A 2 minute Recap Of My Day At E3

Games
1

Quake 4 - saw some really cool stuff. It looks like it’ll be a pretty solid Raven game. They’re finally showing stuff that doesn’t looked yanked right out of DOOM.

Prey - I was surprised the lines outside the ATI theater presentation were so short. I figured sheer curiosity would have brought people to check it out. Some sections, especially the portal and gravity-twisting stuff, looked extremely cool. Other parts looks like assets pulled right out of from DOOM 3. It’s a problem.

Enemy Territory Quake Wars - OMFG. I want to play this RIGHT NOW. It’s Battlefield 2142.

Call of Duty 2 - the level we saw today was as good or better than anything in COD. Great epic D-Day level. It was still fairly linear, and the graphics aren’t a huge jump ahead, but based on the three levels I’ve seen to date (and the fact that I loved CoD), I’d still buy this the day it came out.

Alan Wake - Remedy’s new game. The name just kills me. He’s got insomnia, and his name is A. Wake! Get it!? It was mostly a tech demo, but a pretty damned impressive one. I hope they build a good game out of this engine.

Unreal Tournament 2007 - I’m the biggest UT 2004 fan going, and the engine looks awesome, but it looks mostly like a graphical upgrade than anything else. They’re going to add a second race with different vehicles, but aside from that and a new Conquest mode (they describe it as Assault meets Onslaught, kinda like the missions in SW Battlefront), it doesn’t seem like a huge jump. I’ll play it anyway.

Battlefield 2 - Can I play this now? PLEASE? I’ll buy you a pony.

FEAR - ditto.

Half-Life 2 Lost Coast - it’s basically a tech demo – no story, etc – but the tech stuff is kinda neat. Hopefully this will open the gates to more downloadable HL2 content.

2

Even just watching the Quake wars stuff on the hand held made me drool. I really want to see this on my PC, running full res and smooth.

3

I wonder if Steam is a big psychological barrier to some HL-2 content, or simply all the competition? Though I didn’t mind Steam, as soon as I finished Half-Life 2 I couldn’t wait to uninstall it, all of it… I just didn’t want all that extra stuff mucking up my system. Everything around the HL-2 install and registration was unduly intrusive.

4

I was pleasantly surprised by the Prey demo. It was annoying how nobody narrated things or gave us a Q&A, but I had extremely low expectations and they were greatly surpassed. The gravity twisting stuff could make a good hook for this game. There was one point where the player was running around on a tiny little planetoid, probably 20 yards or so in diameter. But he stuck to the surface as if it had Earth’s gravity. Another part had the player go through a portal, but floor on the other side was up and to the right, so he fell. Pretty neat.

The new Rise of Nations game looks fan freaking tastic. Just so super cool.

Sluggo, you gotta get me in to see Quake 4 tomorrow. And Enemy Territory: Strogg Wars. :)

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All shooters. Is there anything else for the PC these days? Oh yeah, MMOs.

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Yeah, the Quake Wars stuff looks pretty cool. I’m interested in seeing what persistent elements they have in the final version.

Is it going to be a monthly fee game, or buy the box and play for free?

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Yeah, the Quake Wars stuff looks pretty cool. I’m interested in seeing what persistent elements they have in the final version.

Is it going to be a monthly fee game, or buy the box and play for free?

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RTS too but thats about it…

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RTS too but thats about it…[/quote]

I’m not feeling bad about skipping my first e3.

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Here’s what I saw:

The Godfather-- eh. GTA in 1942 with the voices of Brando (his last acting gig), Caan, and Duvall.

Call of Duty 2 – saw the conference showing of a different level than the D-Day one, British taking a town in N. Africa and it was frikkin’ amazing. Non-stop hair raising stuff.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong – you get to play as the Adrian Brody character. It was funny to watch a 3D animated Jack Black with an old style film camera get chomped on by dinosaurs.

Fable PC (it has some subtitle that I don’t remember) – a larger selection of clothes than was on the Xbox (he showed me the pimp hat), customizable tattoos, oh, and 60 more quests, a new town and bunches of new monsters. You still can’t play as a girl. I lambasted him about this and he said they were saving it for Fable 2.

Black and White 2 – less creature, more villagers. Large, RTS style battles. You can pick up rocks and fling them to break city walls, then you can pick up the chunks of city walls and fling those. I made him pet his creature a bunch because the darn thing was nearly comatose from being mistreated for demo purposes. Oh, and the creature now tells you what it’s thinking when it’s doing strange things, so pooping on houses can be stopped before it starts.

24 the game-- I asked if you could yell “-- OR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!” and he said they had included a large number of Bauer-isms, also including “The bomb is in play! I repeat, the bomb is in play!” Kim Bauer will make an appearance. I asked if she would be menaced by cougars. He said the designers had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do with her. I’m like, “Duh, just put her in a white t-shirt and have her run through the forest.” The game will finally explain what happened with President Palmer’s handshake, and Kim Bauer will be having her first day at CTU.

I got my picture taken with a famous Hong Kong martial artist who I had never heard of, and got a signed Aeon Flux poster from Peter Chung.

Tomorrow I want to get a picture of me and a zombie, but only after I get a pirate eyepatch from the Pirates! display. Zombies vs. pirates!

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Kameo: WOW. Screenshots and movies just don’t do it justice compared to seeing it live and playable on a HD screen.

Quake 4 - yawn.

Enemy Territory Quake Wars - yah, OMFG pretty much wraps it up. Best in show from what I saw. I don’t even like these types of games much either =)

Full Auto - Nice. Fun. Playable. Gonna buy a xbox 360 ayup.

Hellgate - I hated the movies and screenshots but in person it looks much, much better. It’s also very playable at E3, and a heckuva lot of fun. I was suprised how good it looked.

Gothic III - They just had a crappy pre-alpha up and running. It looks pretty nice but I was hoping to see more.

12

That is exactly what I was just going to ask! Looks like I won’t need a PC anymore since there are no games I like being made! (Putting aside the fact that I still need them for work.) Same for Xbox 1.5. So PS3 it is somewhere down the road…

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Could someone please make a pitstop at the Blizzard and Bioware booths? I’m really disappointed to not see any updates on Dragon Age, and I thought for sure Blizzard would announce their 2009 lineup. :(

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Blizzard 2009 for PC:

Debugging/balancing WoW.

:P

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Oh, I played the Jaws game for a few minutes yesterday, too. Most. Boring. Game. Ever. Of course, it didn’t help that they just had it on a free roaming level where you just swam around and ate fish until you were harpooned to death.

16

If anyone is there at E3 for the next few days, can you do me a favor and look for a game called Geist comming out the game-cube? It might be in the nintendo area (they are publishing it).

I worked for this company for 4 years and did some work on giest, but its been like 2 years and it still hasn’t come out, I want to know what the hell is up with it and if it has a ghost (pun intended) of a chance of comming out in the next 8 months or so.

17

Damn, forgot to look specifically for Dragon Age, will do so on Friday.

Blizzard really was just pimping StarCraft : Ghost. It looked good, but not terribly exciting. They had a funky little mini game you had to play to break somebodies neck after creeping up on them. The invisible stealth mode looked nice too. It will probably be a great title, it just wasn’t all that exciting.

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Well, I have 8 guys covering PC games for me here at the show. That’s just what I saw. Check back in 3 days. :)

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It was there and it was playable. I tend to shy away from console shooters though, so I didn’t stick around. Looked like the gimmick there was the ability to posess people? Looked nice, from the glimpse I saw.

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Really, where is Dragon Age? BioWare showed that last year. Nothing this year?

And Neverwinter Nights 2?