More games

Bully: While Rockstar Games showed off their Xbox 360 Table Tennis game at E3 (the game has now shipped to stores), yet another Rockstar title was DOA at E3. Bully was announced just before E3 2005 and is under development at the company’s Vancouver studios. The game takes place at a fictional boarding school where your character has to deal with typical school events and yes some kind of bullying behavior is involved.. Very little is known about the game but the suggestion of the game’s subject matter have been attacked by politicians and other groups who feel it might encourage bad behaviors in kids. Rockstar Games has delayed the release of Bully a couple of times (it was due in fall 2005 and has since been pushed back to sometime in 2006) and it didn’t make an appearance at E3. Time will tell if the game will actually be released and it so in what form.

Duke Nukem Forever: Oh, Duke; where for art thou? We have been waiting for the better part of a decade for 3D Realms to release this long awaited first person shooter follow up to Duke Nukem 3D. The last public showing of anything Duke Nukem Forever rated was way back in 2001 when 3D Realms showed a trailer for the Unreal engine based title. Since then there has been no public screenshots, trailers or public demos of the game. A couple of magazine have seen the game in action recently and reported briefly on what was shown but that’s pretty much it. 3D Realms is working with Human Head Studios to finish off their next game Prey so a showing at E3 2006 seemed liked a long shot and indeed it was. Hopefully we will get something from the 3D Realms team about Duke’s latest adventure before too long.

Project Gray Company: Electronic Arts revealed a mysterious web site a few weeks before E3 began that showed some artwork and designs for an open ended fantasy RPG (think Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) that had been in production for a year so far. Unfortunately the project still remain mysterious as EA elected not to show the game at their E3 booth this year. However the web site is updated regularly with videos of the development team working on the game so it shouldn’t be too much longer for more info on this late 2007 title to be revealed.

Fallout 3: Speaking of Elder Scrolls IV, the folks at Bethesda Softworks had a posted about this long awaited post apocalypse RPG at their E3 2006 exhibit..and nothing else. Bethsoft first announced a deal with Interplay to license the Fallout property to make the third game in the series (as a side note, can you believe Interplay is still technically an operating company even though they have released no games for the past several years?). However there has been little to no info on the game since the initial announcement. With its E3 no show, we have to assume that we will have to wait a while longer before more info is revealed.

Star Trek Online: While Bethesda Softworks was showing off two space based Star Trek action games at its booth at E3 2006, yet another previously announced Star Trek game didn’t make it to the show floor. Star Trek Online is the MMORPG based on the long running TV-movie sci-fi series from developer Perpetual Entertainment. Announced well over a year ago, the game has yet to be shown in playable form. Hopefully next year we will get a chance to see if the final frontier is truly something to look forward to playing in a massively multiplayer setting.