Well, I’m back from E3 2006. Overall it was pretty cool. There wasn’t too much in the way of games that I hadn’t already seen before, but it was still cool to walk around and see everything on the big screens. The PS3 stuff all looked really good (no bias here!), the Wii sounded neat but it had a huge line that I was too lazy and wait in, and even though the booth babes were toned down this year there were still some pretty cute ones.
I wandered by the NCsoft booth and saw that they have about six games all in development and all look like they’re using the same engine. Gotta milk it for all its worth I guess, although I’m a recovering Guild Wars addict so they’re doing something right. I also went by the Blizzard booth and all they were showing was World of Warcraft stuff. I think they said they’ve put Starcraft:Ghost on hold indefinitely, which is unfortunate. I heard rumors that Diablo3 was in development, but they weren’t showing anything. I really hope Blizzard doesn’t turn into “those guys that make WoW”, since they’ve been making killer games for so long and I’d like to see their other work continue too.
For me, the biggest disappointment of the entire show was the upcoming Shadowrun game from Microsoft. For some reason, they decided it would be a cool idea to take the name but throw out the entire shadowrun universe. We started with a rich cyberpunk universe, a gripping story to tell and questions to raise, deckers doing battle in the matrix, the list goes on and on. What we ended up with is Counter-Strike with magic. No seriously, it’s now a first person shooter. You get money for winning rounds and stuff, with which you can buy better things. Oh yeah, and the two spells that the game has (resurrection and teleport) are specifically the things that Shadowrun magic can’t do! I predict this one is going to fail, badly.
A friend and I managed to swing some tickets to the super-secret E3 Sony party at Dodger Stadium, where we saw Incubus play, stuffed ourselves full of tasty beef and chicken at the feeding troughs, watching some strange dancing entertainment, and took advantage of the approximately 8 open bars. We ought to do this more often.