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E3 Wrapup Documented
mindless4210 writes "The new Nokia N-Gage, shown at E3, looks promising, but Nokia better be prepared to compete with Sony and Nintendo. Nokia is betting the N-Gage's wireless communication abilities will set it apart and allow multiplayer gaming to move away from computers and living-room consoles and into consumers' pockets." Reader harikiri writes "According to the BBC, the much-maligned Infinium Labs has showcased their Phantom console at E3. Apparently Infinium have made agreements with AMD and Nvidia to provide the processor and graphics controller. The specs seem very respectable: a 2.5GHz AMD processor, 256MB RAM and a 40GB HDD." Reader Ipingforpong writes "E3, probably the most well known video game trade show was assaulted by the U.S. Army in a promotion for America's Army. Soldiers rappelled out of a real Blackhawk helicopter with real rifles and rushed the show."
It's been exhausting covering it, especially when you get slashdotted half way through!
Still, at least I get a rest from E3 action until e3 2005, which is scheduled for May 18-20 2005
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
I'm a writer for FileFront.com, and let me tell you, this year's E3 was great. There are a ton of great games coming out in the next year, and although you hear day-after-day about all the new MMORPGs coming out, make sure you keep an eye out on the great FPSs (Half-Life 2 and Doom 3), 3rd-person action/adventure (Fable and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) and RTSs (Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War) coming out this year as well.
Check out all of the coverage that my coworkers and I put together at our E3 2004 Coverage Page. Lot's of great stuff there.
Trent Polack
www.polycat.net
5000 units in the first week. .02 N-Gages per person (assuming 250 million peeps in US)
I'm in the military, so perhaps I can provide some insight here.
Though I wasn't there, I would say that the soldiers were carrying real weapons, though I can pretty much assure you that they were not loaded with any kind of ammunition.
Those 'training rifles' you speak of? They're the soldier's personal weapon with what is called a Blank Firing Attatchment (BFA) fitted to the end.
That is a real weapon, and all the BFA does is provide a seal for the gases to recock and reload the weapon (so that the semiautomatic and automatic fire functions of the weapon will work).
Basically, the barrel of a gas-operated weapon (like an M-16 or just about any machine gun) has a little hole near the end of it that allows the gases that are propelling the bullet to travel down a gas tube and force the bolt of the weapon backwards to extract the casing in the chamber and put another round in.
When you fire blanks, there's no bullet to provide a seal and force the gas back down the tube. That's what the 'tiny orange thingy' (BFA) is for.
That said, replicas do exist for training purposes. They're made of solid rubber, and they're actually heavier than the service rifles!
#1 rule of gun safety: Always assume the gun is loaded. No gun safety instructor will ever tell you otherwise.
I'm sure something got lost in translation here. We all know AMD doesn't have any 2.5GHz processors. Possibly they meant a 2500+, I dunno.
Regardless, looks like the Phantom is actually just a PC under the hood with some interface for downloading games off the web. Not too terribly different from the ApeXtreme when all is said and done. Except of course that they want you to pay $30/month, which I guess isn't bad if they have a large selection of quality games with no ugly restrictions on play. That being the case, it might compare well in terms of cost/benefit to conventional systems, but I wouldn't bet money on it...
It's not a private endorsement. The game actually was made by the US Army. Therefore, they were endorsing themselves.
"America's Army", the game, is a recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, paid for and run by the U.S. Army. Much of the operation is outsourced, but the whole point is to recruit people into the U.S. Army. "Going to the next level" has a special meaning there.
Pretty much the Honor systems is like levels and experience points: the better you do at things like your mission, keeping your troops alive, patching up wounded soldiers and not blowing the hell out of your own team with the RPG the higher you score. Your score gets kept as experience points and you increase in Honor levels with success. Higher levels need more points needed to advance, etc. And you can lose Honor levels with Rules of Engagement violations like shooting your own team or civilians (and friendly fire detection is always on). You also get little incentives for to increase in Honor, like unlocking the Special Forces at 15 Honor and official 'Elite' servers that you need to have 25 Honor to join.
As you sign in with an account and the official servers ban you if your Honor drops below 9 (it starts at 10) then there are very few TKers willing to put up with the crap of creating a new account all the time. Which only leaves the cheaters...
I was hoping the Army would, you know, hunt them down and gut them - but no such luck.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
I played around with the PSP a bit at E3, and I was initially very impressed with it. The screen is especially nice and the movies playing on it looked incredible. The performance for the games really varied in quality from barely PS1 quality to almost PS2 quality.
However, after thinking about it a while, I realized that there are some big problems with it.
1. It's a little bit too big to be truly portable. You can't really put it in your pocket, nor is there the built in screen protection that the SP (or DS) provides. The pictures they prepared showed a bunch of people wearing it around their necks, as if that was the recommended way of transporting it. The only thing geekier than that is sidetalkin.
2. It's going to be expensive. There is no way that piece of hardware is going to be under 200 bucks, even if sold at a loss. Look at all of Sony's other handheld products like the Clies. They are all expensive for what they are even while they have smaller screens and no internal media drive or fancy graphics processing. No Sony rep would even give me a ballpark figure of the price.
3. The battery life is going to be a big problem. I asked someone at the Sony booth about this and you could tell the response they had prepared was very calculated. "It's 10 hours, but..." and they'd go into this spiel about how it all depends on how the developers do things and how much drive access the game has and such.
If you've used any of the recent PDAs you know you cannot expect much more than maybe 2.5 hours of gameplay where you have a color screen, lots of on-screen action, and sound turned on. Now that's with no media drive and no memory card read/writes.
Any PS2 equivalent game is going to use the drive almost as much as a PS2 game would, which as we all know is a lot. If you're going to have a GTA style world you will still need to stream in all the geometry and textures by hitting the disc a lot. If you're going to have the good sports game commentary audio still, you'll have to hit the disc a lot. Basically, if they are going to deliver on the promise of near-PS2 quality games, they are going to have to have games that use the media drive almost constantly.
Running a motor is going to drain the heck out of the batteries even further, even if it's some sort of power-optimized drive. I really wonder if they can get even a couple of hours of PS2-style disc read usage out of it. Anonymous developer reports that have been posted online recently seem to confirm this problem.
These issues seem to make the PSP barely qualified as a portable system. A lot of people might say, "Oh, well who needs over an hour or two of battery life anyways?" Anyone who actually plays their portables would instantly say, "Me." And of course, if you were actually going to want to watch a full-length movie you'll need that much battery too.
If it's not qualified to be a portable, what is it qualified to do? If you're stuck just playing it at home while it's plugged in to a socket, why not just play a regular console game? The console systems are all going to be much cheaper than the PSP anyways, while I doubt the PSP games will be any cheaper. PS2 quality games means PS2 quality development costs which means full price games, while the consumer expects to pay less than console game prices for a portable game.
As many past failed portables show, a portable needs to be truly portable to succeed. Being extra powerful, which seems like it could only be a plus, becomes an albatross once you don't have the battery life to support it.