After taking a brief hiatus from posting last week, I want to catch us up with some exciting events and awards from the Game Developers Conference (GDC '09) that happened out at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, through late March, and then close with some reflection on reviews coming out for two new video cards from ATI and NVIDIA.

The GDC is a highly anticipated event that brings a collection of some of the best game developers under one roof. We're talking about icons like Gabe Newell from Valve, the Media Molecule team that developed LittleBigPlanet, tons of independent game developers that are pushing out from the edges of modern gaming with radical new ideas and concepts (please do check out The Unfinished Swan for an entirely different gaming experience), and many other companies and members of the industry. It was a four-day event lasting from March 23 to the 27th, jam packed with a Choice Awards ceremony to celebrate the year's best in game development, the Independent Games Festival demoing games created by inspired college students or gaming enthusiasts, and keynotes from respected members of the trade among other things.

Among the top winners in the Choice Awards session, where games are awarded in categories such as technology, writing, or innovation was one of my favorites, Bethesda Softworks, which took home the prized Game of the Year Award for Fallout 3. The apocalyptic first-person RPG experience set in Washington, D.C. features survivors of a nuclear holocaust gathering as tribes in bomb shelters or ruined infrastructures while hostile super mutants, long-forgotten defense systems and robots threaten your very own survival. The detailed wasteland of D.C. is breathtaking and the action keeps you on your toes since you don't always know what's behind every door, every cropping, or every characters' motives. Congratulations to Bethesda Softworks for the recognition of their work, and check out their blog post that includes a video of their receiving the award which was covered by G4 TV, the channel for technology and gaming.
Here is the full list of award recipients:

Game of the Year
Bethesda Softworks for Fallout 3

Best Technology
Media Molecule for LittleBigPlanet

Best Writing
Bethesda Softworks for Fallout 3

Best Visual Arts
Ubisoft Montreal for Prince of Persia

Best Game Design
Media Molecule for LittleBigPlanet

Best Handheld Game
Ready at Dawn for God of War: Chains of Olympus

Best Debut Game
Media Molecule for LittleBigPlanet

Best Downloadable Game
2D Boy for World of Goo

Best Audio
EA Redwood Shores for Dead Space

Innovation Award
Media Molecule for LittleBigPlanet

Another special award recipient was Hideo Kojima of Konami, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award putting him in a league of few honored game developers. Kojima had developed the Metal Gear series for over 20 years and across four generations of hardware (the MSX/NES and all three Sony Playstations), each game raising the standards for game development and innovation in remarkable ways. He had discussed this development process in a keynote at GDC as well, emphasizing the importance of identifying problems in order to address them or sidestep them during the development process. For instance, Kojima was first asked to develop a combat game back in 1986 for a platform that had very limited capabilities (the MSX, more commonly recognized as the Nintendo Entertainment System) and this was such a problem. The MSX could only render a small number of sprites on-screen at a time and that considerably hindered the excitement of action scenes in a combat-based game.
So, after identifying this problem Kojima took a different approach and sidestepped the hardware limitation by removing combat from the game, and indirectly created a stealth and infiltration based game, leading to what is now known as the Metal Gear series.
Hideo Kojima finished the talk with other examples from his development of Metal Gear games, and Kotaku's liveblog of the keynote by Michael McWhertor seems to deliver the audience atmosphere and Kojima's message pretty well, so check it out.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about the two new high-end video cards released by ATI and NVIDIA manufacturers, ATI's Radeon 4890 and NVIDIA's GTX 275. These cards, from the numerous reviews I have read online, both perform well in synthetic tests and real application or gaming benchmarks all while being more efficient and apparently run cooler for the most part. They're high-end cards, so you can expect to pay a premium cost if you'd like the performance that these GPUs offer, and with all that being said, I'd recommend the purchase of the GTX 275 over the Radeon 4890 if you were in the market for a moderately priced high-end card right now. The set prices for the two cards level around the ~$250 mark with some variance on the ATI card, but the higher cost of the NVIDIA card seems worth it as it does outperform it's competitor to some degree. On top of that, you can take advantage of the CUDA support from NVIDIA and apply your card's processing power more effectively to distributed computing projects like Folding@Home. So if a new card is in your sights, consider the GTX 275 if it's in your budget. If you'd like more information on these video cards check out these two well written articles (1, 2) on HotHardware.com, both by Marco Chiapetta.