As summer draws nearer some look forward to getting out of school, doffing bulky winter garments, and generally living a life of leisure. For me, summer means video games and time to play them! We all know that the summer is generally bereft of major game releases. This works out for me because I have a chance to play all the games I bought throughout the previous year. It also works out for the games industry because they get to announce upcoming titles, some of which will be available for the holiday season.
GDC
This conference is happening right now and so evades classification as a summer convention. The Game Developers Conference is an important event in the industry and eschews the pomp and bombast of E3 for a more cerebral discussion about the nature of games development. Game makers meet here to trade ideas about their craft, which offers attendees a perspective of what their favorite developers are thinking and what they make eventually deploy in their games. 1up.com is running an excellent series that delves into the topics of these GDC talks and presents subjects to gamers like Gaming’s vanishing middle class, ruminations about the next generation of consoles, and the future of indie games.
E3
The 2012 E3 convention, Innovation Unveiled, will take place midweek — June 5th through June 7th — at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The show has been undergoing a rebranding in recent years and has switched back and forth between being a loud, raucous spectacle and a more toned down, family-friendly event. We don’t yet know what it will look like this year, but we do have an idea what may be shown.
Nintendo will show the Wii U in its final form and ignite another round of speculation as to whether the company can pull off another insanely unlikely success with the integration of new games technology, in this case, the tablet as controller. Speaking of next gen, rumors are burning up the Internet that Microsoft and Sony won’t let Nintendo hog the spotlight. Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are nearing thr end of their lifecycles so we may start to hear rumblings about their successor at E3. Sony will likely make new games for the PS Vita highly playable in order to move the new hardware. Swag!
Comic-Con
This summer Comic-Con will return to it’s flagship location in San Diego as well as its satellite cons in Chicago, Toronto and Philly among others.
Comic-con is a sort of menagerie of nerd culture rolled into a summer of conventions designed to pull in every corner of nerd-dom from their homes and into huge exhibition halls packed with like-minded peers. Since partnering up with Wizard World the content of the show has expanded from just comics to games, books, movies, TV shows and any other nerd-art form.
Gaming news is being kept underwraps for Comic-con but we can expect to hear about wild tie-ins between games and comics. A new Halo spinoff? Don’t count it out!
There is a lot going on to hold gamers of all types over until the deluge of fall gaming, so fire up your consoles and tackle your pile of shame beforehand!
