What's your game?

E3 2003

I was at E3 all day yesterday. I spent most of my time looking at closed-door demos, and got to see some really great looking games, a whole lot of crappy games, and Gary Coleman with some bimbos. I was only down for the day, so I spent about 30 minutes with each developer/publisher.

We’re going to see the Matrix tonight, so I’ll probably have something about that up tomorrow. I’m trying not to get too excited, but it’s a losing battle.

Click continue reading below to see the whole thing. It ended up being pretty long.

First was Half-Life 2. I went into this demo with very high expectations from reading the online coverage at Shacknews.com and the story in this month’s PC Gamer. This was one of the only games I saw that looked ready to ship right now. The facial animations, character models, environments, and lighting were spot on. When an enemy uber-monster started spraying fire down a street lined with three story buildings, any windows hit by fire blew out. All objects in the game can be picked up, tossed, or dropped. In one room, you knocked a video camera off it’s tripod then could pick up the camera and move it around, all while watching the video output on screens in the game. Half-Life 2 was, by far, the best thing I saw at the show.

Microsoft Games was next, where I saw Flight Sim 2004, Train Simulator 2, Halo PC, an Age of Mythology expansion, and an massively multiplayer RPG named Mythica. Halo PC is just as I expected, essentially the same game as Halo 1, with better multiplayer and a mouse and keyboard instead of a damn Xbox controller. Blood Gulch will be a blast with 16 people. Mythica was a pretty big surprise for me, I’d never heard of it, and it looks surprisingly good. The gameplay is designed for the hardcore MMORPG. It really evoked those old EverQuest feelings in me. The developers aimed to create a game that fixes many of the problems with first and second gen MMORPGs. The demo I saw included a scripted event with a sequence of enemies your group needed to kill in order to win. It’s definitely intriguing, although it didn’t look interesting enough to actually make me break my no MMORPG promise.

After Microsoft, I hit Buena Vista to see Tron 2.0 and ToonTown. Tron is based on the Lithtech engine, and was featured in the Game Engines story I wrote for Maximum PC last October. I finally got to see the game in action, and it looks exactly like the movie, sans the fuzziness of early 80s CG animation. I’m especially excited about the lightcycle deathmatch. What I saw on the show floor looked promising. ToonTown is a massively multiplayer online game that targets kids, and provides a kid-friendly environment to play and make friends.

The Activision booth had a little of everything this year. There was some strong innovation with Call of Duty, a squad-based WW2 first person shooter. The AI for your fellow soldiers was awesome. Playing the same mission multiple times resulted in different actions by the other soldiers, but none of them seemed out of place. It was also the first game I saw at the show that the zoom mode for your weapons had you aiming through the actual sights on the model of the gun. The effect was initially very disorienting, but ended up being extremely cool. I’m really looking forward to this one; it’s number 2 on my list of ‘Cool Games at E3’. Empires is another RTS that stretches across all of human history. To be honest it looked like a bad knockoff of Age of Empires or Rise of Nations and I couldn’t really find anything interesting or unique about it. The new Vampyre the Masquerade game uses the new Half-Life 2 engine, dubbed Source, and looked very interesting. RPGs about vampires are definitely cool. Trinity is a new FPS, which definitely bears watching. It’s set a few years in the future, and allows you to develop your character with technological improvements. Naturally I was reminded of Deus Ex 2. The DOOM3 video looked good, but was pretty disappointing compared to Half-Life 2.

After Activision, I hauled ass to the Take2 booth, where I got to see Hidden and Dangerous 2 and Railroad Tycoon 2. Both look promising. Railroad Tycoon 2 promises to be much easier to get into, while still leaving the high level of tweakability for gamers familiar with the franchise. I remember playing the last version and getting extremely pissed off after I’d run three railroads into the ground in an hour. Hidden and Dangerous 2 continues where the last game left off. You play a British commando during WW2 and have to go on several missions to save the world from Hitler’s menace. H&D skewed toward the realistic, giving you a squad of a few men and specialized gear to finish your objectives. H&D 2 will offer more of the same, including more than 60 driveable vehicles, a whole slew of different weapon types, and three different modes you can play the single player game in. I only hope that this version doesn’t feature the horrifying bugs that are the first thing I think of when someone mentions Hidden and Dangerous.

I snuck in for a quick peek at City of Heroes, one of the MMORPGs I’ve been waiting ages for. You play a minor superhero in Paragon City, home of several different levels of villany. You’ll start out foiling purse-snatchers and bank robbers and graduate to saving the city from alien attack. City of Heroes is a very close number 3 on my E3 list.

Last, but certainly not least, is EA. After a quick run-through the EA sports section, we swung by the Harry Potter Quiddich game, which definitely looks entertaining. We also took a quick look at the next Lord of the Rings game. It’s using a new engine, but keeps much of the same gameplay and the synchronizes well with the footage from the movie. I went to the Maxis portion of the booth next, and started with SimCity 4 Rush Hour. Rush Hour lets you manage your cities traffic patterns more effectively, by adding a new four-lane street to help fill the gap between freeways and streets in the current game. There are also a lot more in-city activities, reminiscent of Streets of SimCity and SimCopter, to occupy your time. Finally, for those of you with a booming SimRegion you can manage your traffic flow from region tile to region tile. We were thrilled when we saw the ferry, which should have been included in the original game, so that island-bound Sims can commute to adjoining tiles. Yay!

Overall it was a good show. There were many more people around than last year, the game companies are really pumping some money into the big titles, and things felt ‘up’. Hell, some of the publishers even had bars in their booths. Talk about luxury…