How The Game Is Played

The E3 Report

Good news and bad news.

I'm back from E3. Unfortunately I managed to leave my camera behind so you will have to relie on Chris Melissinos for the pictures (see the link on the side of this page.)

Frankly, I was over-all rather bored. Maybe I'm just getting older but so many of the games looked so much the same that I really had trouble working up much enthusiasm for any of them.

A high-point for me though was the NCSoft booth. These guys are poised to be the powerhouse in the MMOLRPG space. I got a chance to play City of Villains, they much awaited sequel/add-on to City of Heroes, and earned myself an evil-cape by whipping some hero-ass. This game looks like serious fun. PvP for those of us who don't like KAOS (Killing As an Online Sport.) The PvP is controlled and villains and heroes can chose to fight each other or not. They are also adding bases and apartments to the game as well as some way-cool villain-only costume options.

In addition to City of Villains, I also played Auto-Assualt at the NCSOft booth. This is a Mad Max type car-combat game. The car physics still needed a bit of work, but it was also a lot of fun in a different sort of way.

Finally, I played Tabula Rasa, NCSoft's Space-Marines RPG designed by Richard Garriot of Ultima and Ultima Online fame. This has real potential and I'll defintiely be trying it out when it goes live.

NCSoft also has a small group robot-combat game thats cute, but at the end of the day its just another death match. Of course they already have Guild Wars out and that is gaining a pretty strong following offering a very different sort of fantasy-combat game. Devotees liken it to Magic the Gathering in the strategic decisions you have to make in choosing the skills to use in game.

Finally, they also have Lineage II. Lineage II is a hard-core PvP killer-mud MMOLRPG and they make no bones about it. If your idea of a good time is Compton on a bad day, then this is your game/. Needless to say, its not my idea fo a good time. But there are those who are devotees of this brutal kind of online play.

The really important thing about the NCSoft line-up is first its quality. All the games are beautiful and I haven't heard too many complaints about quality of service. And secondly, its breadth. Each game is a very different kind of game likely to appeal to different players.

Sony better watch their lunch or NCSoft is going to eat it in the next 18 months.

Another big surprise was Nintendo's announcements. The first surprise is that they are embracing networked play in a huge way. They get my "Turn on a Dime" award as the last time I visited their booth, 2 years ago, they were assuring me that networks were unimportant to games ;)

This year, they were pushing the DS heavily and it was all about networking. You could download games demos straight into your DS from their booth's 80211 network and they were showing many networked games and apps, including a VOIP application for the DS.

The second surprise was a related announcement about their new console. The Revolution. While Sony and Microsoft duke it out over who has the higher performance, Nintendo has decided not to play that. Instead, their Revolution will be small, sleek, inexpensive AND, the big surprise, will come with emulators to emulate all their previous game machines! Furthermore, they have committed to making their entire catalog of games for those older machines available for free download into the revolution. The video for Xbox360 looks very nice, and the PS3 looks amazing, but frankly I may well buy a revolution first as, at the end of the day, I find those old games more fun then many of the new ones.

Speaking of Xbox360. Microsoft got caught with their pants down. They had some very pretty demos, and some very pretty looking Xbox360s. Unfortunately, the Xbox360s weren't running the demos. Instead, the demos were running on the development stations, dual G5 Macintoshs, hidden in the bottom of the demo stations.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2005/5/19/362

So Microsoft gets my "Can't fool all the people all the time" award this year.

The sad thing was, even cheating, Microsoft couldn't really compete. The Xbox360 demos were nice. The PS3 demos were, frankly, breathtaking. We're talking real-time rendering at movie quality. If you don't believe me, check this out (and its not even the most impressive one I've seen.)

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=5833&type=wmv#

All in all, if the winner in the next generation will; be decided by graphics horsepower, PS3 is looking to be the clear winner.

But will it be about horse-power? I frankly don't know. I'm over-all pretty sick of prettier and prettier games that all look and play about the same. What I want are games I find interesting, fun and unique. I was reminded of this when I visited the small "classic computer games" display stuck into a corner of the least acessible hall at E3. In that display was an Atari 800 running one of the most brilliant computer games ever devised.

It was called "Qix" and it was originally a vector-graphic arcade game. Its not 3D, its not even representation, its just a set of abstract lines moving around a screen that you need to navigate in order to close off areas of the screen and get points. Its simple, elegant, and absolutely mesmerizing.

And for all their horse-power and impressive 3D rendering I didn't see any modern game at the show that came close to being that engaging.

Posted at 02:22AM May 23, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]