I was fortunate enough to attend E3 for the first time last year. What with all the hullabaloo over Half-Life 2 (HL2), it was an amazing year to visit. After being similarly fortunate enough to attend E3 this year, I have to say that it was an even better experience. Thanks again for the ticket, Dave!
This year's E3 seemed to feature even more amazing titles than the year before. The whole industry moves so fast that what was jaw-dropping last year is now relatively common, while what was jaw-dropping this year is still more over-the-top. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is a great time to be a gamer. I'll provide more specifics below on the various items that seem worth reporting. The coverage is listed in roughly ascending order of its importance to me; i.e., I'm going to discuss the least interesting stuff first and save the very best in show for last.
I don't think anyone makes an instrument sensitive enough to measure how little I care about celebrities. Seriously, I just don't give a rip. I don't care who endorses a game. Sure, the gal who portrayed BloodRayne 2's protagonist knocked my socks off with her incredible sex appeal—about whom more will be said —but in all honesty I didn't notice she had come out on stage, at least at first, because I was too busy watching the game trailer! I play games because they're fun, not because some celebrity is involved.
Having said that, though, I am a bit curious why Muhammad Ali was at the show on Wednesday. It made sense to me that Stan Lee would be signing autographs at the booth for a Spiderman 2 game, just as it made sense to me that Peter Molyneaux was giving a demonstration for his upcoming game, The Movies. But what the heck was Ali doing wandering around E3 with his entourage? I didn't even realize he was standing about two feet from me until a friend pointed him out.
Frankly, I'll never understand that man's popularity, and the reason he was at E3 is all the more elusive. Perhaps EA Sports is featuring him in a game? I don't know and, more to the point, I don't care, but I figure it's probably worth mentioning in our celebrity-crazed world.
To be clear, I didn't spend the time waiting in line for the DOOM 3 (D3) presentation, largely because I could watch this year's movie on the screen outside the booth. Sadly, in my view, it was more of the same. Yes, John Carmack is trying to build the next big thing in game engine technology, and he's not one to be underestimated. But the game still looks to me, in several respects, like it was designed by a bunch of high-school kids. I mean, skulls on mechanized, spidery platforms? Come on, folks, that's the kind of stuff I saw burnouts drawing in the art classes they were busy failing back in tenth grade. Sheesh.
Yes, the lighting looks amazing. Yes, I will probably buy D3 and play it, largely because I loved the original games in the series and will likely be too curious to avoid the third chapter. But does it promise anything obviously worthwhile beyond pretty graphics? I haven't seen evidence yet that it does. The best looking game in the world isn't worthwhile if it isn't any fun to play. Id Software has yet to convince me that D3 is a game and not a technology demo, but we'll have to wait and see what happens. The best thing I can say about D3 is that it hasn't been a soap opera like...
One of the bigger disappointments of the last year has been that the much heralded and greatly anticipated HL2 did not ship. That's not exactly big news to any gamer who hasn't been living under a rock. What does seem like news, to me at least, is that HL2 is no longer clearly head and shoulders above all its competition. Far Cry, also a darling of E3 2003, has already shipped and looks almost as good as HL2. Further, the aforementioned D3 may actually look better than HL2 in some respects, while other games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl seem just as compelling (or arguably more so). In short, last year HL2 was the big hit of E3; this year it wasn't nearly so impressive, particularly with other titles and the Unreal Engine v3.0 on display.
Still, I did see both of the HL2 previews at E3, each of which gave additional glimpses into the game. A fair amount of the footage was stuff I had already seen, but there were some new and interesting bits here and there. I think what struck me most was the relative lack of pizzazz with which it was presented. The second presenter, for example, sort of mumbled his way through his lines—nobody had even bothered to get the poor guy a microphone—and didn't say much of anything that hadn't already been said. At one point, he said "Oh, yeah, this is another vehicle we've added to the game," as if adding another vehicle is obviously an improvement. Sheesh.
I'm sure that others were more impressed with HL2 than I was. Personally, I'm still hoping it will be a great game, perhaps even the next big thing in PC gaming, but my skepticism only grows as its release date remains unclear. It will supposedly ship this summer or perhaps in the early fall. I'll believe it when I see it.
This game was definitely a standout. I had been following its development for a while, but nothing I had seen prepared me for the demonstration given at E3. It was amazing. The game features cutting-edge visuals, an interesting story, a huge arena in which to play, and holds a great deal of promise where its artificial intelligence (AI) is concerned.
In fact, the game mechanics suggest to me that they're betting the entire game on the AI. So much of the gameplay will depend on how well the AI really works; I hope they pull it off. If they do, the game will be something truly special. Watching herds of animals react intelligently to changes in the environment, other stalkers respond to the player's hand signals, etc. was all very impressive. My one concern, that the frame rates seemed pretty choppy during the demonstration, evaporated when I watched a number of participants playing the multi-player aspect on a half dozen servers outside the booth.
The short summary is pretty simple: keep an eye on this one. It could be the sleeper hit of the year. It looks like a must-buy for any fan of first-person shooter (FPS) games, and only some terrible reviews (or an awful demo) could convince me otherwise.
For those who don't keep up on gaming hardware news, Alienware had announced prior to the show that they were going to debut some brand new technology that would increase gamers' frame rates by as much as 50 - 80% under normal circumstances. That seemed too good to be true to me, so I was as skeptical as I was curious about what they had up their sleeve. Once I understood what they've done, I was more pissed off at my own stupidity than anything.
I say that because I wracked my mind trying to figure out what they could do to give such a performance boost. I didn't think it could be overclocking, because it's really hard to get results that spectacular short of radically cooling your system. I didn't think it could be a new memory architecture, their own custom motherboard/CPU combo, their own special video card, etc. for similar reasons. I thought of all kinds of different possibilities, but none of them made much sense. I just couldn't figure it out.
And then it hit me the instant I saw their booth: they took a really old idea and made it new again. Question: if you've got too much work to do, what's the best way to get it done? Answer: hire more people. Or as the old adage goes, many hands make light work. In gaming parlance, that comes down to exploiting parallelism with more than one video card.
What they've done is essentially a fresh take on the old Voodoo 2 SLI interlacing, creating a card that manages two other video cards, each of which paints only a portion of the screen. They've even got it set up to do a certain amount of load balancing. It's really slick. One video card renders a certain portion of the screen while the other renders the rest. The trick lies in keeping them synchronized and making sure both portions of the screen blend seamlessly. From what I saw, they've pulled it off marvelously.
Also worth mentioning is their commitment to customer service. I've personally never owned a system from Alienware, so I have no bias either way. But I know at least one of their customers who has had unbelievably bad experiences. When I found myself speaking with the founder and co-founder of the company, I couldn't resist asking them about it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that both of them seemed very concerned about the situation, the co-founder going so far as to give me his card so that the fellow in question could call him directly to discuss the situation. I'll be sure to write a follow-up on the subject if I hear anything more.
I think it's great that gamers have some really high-end options for buying their systems, and I'd like to think that the concern expressed by the company officers was genuine. It would be nice to find at least one hardware company that handles customer support properly. We'll have to wait and see. Any way you slice it, though, their new, dual-card technology is pretty darned slick.
It's funny, but even though I enjoyed the original Dungeon Siege I wasn't planning on paying any attention to the sequel. The original got a lot of things right, no doubt, but the more I played it the less I appreciated certain elements of the design. The story wasn't compelling at all, too many of the items required such a high level that I ended up carrying them around rather than using them, the inability to see ranged enemies with the camera zoomed in made it hard to enjoy the graphical goodies, the relative lack of quests sucked, and the fact that the game largely played itself all conspired to dampen my enthusiasm beyond my first play-through of the game. Multi-player just didn't do it for me either, so the game lost a lot of its luster pretty quickly. I easily got my money's worth out of it, mind you, but I decided I was going to pass on the sequel.
As it turns out, I ran into the presenter for Dungeon Siege 2 (DS2) at the NVIDIA booth on my last day at the show, and I'm really glad I did. I went into E3 without the slightest interest in DS2, but what Jason from Gas Powered Games (GPG) showed me changed my mind completely. Not only does DS2 look better than the original, which is saying something given how beautiful the first game was, it is also abundantly clear that the developers have paid a lot of attention to the complaints of users.
As I said already, the graphics are improved. I thought the original game looked great, but DS2 manages to look even better with higher resolution textures, more detailed environments, flashier special effects, etc. Even better, new classes of items have been added to the game (e.g., unique, rare, and set items), item-use restrictions have been made less punishing, the alpha transparency of objects when zoomed has been improved, there is a larger number of more interesting quests, the characters have skill trees for much greater customization, and GPG has even hired a professional writer to provide the story this time around.
True, many of the changes seem to have been lifted blatantly from Diablo II (D2), but two things come to mind immediately: (1) D2 was a great game, and (2) imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If such "borrowing" makes DS2 a great game, I don't mind a bit. Heck, the addition of the skill trees alone provides a lot of incentive for playing around with different characters. The options seem interesting and varied enough that it should be a lot harder to grow bored with DS2.
Arguably, one of the neatest new things is the way DS2 handles "pets". The mule from the original game, which died far too easily and irritatingly dropped all the party's belongings in the process, can still be added to the party. But this time around he's tougher and is part of a more generalized "pet" system. The presenter demonstrated a fire elemental pet that grew in his attributes and abilities with experience and, in a particularly amusing and clever mechanic, from consuming unwanted items as well. Sure, it's a bit odd that a fire elemental can grow from eating armor, but it sure does provide a neat way to get rid of stuff in the field without taking it back to town.
In short, the presentation I saw convinced me that DS2 deserves a very serious look if not, in fact, must-buy status. The goal, as it was explained to me, was to improve upon all the best stuff in the original, fix all the stuff that didn't work, and add a bunch of new and interesting stuff in the process. From what I saw, I'd have to say they're succeeding.
Ok, this is one of the few negative things I took from the show: too many vendors have joined Blizzard in neglecting the PC. Starcraft: Ghost, a.k.a. Operation Screw PC Users, was on display again this year and was looking better than ever. But this year it was joined by far too many other great-looking titles that will be exclusive to various console platforms.
I loved last year's Tron 2.0, for example, so I was really excited to see Tron 2.0: Killer App at the show. My excitement turned to crushing dismay, however, when I discovered that it's a console-only game. I suffered similarly upon seeing The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, a fabulous looking Tolkien-inspired role playing game (RPG) that will also be exclusive to consoles. This is a disturbing trend to say the least, and I really hope it doesn't continue. PCs are far better suited to serious gaming, and one can only hope that vendors aren't planning to screw us all the harder going forward.
I'm pretty surprised at myself for mentioning this title so prominently, but here it goes. As I wrote last year, I'm just not a big fan of the whole vampire/goth scene. Sure, I like women in tight leather, fishnet stockings, etc. as much as anyone, but the whole blood-drinking, fangs-for-canines, drama-queen goth nonsense really cuts against the grain. BloodRayne was the first (and only) vampire-related game I've enjoyed, but Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (V:TM) is pretty darned intriguing.
Even though I have a hard time finishing them, good RPGs really catch my eye. In V:TM, the player has a plethora of options for building an interesting character and then choosing how that character will live in the world. There are a number of different clans, all apparently competing for supremacy, and somehow the story will revolve around and be revealed by the various bits in the game. I'm pretty ignorant of the milieu from which the game's basic mechanics are drawn, but I was very impressed nevertheless by the way it looks, sounds, and plays. It looks like the first killer (pun intended) RPG based on the HL2 engine.
I should also mention that somebody might have paid attention to my comments about last year's show. This year I didn't see any middle-aged housewife qua dominatrix ladies packed into overly-tight latex. Rather, the booth babes for V:TM were all young, beautiful, and far more sensibly adorned as would-be vampires go. If vampires are your thing, I think you're going to love V:TM. I'm pretty curious about it myself and it's not my thing, which says a lot about the game.
I'm not one of those hard core Tribes lunatics. That's not to say I haven't played a lot of Tribes 2 (T2), mind you, only that I didn't get started with the series until T2 which makes me something of a late-comer. Still, even I can see that Tribes: Vengeance (T:V) is shaping up nicely. I got to play capture the flag for a few minutes on one of the new multi-player maps, and I can see how the game might well surpass the previous games in virtually every respect.
Visually it's absolutely beautiful, as one might expect from the engine that powers Unreal Tournament 2004. The physics engine harkens back to the old-school of the original Tribes, what with its speedy and easy skiing. The weapons are great, the gameplay seems nicely tuned, and I had a lot of fun with it. It's definitely a game to watch, and it already looks like a must-buy for fans of the series. I know I'm planning on picking up a copy.
I'm a late-comer to this series of games as well, having only purchased the Medieval: Total War (M:TW) battle pack a short while ago. I loved the game's concept and much of its implementation, from playing the demo, but I couldn't get past the less-than-cutting-edge graphics and somewhat screwy controls for quite a while. I'm not sure why. What finally made me buy into the series was the fabulous value that the battle pack represents, packing not only the M:TW game but also the Viking Invasion (VI) expansion into a single, value-priced box. I haven't played enough of the game to review it yet, but I have really enjoyed it thus far.
But while M:TW and VI are clearly entertaining, Rome: Total War (R:TW) seems poised to take the franchise to a whole new level. Nobody will be able to complain about the graphics in R:TW. It is positively amazing in its ability to render huge numbers of troops on the battlefield. I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the show, watching tens of thousands of units clashing in frenetic battle at acceptable frame rates on comparatively modest hardware.
It looks like the developers have radically beefed up the graphics engine, kept all the great gameplay of the previous games, and added a bunch of interesting new stuff as well. R:TW sure is drool-worthy, and not just because of the incredible blonde who was paid to lay there and look gorgeous while holding a bunch of fake grapes—good albeit demeaning work, I suppose, if you can get it. Keep an eye on this one (the game, not the girl).
As much as I enjoyed the original Thief and Thief II: The Metal Age, the third game in the series, Thief: Deadly Shadows (T:DS), looks even more appealing. I spent a fair amount of time talking with one of the developers from Ion Storm, and I'm more geeked than I was before about T:DS. It really looks like everything has been improved.
The visuals are absolutely first-rate, providing beautiful real-time lighting effects at reasonable frame rates on today's hardware. Gameplay has been expanded through the mechanisms of a third-person view, better options for up-close confrontations, a marvelous physics system, new and interesting items, a more dynamic system of objectives, a lock-picking mini-game, etc. And the enemy AI seems smarter than ever. Guards provide far more feedback than ever before, giving the player far more freedom to experiment. The player has a much better handle on the states of his foes.
The presenter wouldn't confirm my hopes of a Thieves vs. Guards multi-player mode, but he did say that they had been paying close attention to that mod for the original Unreal Tournament. He said he couldn't give anything away as of yet, but he did say that interesting things were in the works. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like we might finally get a solid multi-player component in T:DS. How cool is that?!
Yet despite all the great changes, it looks like T:DS maintains its roots. The same great art direction is there. The same iconic anti-hero perspective oozes from every scene. The same style, flourish, and highly detailed world are all in place and beautifully done. Dang, I'm gushing again, but T:DS is worthy of it.
It's also shaping up to be the best year yet for Star Wars fans, what with Star Wars: Battlefront (SW:B), Star Wars: Republic Commando (SW:RC), and Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Light Speed (SWG:JtLS) all due to be released in the not-so-distant future. I got to play the first two at the ATI booth, and I got to watch the third being played for a while. All three were extremely impressive, albeit for different reasons.
First, SW:B is basically Battlefield 1942 (BF1942) set in the Star Wars universe. The game highlights key battles in the seemingly endless struggle between the Rebels and the Empire, featuring a number of different player classes, control points to capture, objectives to achieve, plenty of vehicles, interesting weapons, etc. What surprised me the most, I think, was how beautiful the game looked and played. Every video that I had seen prior to the show featured low-resolution, jerky images.
Honestly, I have no idea why a company would put out such ugly videos when advertising a game. The whole point of releasing such things, after all, is to excite gamers about a product, not to give them the impression that it runs poorly and looks like crap. What Lucas Arts could possibly have been thinking is beyond me.
That aside, the game is absolutely gorgeous. The environment in which I was fighting sure looked a lot like the forest moon of Endor, and, wherever it was, it was head and shoulders above BF1942. Light streamed through the forest canopy, the vegetation looked amazing, the environments were very detailed, the soldiers were well modeled and nicely animated, the weapons and their sounds were vintage Star Wars, etc. In short, it looked and played as it promises, finally putting gamers in the middle of the battles they have wanted to play for years. It looks like a must-buy game to me, and I'll be watching it with great interest.
In contrast, SW:RC is more of a Tom Clancy meets George Lucas sort of proposition. But whereas Clancy's highly trained soldiers/counter-terrorist operatives still get hung up on doors, flashbang themselves, etc., thanks to nasty problems with the AI, the big stand-out feature of SW:RC is that the squad you lead actually seems intelligent. They move well, maintaining good formation; they direct their fire well; they respond intelligently to situations and commands; and so forth.
Of course, it also bears mentioning that SW:RC looks fabulous, sounds fabulous, and seems to have a compelling story behind it as well. But all of those things paled, in my mind, compared to the immersion of moving through Geonosia with a squad of crack troopers. There are plenty of ways that it could be screwed up before release, but it was a blast to play at the show. I'm thinking that it too is another must-buy game.
Finally we come to SWG:JtLS, which is sadly an expansion pack for the original SWG. I say 'sadly' because I am interested in the expansion but not so much the original game. I may end up having to find a cheap copy of SWG just so I can try the SWG:JtLS expansion. It looks that good. What I saw at the show was a space battle that seemed to involve hundreds of ships all at the same time, re-creating a scene reminiscent of the battle at the end of Return of the Jedi. It was amazing.
I know that Lucas Arts took a lot of flak for focusing solely on planetary settings with SWG, but it looks to me like they have dug themselves out of that particular hole with the expansion pack. It's pretty incredible to behold, that's for sure. The sheer scale of the interstellar arenas and missions is daunting.
I said earlier that John Carmack is trying to build the next big thing in gaming engine technology with D3. What also needs to be said, in my estimation at least, is that the title is no longer his to lose. After seeing both the engine that powers D3 and the demonstration of the third iteration of the Unreal engine, I'd have to say there's no contest. The Unreal Engine v3.0 (UE3) seems like a more capable gaming engine and is already available for licensing, if I understood the presenter correctly.
It can do positively mind-blowing things. It today renders scenes with more than a million polygons, and lighting information culled from orders of magnitude more, at acceptable frame rates on current, cutting-edge video cards. It supports high-definition lighting, real-time development of amazing shader effects via an absurdly simple plug-and-play tool, fabulous physics, cutting-edge animation, stunning real-time lighting, and pretty much every other nifty thing that developers could want for tomorrow's games. Obviously, it's impossible to say whether the D3 engine or UE3 will ultimately be the right choice for most developers, but from what I've seen it looks like UE3 holds the early lead. It's... well... unreal.
Oh, and by the way, in case you're tempted to fall for the nonsense NVIDIA has been preaching of late, the fellow who demonstrated UE3 told me that the entire demonstration was done using the pixel shader 2.0 (PS2) specification. In other words, NVIDIA is just blowing smoke with their claims that only pixel shader 3.0 (PS3) equipped video cards will be capable of producing cutting-edge shader effects. No doubt PS3 allows developers greater flexibility, but PS2 is clearly more than enough to get the job done. Games based on UE3 won't ship for more than another year, and they'll surely support PS2 when they do.
I asked about it because I had been worried about future-proofing my next video card purchase. I'm in the market for a new card—my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is getting a bit long in the tooth for my graphical greediness—and I've been weighing the various high end solutions from ATI and NVIDIA pretty carefully. After talking with the fellow at the UE3 demonstration, I'm confident that I can buy either of the latest and greatest video cards without screwing myself.
BloodRayne 2 (BR2) was definitely one of the best in show as far as I am concerned. The original BloodRayne (BR) was fun, but the game suffered from certain issues. As with DS2, it looks to me like the developers have done a good job of keeping all the good stuff while taking steps to fix all the problems. The result looks to be an even more compelling game, though it's hard to make certain judgment calls (e.g., how well the control scheme works on the PC) from playing it on the various consoles at the show.
Three things really stood out to me, however, as worthy of mention. First, if the original BR looked good, BR2 looks positively fabulous by comparison. The ambient detail, texture quality, effects, animation, and pretty much every other aspect of the visual presentation has been improved in the sequel. Even Rayne herself has been given something of a makeover, insofar as she is even more beautiful and far more womanly in her appearance. She looked like some kind of refugee from a Rwandan hunger camp in the original game, but she's got all the right curves in the sequel. Suffice it to say that the game's look is even more compelling than the original.
Second, it looks like the developers have done much to make combat more interesting. Rayne could pull off some nifty combo moves in the original game, but this time around they seem to be under the player's control. Previously, the combos would simply activate in a pre-determined order, which was not only boring but coule be downright irritating when they really weren't appropriate. I couldn't understand why the developers didn't let the player trigger her special moves deliberately; the sequel's inclusion of user-triggered combos suggests they couldn't either. While playing, I accidentally triggered a neat-looking and deadly move that had Rayne spinning around on her head with her legs spread and blade-equipped boot heels spinning around her. The nearby enemies were cut to ribbons by her very slickly animated move.
Third and finally, this year's award for the most gratuitous use of female flesh clearly goes to the folks responsible for BR2. Sure, I saw a number of attractive and even stunning "booth babes" this year, but head and shoulders above all of them stands the woman who portrayed Rayne. Last year it was the women at Microsoft's Mythica booth who just about knocked my eyes out of my skull. This year it was the earthbound goddess at the BR2 booth. Sure, the shiny blades on her arms were a bit disconcerting, and the platform, high-heeled leather boots she was wearing contrasted pretty strangely with her wonderful, satin-looking, bare-backed evening dress, but everything else about her was pure sex appeal.
Seriously, she was hot enough to shock gay men straight. I've never seen a woman so sexy in my life; I didn't know such women even existed. I thought Rayne was just one more anatomically impossible digital creation, but the model who portrayed her at the show proved me wrong. Two words: hubba hubba.
| NB: | Since writing the above I've discovered that the world's unwashed heathen (i.e., those who didn't go to E3) can still bask in the sex appeal of Ute Werner, the model who portrayed Rayne. Just go to the official BloodRayne 2 web site and sign up to check out the exclusive gallery. Trust Phil on this one, gents: you won't regret it. |
Finally we arrive at what I think was the very best in show: The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth (TBFME). To be sure, I'm biased: I've been a Tolkien fan since my age approached double digits. I've also been waiting for a good Lord of the Rings game ever since childhood, and have become still more desperate since Peter Jackson provided the world with the definitive movie treatment of Tolkien's epic masterpiece. From all the footage I've seen, and from the demonstration at E3 conducted by Mark Skaggs—the fellow responsible for producing the genius Command & Conquer: Generals (C&C:G) titles—I'd have to say that TBFME is likely to be a huge hit. Of this much I'm certain: EA Games would really have to screw up to make it a bad game.
Graphically it is amazing. It takes the SAGE engine from C&C:G and beefs it up considerably. What SAGE nailed in C&C:G was Hollywood-quality special effects: guns firing, tanks kicking up dust, explosions, and every other effect was absolutely perfect and added a great deal to the game. This feature alone made SAGE the perfect engine for TBFME as well, largely because of its ability to render such amazing scenes on such an incredible scale. The demonstration I saw showed us the siege of Minas Tirith, and it really did look like 100,000+ bad guys were assaulting a city populated by a few thousand defenders, only to be attacked from the rear by 6,000+ Rohirrim. It was unbelievable. My jaw hit the floor in the first few seconds and stayed there throughout the whole thing.
Seriously, TBFME's menu screens are more beautiful than some other complete games! The "living map" is itself something to behold, providing a pristinely gorgeous top-down view of Middle Earth. The attention to detail, lighting, texturing, and everything else was similarly stunning. And perhaps best of all, it looks like the interface won't intrude into the game at all; i.e., there were no icons, no heads-up display, and no other obtrusive elements of any kind to intrude upon the game's raw beauty. TBFME looks like it will be both a work of art and a game all at once, and its gameplay seems as compelling to me as its visuals.
At the risk of gushing, TBFME is a must-buy from what I've seen already. I'm going to do my best to wait until the reviews are in, but it's going to be terribly difficult for me not to camp out at my local software shop the day it's released. It really does seem that good, and it was the best of E3 in my book.
And so another year at E3 draws to a close. My fellow gamers, we've got a plethora of amazing titles coming our way yet this year if E3 is any indication. Unfortunately, I'm also seeing a disturbing focus on the console end of the business, with more and more games being co-opted by console vendors to appear exclusively on their hardware. That's not good at all.
To be clear, I absolutely despise consoles for their awful controls, their limited graphics, their crappy save schemes, their limited mods, and pretty much every other sucks-compared-to-the-PC facet of their existence. The more games that go the console-exclusive route, the worse off things will be for the PC gamer. Be sure to vote with your dollars, folks, letting companies know exactly what you think of such a wretched state of affairs.
Last year, I said that I hoped David, Daniel, Joel, Jeff, and I could do it all again next year. As it turns out, that's exactly what happened. A lot has changed with me since then, however, and this might be the last year that I get to go to E3. If it is, I'm happy to say that my days at E3 ended with a bang and not a whimper. E3 2004 was chock full of stuff worth watching and (hopefully) games that should be worth playing when released. And that's about the highest praise that I can give.
If it seems like I gave the initial must-buy nod to far too many games, that's because I did. This year has already been hard on the gaming budget, and I don't see any relief in sight. I guess, all things considered, that's a pretty good problem to have. So here's to E3 2004: long may her games delight us!
05/18/2004