Portal, Bioshock Lead Game Developer's Choice Nominations 71
Gamasutra is reporting that the annual Game Developer's Choice Award nominations are now available for your reading pleasure. Portal, BioShock, Mass Effect, and Call of Duty 4 are all looking pretty good, with Portal in particular sitting pretty in five separate categories. Here are a few of the nomination lists: "Best Game Design - BioShock, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Portal, Super Mario Galaxy. Best Visual Art - Assassin's Creed, Team Fortress 2, Crysis, BioShock, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Best Writing - Portal, God of War II, Mass Effect, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, BioShock. Innovation - Rock Band, Portal, flOw, Peggle, Mass Effect." Five bucks says Portal sweeps the awards.
Re:Rock Band (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though, it is mildly innovative in how it combines them together. At least they didn't nominate Bioshock in that category. I keep hearing people call BS innovative and I still don't see a single new thing in gameplay it brings in (sure the setting is new, but many games have new settings, and I don't really interesting story elements, no matter how inventive, innovative in a game where gameplay is what you're looking for).
Re:Portal` (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I'd love to see a TF2 map that featured the portal gun in a very limited sense - say, one gun with very limited "ammo" that cannot be reloaded, and had a slow respawn. Or perhaps a class that was armed with the portal gun only, and limited to one player per team.
Could open some interesting dynamics, like forming a mass attack party to try and escort that player to the intel room, or trying to open a portal into the enemy's choke point after 4 engineers build level 3 turrets at the other end. Or open a portal under the enemy flag runner to return them to the intel room.
That could lead to some very wonderful chaos...