The Game Developers Choice Awards are the other side of a coin that also contains the IGFs. Sure, indies are allowed into this GDC organised awards show, but they have to promise to be on their best behaviour. And wash behind their ears.

The nominations for this year's award - chosen by a panel of game developers - have been announced, with The Walking Dead and Dishonored scoring plenty of nods. Not the most, though - that honour goes to Journey, which is apparently a PS3 game about collecting scarves. Or something.

Dishonored picked up four nominations, including Game of the Year, Best Game Design, Best Narrative and Best Visual Arts. The Walking Dead also received nominations for Game of the Year and Best Narrative, as well as a chance to nab Best Downloadable Game. Wait, aren't all games downloadable?

Other PC relevant nominations include Game of the Year nods for Mass Effect 3 and XCOM, a well deserved Best Audio mention for Hotline Miami, and a Best Technology listing for Planetside 2. FTL also did well, being nominated for the Innovation Award, along with a shot at Best Debut for its developer, Subset Games.

Here's the full list:

Game of the Year
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)

Innovation Award

Mark of the Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
The Unfinished Swan (Giant Sparrow/Sony Computer Entertainment)
ZombiU (Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft)


Best Audio

Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games/Devolver Digital)
Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)


Best Debut

Humble Hearts (Dust: An Elysian Tail)
Polytron Corporation (Fez)
Giant Sparrow (The Unfinished Swan)
Subset Games (FTL: Faster Than Light)
Fireproof Games (The Room )




Best Downloadable Game

The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
Trials: Evolution (RedLynx/Microsoft Studios)
Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)




Best Game Design

Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)


Best Handheld/Mobile Game

Gravity Rush (SCE Japan Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment)
Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
The Room (Fireproof Games)
Kid Icarus: Uprising (Sora/Nintendo)


Best Narrative

Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Entertainment/2K Games)
Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Virtue's Last Reward (Chunsoft/Aksys Games)


Best Technology

Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
PlanetSide 2 (Sony Online Entertainment)
Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Treyarch/Activision)
Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)


Best Visual Arts

Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software/2K Games)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)


The winners will be announced at GDC on March 27. Can you think of anything that's been unfairly missed out?

It may have won our Best Music of the Year honour, but Hotline Miami's excellent soundtrack wasn't previously commercially available. Sure, you could hear it in a browser, or even dig into the game's root folder to get at the .OGG files inside, but there was no single, purchasable MP3 album for fans of those frantic, trippy sounds to enjoy. Until now.

Steam has just released a soundtrack pack for the game that, when purchased, will add the MP3 files to Hotline Miami's directory. The pack is £6.99 - arguably expensive at the same price as the game, but worth it for tracks like Sun Araw's meandering Deep Cover, El Huervo's urgent, glitchy Turf, or the ultra-cool Paris by M.O.O.N.

If you're not sure why you should care about the soundtrack, or the game it's attached to, you can get Hotline Miami at half price this weekend. £3.49 is a great price for the improvisational violence ballet that results from Hotline's best levels.

Hi-Rez summoned forth the open beta of its gods-vs-gods arena rumbler Smite today, throwing open the golden gates for all players to sign up for an account and download the client for free. A number of graphical updates and menu improvements have also been introduced, and character progress and unlocks won't be wiped leading into the official launch (a release date has not yet been announced).

Smite pits two teams of five mythological gods against each other in a three-lane map similar to the ones popularized by Dota and League of Legends. Like most MOBA games, teamwork and savvy ability management seal victories, and an over-the-shoulder camera angle balloons the action across your monitor with colorful effects and helpful directional arrows for area-wide spells.

Not missing a beat, Hi-Rez also announced a competitive season for Smite in the works with a $100,000 prize. Specific details on qualifications and the schedule are expected in the next few weeks. If you think a sack of money should remain the pursuit of mere mortals, then you might be up for Hi-Rez's offer of a special Ymir skin for players reaching level 30 to be awarded when the game releases in full. You'll need to bash in quite the amount of supernatural skull to reach that lofty number, so pray to your favorite Chinese/Egyptian/Greek/Coconut Monkey deity for luck.

We're not dead! The silence of the US Podcast's unplanned hiatus will be broken next week, as T.J. explains in this informative emergency bulletin: PC Gamer Podcast Quick Update, January 24, 2013. Have a look at our YouTube channel to tide you over.

Until then, send your questions, comments, complaints, and observations to: 1-877-404-1337 ext. 724 or email an MP3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com.

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The first in-game footage of Dead Island: Riptide has burst forth from its sandy grave with nine minutes of the same enjoyable brain-slicing and power-kicking action from the previous open-world survival RPG. We also see a couple new elements Techland plans for the return to Banoi, including driveable boats and hub defense missions.

Hub defense is essentially Riptide's Horde mode where waves of mindless undead assault your fortified position. You'll scramble to set up turrets and rig makeshift fences between waves. It looks like a good fit for epic last-stand scenarios, but the failure condition of letting just a single survivor perish doesn't sound appealing at all. In fact, wouldn't the harshness of skirting death on a zombie-infested island only become stronger as you lose more allies?

Dead Island: Riptide hits shores on April 23. Though publisher Deep Silver defines it as a spin-off from the original Dead Island, it's more of a sequel in disguise, continuing the story from where it left off at the first game's conclusion. New characters, weapon types, and vehicles are all included in the...er, spin-quel.

Veteran designer Cliff Bleszinski split ways with longtime employer Epic Games back in October, seeking a "fresh start" after 20 years. Though Bleszinski wants to keep making games, the finer details of his next move haven't appeared yet. In an interview with VentureBeat, Bleszinski didn't rule out a return to triple-A production, explaining any such effort would have a slower rate of ramp-up.

"I would want to get back to the triple-A space eventually, but the last thing I would want to do—and no offense meant to Curt Schilling and John Romero —is to do what those guys did," he said. "'Let’s throw 300 bodies at it! Sure, we’ll just make it work!'"

Instead, Bleszinski would take a more cautionary approach to future projects, contracting small, indie-studio-style teams to prototype "defined goals and a number of assumptions that I thought would be cool as far as what kind of game I'd want to make." If everything checks out, the project would kick into triple-A mode. Think of it as a fast-forwarded version of a developer's evolution from humble beginnings to a successful, multi-franchise company.

"Even if I had a publisher tomorrow who said, 'Hey Cliff, here's $50 million dollars: go make your dream game,' I'd still only ramp up with a handful of people," Blezsinski stated.

You know what they say: The first taste is free. In this case, the taste in question is the leaden shell casings you'll be leaving in your wake in Omerta: City of Gangsters, which has just released a single-player demo. Detailed extensively in our preview, Omerta is a hybrid turn-based squad shooter/strategic crime empire management romp through 1920s Atlantic City.

The short demo will give you a brief look at both sides of the game: the XCOM-style combat missions, and the larger struggle to extend the blood-stained fingers of your crime empire across the urban landscape. So if you're one of those people that's still really on the fence about bootlegging, racketeering, extortion, and murder, here's your chance to just make up your freakin' mind already! Sheesh...

The full version of Omerta will be rolling up on your place of business on February 12. It would be really unfortunate if you were to forget to keep an eye out for more of our impressions in the future, and something bad were to happen to your Steam wallet. Very unfortunate...

Paradox is taking full advantage of its permanent content team for the multiplayer medieval mosher War of the Roses. An update released yesterday furnishes the armories of the Lancaster and York ranks with a free helm and chestpiece combo modeled after the Scottish Gallowglass mercernaries.

"Covered in mail and ready to cut down Englishmen for cold hard coin, the Scottish Gallowglass mercenaries brought brute force and fighting spirit to the battlefields like none could. Now is your chance to become one of them," reads the update announcement. It's almost as if you inhabit the soul of a claymore-swinging Highlander sealed within the scuffed chainmail and steel.

The patch notes also mention a revamp of how much protection each type of armor affords for wearers. Cloth armor now negates 10 percent damage, leather 20 percent, mail 30 percent, and plate 60 percent. Maces ignore armor entirely but deal less damage, and axes dispense the harshest punishment at the cost of speed.

Overall, the tweaks seem balanced enough, but as any feudal knight knows, the best measure of merit lies in taking up arms and experiencing the changes yourself. For those who've done so already, do you think these changes are needed? Let's hear it in the comments!

Stomping right behind the Spider Mech that launched last week, the Death's Knell is a new and agile robotic warrior included in MechWarrior Online's latest update. As a bonus, a familiar-sounding startup sequence for series veterans now plays whenever you switch on your towering titan.

The Death's Knell brings four medium turret lasers, a top speed of 113.4 KPH, and a 30 percent boost to how fast you earn C-Bills in the field, so it's useful for getting some quick cash while stomping around in a big metal man-suit. The rest of the patch brings changes to power-up and shutdown while overheating and a batch of memory leak fixes and CryEngine tweaks. Have a look at the notes in full over at the game's official website.

As if slaying your way across a zombie-infested wasteland as a pack of gun-toting raptors wasn't awesome enough, modder Lurch of the L4DMaps community offers the Stay Puft mod which replaces Left 4 Dead 2's burly Tank with the soft and tasty juggernaut from Ghostbusters.

It's a pretty basic mod—a simple reskin of the Tank is all you'll get for less than a megabyte's download. Some default animations don't exactly translate well in those rolls of sugary goodness, as the model's arms stick out awkwardly and ragdoll effects are anything but smooth. Rock tosses are subsequently hilarious-looking. (You'll see what I mean in the short video I recorded above.) Still, making the conscious decision to shoot at and be chased by a grunting behemoth of marshmallow should count for something.

You can pick up Puft at L4DMaps' website. Be sure to also check out Left 4 Dead 2's freshly launched Steam Workshop listing for more mods.