Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Another hazy Los Angeles day is over and
so goes with it Day Two of E3 2001. The LA
convention center was much less packed then
yesterday, and it gave me much needed time
to play some of the more interesting games
as well as take pictures of the awesome
exhibits. (A note on the pictures - my friend
who owns the digital camera conveniently
forgot to bring the upload cable for the
camera, so I can't post the pics until we get
home. As soon as we get back I will create a
gallery and post it up)
Before I go into the specifics of today, I
wish to discuss for a moment the uncreative
state of gaming these days that I hinted on
yesterday. While there is a lot of new
hardware technology hitting the streets, one is
shocked by the utter lack of truly new games.
If you would notice, all the big titles at E3 -
Warcraft III, Final Fantasy X,
Return to Castle Wolfenstien, Unreal
2, Duke Nukem Forever, Myst III:
Exile - are all sequals. While I am certainly
NOT claiming that these games won't further
expand the gameplay possibilities and overall
cultures of these great titles, we are missing
the truly innovative games that drive the
industry forward. Are we to believe that the
creative space that exists within computer
gaming is completely exhausted and we are
doomed to rehashing classic games over and
over? I would sure hope not. But for now this
seems to be the theme; somehow,
somewhere, someone determinted that now
was the appropriate time to cash in with
sequals to these classic titles. While I hope to
see more innovation in the future, I must say
that I am happy to see some great games
modernized (the new Wolfenstien is
awesome...more later). I guess I can live with
a little unoriginality for now. Okay...rant over,
now on to the stuff you folks care about.
Sony
The word of the day for Sony is
"ubiquitous". If you go to any of the major
publisher's booths (EA especially), you will
see the distincive black PS2 controller in front
of most of the demo games. It doesn't take
too much pondering to figure out Sony's
advantage: their system is actually out on the
street! While Microsoft and Nintendo are still
looking at a year to two years before release,
Sony is taking advantage of their huge third-
party developer base to crank out good, solid
games. I had the priveledge to demo quite a
few awesome PS2 games, including
Twisted Metal Black, AceCombat.04
Shattered Skies (hella-cool flight sim),
Tony Hawk 3, Quake III: Arena,
Giants: Citizen Kabudo, and of course, the
AMAZING Final Fantasy X. If you don't
own a PS2, there is no reason not to buy this.
I can tell already that this system is going to
have the kind of developer support that PS1
had, which means the games will be plentiful
for the next couple of years. Sony's theme is:
"why wait for XBox when PS2 is here NOW?"
A little bit more about Sony, I had the
chance to demo the broadband adapter
running PS2 Linux and Netscape 4.77. The
experience was just about as good as you can
get from Netscape 4.x. Also, I was pleasently
suprised to see Java and Flash support
included. Also being demoed was AOL on
PS2. I opted to skip that...I mean, I don't care if
it was a Cray supercomputer running AOL 6.0,
it would still suck. While the Sony folks
seemed to confirm its existence, what wasn't
on show was the broadband/hard drive kit. No
release date was set for either of these items,
but the monkey at the booth was pretty
confident when he said that it would be
available by the end of the year.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Let me first say that I am proud of id. They
were not afraid to put big-boobed, scantily-
clad women dressed in tight WWII medic
outfits in front of their booth "flaunting" the new
game (and some other things). Bravo id,
bravo. Also quite an interesting sight was this
dude walking around with the last name
"Carmack" on his badge :-) (okay, okay, so the
first name was Adrian and not John, but he
still worked for id so that is good enough). I
got to actually play the new game as well as
chat with a marketing guy from Activision who
was actually quite knowledgeable about the
game. Here is the scoop:
The game is based on the Quake 3
engine, but uses the skeletal character
rendering code from Doom 3 for
incredibly realistic models with awesome,
dynamic facial expressions. The idea is fairly
similar to the original: you are dropped just
outside of Castle Wolfenstein and you must
inflitrate the castle and investigate the human
mutation projects that SS scientists are
performing (you just know some killer bosses
are gonna be based off that). No multiplayer
has been implemented yet, but the plans are
to make it follow the story plan as opposed to
being the old "run around and shoot the other
guy" multiplayer of Quake. The Activision guy
compared it loosely to Counterstrike,
except they will not create it so that people can
play as Nazis. This is for obvious sensitivity
reasons (in fact, when they ship this game to
Germany, German law requires that they
remove all Schwastikas (sp.) from the game).
Frankly I don't care if I am a Nazi or not, this
game is just gorgeous and a lot of fun.
Speaking of fun, some very nice weapons
have been implemented. To go through all
that I can remember, we have two pistols,
three machine guns (one which heats up
while being fired and eventually jams), two
sniper rifles with zoom, a flame thrower (VERY
nice), and several grenade-type
projectiles...and of course you have your trusty
Army-issue knife.
The game should be out within the year,
and the bad news is that they plan an official
version for Windows ONLY. While companies
like Loki and Macsoft might make ports to
linux and macintosh respectively, nothing
official for these platforms is coming out of id.
Boo...
Duke Nukem Forever/Unreal 2

I was a bit suprised here. I headed over to
the Infogrames booth to get some info about Unreal 2 only to be directed to their
Unreal Championship display. In fact, the
folks in the press booth seemed like they
were unaware that their company was even
publishing this title (their "lack of knowledge"
might have had something to do with my "lack
of a press pass"). Dissapointed, I headed
over to the Take 2 booth; Duke Nukem
Forever is appropriately titled since it has
been in development FOREVER, so I was
sure to see some juicy stuff from their
publisher. Once again, NOTHING!! This was
quite a shock. I mean, there were even
people wearing DNF t-shirts advertising the
Take 2 booth, not to mention a full-page DNF
advertisement in the "show daily" handout. All
I can say is WTF...I mean seriously, I would
have flown out here for DNF alone, and now I
go home empty-handed. I am a bit bummed.<
/p>
Okay, that is it for today. I know I promised
Warcraft III coverage, but I didn't have
time to look at it as in-depth as I would have
wished. So I am going to find a Blizzard guy
tomorrow, barrage him with questions, and
report back with the scoop on my Day 3
wrapup. Also look forward to coverage of the
"indy" booths; the small booths that have a
bunch of cool gaming hardware/accesories.
So until tomorrow, I bid all a fond adeiu; I am
off to check out hollywood for a few hours then
sleep.   E3 Expo (official site)