I can’t believe how awsome E3 was. It was like and attack on all the senses at once that you could just not get enough of. Some of the games that we got to see were just breath taking.
For the first time, I got to see some actual game play video of Doom 3. The attention to detals such as sound and lighting in the game are fantastic. It’s going to be one of those games that you have to play at night with all the lights off and the volume turned way up. This game was getting a lot of attention and people walking by the display would become mezmerized in the video preview.
Ben and I both really wanted to see the Half Life 2 preview but unfortunately ATI were being Nazi’s about it and you had to wait in a HUGE line to watch it in a personal viewing room. And we were both feeling a little uneasy walking around the ATI booth with Nvidia badges on so we decided to skip it. Which is really okay because you can see the same video now that they were showing there on Fileplanet. The video is 25 minutes long and 600MB. I’m uploading it to my site as we speak so you don’t have to wait in a 60 minute line to get it at Fileplanet. I’ll update this as soon as I have it.
They had an entire section set up for the N-Gage… and it was totally dead. There did not seem to be too many people there and the poor guys that ran the booth were standing around with nothing to do. We opted to eat insetad of checking them out. 🙂 The boys at Penny Arcade spent some time playing them and they seemed less than impressed.
I have to say that the best booth, hands down, was the UBI Soft booth. They had an abundance of units set up to play all the latest and greatest games on as well as a HUGE LCD screen showing video of all the newest games they had coming out. I think we stood there for about 30 minutes watching it. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3 and Ghost Recon look spectacular to say the least. And they have a game called XIII coming out that had a comic book feel to it that looks like it is going to be some fun to play.
The newest Gran Turismo game had a pretty cool set up. They had Recaro like race seats set up with the console attached to them. There were four seats in the center that were set up to LAN and an announcer there to make fun of you if you were losing. They also had about 10 other seats set up in a circle around them that you could play single player games. We sat and watched them for awhile looking for something that set it apart from Gran Turismo 3 and we really could not see anything. But we did not play them ourselves so…
I, as well as Ben, really wanted to visit the Atari booth for the UT2004 demo but to both our dismay we could not find it. It was not in the map book, in the list of vendors… I did however read this review and now could kick myself in the ass for not finding it. But the place was huge, we visited three different wings of the Staples Center and did not see it anywhere. :-<
Anyway, there is so much more that I could go into. As a matter of fact, I could go on all night. It was serioulsy so much more than I expected. Hopefully this will not be my last trip. Next year I think that I’d go a day earlier so that I could spend a little more time playing the games and exploring everything. That will have to do for this year though. Thank you so much to Ben and to Nvidia for the chance to go this year.