The Game Developers Conference (or GDC as we in the kool krew call it) has finished, and in its wake lies a great big pile of nothing much.

While it is true that this is more the development wing of gaming shows, as opposed to the ferociously commercial events such as E3 and the like, it’s still disappointing that we didn’t get any HUGE, LIFE-CHANGING announcements.

Like a new add-on for the PS3 made of human thoughts.

Or that the latest Wii release is going to be a game you actually want to play for more than thirty minutes. Or that the latest 360 community game will involve an ugly girl getting naked…

Oh wait.

No, this was a conference full of mutual back-slapping, Hideo Kojima proving he’s more mental than people gave him credit for and that future ‘secret’ game announcements should probably have recording equipment banned from the room, should they want to keep the ‘secret’ footage ‘secret’.

Mass Effect 2, go and stand in the corner, you dunce.

Far from the Megatons of the past, GDC merely had a few smaller announcements (yes, we’re willing to class Modern Warfare 2 and yet another Zelda game as ‘smaller’), a few “wait until E3” non-announcements and a fair few videos of games we already knew existed.

Though, to be fair, the 10 things about Prototype video is excellent.

There we were, waiting for the Next Big Announcement – waiting for the thing to come along that would change our lives forever, make us better people and cure us of the evil of the credit crunch.

Instead we got Peter Molyneux boring us to death (and still not announcing a new Syndicate game).

So, yes, OnLive was the big thing of GDC – but we don’t care about that because it won’t work (or will it OR WILL IT? etc).

This is not a conference for the everyday gamer to take any notice of, but thanks to the way the internet works and how everything ever seemingly has to be reported, we get a barrage of non-stories from the game-o-news outlets the world over.

Does this happen in other industries? Do fans of celebrity culture get bogged down in the minutiae of everyday occurrences? It’s not like fans of that particular facet of culture (using the word loosely) would really care about the day-to-day, mundane activities of their favourite non-event of a person…

Ah, no, wait – we got mixed up there.

No, this just proves that gamers are exactly the same as Heat (and hecklerspray) readers. One half gives a crap what Kerry Katona’s left armpit looks like, the other take note when Cliff Bleszinski announces that “something might happen at some point”.

Far from being A Bad Thing, the obsessive coverage of GDC is A Good Thing, even if we do have to sift through layer upon layer of tripe to get to the real juicy, meaty, tasty, gravy-coated, with a side of mashed potatoes…

Nope, we’ve lost that train of thought.

THIS WEEK: Aside from being effectively robbed by Steam and its stupidly good deals, we discovered Valkyria Chronicles on PS3. While late to the party, we can still lambast you fools for criminally ignoring this wonderful, wonderful game. You big sods.

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