Thanks to the help of Buffy_helmet and my old pal Mike, I was able to attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005 which ran from may 18th to may 20th. It was exhilerating, surreal, exhausting, disappointing, amazing, deafening and more.
Of course, there is a huge amount of video footage, articles, interviews, pictures, etc. out there that the aficionados amongst you have no doubt been devouring.
But I’m sure you still have questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. Fire at will.
Did you get to try out any of the new console controllers? If so, how are they comfort-wise, and layout wise? You said part of E3 was dissapointing, which part? Did you play any good demos?
PS3, 360, or Revolution?
(Pretend I don’t have a vested interest … . :))
What do you make of this? Did you go to that presentation?
Any surprising OMG moments? I’ve seen some sweet videos, but nothing really that surprised me out of nowhere. All the cool ones are games I’ve been anticipating forever (Shadow of the Colossus, Kingdom Hearts 2, Final Fantasy XII).
Actually, take that back - Motorstorm for the PS3 was pretty mind-blowing, but who knows if it’ll really look that good.
Did you see one of the fake PS3’s or Xbox 4812’s in person?
What do you make of the whole backwards compatibility issue with the new Xbox?
Are there any cool single-player, story-line laden, RPGs coming up? Every developers nowadays seem to be cashing on the MMORPG bandawagon…
I was there, too. Did we meet?
To those who went - what was your way in? Press? Employee? Other?
The PS3 controller was only shown behind glass and the revolution controller is this big secret that’s not going to be revealed for quite some time due to its supposed revolutionary nature.
I did however put my hands on the Xbox360 controller as I played the upcoming Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Sega’s Full Auto. I am pleased to say that I like the controller. I was disappointed when I first saw the images as I was hoping for more than slight modifications to the current xbox controller but once I actually got it in my hands. I found it to be quite nice. It’s lighter and more comfortable than the current controller-s for xbox. As for the layout, I didn’t notice anything bad about it which is good. I didn’t get to use the anterior shoulder buttons though so I couldn’t comment on those. They weren’t used by the games I played.
overall, I’d give it an A- . Well done but it didn’t wow me.
I said disappointing for several reasons:
1- Nintendo completely ignored their upcoming revolution. Everything was about Zelda, the DS, the new spinoff mario games coming up for the cube and the gba mini.
2- Sony didn’t show anything but the videos they had already premiered at their press conference a couple days earlier. Of those, only 2 were done in real time (the Unreal 3 engine tech demo and EA’s boxing game short videoclip) , the rest were prerendered CGs. Nothing was playable, you couldn’t touch the gamepad either.
3- While there were several promising current generation games shown, they looked like crap. Now that we’ve got a taste of what next-gen games will look like, it’s hard to be wowed by them. Okami for example looked absolutely gorgeous but you couldn’t help but think how much better it would look on the PS3 or the 360 at high def resolutions.
4-Rockstar had this huge booth with several buses painted with the logos of several of their upcoming games but nobody could get inside. Not even the press. Apparently, only potential investors were shown the goods. They tried to appease the rest of us by handing us music cds and other swag but people were majorly disappointed.
5- Where the heck was Perfect Dark? Not on the E3 floor…
As for good demos. Yeah, I got to play a lot of them. However, courtesy dictates that you don’t hog the controllers for too long so it’s hard to judge a game after only playing it for 10 or 15 minutes. There were not many surprises and all the hyped games looked good so I’ll focus on the disappointments and good surprises.
Batman returns played like crap. Don’t hold your breath for it. Hulk: total destruction (or whatever it was named) is basically GTA with the hulk in it and while it’s fun for a little while, I expect it to get boring after a while. Ultimate Spiderman looked cool. They did some original stuff with the editing to really make it look like an interactive comic. This is one franchise that might not disappoint!
Sega’s full auto for xbox 360 looked like a bucket of fun. I wasn’t impressed by the screenshots I had seen beforehand but when you’re actually playing the game, you stop caring. It handles great, shooting a machine gun and rockets at things and cars is very enjoyable and I have no doubt that it’s going to be a fantastic online experience. I’m looking forward to that one. Sega knows games.
Need for Speed: most wanted looked very good if you ignored the sporadic FPS problems (You have to keep in mind that all the demos were running on old dev kits that don’t have as much horsepower as the final console) but there is absolutely no innovation and it plays the same as the last opus on xbox. Typical EA…
Top Spin for xbox360 was very disappointing. I’m sure it’ll play as great as its predecessor but the current visuals are a trainwreck. They’re barely better than what can be found on xbox at the moment. The devs claim that they will improve them a lot before the game comes out and I hope it’s true. We’ll see…
Kameo: elements of power had huge Framerate problems and didn’t look very appealing as shown at E3. I’ll have to wait before passing judgment on that one.
Call of Duty 2 looked like a very high end pc game and I have no doubt it’ll satisfy the fans. Of course, it was hard to get too excited about it after seeing the videos for Ghost Recon 3 and the admittedly CG killzone. Nonetheless, that’s a sure hit.
I played a lot more stuff but I can’t recall it all. I’ll wait until I get more specific questions before writing some more.
PS3. I just wish Sony didn’t lie so much. a 1080p videocamera for the PS3? What kind of crazy talk is that? Even their High End consumer HD camera only supports a trunked 1080i resolution and it still costs upwards of $5000.
I wasn’t at any of the press conferences. Only at the show floor so I can’t comment.
No, no surprising moments. I had already seen videos from the press conferences and that’s when I did all my jaw-dropping. Killzone and Motorstorm were simply unbelievable. It was neat to see all of that in person on a Big Screen though.
Yeah, I saw both the PS3 and the x360 in person and took lots of pictures. I’m still wondering why the PS3 has 2 HDMI ports and 3 Ethernet ports. I also really liked the custom x360 faceplates. It’s a gimmick but it’s a cool one.
No mystery there, Microsoft couldn’t develop a decent emulator (I don’t blame them) so now they’re busy recompiling the game executables to run on the 360. I think i’ve used the backward compatiblity option of the PS2 for about 30 minutes total so I personally don’t care.
Developer.
And my favorite game of the show was an XBox title called Stubbs the Zombie. You play a zombie. You shamble around. You club humans into unconsciousness and eat their brains. They become part of a pack of zombies that follow you around, helping you kill more humans. It was the only game at the show that left me with a silly grin on my face.
Biggest disappointment: Will Wright’s Spore was only showing behind closed doors.
Oh yes, there were plenty. Square was showing Dragon Quest VIII, Full Alchemist 2, Kingdom Hearts 2, Radiata Stories, Code Age, Dirge of Cerberus and World of Mana (Yes!!!). All of them looked good. And of course, there is Zelda and Okami that I guarantee will be great.
On the PC side, Morrowind IV is coming and it looking good.
There were too many MMorpgs to list 
I did meet you but I did it stealthily so you wouldn’t notice.
A friend of mine who works for a game company hooked me up with a pass.
Ah, fudge. I think this was really the only thing I was interested in.
As for how I got in? I’m press. I had the sacred media badge that allows all access. You should have tried the vodka one of the Russian firms gave me as a ‘gift’.
Bethesda Softworks had the best game demo I saw this time. “Oblivion” looks great.
The big story of the first day was the blown power that cost us the press room and our ability to contact the home office to file stories.
As well as shutting down all the food service around West Hall, swamping the South Hall cafeteria. I had a lunch pass for the Sony booth, but unfortunately my wife was with me at the show on Wednesday and she DIDN’T so we both got to spend an hour waiting in line for Convention Center hamburgers … .
Yeah, for like $7 each. Urgh. I’m glad I get free meals.
I spend most of my time in Kentia hall this time as I had a bunch of sales contacts I wanted to make.
The story of the show seemed (to me) to be the number of firms trying to be the first large-scale ‘developer-to-consumer’ provider. That is, if a developer has a game and no publisher, they’d broker the game into a direct-to-consumer download system through major retailers…thereby cutting out the publisher from the process completely.
From what I’ve read it seemed like E3 wsa mainly geared for the consoles. Anything impressive that you seen that will be for the PC, COD2 aside?
Well, the majority of the industry is consoles so it’s no real surprise there.
I saw a VERY early in development MMORPG called ‘Gods and Heroes’ that looked like it was going to be good. But it’ll be a while.