E3 Highs / Lows and Views!

Marcus Dublin · May 2006

I went to E3 this year and had a great time, it was great to see a lot of original games instead of a bunch of sequels! Yes there were still more sequels than original games but its encouraging to see some developers broadening there horizons even within specific genres, there seemed to be something for everyone. For the first time Im proud to be an X-box 360 owner because they have a ton of hot games coming out within the next few months and it finally looks like Next Gen is for real and hitting its stride. Another highpoint was getting a chance to talk to other developers in depth big and small about their games and whats going on in the industry. The guys at Webzen were extremely generous at going in depth about working with the Unreal 3 engine, character creation and MMOs in general. Speaking of MMOs I was able to play Warhammer for a little bit and I was really impressed, I wasnt to thrilled with the screen shots that I saw prior to playing it but I have to say from an art direction point of view Mythics got there Sh&*t together, the animation was pretty sweet for an MMO and the character art was refreshing. Kudos to Mythic for letting me try it out for a bit. Another high point of the show has to be Sonys PSP and PS2! It seems Sony remembered that they have a handheld system and really had a great showing, there were tons of terrific titles for the system on the way like Ace Combat X, Tekken, ATV Off road Pro and Killzone liberation. Its good to see Sony still supporting its PS2 system as well, unlike Microsoft who has all but abandoned its X-Box! They have some terrific games on the way and of course GOD OF WAR 2, nuff said! Now onto the PS3, Unfortunaly Sony didnt have many playable games but they did have a some of video, Im not naive to think that many of the videos they had playing were going to be the in game graphics (Killzone) but what was encouraging was the vibe Sony was generating at the show, with all the fantastic games Microsoft had on display people were buzzing about the PS3 and every one I talked to was eager to get there hands on one. Last but not least was Nintendo, people were genuinely excited to see the Wii in action and for the first time in years Nintendo was cool again. Unfortunately I didnt get a chance to play any of the Wii games and I only saw some footage online before going to E3 at the Nintendo Conference.

Which leads me to my Lows of the show! Nintendo was a bit to cool at E3 this year, they didnt even bother to have kiosks set up with any of there Wii games in action to entice the crowd. Yes thats right, unless you stood in a two our plus line you didnt get a chance to see any of there new games! Now dont get me wrong it was my own fault for not standing in line like everyone else but was it to much to ask to have some screens showing the new Mario Galaxy game running while fans waited. The diehard fans of course will wait but if you left the Nintendo camp years ago and wondered what all the fuss was about at this years E3 you were left wondering for this very reason. Sonys booth did a much better job of this with the PS3 having stations set up showing footage of some of there games in action, yes you still had to wait in an insane line but at least your appetite was wet a little while looking at those Warhawk screens! Hopefully Nintendo learns from this next year but Im still looking forward to buying a Wii when it comes out. More lows of the show had to be the lack of any big surprises ( unless you consider the new GTA being available for the X-box360) which is a shame because E3 used to be key for a companies to come out the blue with a big announcements! Last but not least has to be all this pre rendered cinematics companies were showing! I remember developers were talking years ago about not needing to use pre rendered cinematics anymore and that the in game graphics were good enough to show off their games. Now we know even as powerful as the next gen systems are they still cant compare to the awesome cinematics found in those fancy Blur videos, which is fine but we are selling games here! Show me the money, can I get a glimpse of some in game footage after youve shown your two minute prerendered bundle of joy! I know companies were showing there stuff behind closed doors to the press but it would be nice to see real game footage running for a change. All in all I had a good time at the show and my low points are mere nitpick gripes at best but Im excited to see where this industry will be going down the road!

Now onto my tops lists:

For me the best games I played at the show were:

God of war 2
Lost Planet
Dead Rising
FF12
Ace Combat X
War Hammer MMO
Okami
SUN Soul of the Ultimate Nation
Ninety-Nine Nights
Huxley
Prey

Worst Games I played worth mentioning:

The New Sonic (Whats with the PS2 controller)
Final Fantasy 7 Dirge of Ceribus / Bad Controls and crap AI!
Chromehounds / Wheres the texture work on the mechs!
Naruto / I was looking forward to this!
Crackdown / Needs a ton of work!
Hellgate: London / Felt very repetitive after just ten minutes of play.
Mobile ops Gundam / So wheres the AI?

Best Game Demos ("Playable only by company Staff"):

Frontlines: Fuel of War / Totally bias pick!
Splinter Cell Double Agent / F&^cking Awesome!
Gears of War / Some one smacked me silly with ten tons of cool / Love the headphones!
Crysis / Yes it looks for real, just remember to fire up that Quad SLI!
Rainbow Six Vegas / Dam UBI soft is smoking these days!
Stranglehold / Get ready for some John woo kick ass!

Best Non-playable Video:

Metal Gear 4 / SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!! Raiden Rocks!
Halo 3 / yes it was running in real-time folks, minus AI, sound, physics, etc!
Alan Wake / Looks like a Silent Hill type which is right up my alley!
Final Fantasy 13 / because its final fantasy!
Turok / Yes Turok
Superman / I wana fly really fast
Virtua Fighter 5 / Tekken 6 / I love fighting games
Haze / Good god!
Brothers in Arms / One more WW2 title cant hurt!

Companies on the rise:

Webzen / Where the hell did these guys come from, is this the next Square?
NC Soft / I remember when they were a tiny, now there booth rivaled some of the big boys!
2k Games / more than sports thats for sure!

Funniest Moments of the show:

Seeing Peter Molyneux eating breakfast at Dennys!
Not paying attention and bumping into CliffyB!
Not paying attention and walking into the womens bathroom, I was wondering where the urinals were!
Watching grown men play some Dance game in public, Ill post video soon!
Seeing one of the booth babes costume almost come undone right before my very eyes, Kodak moment!

This is just my two cents and of course like any game still in production all of my worst games of the show picks can turn out to be awesome. Theres a crap load of games I didnt write about but these just stuck out in my head for different reasons. I just wish I could have cloned myself, this way I would have been able to see and play everything, hehe.

See ya next year!

Marcus Dublin
IM: mxd76@hotmail.com

PS: Its nice to see companies art direction use normal maps better, barley any plastic figures running around!

For anyone who attended I'm curious to hear your views!

Daz · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]
Its nice to see companies art direction use normal maps better, barley any plastic figures running around!

For anyone who attended I'm curious to hear your views!

[/ QUOTE ]

As an aside, normal maps really aren't the perpetrator of plastic looking characters, its poor implementation of specular shaders that are really the root of the problem.

I was disappointed in the show. One thing that struck me was that 'next gen' seems to be synonomous with 'shit framerate'. PS3 was a letdown. I notice all the folks who fell for the Killzone video are fairly quiet right now. PS3 Gran Turismo simply looked like Gran Turismo in HD. Considering how Polyphonal Digital manage to squeeze every last drop of power out of the PS2, this really surprised me. The trees looked as crappy as they always did on PS2 and were still very obviously made of two crossed planes. I know it's early days but c'mon. Warhawk looked immeasurably tedious to play. Lost Planet did look quite nice though I agree. But still, hardly the leap forward most people were hoping for. In terms of realistic rendering engines, Crysis, the Crytek engine looked streets ahead of *anything*. Hopefully this will run like a dream on dx10, since slowdown was problematic. I notice that EA didn't put Superman next to Crysis. It looked rough as hell. But that's OK, it had a big sticker on the TV saying '40%complete.' EA showed poorly overall imo, which pisses me off cos I need the stock price to go up before I have to sell dammit! I guess the next Battlefield seemed cool, but Quake Wars looked waaaay better and was an absolute blast to play. Huxley seemed tedious and repetitive and Im hoping it isn't a good representation of the U3 engine visually, cos it looked decidedly average to me. I assume its majorly cutdown for multiplayer. Rares piniata game for the 360 looked fantastic.

Couldn't be bothered to line up to play with Wii. Nor anything else that was 'behind closed doors'. And yeah, the whole pre-rendered video shit is getting really tedious. Im a little fed up with the increasing bs in the industry incase that isn't obvious.

The most annoying thing of the show by far were those stupid webzen inflatables stuck to peoples backs taking up even more personal space in an already annoyingly crowded environment. I wish I'd thought to bring a sharp object back to the show with me on friday so I could puncture them as they bashed into me. Cutest boothbabe by far was the one in red on the Titan Quest stand. Absolute perfection in female form!

SouL · May 2006

Friday was hilarious. Hahahaha

Toomas · May 2006

Daz the GT demo was GT4 in HD, it was even called GT HD.

Steve Schulze · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]
Couldn't be bothered to line up to play with Wii.

[/ QUOTE ]And for those of us who weren't there, heres why...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=B2wjeMGGPik

JKMakowka · May 2006

Wow, that line is insane.

@Daz: pictures damn it! (of the 'absolute perfection in female form' of course)

blankslatejoe · May 2006

highlights for me:
I spent a bit of time around the THQ booth for obvious reasons, so I got to tinker there a bit.

-Suprisingly, the little movie-tie-in of Monster house played really fun. Nothing new, nothing special, but it was humorously old school.

-The trailer for Supreme Commander was fantastic.

-got to demo titan quest to some guys from blizzard. that was fun.

-lost planet did play and look nice.

-I played a ton of psp and ds games. the card-grab bag game for ds was nice and simple, and ff3 was all sorts of old school fun. for psp the dungeon siege game was gorgeous and played very well.

-hellgate was great I thought. what they had was repetitive yes, but i spent more time exploring the interface, my skill upgrades and weapon upgrades..it reminded me MUCH more of deus ex than diablo. I hope the random levels thing doesn make the game boring...

-played some nokia cell games... I was impressed with how far cellphone games have come..and how pretty their booth babes were. They also had chairs. I won a tshirt from them.

-talked to the guy who does the voice of mario in the wii line. that was neat.

-crysis looked amazing. I watched the demo guy play it for about a half hour. It's everything I liked from far cry..only bigger, more beautiful, and more interactive.

Let Downs:
-I was let down majorly by Turok. I hate all this military stuff that's a craze these days....which is what that felt like...only with a bow. Free tshirt though.

-not too excited by okami...the gameplay felt rather boring to me. It looked refreshing though.

-the biggest letdown was the Wii. After all the hype I was expecting immediate, or close to immediate response time in the controller. I got in early when the lines were only about 30 minutes and spent about 2-3 hours checking games. I played project hammer, a few of the sports titles (airplane, tennis), warioware, and tony hawk downhill jam. I watched people play baseball, mario galaxies and zelda for some time.

The controller does not really sense subtle movements..it feels blocky and sluggish. The airplane game had me really excited at first, and while controlling it was fun, I found that I was waiting half a second, at the minumum, between shifting my wrist and when the plane would actually shift. It was pretty sad. Most of the other games just involved batting the controller around wildly.

despite all that negative feedback though, the Tony hawk wii game was fan-freaking-tastic. It responded VERY nicely to the controller (you tilted it like a seesaw to turn) and was pretty fun. They let me play 3 runs with it because no one else was in line (suckahs!) but it was the only game that sold me that the wii controller might work. Both Mario and zelda looked like they used the little thumbstick for core movement.... their reliance on the motion sensor didn't seem as fundamental as tony hawk or the airplane game.

-bioshock was behind closed doors only! Booooo!

over all it was a fun time. It was my first e3, and was neato.

Steve Schulze · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]
-played some nokia cell games... I was impressed with how far cellphone games have come...

[/ QUOTE ]Did you see Payload, perchance?

blankslatejoe · May 2006

jack - nope, didn't see it. I played space impact mostly---it was nostalgic to play a top down shooter again. I saw quite a bit of some fishing game and some racing game that looked impressive. There was an mobile fps style rpg also on display, though I can't remember if that was in the nokia booth or elsewhere.

Also, the whole nostalgia thing was everywhere...while the nes/snes/sega/tg16 aspect of the wii was confined to a tiiiinnny corner, capcom had a whole wall devoted to it's 'Classics' rereleased. One title had Strider AND Bionic Commando packed together. I spent a long while revisiting BC before I forgot how much it sucked that they didnt have a jump button. Also, ,street Fighter 2 stations were in several places on the floor... it was neat to see the old stuff again.

Daz · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]
Daz the GT demo was GT4 in HD, it was even called GT HD.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, but why?

It's all very weird and ambiguous wether it's going to stay as is or get some graphical update: http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3story.html?sid=6150156&pid=928379 They're releasing GT on the PS3 and the only thing they do to it graphically is run it in HD?

Dont you think that's a bit, well......shit?

KDR_11k · May 2006

Also, doesn't GT4 already support HD on the PS2?

Joshua Stubbles · May 2006

Daz - Gran Tursino HD was nothing more than a milestone for GT5's development. They had to get all of the assets from GT4 running in 1080p at 60fps. This was explained during the press conference.
They also stated that the actual game will look way better, since all of the assets are going to be new. This is not what GT5 will look like.

Toomas · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Daz the GT demo was GT4 in HD, it was even called GT HD.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, but why?

It's all very weird and ambiguous wether it's going to stay as is or get some graphical update: http://www.gamespot.com/e3/e3story.html?sid=6150156&pid=928379 They're releasing GT on the PS3 and the only thing they do to it graphically is run it in HD?

Dont you think that's a bit, well......shit?

[/ QUOTE ]

It was a tech demo, the GT on PS3 will not look that shitty.

Daz · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]
This was explained during the press conference.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ah, didn't watch it, thanks.

Daz · May 2006

[ QUOTE ]

@Daz: pictures damn it! (of the 'absolute perfection in female form' of course)

[/ QUOTE ]

This really doesn't do her justice but: http://media.www.gamespy.com/articles/707/707402/img_3593822.html

SouL · May 2006

Ah yeah... Titan Face. Wow.

I played GT4 HD... it felt just like GT4 but with much sharper visuals. It was cool how you raced with 8 other cars, though. AI still needs work. Having them stick to their lines causes them to basically run you off the track.
I really wish it was hooked up with steering wheels and seats in VS mode.

I thought the PS3 controller was a little wierd, though. The shoulder 2nd set of shoulder buttons felt mushy because it's more trigger-like now.

blankslatejoe · May 2006

soul, were you one of the guys I was talking to in the nvidia booth, while I was demo-ing TQ?

aesir · May 2006

not nearly as cool an e3 as last years... which is odd cause on other forums most people are saying it was the best ever.

Tulkamir · May 2006

You're just bummed cause the booth babes weren't as scantily clad aesir.

acc · May 2006

For people who weren't actually there, E3 was awesome. But at the show itself most all of the good stuff was behind closed doors or past the insane lines to Nintendo's booth.

Hey blankslatejoe, did you get to check out Sonic Wild Fire (Wii)? I've heard its the first 3D sonic (including the PS3/360 one) that might not suck. It's weird no one is talking about it, though.

Pseudo · May 2006

I came away from the show really excited about Assasins Creed. That and of course Tony Hawk's Project 8, but I'm a bit biased on that one

CMB · May 2006

http://media.gamespy.com/columns/image/article/707/707402/babes-and-booths-of-e3-2006-

LAWL cheesy.

Downsizer · May 2006

Dunno if they allow hot linking. but the crysis shots look jaw dropping:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/127/931665_20060508_screen008.jpg

Did'nt attend, but thought you guys should see this withotu me opening a new thread.

arshlevon · May 2006

i am going to have to dissagree with blankslate and say the wii was the best thing i played. i loved the controls on everything except red steel , the game had a ways to go imho. i thought they were rather responsive and in some cases almost too responsive, i had to turn down the sennsativity a bit on metroid.

crysis looked cool but had a horrible frame rate, and in motion while playing the awesomely awesome graphics kind of blurred away to uncover standard FPS fare. they need to pull it together with a good story, ala half hife.

okami looked awesome was a bit of a let down on gameplay, but i will still buy it cause its pretty, would be much more fun on the ds with all the brush painting stuff, not so fun with the analouge. i actually liked the new sonic, the one on xbox 360, the ps3 version had a shit framerate and filtering problems, stuff started getting hella blurry less than 2 feet in front of you, i am guessing this is segas inability to develop for the ps3 at this point in time cause warhawk had great filtering. biggest let down was sony, man all the hype, at least before when they got the hype going they could back some of it up, the PS3 seems so rushed out the door, and diddnt have any content i was really interested in, i was much more excited for the stuff coming out on ps 2 like okami and god of war 2.

i had a great time, and that was because i was complety trashed the whole time, maybe thats why i thought the wii was so fun, or maybe it was cause i didnt have to wait 5 hours to play it, i am sure if i had to wait at all it would of tainted the experience. thank god for connections.

!!!!WORST OF SHOW!!!!

desparte housewives the game!! WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fuse · May 2006

surely you jest, is the game going to require you to cheat with as many people as possible within a time limit ? oh the drama !

AstroZombie · May 2006

Best of show:

Bianca Beauchamp as Alexis Sinclair

Joao Sapiro · May 2006

desperate housewives ? PWND !

i wish i had gone to E3, of the videos and images i saw, i only got surprised graphic wise by crisis, the rest was prerendered bullshit...wii seems the only worried on making fun games ahaha !