E3 - First Day Shows Multitude Of New Games

Thanks to Eurogamer for its in-depth E3 coverage, as well as GameDaily's detailed write-ups and Ferrago's similarly wide-ranging coverage, as they add to previously-mentioned gaming websites covering the E3 Expo in Los Angeles. Highlights of the first day include hands-on impressions of Conker: Live and Reloaded for Xbox, a seriously in-depth Half-Life 2 interview, some first impressions of Myst IV, confirmation that Sega's signing of The Matrix Online was their 'big announcement', though Phantasy Star Universe was also announced, the list of songs for Donkey Konga, and a hands-on look at Final Fantasy XII. What other software are you most impressed by?

Comments

Re:The gaming industry needs to grow up

[fireduck]

In the movie industry, the pattern these days seems to be for the big "blockbuster" products to be delivered on-time.

Oh, I don't know. doing a quick google "delayed movie releases" search turns up that the release of Blade was delayed. Against the Ropes (that Meg Ryan movie) was delayed quite a while before it was released. Apparently the new Miyazaki film is going to be delayed. Sky Captain is being delayed. And here's a whole list of films from 1999 that had their release schedules changed (with a number of them including "behind schedule" in the reason).

So, its a bit unfair to criticize the game industry for being amateurish, while denying it happens in the movie industry. Perhaps all of the Lord of the Rings films were released on schedule, but a quick search for a recent semi-blockbuster, Kill Bill 2, shows that it was initially scheduled to be released in February and was pushed back to April.

Re:Slashdot Bias Against Halo2? Or What?

[Pluvius]

What is this... Halo 2... slated to likely be The, no, make that THE, game of the year, is completely ignored on Slashdot. Just because we're computer games does NOT mean we don't play consoles. I mean, come on... if it's not a PC shooter, it's not good?

Console FPSes tend to have much worse control than PC FPSes due to the different input devices. That's why I prefer PC Halo to XBox Halo even without the cooperative mode.

Anyway, I think the reason why Halo 2 in particular is being ignored isn't because it's a console FPS, but because it was already hyped up last year. Besides, even though Halo was decent, it was disappointing compared to Bungie's previous offerings. Oh, and there's also HL2 and Doom 3 grabbing the attention of FPS fans.

Rob

Re:Halflife 2

[delus10n0]

Linux market

You mean the 20 people or so wanting to play games under Linux?

but as id and Epic have shown us, it really isn't that hard to write code that is fairly portable to begin with

There's the flaw; HL2's game engine is inherently built upon DirectX. "Simply porting it" to work on Linux would require quite a bit of work. You'd have to port the graphics elements to OpenGL, and then figure out what library to use to handle standard inputs, sound, etc. for multiple pieces of hardware -- all stuff which Linux is severely sucking at. Until Linux has a "DirectX" type layer, it will not get mainstream support from the game developers.

You might hate Microsoft, or hate Windows, but at least they've got a pretty much unified way of communicating with the plethora of devices out there (controllers/video cards/audio cards/midi cards/network cards) with a single interface (DirectX.)