Microsoft's Jeff Bell and Reggie Bush at E3
(Credit: Dan Ackerman/CNET Networks)By now, the news has hit the wires (and the blogs) that Peter Moore, corporate vice president of interactive entertainment at Microsoft, is leaving Redmond to be president of the sports division at game publisher Electronic Arts (EA). An EA representative confirmed to CNET News.com that there is no press conference planned, but a release (now posted on Kotaku, which first reported the news) has been sent out.
It's by no means the only recent major executive shuffle in the game console world, as PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi famously stepped down in April. But Moore's timing is interesting--he's departing just as the releases for some big Xbox and Games for Windows titles have been finalized in the pipeline, such as Halo 3. In essence, he's in the clear.
What's even more interesting is that even though Halo 3 was undoubtedly the centerpiece of Microsoft's rather theatrical press event at the E3 Business and Media Summit last week, Moore made a pretty big deal out of the EA Sports title Madden NFL 2008, with New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush coming onstage to demo the game (though his appearance was with Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of Microsoft global marketing, not Moore). Yes, Microsoft and EA are partners in this sense, so it was also positive hype for the Xbox, but talk about making EA Sports stand out.
One CNET writer quipped that Moore must have "told reporters they would only get the first half of his acceptance speech...and the rest would be up on Xbox Live Marketplace for 400 Microsoft Points." Moore, it should also be noted, is seminotorious for having tattoos of the Grand Theft Auto 4 and Halo 2 logos. No word on whether he's made plans for some EA Sports-worthy additions.
Game fans know that E3 is America's big, annual video game trade show, traditionally known for oversize displays and loud music and filled with anyone even vaguely affiliated with the interactive entertainment industry. Until this year, that is. Rebelling against the high costs of the LA-based show, the big game companies instead elected to put on a radically different show in 2007, losing the massive convention center booths and moving to a handful of hotels in Santa Monica, along with cutting attendance to less than 10 percent of last year's.
Attacked by a diaper-wearing chimp at EA's The Sims cocktail party
The great experiment dubbed the E3 Media & Business Summit is over, but the verdict is still out on the show's new format. Some would call it smaller and more intimate, while others said it was inconvenient and a scheduling nightmare. One clear theme was obvious--an emphasis on big games coming out for the 2007 holiday season, rather than games that may be years away from store shelves.
Personally, the "Best of Show" has largely been locked-in since last year's E3, where we saw the first glimpses of 2K's BioShock, a dystopian action/adventure set in an art deco underwater city. Nearing release at the end of August, the game continues to impress. Another favorite was Rock Band, EA's answer to the Guitar Hero franchise, compete with faux drums, guitars, and a karaoke-style mic. It may take up a lot of living room space, but house parties will never the same again.
Other high-profile games on display included Halo 3, sure to be a best seller when released in September. It looks better the longer you play it, with graphics packed with subtle details. But the game itself seems too similar to the two previous installments, as if the basic idea had run out of steam. Grand Theft Auto IV looks like more of a leap forward for that series, but there was too little of the game on display to make an accurate judgment.
Games for 2008 that made an impact on attendees include Fallout 3, a new entry in a cult favorite RPG series, and Resident Evil 5, seen only in a brief, but impressive, trailer. Those two will clearly be big at next year's E3 (if there is an E3 next year).
We asked a few fellow journalists what their favorite game of the show was. "Fallout 3 may be more than a year out, but it sure as hell doesn't look like it," said Russ Frushtick, senior games editor at UGO.com. Scott Steinberg, publisher of DigitalTrends.com, voted for Resident Evil 5, saying, "It looks fantastic and appears to deliver the cinematic intensity we've come to expect from the series." Evan Narcisse, senior associate editor at Time Out New York Kids, went more mainstream: "Rock Band actually lived up the hype. Being a front man for a crew of deadly rawk assassins scratched an itch I didn't even know I had."
Finally, if you're reliving all the E3 fun, you can retrace my week in Santa Monica through the links below.
E3 2007: 'BioShock'
E3 2007: 'Warhawk'
E3 2007: 'All-Pro Football 2K8'
E3 2007: 'Guitar Hero III'
E3 2007: 'Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles'
E3 2007: 'Rock Band' (we rocked so hard, we blew the lights)
E3 2007: 'John Woo Presents Stranglehold'
E3 2007: 'BlackSite: Area 51'
E3 2007: 'Uncharted: Drake's Fortune'
E3 2007: 'Medal of Honor: Airborne'
E3 2007: Sony's big ol' press conference
E3 2007: Microsoft kicks off the E3 press conference season
E3 2007: Welcome to the new high-security E3
On Monday, Sony announced a $100 price cut for the 60GB PlayStation 3, taking the console's retail price down to $499. Since many gamers saw the PlayStation 3 as too expensive at its previous retail price of $599, Sony's decision was widely praised. Unfortunately, the $499 60GB PS3 isn't going to last, because Sony has just confirmed that the company is no longer producing 60GB PS3s.
On the same day the price cut was announced, Sony announced a new 80GB PS3, a console that will be bundled with Motorstorm and will retail for $599, the same as the first. The price cut for the 60GB PS3 was never intended to be a permanent cut for the product; it was only intended to clear out stock for the new version to be sold at the old price. GameSpot has reported that Kaz Hirai, Sony Computer Entertainment's CEO and President, has confirmed in a video interview that the 60GB PS3s are no longer in production, and that all new PS3s will be 80GB models to be sold at $599.
When E3 kicked off, everyone was pretty excited about Sony and the new $499 PS3. Sony had a $499 PS3 before, but it was a slightly scaled-down, 20GB version that was discontinued back in April. Now it seems like Sony's doing the exact same thing with the 60GB PS3 (originally the high-end model) that they did with the 20GB: kick it out the door and make sure the only available PS3 will sell for $599 a pop. Considering the biggest complaint leveled against the PlayStation 3 has been its price, this was simply a terrible decision.
Sony Computer Entertainment of America's director of corporate communications David Karraker told GameSpot, "This is absolutely not a bait and switch," he said. "We are offering a full-featured PS3 for $100 lower than the original price and will do so for months to come, allowing consumers the opportunity to acquire this model at this adjusted price."
For many gamers, even $499 is too much for a console. The Elite version of the Xbox 360 retails for $479, and it includes a 120GB hard drive (though it lacks the PS3's Wi-Fi support, Blu-ray drive, or media reader). The Premium version of the Xbox 360 only costs $399, and the Nintendo Wii only $250. The supposed $499 price was seen as a concession by Sony that, yes, the PS3 cost too much. Suddenly saying that they're just clearing out stock and that the only PlayStation 3 they're currently producing will still retail for $599 is utter madness.
The decision alone is made even worse by the timing. Today is the last day of E3 2007, and the entire expo is being capped off by confirmation that the PS3 price cut won't last. Nearly every media outlet is going to mention the price uncut in their expo wrap-up. Everyone is walking away from Santa Monica with the $599 PS3 back in their heads.
It's also Friday the 13th, but that might just be coincidence.
id didn't show us anything new about Quake Wars, but it still looks great.
(Credit: Activision)We didn't learn anything that isn't already public about id Software's forthcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and it wasn't really showing off its next-gen id Tech 5 graphics engine to journalists. We made good use of our meeting, though, by getting the shooter pioneers to open up about Microsoft's Games for Windows Live platform.
Quake Wars won't incorporate a Games for Windows Live element, so all of the voice chat and player matching will go through id's own in-game software. It cited the fact that Vista came out three years or so into the game's development as one reason, it wouldn't make sense to shoehorn Live support in at such a late point. We were told, though, that it can see for future titles that Windows Live support could be a good thing, because by adding the various Live features as supplied by Microsoft, it means the developer doesn't have to spend the time developing those things itself. In other words, like DirectX 10, it will probably be a while before we see broader adoption of Games for Windows Live.
Our meeting with Sierra yesterday highlighted perfectly why you'll need to be very careful in cutting through the hype surrounding the next-gen PC gaming graphics. First we sat down for a showing of World in Conflict, a real-time strategy game that asks, "What if the Cold War ran hot?"
Soft particles make the smoke in World Conflict look more natural.
(Credit: Gamespot.com)As part of the demo for World in Conflict, a producer from Sierra showed us a video hosted by the game's lead designer, highlighting the game's graphical features, specifically regarding the benefits Sierra is getting from DirectX 10. "Soft particles" was one feature the designer cited, which essentially means modeling all the little particles in a cloud of smoke, for example, so that they look and move more naturally in a game. The alternative creates a banding effect at the edges of a smoke cloud, which hurts the overall feeling of immersion.
Cool. Soft particles. Finally, we thought, DX 10 comes to life.
Our next meeting with Sierra was for TimeShift, a very detailed-looking shooter that involves time travel and does not incorporate any features of DirectX 10 in its graphics engine. And what did company reps show us when highlighting its current-generation visuals? That's right, soft particles!
We're not suggesting that anyone at Sierra is trying to pull a fast one. The features he pointed to probably are capable because of DirectX 10, at least in World in Conflict. As one of the developers of Crysis told us when we interviewed him later in the day in front of his own game: right now, it's not so much that DirectX 10 gives you the ability to incorporate any one feature that you can't do in DirectX 9. Rather, you can expect that games claiming DirectX 10 will have more of the current-gen stuff, but in varying degrees. In other words, if visuals are important to you for gaming, we'd suggest you approach any bullet lists of supposed next-gen features warily. We expect DirectX 10 will have a more significant feature-based visual impact eventually, but for now, you're probably better off looking at screenshots to determine not what but how many graphics bells and whistles a game has to offer.
Sure, you can get Master Chief, but the original Ckin designs aren't bad, either.
(Credit: Commodore)We found out back in March that the Commodore name had been scooped up by a Netherlands-based company looking to reinvent the brand as a modern gaming PC. Now we get wind of the new lineup of PCs coming soon (this quarter) to the States, first via online sales, with an unnamed big-box retail presence following afterward.
... Read more
We can't work all the time, you know. Those of us at this year's E3--reporters, analysts, game developers, and so on--have been more or less running back and forth between meetings and events at various hotels around the Santa Monica coast, wishing we were sitting on the beach rather than being tragically forced to try out new Xbox games that aren't on the market yet. (Woe is us.) But that all changes after about 6 p.m., when a whole host of software companies make us feel better by throwing parties and treating us to free food and an open bar.
One of the E3-related shindigs on Wednesday night was the Bethesda Softworks party at a delightfully cheesy Sunset Boulevard joint known as the Saddle Ranch Chop House.
It was a good half-hour drive out of the way, and there were plenty of other game companies that threw parties that night, but this one had a mechanical bull. (Not sure about where you're from, but on my home turf, ride-the-bull attractions are pretty rare. I think there's a total of two of them on the entire island of Manhattan.) Check out what happens when a bunch of geeks invade a bar that looks like it fell out of Disney World's Frontierland...and try to conquer a piece of "interactive entertainment" that doesn't involve a console or a joystick.
As you can see from the extensive footage above, the average E3 attendee does not appear to be particularly good at bull riding. Maybe the Wii Balance Board could help with that.
... Read moreWe admit heading into our preview of Gearbox's Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway with some trepidation yesterday. Shooters set in World War II feel so played-out that even calling them a cliche has become a cliche. It seems that the team is trying some innovative things with its new title, though, including an attempt at making the "feel" of combat more authentic. Some new tactical features, like requiring you to lay down suppressing fire, as well as a mechanic for simulating the overall heat of combat, gave the preview we saw a unique flavor.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway takes us back to WWII.
(Credit: Gamespot.com)But the end of that meeting was even better for us, at least as far as our quest to find out about the overall adoption of DirectX 10 in the next batch of PC games on the horizon. As Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told us, we'll be in a mostly DirectX 9 world for a while yet. And when we finally get to games built from the ground up with DirectX 10, you might not even notice, because next-gen graphics features will only trickle in to new titles gradually for the next couple of years.
According to Randy, PCs using today's DirectX 10 hardware would still likely have a hard time with a pure DirectX 10 game. There's still optimization that needs to go on with the drivers and the software in general. Further, and this is a bit more obvious, few developers are going to spend a lot of time on DirectX 10 now, when so few gamers have the hardware to take advantage of it. That's also why even on the titles that do incorporate some features of DirectX 10, you won't see anything drastically better-looking, because those games are still only dabbling with the next-gen API. This explains why (in our opinion) the current crop of DirectX 10 supporting games, Call of Juarez, Company of Heroes, and Lost Planet , and don't look that much different than their DirectX 9 counterparts.
DirectX 9-based Fallout 3 still looks fantastic.
(Credit: Gamespot.com)Just prior to our meeting with Gearbox, we sat through an hour-long demo of Fallout 3, developed by Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda, if you recall, was the developer that made The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which, when it came out last year, seemed to hit the apex of DirectX 9's capabilities. The Fallout 3 demo, running on the DX9-only Xbox 360, no less, had noticeably better-looking graphics than Oblivion, despite using just a slightly updated version of the same graphics engine. Clearly, DirectX 9 still has some impressing to do.
We don't doubt that Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, and the other big PC shooters this year will look great when they launch. We also still advocate DirectX 10 hardware if you're a gamer and you've moved to Windows Vista. Even though both vendors need to work on their Vista drivers, Nvidia and ATI are making DX10 graphics cards right now that are relatively affordable and fly through games from the previous software. The only thing we'd suggest is that if you're happy with your current DirectX 9 hardware, you might wait to see what the visuals look like with these next-gen games. The newer cards do have faster clock speeds overall, but for the older cards that can get these new games running at a respectable frame rate, you might also find that you're not missing out on too much in terms of visual quality.
If there's one thing that seems very familiar about this year's E3 video game show, it's the lavishly produced, but oddly stilted press conferences from the big three game console makers: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.
Sony's Jack Tretton and Kaz Hirai in the PS3 Home platform.
Sony has a unique home court advantage in Los Angeles, and the company has hosted its E3 press conference at Sony's own Culver City studios in recent years. Despite saving a few bucks on renting a presentation space, last year's 2006 Sony press conference was an infamous dud, thanks in large part to the unveiling of the PlayStation 3's $599 price.
This year, the mood was somewhat brighter, thanks in part to this week's preemptive price cut, bringing the 60GB version of the PS3 down to $499. No one needed to point out to Sony that the "3" in the PS3 has pretty much stood for third place in the current generation of game consoles.
The slightly thinner new PSP
With that in mind, Sony used its press conference to concentrate on the one missing ingredient in its product line--exclusive games for the PS3 console. Thus far, the PS3 has had very few must-have games that aren't available on other systems, and this holiday season, the exclusives are finally starting to flow. They include:
We'll take an extended look at two other PS3 exclusives, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Warhawk, later this week.
On the handheld side, the PlayStation Portable has a guaranteed hit with God of War: Chains of Prometheus, a handheld version of the PS2 hit, combining Greek mythology with button-mashing action.
Chewbacca introduces a special Star Wars PSP.
SCEA President Kaz Hirai has a surprise for the audience, a new version of the PSP hardware. Unfortunately, the unveiling was clearly the single biggest dud of the show so far. It was virtually identical to the current version. You couldn't tell by looking at it, but Kaz claimed it was 19 percent thinner, and perhaps a third lighter. It also had an output for sending a video signal to a TV, which was not exactly high on the list of new features people were looking for.
We overheard one attendee say, "I thought it was a joke and he had the real new PSP in his other pocket." Only slightly more satisfying were two new PSP designs. A silver model, and a special Star Wars-themed PSP, introduced by a guy in a Chewbacca suit. Seriously.
Perhaps the most intriguing new project from Sony is simply called Home. After an admittedly weak initial foray into the online community space, with the PlayStation Store, Sony is pulling out the stops and creating a fully 3D world, where PS3 players can create avatars, set up houses (hence "Home"), share media files, and of course, purchase things online and get into multiplayer games. A Home beta is currently going on, and the free service will launch later this year.
The 'ice silver' PSP is one of a trio of new PSP versions available.
(Credit: GameSpot)
Those rumors about a PSP redesign turned out to be true--sorta. Demoed onstage at the Santa Monica E3 show by Sony's Kaz Hirai, the new PSP doesn't look all that different on the outside, but it's said to be 33 percent lighter, 19 percent slimmer, offer better battery life, faster game load times, and video output to TVs.
Separately, the company will also bow PSPs in two new colors: "ice silver" and a Star Wars-themed white PSP emblazoned with Darth Vader's visage. Both the colored PSPs will be available in "Entertainment Pack" versions for $200 each--the silver model will include Daxter, a Family Guy "Freakin' Sweet" UMD video collection, and a 1GB Memory Stick Duo, while the Star Wars version will include the new Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron game.
And...that's it. Looks like anyone waiting for a more robust PSP upgrade (with oft-requested additions such as onboard flash storage, a second analog stick, or a touch screen, for instance) will have to wait until 2008 or beyond. That said--the promise of faster load times and video output may mean a lot of older PSPs may soon be finding their way to eBay.
