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Alan's E3 2006 Diary May 13, 2006 Alan /.effect Dang |
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Summary: In his E3 diary, Alan goes over his impressions of Sony's Playstation 3 console, Xbox 360, and Metal Gear Solid 4 (among others). He also drops by Kentia Hall to check out Smart Games booth.
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The day started off great. I woke up at a nice leisurely time, and made my way to the LA Convention (right next to Staples Center). After paying $20 for parking, I made my way to the entrance. I was at E3. Yay.
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I arrived about 30 minutes after the expo had opened, so most of the early-bird attendees had already gotten to the expo floor; the rest were still sleeping. LucasArts had a nice rolling demo of several of their games, and although most people ignored the Star Wars Empire at War clips, the LEGO Star Wars "Original Trilogy" game drew a small crowd.
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But I had no time to waste. I was ready to see the sights of E3…
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I walked through the security checkpoint (with UV lighting to detect phony badges) and I was in.
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My first stop was Sony's booth. As I wasn't very impressed with the PlayStation 3 demos I had seen at GDC in March, I was hoping for something more exciting at E3. I mean, I still remember the excitement and wonder I had with the "Next Generation PlayStation" when Phil Harrison came to Stanford University to demo PlayStation 2.
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Officially, the wait was supposed to be 60 minutes to get up to the PlayStation 3 demo area, but I must have gotten lucky since I just walked in with the group after a 30 second wait. Maybe it was the press badge, or maybe it was just my elite sneaking skills.
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The games they had on demo were just allright. First was "Heavy Rain: The Casting" which was a technology demo showcasing the future potential of digital actors.
While the technical detail of the demo was good and it was clear that the developers were using sophisticated shaders and high-resolution textures, the lighting models were still insufficient to make it look better than what I'd consider currently on the market.
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I chose the best picture from the official press images to show you, and I know it looks pretty good. The problem is that in motion it's much less impressive due to lighting. You can download the direct-feed video of the technology demo at:
http://www.quanticdream.com/downloads/news/HEAVYRAIN_THECASTING_AVI.zip
Go ahead and download the video – before reading on. Watch while reading…
This actually highlights the number one challenge of next-generation gaming. The hardware is reaching the point were developers have sufficient freedom to do the things they want to do. You can have massively multiplayer online worlds, tens of thousands of enemies on screen at any given time, and even worlds that can take hundreds of hours to explore. Even so, art plays a critical role in providing the optimal experience. This is true not only for graphics, but for hardware-accelerated physics as well – but more on this in a future article.
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Anyhow, the PS3 gamepad maintains the proven PS2 form-factor with a few changes. Rumble feedback has been replaced with 6-axis tilt sensors, and there's now a central PlayStation button.
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Gran Turismo HD looks great and it's basically Gran Turismo 4 with high-resolution textures and a 1080p framebuffer. It basically looks just like the photo mode from GT4, only in 60fps motion. I'd be happy to buy a PlayStation 3 just to play this one game and as a Blu-Ray player. The rest of the PS3 demos didn't look substantially better than Xbox 360, but they seemed to be running at very smooth framerates.
Since I was already on the second floor platform, I took the time to take some shots of the Sony booth. Yeah, I noticed that Gran Turismo HD was also down on the show floor … it's a good thing I didn't wait an hour.
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Across from the Sony booth was Nintendo. Dozens of people enjoyed the Nintendo DS lounge, and even more people were waiting for a preview of Wii. The wait was supposedly 5 or 6 hours. Way too long for me… especially since the tilt/motion type control has been done before.
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Both GameSpot and 1up had huge on-site booths where they did real-time coverage of E3 including video and written content. While Ziff Davis's 1up.com was built off Ziff Davis's Gamers.com, only Gamespot gets a photo because that's where FiringSquad alums James Yu and Bob Colayco are working (Sarju Shah too… but I didn't run into him).
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I had heard a lot about EA's 360 degree surround screen and how awesome it was. After seeing it in person, I can say that it's just like the ones you see at one of the Disney theme parks… only EA's is smaller.
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Nokia is still pushing the N-Gage platform although now it's crossing over to the mainstream mobile phone line up. The booth itself was actually very nicely done with nice plush chairs. Or at least, the chairs looked nice and plush.
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There were clearly other attendees who need a rest more than I did.
Continuing through the various halls, I walked by the Rainbow Six: Las Vegas. The game actually looked very promising. It merged the true tactics of the Rainbow Six line with the next-generation graphics of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. This is definitely a game to keep an eye on.
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I skimmed by Sega's booth, but I didn't see anything too interesting.
Microsoft
I wasn't expecting much when I made it to the Microsoft booth. Test Drive Unlimited was actually looking very good in motion. I had not had a chance to pick up the demo from Xbox Live Marketplace, and was pleasantly surprised. Despite some lackluster screenshots, the game looked much better than Project Gotham Racing 3.
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One thing Microsoft has definitely done right with the Xbox 360 is making sure games really captivate the gamer. Just look at these two:
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I'm actually completely serious. Most of the gamers playing the Xbox 360 stuff were absolutely engrossed with the gaming action. A bomb could go off next to them, and I'm not sure they would divert their attention from the game.
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Square Enix's booth was obviously popular with most of the attention going to the upcoming Final Fantasy XII. Apparently photography wasn't allowed. After claiming that I had no clue how to use my camera by taking a blurry shot without a flash, I went ahead and took a shot of the full size replica of the armor used in Final Fantasy XII. That would definitely make for a cool costume..
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Sixteen Korean game developers worked together to set up a "Power of Korea Game" booth. This was actually one of my favorite booth since they had "F-sharp" from Seoul Fusion Orchestra as entertainment. The fusion/electronic trio had a style somewhere in between that of British violinist Vanessa Mae and that of the string quartet "bond."
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I was going to have the FiringSquad team come back for video, but by then the trio had already finished their gig… maybe next year.
Console gaming was definitely the biggest part of E3, but NVIDIA had a modest sized booth as well. There wasn't anything new that was announced at E3, but it was still a popular booth to get some hands-on time with some of the new PC games. I didn't see an ATI booth.
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I made my way to the MGS4 video clip, stopping only to take a picture of a waving Snoopy.
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There was no doubt that Metal Gear Solid 4 had a lot of interest. Kojima and his team know how to edit a trailer, but nothing has ever been as revolutionary as the incredible MGS2 trailer. I won't discuss the trailer for MGS4 – you should just check it out once the direct-feed version is available on Konami's site.
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Buena Vista Games had their own in-house games as well as THQ's licensed version of Cars and Bethesda Softworks's licensed version of Pirates of the Caribbean game.
While on my way to Kentia Hall, home of the "weird stuff," I stopped by the Into The Pixel exhibit. These were actually from the 2004 exhibit. What was very clear to me is that good art transcends time. It's too bad that the vision for StarCraft:Ghost never materialized. This year's exhibit can be viewed online at http://www.intothepixel.com/view-art.php?year=2006
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The tricky part is that although beta waves tend to represent the most alert state, it's also associated with anxiety and so if you're really good at a game (i.e. Gran Turismo 4), there's probably less beta activity.
Anyhow, with my trip to Kentia Hall complete, I went back to where I started and listened to the Video Game Pianist do his thing. He was on a Kurzweil stage piano – was surprised he wasn't using something like a Kawai MP8.
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And of course, on my way out I picked up some earplugs from Tylenol's booth. They're marketing their drug for the "gaming headache." Remember though, you shouldn't take more than 4 grams every 24 hours, and you should see a doctor if your headache persists, and see him right away if it's associated with any type of weakness or vision changes, or if there's anything at all that makes you feel like it's a "new" type of headache.
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And that was my E3 experience.