Back from E3. I am only going one day this year. I don’t have a “game of the show” because nothing that I saw really stuck out at all. So here’s my quick impressions of some shit I remember
Katamari 2
MOTS but this looks like it will be a good thing. They’ve added a literal “snowball” level or mode or something, rolling up snow just feel so right :) The co-op is an interesting diversion for about 2 minutes. So the game plays exactly the same only with less control and more confusion and frustration? Awesome!
Prey
I literally wandered into a closed-door screening showing off some various gameplay footage from the game. For using Doom 3 engine it manages to not appear to use it, at least not as blatantly as Quake 4 seems to. The opening sequence where a ratty bar gets vaporized / taken up by a UFO was kind of cool but not amazing, but the graphics got better although there were still some rough parts. The player can enter a “spirit mod” or whatever where the body stands still and you fly around as a ghost or whatever with a bow and arrow and can shoot enemies. The portal stuff was mostly a gimmick with portal teleports opening and closing and generally not being super impressive. I did like how you can walk on walls/ceiling in certain areas and there was one part I liked in a long hallway where the player shot these things on the walls to reverse gravity and everything fell up, which then became down.
Call of Duty 2
Surprisingly ugly and unpolished. Looks like a standard cinematic WW2 game. Only saw the North Africa level though.
CoD: Big Red One
Looked pretty lame actually. Same problems with animation, general polishing issues, etc.
XBox3 360 games
Need For Speed, CoD2, and a few others. Very underwhelming. Looked like latest-gen XBox games only at a higher resolution and somewhat better eye candy. Still some times when a wall texture was so obviously low rez that it looked nasty. Kudos to MS for actually demoing the XBox360 though, as opposed to Sony with their strictly behind closed doors shit.
Half-Life XBox
Total POS. Demo level was the one in Ravenholm where all the zombies come out of the shadows and you have to go up on the rooftops and cross the planks and shit. However they brightened it so it’s no longer night, and everything looks like low res texture ass. Plus it had a really really shitty framerate.
24: The Game
Has the feeling of 24 down pat with the pounding numbers and the shifting splitscreen views. Nice voice acting from the cast members from what I hear. Somewhat okay graphics, not the best the PS2 is capable of. Third-person shooting segment is extremely generic with lock-on reticle, pressing against corners and popping out to shoot, a dive-roll button, etc. Driving segment was basic “drive away from bad guys until you win.” There was a part where you had to go through satellite feeds to find heat signatures of bad guys by looking at nearby buildings and paging through diagrams of each floor, lame. Interrogation segment had to do with some sort of EKG meter and either upping or toning down the interrogation techniques to try and stay within a certain marked level. Then at the end you had to press a button at a certain time to “break” the suspect. However I think the interrogation scenes will provide excellent jerk off material for 24 fans as it basically is Jack Bauer screaming at a suspect and threatening to shoot him in the face, etc.
Wanda and the Colossus or whatever it’s called now
Looks very cool, enormous collossi stomping around and you have to climb up their body and stab them in various sweet spots. At one point a guy stabbed one in the top of the head and a fucking geyser of blood spurted out, I wasn’t quite expecting that. Nice graphics for the PS2. Hard to pass judgement until I can play more.
Nintendo booth
They seriously had more DS stuff on display than Gamecube stuff, what the fuck.
Quake Wars
Looks fucking awesome, wish I could play it.
Kentia Hall
Lots of fun. I prowled around the collection of old game stuff and strapped on the Power Glove and told everyone that walked by “I love my power glove, it’s so bad” until someone finally got the reference. Doom on the 3DO was fucking unplayable. The Virtual Boy was just as retarded looking as in my dreams. The Game Gear and the Lynx were/are fucking monsters that make the PSP look svelte. Then I tried out another dumb virtual reality rig and tried to play Call of Duty by swiveling my head around and navigating with a dumb gamepad built into a plastic gun. The display was really crappy and washed out and I could barely make out the Nazis against the background but come on, virtual reality! You must go to Kentia and try this! Plus I strapped on boxing gloves to punch out a virtual opponent and all the other standard Kentia junk.
Hellgate: London
If I had to choose my game of the show thie would probably be it, it’s apparently still in the very early stages but what they showed was still fantastically well done and really felt like Diablo transferred into a post apocalyptic shooter. Very very impressive stuff. Plus they had this absolutely awesome CG trailer for it which just followed two soldiers killing various beasties and it just kept going and going and escalating more and more and at least three times I thought “OK now they will fade out” but instead the soldiers kick the shit out of the new threat and keep going. Not that that has anything to do with the game itself but I was still wowed.
Oh yeah and best booth babes goes to the Namco stage show. By far.