E3 day 1

[The Evil Couch]

First day of the expo part of the e3.

City of Heroes: the online comic book hero RPG is looking pretty damn good. I got to play it for about a half hour, running around the city and setting muggers, thugs and aliens on fire. The concept is that as a low-level character, you'll be able to thwart muggings and save citizens from everyday crime. As you progress and get better, you'll be able to take on more powerful thugs and eventually henchmen, lieutenants and bosses.

I was talking to a member of the dev team and as you run enough missions against a particular faction, you'll develop an arch-villian who you can create an on-going war against. Basically, you're taking a hero from his little baby steps into crime prevention up to being able to defend against alien invaders and criminal masterminds' plots to do bad things to the world.

Graphics, gameplay and control look like this game could start running people's lives.

Doom 3: Man, this game just gets better and better looking. In addition to all the nice shiny graphics you guys have been seeing, the sheer amount of fluidity in some of the enemies' movements is amazing. I saw an imp leap from a catwalk onto a pipe and then scurry down it, like a roach. At another part, I saw a behemoth grab a zombie, shake it like a rag doll and then spike him off of a wall. Truely an awe inspiring sight.

The game looks like they're picking up on the action aspect of gameplay, so if you were looking for a spook-show, you may be disappointed. But if you were looking for a redux of the original Doom with some absolutely incredible graphics, sound and atmosphere, you're going to drool on yourself when this comes out.

Worlds of Warcraft: Blizzard's staking out their piece of the action in their online RPG and it's got definately potential. As with any persistant world game, only time and the masses exploring it and twinking their characters up will tell whether or not WoW will be able to stand up in this year's slug-fest for persistant world RPG fans. It's got the look and the feel, but there's only one way to make sure it's fun.

Starcraft: Ghost: Yeah, it's still just for consoles, but if you're willing to shell out the coin to get it on console, they're willing to make it worth your while. The gameplay reminds me heavily of splinter cell, but with more action and less sneaking. Which I really don't think is a bad thing.

Mythica: Microsoft's adding to their persistant RPG stable with this RPG based on the Norse pantheon. Playing as a demi-god, you're going to be fighting mortals and other demi-gods in order to gain enough power and favor of your patron god to ascend to full immortality. The game allows you to go off and do quests and unique monsters off with just your friends, so you don't have to worry about other players getting in your way. You can align yourself with a god and get into treating mortals however you want to. The way that you treat mortals will end up reflecting in your appearance. If you beat up helpless humans, you'll get a darker, more grim appearance, and if you help them out and save them frequently, you'll become much more friendly looking. This looks like a lot of fun.

Age of Mythology: Titans. This expansion for MS's latest "Age of" game looks fun as hell as they re-introduce the Atlanteans as a playable and adding in Titans. Instead of trying to build an Wonder, you can build a Titan and then set him loose on the world. Titans can take a huge amount of hits before they'll actually go down. I saw the Atlantean Titan take on an entire village and even with the entire defensive army respawning 4 times and getting constantly hammered by arrows from buildings, they only took him to half health before the entire place was leveled.

Atlanteans seem to be out of balance, as their villagers are tougher, stronger, build faster and don't need a drop off point. The price for their amount of badassness is that they're harder to build both in terms of resources and in the time that it takes to build them.

Also new is the ability to raise any character to hero status, provided you have enough resources to do it. It looks like Age of Mythology fans are getting a good deal of fun new content.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines: A FPS based off of Vampire. You can be a Kindred from any of the Camarilla clans and your appearance and behavior is reflected by your clan choice. For example, the best armored outfit that Malkavians (lunatic vampires) have is a fur coat with a big cat-in-the-hat hat. More conservative vampires, like the Ventrue dig well-tailored suits instead. A Toreador female talking to a male guard can use flattery to try to get a guard to let her past, while a Brujah can tell him to go dance in traffic and a Malkav can spout gibberish until the guard's mind snaps and he cries to himself in the dark. I actually saw all of those happen. Trying to talk to someone while you're a Malkavian is nearly impossible. Those guys are fucking lunatics. But extremely fun to play.

Counterstrike: Condition Zero: Yeah, it's still coming. It looks like they're pretty much done with it, though. They have a playable version out now. The single player may have been made easier for the E3, or the easy setting may just be really fucking easy, but laying waste to terrorists has never been easier. With nothing more than a pistol, a riot shield and a pair of wire cutters, they were getting their asses handed to them, no matter how many times the guy demoing it got shot in the arms and chest.

The Sims 2: This game is fucking phenominal. If you thought the original Sims was addictive, you are in for a rude shock when the sheer crack that is Sims 2 hits store shelves. Not only can you create faces basically from scratch, but you can modify them to extreme ranges. Instead of just slapping on a picture of your face onto a Sim, you can use a program that they plan on bundling with it that will sculpt the 3D model of the Sim to match your face.

And if they don't bundle it, you can be sure that the thriving mod community will release it. The key feature of Sims 2 in growth. Everyone grows old. People can have kids and their kids will be a combination of the two of their genes. You can even use the aliens that were so fun to play with in the original Sims to father human-alien hybrid children. Me and a dev team member sat down and found out that it would take 4 generations of alien-human interbreeding before the hybrids would look just like humans, with the exception of the aliens' dominant eye and skin color.

Sims 2 is definately something to keep your eyes on.

Medal of Honor: Rising Sun: Holy shit. This game showed off probably the best rendered scenes I've ever seen on a PS2. And they said they were in pre-alpha at the time. They demoed Pearl Harbor for us. It had an incredible amount of detail in both the fire and constant action that was going on. If you played the Omaha beach mission in MoH: Allied Assault and felt like you were in a movie, simply because of the large amount of seamless scripting they did, you know what that level's all about.

Daredevil: Oh hell yeah. While they still don't have a playable demo, Encore's bringing you the man without fear. Also as a playable character is Elektra as you both beat the crap out of bad guys left and right in motion-captured scenes that'll top anything that panzy Matt Damon did in the movie.

Chaser: A first person shooter, with a plot similar to Total Recall. It's set in the future and with an unreal number of weapons that you can use. Over 60 different guns to use on whoever gets into your way. The environment is extremely destructable and it looks like some good clean fun.

Cold Zero: Playing an ex-police sniper in this overhead action/strategy game, you are forced to do jobs for the mob, which end up being cleaning the streets of a new drug called cold zero. You can accomplish this with a variety of ways and weapons, gaining XP for taking people out. You can just sneak past them if you want, but you do get more XP for wasting everyone you see, so choose your strategy carefully.

Aquanox 2: A sequel to the world's most fun submarine first person shooter, Aquanox 2 has you running all over the ocean, laying waste to bad guys. You can plan where you want to go and hence what kind of missions open up to you, making it kind of open-ended

Neighbors From Hell: This game is hiliarious. I mean, it's just funny as hell. It's a cutesy cartoon-style game where you're on a reality TV show where your job is to screw with your neighbor as bad as possible to boost ratings.

You can raid his house for supplies and then sneak through his house, hiding in furniture as needed to escape his wrath and sabotage his stuff. This can include putting superglue on the eyepieces of his binoculars so that when he goes to oogle the hot chick next door he glues them to his face or stuffing his chair full of dynamite. This thing's just plain funny. So long as they make enough levels to keep the fun going, this game could very well come out of no where and be on everyone's hard drive in a year.

Grooverider: Slot car thunder: It's not meant to be a serious game or an indepth game. It's meant to be a cheap, fast, fun game and it'll probably suceed at that. With a planning retail price of under 20 bucks and a hell of a lot of fast minature racing tracks and cars, this could be an easy way to kill some time and relax after work.l

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: Coming out before the movie, you'll be able to live the movie before you see it. You can play as any of the 6 remaining members of the Fellowship of the Ring. I got to play as Galdalf and for an old and once-dead guy, this wizard has some serious moves. He was flipping over wallls, whirling his staff and sword with lethal precision. He beat the crap out of orc after orc, pausing from time to time to whirl his sword and then stab a not quite dead orc while he was down, to make sure he wasn't getting up. And if you've got a friend that wants to play with you, then there's no problem. This time around, there's a co-op mode where you can fight side-by-side with your buddy.

James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing: This time around, James Bond has got a lot to do and it's required to have fun doing it. The game is easier than previous James Bond games, but that's because they want to you tackle puzzles and enemies like 007 would. Instead of sneaking around corners and circle-strafing people, they want to you to get right into the thick of it, dodging volleys of bullets and pounding bad guys.

You never have to worry about falling off the edge of a building as the hallmark of this game is rappelling. You can use your rappell gun to climb buildings or you can just jump off the edge and you'll automatically shoot a line to slide down the side of the building. Add in very Bond-ish vehicles and a co-op mode and this game's a winner.

Need for Speed Underground: A slight departure from the usual dodging police cars in sports cars, this NFS game features street racers in a slick, night racing circuit. You can do a bunch things, including some quarter mile drag tracks where perfecft shifting and clutchwork is essential. The customizability is amazing as you can sup your car up to the extreme, or rice it out past any realm of sanity with a mind-boggling array of body kits, engine kits, and a bunch of other shit I have no idea about. Had Mikey been with us during this trip, he could explain to you precisely what kind of stuff they've got in this game, but he wasn't, so all you've got is me and my automotively challenged opinion on it.

SSX 3: Holy shit. If you've played any the last two of the SSX series, you're in for a rude awakening. You haven't done jack squat yet. in SSX 3, you can snowboard down a gigantic mountain with 3 peaks to challenge and master. You'll get drawn into challenges through a messaging system that the other riders will talk to you through. You can find challenges and minigames all up and down the side of the mountains. About 150 of them. They tried to do away with the menu system as much as possible, instead to concentrate on you snowboarding. Instead of selecting a race, you just find get a lift to the area, board to the gates and then go. Other riders will have their own opinions of you depending on how much shoving around you do during the rides. Piss off enough people and they'll throw down a massive beat down in the middle of a course.

And even once you've got all three peaks unlocked, you're still not as far complete as you think you are, there are packages hidden around each of the various routes down the mountain in huge free-boarding areas. In fact, the whole damin mountain is a free-boarding area. You can board down the entire mountain if you want to. Be advised, this game is so massive that boarding down the whole thing will take at least 30 minutes.

I used to think that SSX Tricky was an amazing game. And then I saw its sequel. Holy shit.

[nBk]

Somehow I think Half - Life 2 will be a much better game than Doom 3, maybe not graphics wise. The footage shown is just so amazing, and the fact that it is coming THIS year... wow.

[The Evil Couch]

the release date doesn't matter in this case, however the fact that half-life two remains focused on suspense and telling a story is definately shifting the interest their way

this year doom 3 has little that we haven't already seen. it still remains visually stunning, however we still haven't had a "holy shit!" shocker for doom 3 this year and likely won't see one until the gold disc comes out.