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The three things that I liked best from GDC 2007

Yesterday officially marked the end of the 2007 Game Developers Conference week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.  I just wanted to write a quick blog to mention some of the things that I liked best from this year's GDC.

Sony has its back to the wall because of the immense popularity and high demand of the Nintendo Wii game console.  Sony simply had to have a good show during GDC, starting with Phil Harrison's keynote on Wednesday -- and everything fell together nicely!  Even though attendance in the hall wasn't as high as the Nintendo keynote on Thursday, Sony still has to be pleased with most of the press coverage due to the Harrison keynote.

The Nintendo Shigeru Miyamoto keynote didn't have any big announcements, but just hearing the man speak seemed to be enough to excite the large amount of people that waited up to almost four hours in line to get into the auditorium.  Miyamoto covered how and why Nintendo is continuing to put so much effort into trying to recruit "casual" gamers.    

The Unreal Engine 3 is also something else that I know many of you are excited to hear news about.  UE3 is being utilized for the PS3 and DirectX9-equipped PCs, giving developers to have a powerful engine to manipulate.  I can safely say that Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 3 is a PS3 game that looks very promising, even if it is still a few months away from release.  The UE3 demo on the show floor during GDC did have a couple of problems, but still was good enough to wow spectators as they walked by.