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It's not like I played a lot of games yesterday here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But, hey it doesn't matter! Because I've woken up to the annoying fact that the big story that was embargoed until tonight was broken this morning. It's only a story that could change gaming forever. Sigh. Guess I should get started. Look for my detailed and skeptical interview with the co-founder of OnLive, posting in the next hour.

During the post-mortem panel for the "Super Monkey Ball" iPhone game, SEGA's Producer of Digital Content Ethan Einhorn told would-be iPhone developers to not "play price wars" with their apps. He advised to keep the highest price you can while staying in the top 50 and resist the temptation to drop your price prematurely; "Super Monkey Ball" saw a boost in sales during the holidays. He added, "A $10 price point is not reasonable." Eihnorn also said to consider the pros and cons of "Lite" versions, free demos of the full-priced product. While he said they were good for new, complex games, developers should "think twice" before putting a "Lite" version; many users may feel that just a small taste of the game is enough, impeding possible impulse buys.

During a panel titled "Post Mortem: 'Super Monkey Ball' iPhone," Ethan Einhorn, SEGA's Producer of Digital Content, talked about the different things they tried with the game before it launched with the release of the iPhone App store last year. One idea SEGA of America had was to have the monkeys collect apples instead of bananas as "a fun reference" to the Apple iPhone platform. Einhorn added, "The Japanese development team said quite reasonably, 'Monkeys eat bananas,' so let's leave it at that."

Once in a while a game developer says something that makes me want to rush to my console and try something out. That has happened during the still-ongoing "Gears of War 2" artificial intelligence post-mortem when Epic Games' Matt Tonks mentioned one way in which he thinks the first game still has an advantage: Despite the many AI improvements in the second Marcus Fenix action game, the grander scale of levels in "Gears of War 2" forced the designers to create more narrow funnels of enemy attacks -- "cover crawls," The result, said Tonks, was that the AI-controlled enemies sometimes didn't have as much room to demonstrate their full range of intelligent techniques. The first game is often better in that regard, he said: "The encounters were smaller and more open, so the encounters were more fluid than in in 'Gears of War 2.'"

There are women at GDC -- I've spoken to at least three of them today -- but a gathering of game developers is, primarily, a gathering of guys. Added bonus was the non-functional air conditioning this morning at the conference center. When that was fixed, things smelled better.

Maxis' Eric Grundstrom representing Artificial intelligence development on "Spore" during an AI Post-Mortem at GDC 2009:

Something that didn't work: Maxis wanted all of the game's simulations to stack, so that, even when the player is in Space Stage, they could zoom in to any planet and see the complex food-collecting behaviors of the Tribe Stage or, the grouping behaviors of the Creature Stage. They abandoned this goal as too unwieldy.

Something that worked: The developers originally thought the game would be species vs. species, but changed that dynamic early to player vs. environment -- one vs. many, allowing the player a greater sense of control and better player understanding of the simulations around them.

Some advertisers buys ads on the soles of boxers' shoes, cynically assuming that those fighters will be knocked off their feet. As seen here in a shot I took at the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft buys GDC ads on the staircase of a convention where thousands of developers are milling about. The secret: game developers use escalators, not stairs.

I just came from an embargoed meeting during which I had a game developer make me a game in 10 minutes. I gave him an idea. He got to work. Ten minutes later, I played it. I'll reveal more tomorrow.

I'm at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Tracey will be here shortly. Things will be different this week as we cover what should be a fantastic series of panels, demos, interviews and speeches involving some major games and some major developers. For most of the event, you can expect short posts from us, quick takes on what we're seeing and hearing. Some regular features, like Lunchtime Video, will take the week off. And some major interviews we're doing this week will probably not run until early next.

We'll be back to normal next week, but we hope, for GDC 2009 that you like our experiment and keep checking in throughout the day. It should be fun!

I tried a lot of games this weekend and made the following snap judgments about what to keep and what to reject for what is something of a special Monday edition of What We're Not Playing... Read more...