I haven't been online for 6 days now, so if you want to waste all of our time with a complaint that someone has already checked in with their E3 thoughts, that would be swell....
I'll start off with the highlights:
Doom III
First of all, Activision gets the dumb 4ss of the show award for the way they handled this thing...someone must have at least anticipated this would draw a crowd, right? So the wonderful planners at Activision station the Doom III "theater" at the corner of their floorspace, which is fine, but then there is this little thing called a line that they forgot to think about. They placed three monitors, not very high off of the floor, right where the first turn of the line would be, so of course, right away there is quite a crowd gathering to get in line and/or to see the footage on these monitors (this footage was pretty much crap by the way, the good stuff was inside!)..then, the Wolfenstein PS2 area is right in the path of the line (who cares about that port anyway? Looks like crap next to a PC version, and FPS on consoles = not the same), so now there is a second line forming after the Wolf3D area, but the second half thinks the first half has all kinds of line cutting going on, which it did.....except for the fact that the showings hadn't even started two hours into the show! Needless to say quite a few people were highly pissed off, and the show organizers were pissed as well since this line/mob was creating some serious traffic issues.....they finally figure it out later than day, and hand out 'tickets' to showings at specific times....which I managed to get for the next day....
On to the game, I can honestly say that what they showed was far and away the most impressive visual experience I have ever seen coming from a PC game. Simply mind-blowing stuff. The sound was right up there as well, id's sound guys have really stepped up this time around..full 5.1 digital sound will be in this game. My only real concern is that this game doesn't appear to have any similarities to the old Doom games at all...this looks more like Resident Evil on steriods. I would imagine that the insanely detailed models of the enemies would limit the number of them onscreen at once, but with the shadows and lighting effects, I really was remined of an Ultimate Redsident Evil game..they also mentioned that the multiplayer in the final retail verison of the game will be very simple (aka DM), and that the single player experience is their focus.
Gore looked surprisingly good, much better than the crappy demo's that have been out for some time now. Soldier of Fortune II was very fun to play at several of the booth's for some DM action...the new Matrox Perhelia card impressively displayed this game on three monitors at once, which was a very impressive feat...Unreal Tournament 2003 really looks like it is ready for release, and it looked and played nice, but I really wasn't blown away or anything...then again, the three or four screens that this game was on were very poorly set up, as a constant shower of overhead flashing lights made seeing the details onscreen nearly impossible....that is about it for FPS games, there were others too, but nothing really made a good impression (Kreed, Ironside, etc, etc)..Deus Ex II could have passed for I, I really didn't see much that looked different from the first, though that was a great game!
RTS games were all over the place...I did not get into the C&C Generals display..Warcraft III was there for the third year in a row...yawn....I really like the game, and played several missions of the single player game....release it already, it is done, and you are going to continually tweak the multiplayer settings anyway, so get it over with already! Praetorians looked pretty cool, Age of Empires looked nice...a few others too...
I asked around about the Dungeon Siege expansion, but didn't find out much...still no comment on a StarCraft II either!
Overall I was let down by the amount of truly "new" stuff at the show, software and hardware wise. The Xbox was all over the place, and the PS2 and Gamecube were very big as well...there just wasn't a great deal to get excited about on the PC front that we didn't already know about. (World of Warcraft...yawn..)...
The new Hanaho controllers for you emulator fans are very nice, adding a trackball to the mix...Monarch computers had some really nice cpu cases on display in the Hercules booth, and the guy from that company was really cool to talk with......I did see Robert Horry on Tuesday (punk!), Janine (yes, that Janine!), Cyrus from the Real World, not many other people...Tony Hawk, Jeremy McGrath (if you like that kinda stuff...)..I managed to miss seeing Carmen Electra, who apparently was there to plug a BattleBot game....
The CityWalk at Universal Studios is still a great place to hang out, eat, and even watch a playoff game on the bigscreen outside....Sunset strip is really cool, Hollywood Blvd was really a let-down....Episode II ruled, Spiderman was better than I thought it would be, free T-shirts made a nice comeback this year, free shuttle service to and from the show rules, guys should not ever be passing out "show daily" magazines..and damn, some gamers are really, really weird looking people......people that are on their cell-phones while they are checking their email at the email stations should be beat down....should I feel bad for having the theme music from Samurai Jack in my head all week? Finally, can someone tell me why we still have no answers on Team Fortress 2 or Duke Nukem Forever? I would have to guess by now that the DNF team has moved their game, again, to the latest version of the Unreal Engine (whatever version UT2003 is using), but how about a movie clip or something? Gabe Newell (pompus 4ss btw) refused to even acknowledge my question about TF2.."sorry I don't have a press badge Gabe" (that was in an Artie Lang voice btw).
I'll start off with the highlights:
Doom III
First of all, Activision gets the dumb 4ss of the show award for the way they handled this thing...someone must have at least anticipated this would draw a crowd, right? So the wonderful planners at Activision station the Doom III "theater" at the corner of their floorspace, which is fine, but then there is this little thing called a line that they forgot to think about. They placed three monitors, not very high off of the floor, right where the first turn of the line would be, so of course, right away there is quite a crowd gathering to get in line and/or to see the footage on these monitors (this footage was pretty much crap by the way, the good stuff was inside!)..then, the Wolfenstein PS2 area is right in the path of the line (who cares about that port anyway? Looks like crap next to a PC version, and FPS on consoles = not the same), so now there is a second line forming after the Wolf3D area, but the second half thinks the first half has all kinds of line cutting going on, which it did.....except for the fact that the showings hadn't even started two hours into the show! Needless to say quite a few people were highly pissed off, and the show organizers were pissed as well since this line/mob was creating some serious traffic issues.....they finally figure it out later than day, and hand out 'tickets' to showings at specific times....which I managed to get for the next day....
On to the game, I can honestly say that what they showed was far and away the most impressive visual experience I have ever seen coming from a PC game. Simply mind-blowing stuff. The sound was right up there as well, id's sound guys have really stepped up this time around..full 5.1 digital sound will be in this game. My only real concern is that this game doesn't appear to have any similarities to the old Doom games at all...this looks more like Resident Evil on steriods. I would imagine that the insanely detailed models of the enemies would limit the number of them onscreen at once, but with the shadows and lighting effects, I really was remined of an Ultimate Redsident Evil game..they also mentioned that the multiplayer in the final retail verison of the game will be very simple (aka DM), and that the single player experience is their focus.
Gore looked surprisingly good, much better than the crappy demo's that have been out for some time now. Soldier of Fortune II was very fun to play at several of the booth's for some DM action...the new Matrox Perhelia card impressively displayed this game on three monitors at once, which was a very impressive feat...Unreal Tournament 2003 really looks like it is ready for release, and it looked and played nice, but I really wasn't blown away or anything...then again, the three or four screens that this game was on were very poorly set up, as a constant shower of overhead flashing lights made seeing the details onscreen nearly impossible....that is about it for FPS games, there were others too, but nothing really made a good impression (Kreed, Ironside, etc, etc)..Deus Ex II could have passed for I, I really didn't see much that looked different from the first, though that was a great game!
RTS games were all over the place...I did not get into the C&C Generals display..Warcraft III was there for the third year in a row...yawn....I really like the game, and played several missions of the single player game....release it already, it is done, and you are going to continually tweak the multiplayer settings anyway, so get it over with already! Praetorians looked pretty cool, Age of Empires looked nice...a few others too...
I asked around about the Dungeon Siege expansion, but didn't find out much...still no comment on a StarCraft II either!
Overall I was let down by the amount of truly "new" stuff at the show, software and hardware wise. The Xbox was all over the place, and the PS2 and Gamecube were very big as well...there just wasn't a great deal to get excited about on the PC front that we didn't already know about. (World of Warcraft...yawn..)...
The new Hanaho controllers for you emulator fans are very nice, adding a trackball to the mix...Monarch computers had some really nice cpu cases on display in the Hercules booth, and the guy from that company was really cool to talk with......I did see Robert Horry on Tuesday (punk!), Janine (yes, that Janine!), Cyrus from the Real World, not many other people...Tony Hawk, Jeremy McGrath (if you like that kinda stuff...)..I managed to miss seeing Carmen Electra, who apparently was there to plug a BattleBot game....
The CityWalk at Universal Studios is still a great place to hang out, eat, and even watch a playoff game on the bigscreen outside....Sunset strip is really cool, Hollywood Blvd was really a let-down....Episode II ruled, Spiderman was better than I thought it would be, free T-shirts made a nice comeback this year, free shuttle service to and from the show rules, guys should not ever be passing out "show daily" magazines..and damn, some gamers are really, really weird looking people......people that are on their cell-phones while they are checking their email at the email stations should be beat down....should I feel bad for having the theme music from Samurai Jack in my head all week? Finally, can someone tell me why we still have no answers on Team Fortress 2 or Duke Nukem Forever? I would have to guess by now that the DNF team has moved their game, again, to the latest version of the Unreal Engine (whatever version UT2003 is using), but how about a movie clip or something? Gabe Newell (pompus 4ss btw) refused to even acknowledge my question about TF2.."sorry I don't have a press badge Gabe" (that was in an Artie Lang voice btw).
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