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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?
http://www.happypuppy.com/e3/photos.jsp
Sorry couldn't resist, since there are entire sites dedicated to the E3 Booth Babes :)
Was just positively small and insignificant. Yay, another MMORPG. Wooo. Excitement. I was really hoping for another SEGA console(return of pure gaming companies!), but I knew it wasn't coming and I knew it was going to either be disappointing or it would piss me off(like MS buying out SEGA or something).
Heck a lot of things were overshadowed by Sony and Nintendo. Some of the eyetoy stuff is just neat, wild new speculation about the PSP(will it manage to play games longer than it can play video[2.5 hours]!? Time will tell!), and the DS is confirmed as nifty.
Watching the XBox fanboys tout some of the Halo 2 stuff is proving to be amusing though. I love how it's like most of them never played Marathon or any of the better PC FPSs to hear some of them talk about all the revolutionary new features. The game looks really good, but comeon now.
Metroid Prime 2 looks like more of the same, only now with multiplayer. That's kinda neat I guess.
The new Zelda looks like it'll be really cool, but that's not til 2005.
Square-Enix once again moves the line between masculine and feminine with their FF character designs.
I'm just all curmudgeony right now.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
I like how at every E3, the Date Fairy suddenly dumps her (his?) magical bag of special date dust over everyone's game. In fact, E3 is just one huge calendar orgy.
And then, come forth quarter, the Date Fairy's true magic is revealed: she used disappearing ink; dates that were so firm, so solid, so there suddenly disappear into vaporness, or instead they morph into the ancient puzzling runes "WHEN IT'S DONE."
I'm already seeing comments appear along the lines of "they set release dates at E3 and then never keep them". These comments are, of course, factually correct in most cases and lead me on to my main point.
The videogames industry is still behaving like it's stuck in the 80s. Release schedules for games are usually either wildly optimistic (and not met) or not even published at all, beyond "when it's done". With the amount of money involved in the games industry these days and the increasing involvement of big business, I just don't see how this amateurism can survive much longer.
In the movie industry, the pattern these days seems to be for the big "blockbuster" products to be delivered on-time. Whatever you think of the quality of these films (most of them suck), you don't hear of these films being hyped to death for a sudden release and then, at the last moment, delayed until the next year or "until it's ready". Investors and shareholders just won't stand for this kind of thing; they need to know when they can expect a return on their investment and they know that the public will get cheesed off pretty quickly by successive delays.
I remember reading an article in the mainstream press a couple of years ago, about the chain of disasters at Ion Storm that led, ultimately, to Daikatana; an underwhelming game with qite possibly the worst release publicity in history. I know this is an extreme case, but it does seem to point at much of what is wrong in the games industry; too many "hobbyists" involved, too little understanding of business realities and too little commitment to actually delivering a project on time and on budget.
It really is a shame that Valve is not more commited to Linux. As an avid Linux gamer, I find it disturbing that Valve can simply ignore the Linux market. I understand that we are a very small group, but as id and Epic have shown us, it really isn't that hard to write code that is fairly portable to begin with, then have a small team do the porting. I'm sure there are quite a few programmers out there that would do the work for peanuts, or even free.
Maybe by the time Halflife 3 hits the shelves, Linux will have become a viable gaming market and we'll see the games being released for our favorite platform, too.
I found the HL2 interview a good fairly decent read. I've found most gaming interviews lack content, and decent thought out questions. "When will it be realeased? What sort of weapons will there be. What are the levels like. When will it be released? Tell us about the graphics/sound. When will it be released? What are the system specs?"
Sure, many of these questions were addressed in the interview, but its the other questions that make it interesting. Like hearing about how the code leak affected them. Hearing about how excited the team got when they got to play the game through. Hearing about some of the design aspects, like the revolution/evolution of the AI. Good stuff.
When I read about what I was most impressed by is the lack of original titles.
I don't mean to turn this into a session of bashing E3, because I do think it's always fun and interesting to see what's being released--or at least, what people have on their minds.
However, my reaction to E3 this year has been notably different. It seems that many of the titles are things I've heard about for a couple of years now, or are sequels. Many of the rest of the titles seem unoriginal in the sense of essentially being remakes, in actuality if not in name. So far I'm not aware of any titles that represent radically new game ideas or interesting new games that I've not heard of before. Generally, this is what I've come to expect from E3, and haven't seen it so far.
There's still plenty of time and lots of games, though, so maybe more will surface as E3 continues. It takes awhile to filter through everything, and the most hyped games will invariably be sequels to well-known series from large publishers.
My feelings about E3 intersect with your comments in a couple of ways, though:
I think a better analogy to E3, rather than film, would be car shows. Some of the fun of E3, historically speaking, comes not from finding out when games are released, but to discover new games to salivate over and hope have some upcoming release date in the not-to-distant future. E3 is somewhat like a new car show in that there are invariably new games--like new car prototypes--that may never be released, or will be released in the distant future. The point is to get a peek at what developers are up to and thinking about, and will probably be coming in the future, not to find out what actual release dates are.
In this regard, I think the lack of original, new content at E3 shifts the focus from new content to things like release dates. Because we don't have the new interesting ideas and developers as has sometimes been the case in the past, we find ourselves being concerned with release dates and stuff. To the extent that we can't say "Ooh, look at that title--very interesting idea", we have to say something like "Ooh, look, it's Monster Slayer IX--when is it coming out?"
Personally I think the first halo was a very over rated game. Granted it has a great multiplayer expereince....but so what! There are *many* games that give you a good (even better!) multiplayer experience.