I never really had heard of the Game Developers Conference until this year. I heard about it from my mom who was telling me about her friend's son(?) coming over to go to some game design conference. He ended up being Vice President of Resource Management, whatever that position is, at Vykarian. When I spoke with him, the two names that he threw at me were American McGee and Steve Gray, so I guess his company is pretty well known. He also listed a bunch of game titles that Vykarian was a part of, but I don't remember many of them.

So with his All Access pass around my neck, I headed off to the Exhibition hall. While I'm not much into how games are developed and how 3-d art is done, or how motion capture works, I still got some fun out of it. Outside the hall, there were a bunch of really comfy bean bag chairs. And inside, lots of flashing lights. Well, they mostly came from the Playstation booth.

Most of my time wasn't actually very productive. I actually ended up walking between the North and West halls quite a few times. In the North hall, I basically played Brawl for a while. It takes some getting used to playing with the wiimote, that's why I'm not playing with it. Also, characters float and glide a lot more while in the air after a jump. The new characters also seem to be slightly unbalanced, but that's only till players figure out the strengths and weaknesses of those characters.

Blizzard interestingly enough, did not have a booth in the North hall, only a recruitment booth in the West hall, where the people didn't have any info on Starcraft II, unfortunately. Otherwise, most of my time spent in the West hall, or Career Pavillion, was entering the in the various drawings being held. Activision held quite a few, one being a raffle for a PS3. EA held a drawing for a DS Lite and Rock Band.

The only other notable for me was the food. On the third floor of the West Hall was a huge area of catered lunches. I got a chipotle chicken sandwich which was delicious. I was not able to try out Intel's hypnotizing 3-d chair sadly.

In the end, thankfully, no one once questioned the badge I was wearing, or why I was taking a bunch of freebies and just leaving their booth. My favorite freebie, a Wiimote LED light from the Nintendo booth. Its just darn cool.