The six Gamma IV finalists are on the GDC expo floor for the next couple of days, and I've been trying these one-button beauties out to see what makes them so special.

Silent Skies by Spyeart aka Michael Todd uses a simple control mechanic. Flying a plane over a strange world, holding the button causes the vessel to fly in a anti-clockwise arc, while releasing the button turns clockwise. A combination of taps and good timing can send the plane roughly in a straight line.

There's a few levels on show here, each with its own special theme - e.g. one sees you collecting stars, while another involves a bombing run. There's also a final boss level. The mechanic works smoothly and makes for an enjoyable, if a little tame, experience.

Honeyslug's Poto & Cabenga is a really interesting concept that sounds like it shouldn't work, yet is pulled off wonderfully. When an alien rider is split up from his trusty steed, both must jump their way past a horde of enemies. Of course, both must also be controlled using one single button.

So it works like this - when the button is held down, one runs while the other walks, while the opposite happens when the button is not pressed. Also, when the button is initially hit, the guy jumps, then when the button is released, the horse jumps. Sounds incredibly confusing (and believe me, when I watched someone play it, I wondered how they were even managing it), but the enemies spawn in such a way that a pattern emerges which isn't too difficult to keep to. Very clever stuff.

4Fourths is a 4-player team game, and is probably my favourite Gamma IV winner. Created by Mikengreg, two spaceships adorn the left and right edge of the screen, with a player controlling each (tapping the button boosts the ship up the screen, while releasing it lets the ship fall slowly down). The other two players control the guns, which are both facing into the centre of the level.

Huge boss ships are then sent one by one down the centre of the screen, and the 4 players work together to take each out. Being on opposite sides of the action, it is possible to shoot your team-mates and kill them, so careful blasting is necessary. Of course, you'll probably want to shoot your team-mates anyway since, let's face it, killing each other is fun. Mikengreg are looking for someone to help them take the idea to the next stage, so if you're a publisher-type person reading this - make this happen please.

B.U.T.T.O.N (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now) is another multiplayer one-button experience, although it seems a rather strange choice for a winner. Tasks pop up on the screen, such as 'Think of your favourite colour' and 'Take 5 steps back', and each player must follow the rules correctly to win.

Each game inevitably ends with all 4 players rushing at the screen and bashing their (or other players') buttons to succeed. It is good fun (I can imagine a small helping of alcohol would make it a party favourite), yet it's not exactly what I would class as an 'accessible' game.

cactus' GAMMA IV - THE GAME is trippy yet simple. Lines explode out from the centre of the screen, and each tap of the button causes the lines to change direction by 90degrees clockwise. The task is to smash into each of the squares around the screen and not bump into walls and the like.

It's mesmerizing stuff, although once you realise that it's possible to simply watch one corner of the screen it does pretty much become an extravagant game of Snake.

Finally, Steph Thirion's Faraway features perhaps the most innovative one-button mechanic of the six winners. Players control a shooting star which is flying through space. Holding down the button causes the comet to use the nearest star as a centre of gravity, allowing it to orbit around, changing its direction and velocity.

The key is to find special areas in space when constellations can be produced. Once such an area is entered, the key is to loop around stars, connecting them up and creating as complex a constellation as possible. Better connections give more score and add time to your clock - running out of time ends the game. It's a really gorgeous idea, although I was admittedly terrible at it.

So, these were the 6 winners chosen from over 150 submissions. If you're down at GDC in San Francisco, they'll all be available to play on the expo floor until Saturday evening. Well worth checking out.

#clips It looks like those leaked screen shots were real, showing stills from a trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution premiered tonight at the Game Developers Choice Awards. More »

#deusex3 We just were sent a load of images from what we're told are screens from a Deus Ex: Human Revolution trailer. No idea if they're real, but Eidos Montreal was talking about it today at the Game Developers Conference. More »

#dc The 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards kicks off now. Stay tuned to see if your favorite games, publishers and developers win the big awards. More »

#gdc10 Yes! The IGF Awards are happening right now at this year's Game Developers Conference, a chance for indie developers to be handed awards under bright lights and for those indie developers to give short, awkward speeches. Let's do this!!! More »

Pocketwatch Games' stylish co-op caper, Monaco, was the big winner at the Twelfth Annual Independent Games Festival Awards, which was hosted by the Game Developers Conference 2010 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Monaco received the top award at the ceremony, earning the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game, as well as the award for Excellence in Design.

Other IGF award recipients for 2010, as judged by over 170 industry veterans, independent developers and indie-friendly journalists, also include PlayDead's starkly beautiful silhouetted platformer, Limbo, which won the awards for Excellence in Visual Art and Technical Excellence. Closure Team's puzzle platformer, Closure, earned the award for Excellence in Audio.

Noted independent developer Cactus (pictured) received the inaugural Nuovo Award for his abstract visual puzzle game, Tuning. The Nuovo Award honors "abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games."

The Nuovo Award was judged by a separate, smaller juried panel of notable game and art world figures, including previous IGF Innovation/Nuovo Award winner Jason Rohrer (Passage), Area/Code's Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more.

The IGF was established in 1998 by UBM TechWeb Game Network to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community. The IGF offer finalists both global exposure and over $50,000 in cash prizes to each year's winners.

Previous breakout IGF award-winners include titles such as Braid, Audiosurf, Castle Crashers, and World of Goo, and this year's awards saw 301 Main Competition entries from all over the world, coupled with the record-breaking number of IGF Student Showcase entries and IGF Mobile entries, for a total of nearly 650 entries. S2 Games' Heroes Of Newerth won the Audience Award, after receiving the largest share of thousands of public votes cast at IGF.com in recent weeks.

To ensure the highest-quality judging for the IGF, more than 170 leading indie and mainstream game industry figures -- from 2D Boy's Ron Carmel through Spore's Soren Johnson to ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago and beyond -- were recruited to choose finalists via a carefully constructed empirical process.

Finally, the award for the Best Student Game went to Ragtime Games' shifting-tile puzzle platformer Continuity, IGF Mobile Best Game was awarded to Tiger Style's Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor, and download partner Direct2Drive's $10,000 D2D Vision Award was won by Press Play's Max & The Magic Marker.

"This year sees an impressive array of visually arresting, emotionally challenging and fun games," said Simon Carless, IGF chairman. "And after extensive, in-depth playthroughs from a panel of influential games industry figures, the cream of the crop were chosen to receive honors at the IGF. We're extremely proud of the record number of amazing entries this year, and very grateful for the independent teams who put their hearts and souls into creating captivating, addictive and original gameplay experiences."

The IGF awarded the following games in each category of the main competition — each received a cash prize of $2,500 as well as sponsor-related prizes, apart from the Grand Prize of $20,000 and D2D Vision's $10,000 award.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:
Monaco, by Pocketwatch Games

IGF Nuovo Award:
Tuning, by Cactus

Excellence in Visual Art:
Limbo, by PlayDead

Excellence in Audio:
Closure, by Closure Team

Technical Excellence:
Limbo, by PlayDead

Excellence in Design:
Monaco, by Pocketwatch Games

Student Showcase Award:
Continuity, by Ragtime Games

IGF Mobile Best Game:
Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor, by Tiger Style

Audience Award:
Heroes Of Newerth, by S2 Games

D2D Vision Award:
Max & The Magic Marker, by Press Play

For more information about the IGF, the finalists and the winners, please visit the official Independent Games Festival website.

The CNET News article, GDC: What’s next for video game AI?, features demos of EIS research projects delivered at the AI Summit at GDC along with the latest AI demos from Richard Evans and Ian Holmes. The AI Summit session, Experimental Game AI: Live Demos of Innovation, included demos of EIS’s Starcraft agent and The [...]

This surprisingly broad lecture on game design was given by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to help students review for the final exam in our Foundations of Interactive Game Design class. However, if you are not one of the 300 students in the class, you might find it quite interesting to share with a friend. Perhaps you know [...]

The Global Game Jam 2010 concluded over 30 days ago, but the treasure trove of indy creations it left behind remains largely unexplored. Then again, how is anyone supposed to review some 1000 games created specifically for an event that shuns any global judging? Who has that kind of time anyway? Certainly not overworked grad [...]

AIIDE 2010 has posted a call for papers, just in time to advertise the conference at GDC. The deadline for papers and the industry track is May 16, 2010. This year AIIDE will also be hosting a StarCraft AI competition!

The Game Developer’s Conference is less than a week away, and for those who don’t get to see what goes on during this amazing week, we, at the Expressive Intelligence Studio, put together a mini documentary about the “People Behind the Products.” Now, we aren’t film-makers at EIS, but in addition to doing some awesome [...]

Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note [...]

EIS is now able to claim “big in Santa Cruz” after being featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the local newspaper (I’ve also heard reports of the story being syndicated to the San Jose Mercury News for the wider Bay Area).

“Façade tried to solve this problem by replacing the parrot with something more like a brain-damaged human; Heavy Rain, by comparison, is probably the best-trained parrot in history.” From Archie Bland’s Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons?

“Developing Games for 2020″ Bob Mitchell, ohai Date: Thursday, February 25th Time: 2:00pm Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin Abstract Students at UC Santa Cruz today will be among the engineers, artists, designers, and producers leading game teams in 2020.Review some of the changes to interactive entertainment over the last ten years in order to look ahead to the [...]

“The breadth of video game development” (working title) John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro Date: Tuesday, February 23rd Time: 2:00pm Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can [...]

#oddities So, this guy gutted an Outrun arcade cabinet, jammed it on a go-kart and, in the name of university research, assembled a contraption that drives 15 mph in the real world while displaying it as an 8-bit virtual one. More »

#salesget It's been almost four months since a Pokemon game was the bestselling game on Japan's software chart, but Nintendo's newest Pokemon Ranger title for the Nintendo DS ends that dark period for the franchise. Whew! More »

#gdc We saw a peek of Slider yesterday when he trailer was released, but today I got a chance to zip down a paved street on an office chair with the help of the PS3 Move controller first-hand. More »

#gdc10 Just as it did with its colorful puzzle game Critter Crunch, Capybara Games' Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes is getting the high-definition once-over, making the jump from Nintendo DS to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade later this year. More »