E3 2007 blogroll

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Saturday, July 14, 9:00 a.m.

Friday was the last day of E3 2007, but it was a full day for me.

I started off visiting Eidos, where I had full demonstration of a new massively multiplayer online game based on Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian. Titled Age of Conan, the PC version of this rich game is coming for the end of October. An Xbox 360 version will follow in 2008. I also had a chance to check out Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, which was inspired by crime dramas such as Dog Day Afternoon and Heat, in which two anti-heroes try to get themselves out of another mess.

Ubisoft has some great games coming out in the next while, the best of which is Assassin's Creed, which is a beautiful game set in what we now call the Middle East during the Third Crusade, in the year 1191. The demonstration I witnessed showed a historically-accurate Jerusalem, and the environments created by the Montreal development studio are simply breathtaking. With a unique movement and combat system, this game could change the way some action adventure titles are built in the future. I also took a look at Naruto: Rise of the Ninja, developed for the Xbox 360. Based on the biggest thing in Japanese anime in some time, this smooth, cell-shaded animated game combines platform-type gameplay with 3D fighting gameplay, all set in an open, sandbox environment.

Sierra, a division of Vivendi Games, picked up the rights to Timeshift, which was going to be coming from Atari. Senior producer and creative Kyle Peschel walked me through his reinvention of first-person shooting games, in which you have complete control over time. The attention to detail in this game is amazing, and it comes with a deep and robust story. Also from Sierra are a sequel to The Legend of Spyro and an expansion pack to the exhilarating F.E.A.R. I also checked out the Battlestar Galactica game being created by Sierra Online. It makes you a pilot and lets you play through the first three seasons of the television show. It is coming to Xbox LIVE Arcade and PC for download this fall.

Two of Midway's biggest titles for the fall are BlackSite: Area 51 and Stranglehold. BlackSite is an action shooter in which you play as a combat veteran in Iraq who encounters an alien and is ordered to keep it to himself. Years later, you're deployed to Nevada, where alien life forms are wreaking havoc. Susan O'Connor, who was a writer on Gears of War, is also writing BlackSite. That's a good sign. Stranglehold is a project being developed in collaboration with Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo, and starring Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Yuen - Tequila - who was immortalized in the 1992 film Hard Boiled. It's an extreme and hyper-real game that has the spirit of Woo's cop films. The PS3 version of the game will ship with the Hard Boiled film on the Blu-ray Disc.

Warner Bros. Interactive are reinventing their Looney Tunes franchise for themselves (in the past, they had licensed their characters to other developers, with mediocre results). The first two games, Acme Arsenal for the PS2, Wii and Xbox 360 and Duck Amuck for the DS, are both cute, clever games that really embody the spirit of the classic cartoons. They're going to be fun.

THQ were showing off a number of new titles, including a Conan game of their own, a Wii version of the Destroy All Humans! game called Big Willy Unleashed, a sequel to the Cars video game (that was itself based on the animated film), and a clever puzzle game called De Blob, for Wii and DS, in which you paint a world that's been drained of colour. They were also showing off Darksides: Wrath of War, which won't be on shelves until fall 2008, but already looks great. You play War, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and after the destruction of Earth, you are betrayed, and left to survive on the husk of the Earth, while angels and demons fight over what will happen next. It's a great concept.

But the game of the show for me, and for many other media and video game biz folks, was Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3. The images here are screen shots from the E3 demonstration. Fans of the earlier Fallout games may not approve of how executive producer Todd Howard and his team have decided to reinvent the franchise, but they cannot deny that what Howard and crew have come up with is breathtaking. From the production design to the attention to detail to the complexity of the story and the world in which it is set, Fallout 3 promises to be the kind of game that will have gamers calling in sick because they've been up all night playing.

The game maintains the post-apocalyptic theme established by the earlier titles, and starts with your birth in Vault 101, at which point you create your character. The game will flash forward through your life, and really starts when you've reached early adulthood. It's being told in first-person, but you have the option of switching to an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective if you choose.

"You're born in Vault 101. You'll die in Vault 101," says Ron Perlman, in the narration that precedes the game. You do escape the vault and into the distressed and degenerated world above, but it won't be easy.

That's it for me for this year's E3. We've heard rumours that the E3 powers-that-be may decide to alter the format or venue for next year. Time will tell.

Thanks for listening.