
console and is designing peripherals along those lines.
"It's an exciting time to be in
gaming," famed maker of computer strategy games Sid Meier told
AFP after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award.
"I make games for the fun of it."
-- AFP
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