The Graveyard
Developer: Tale of Tales
Nomination: Innovation Award
Platform: Windows, Mac
Website
Description: You accompany an old woman on a visit to a graveyard. Selected by Indecade and the European Innovative Games Award.

Dyson
Developers: Rudolf Kremers and Alex May
Nomination: Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Platform: Windows, Linux (free)
Website
Description: Dyson is a real time strategy game about colonizing asteroid belts. The catch: this game is one of the most abstract RTSs available today, and has simple enough inputs to be played only with the mouse.

Cortex Command
Developer: Data Realms
Nomination: Technical Excellence
Platform: Windows, Mac OSX
Website
Description: You play a disembodied head with remote access to control zombie bodies and cool robots to do your bidding. Like all right-minded people, you use this power to look for gold and shoot people who get in your way.

Coil
Developer: From The Depths
Nomination: Innovation Award
Platform: Web Browser (Flash)
Website
Description: Coil is an experimentation in what games can be. It intentionally into putting the player into situations where he doesn’t know what to do, but trying not to make that a bad thing.

Cletus Clay
Developer: TunaSnax
Nomination: Excellence in visual art
Platform: XBLA, PC (just videos available for now)
Website
Description: Take on the role of Cletus Clay, redneck extraordinaire and last true patriot, as he defends the earth from aliens using little more than his violence and inbreeding. If we’re lucky, the two concepts won’t be mixed.

CarneyVale: Showtime
Developer: Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab
Nomination: Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Platform: XBLA, PC (Free demo, paid full version available)
Website
Description: You play as Slinky, the magically-animated puppet acrobat, in his quest to become the best acrobat ever. You use the ragdoll physics to navigate through perform tricks in vertical platform levels. Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Dream Build Play Challenge.

Brain Pipe
Developer: Digital Eel
Nomination: Excellence in Audio
Platform: Windows
Game Website
Description: A first-person perspective game where you navigate through a curvy pipe avoiding bad things and picking up good things.

Blueberry Garden
Developer: Erik Svedang
Nominations: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Audio
Platform: Windows (not yet publically available)
Game Website
Description: That’s a darned good question. You can see the game’s trailer, which is all we know about it, at the game’s website. It was the winner of the Best Innovation award at the 2008 Sweedish Game Awards.

Try inviting 26 people over to chat about video game design. Do they fit in your living room? Do they stay on topic? Does your 27-member cabal grow into the largest industry-only summit over twenty-seven years? If you’re Chris Crawford, you can answer each of those questions with a resounding “yes,” and the name of the event spawned in your living room is the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

The rapidly approaching 2009 GDC is being held March 23rd-27th in San Francisco, and today Pixelsocks unveils our latest project, “Countdown to the Game Developers Conference.” We’ll be serving up a delicious twenty-two course “game-a-day” meal featuring the games nominated for the IGF awards, and succeeded by a dessert of ten scrumptious student-developed, IGF-finalist titles, again in “game-a-day” courses. The Pixelsocks staff will then trek to San Francisco to cover our very first industry-only show. So please, have a seat, and prepare to enjoy over a month of daily GDC goodness (though this coverage will supersede your regularly scheduled game news and reviews).

We’ll be keeping all of our coverage together here.

Between
Developer: Jason Rohrer
Nomination: Innovation Award
Platform: Windows, Mac , Unix/Linux
Game Website
Description: Between is a two-player tower-building game played on a local network. Currently freely available at SourceForge (links above). Telling you more would be cheating.