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E3 2005 - A Look Back
Last week was so interesting I caught the plague and died for two days. Now that I've gotten a rez and E3 has wrapped up, a look back is in order. Ferrago takes a look at E3 no-shows, like STALKER, while GamesIndustry.biz has a look at statistics. The big three PR conferences were some of the highlights of the Expo, and Gamespot tells us who 'won'. The best way to get a feel for what happened last week, though, is to get it firsthand. The Casual Gamer Experiment is over, with his impressions now available. Personal accounts are available at Press the Buttons, GamersInfo.net, CliffyB.com, Grimwell.com, John Davison's Blog, and Jeremy Parish's Blog. Was there any firsthand E3 coverage that you particularly liked this year? What did you think of G4's live broadcasting, if you caught it? Update: 05/23 18:56 GMT by Z : Obligitory PA link. From the post: "I don't believe there is any such thing as a 'Playstation 3' yet, and I don't believe in the Killzone video. What I do believe is that Sony harnessed the media and then rode it from place to place, one hand on the bridle while the other waved madly in the air."
I would have been more impressed if Sony hadn't shown so many "to spec" videos as they call them, or as I like to call them, pre-rendered concept videos. The Unreal 2007, Tech Demos (ducks,leaves,doc oc,ff7) and maybe Fight Night were the only ones that were fairly real demonstrations of what the system can do. Everything else was just theoretical... And if you look back to the PS2's original tech demos they never got to the level they showed in some of them, like the Tekken demo for example...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
This feller has it pegged. I weep for the state of the industry. Enough with the megagames which are all clones of one another...Enough of the CEOs being the ones who make all the money and all the game design decisions and have no clue what makes a truely fun and original game.
I believe I will be leaving the industry soon as a wage slave and starting my own budget company with a few friends cuz I'm just tired of all the "South Hall Mafia" crap.
I was fascinated to learn that Microsoft used actual Apple G5s to represent what the Xbox 360 will be capable of when it's actually working. It's one thing to ship G5s to your developers for use as compile targets for your Xbox IDE; I think it's another to use the box as the working machine for a demo presentation at E3, of all places. For G5s to be used in that venue, they have to be both fast and stable platforms for your code.
In short, that makes it I think more likely that we'll get Xbox games on the G5 if Microsoft has any desire to ship that. Still an admittedly slim chance, but it's warming to know that these actually run game code full speed.
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$tar -xvf
I think SOny's focus on numbers is terrible, since none of them actually MEAN a damn thing. Even the ones that aren't just made up are irrelevant.
Check out the Nintendo press conference. At the beginning, when Reggie comes out, he talks about numbers a little, yes. But at the same time, he makes fun of the other number-heavy presentations a little, when they put up a huge slide that just has a big "2" on it. I think their presentations show where they want to go with their ideas, and that's more meaningful than some numbers.
Plus, you sure as hell never see Sony Entertainment's top dog up there talking about how nothing makes him happier than seeing the birth of a new gamer.
The G4 stuff was what I expected it to be. And it's the same reason I normally skip the channel. They spend too much time cracking stupid jokes, or insulting their audience. Back before the G4/TechTV mess, I'd only watch shows on TechTV for gaming news. I was a bit disappointed when the game show changed into XPlay with a G4ish additude, but back then it was still better then G4 shows.
The interviews they got with some people were nice, but still not as good as I would hope.
Oh well, at least we have plenty of other methods to fill ourselves in about E3. I'm still trying to catch up, since attending the show is a sure fire way to make sure you miss a ton of it.
I don't think space is a big deal when it comes to downloaded games. NES games are generally below 0.1 megabytes, SNES games are a couple of meg and N64 games around 25 megabytes. For the average person who just gets Goldeneye and some of the Mario games you probably won't even have to get an extra memory card. The emulators aren't that big either, and will probably be on a ROM anyway.
For gamecube games you'll likely have to buy the disk rather than download - they're pretty big to get over a typical broadband connection, as well as too big to reasonably store without a hard drive.
What really intrigues me is the possibility that old games from other systems could also be available. There's no technical reason why the entire library for, say, the Sega Master System and Megadrive couldn't also be on the revolution, likewise for the old Neo Geo, Ataris etc. And since these consoles are all from companies that no longer make hardware the licensing might not be that difficult to arrange either.
Likewise games for Nintendo and non-Nintendo handhelds could be on the system...
Imagine the history of gaming at your fingertips! It won't actually happen, as Nintendo will no doubt charge you $5 a go and limit it to A-list first-party games. But it could be pretty damn cool, like having a MAME cabinet legally...
Netjak's got their Best of Show, Worst of Show, and Biggest Surprises up, too.