X-bit labs

E3 Show in Los Angeles: All About Gaming (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 05/17/2004 | 05:28 PM ]

One more game category that attracted a lot of male attention was the so-called fun quest type of the games. Here I would like to mention the Playboy mansion, which gathered the whole crowd of people and a new chapter in the Larry series.

  

One more thing that attracted my attention was the booth where you could take a look at the first gaming systems dating back to the early 80s: bulky plastic cases, monochrome or CGA monitors, and the good old fun games, many of you do not even remember about any more:

“Back to the future” or how the whole gaming started.

Well, and now lets talk a bit more about the latest and greatest, about the long awaited games, which have been on our mind for the past months. One of them is definitely very familiar to you already: it is the notorious Half Life 2, which was supposed to be launched in October last year, then was postponed until this April and now seems to be scheduled for this summer.

In fact they only say that it is going to be summer. You all know very well that summer is the so-called “dead” season in the computer market. And gaming software market is no exception. So the most likely release date for this one is September 30, 2004.

At the show you could watch the new HL2 demo, revealing all the cool special effects, amazing graphics and textures and the major gaming scenes. The demo did leave a very good impression, however, I doubt that the 10-minute movie could really make up for the 4.5 hour wait time in a line to get to see it. Yes, this is absolutely true: people were waiting for over 4 hours in a line to see this demo (these must have been really loyal HL2 fans, I bet :)

Despite the delayed release of the game, Valve and its partners are very optimistic about the market success of their offspring. And it is not only due to the excellent branding of the game and powerful marketing campaigns: the company is also planning to release the whole bunch of games on the original HL2 source code, at the same time, which will include Counter Strike, and a few other well-known ones. Of course, such a package will be a tough competitor to beat. But before we draw any conclusions let’s check out the rivalry products, which are about to be released within the same approximate timeframe.

Yes, this is the new part of the Doom sequel: Doom 3 game. Frankly speaking, Doom 3 developers did not sound very optimistic to me about the future of their product. They were not only uncertain about the release date, but also seem to still have a lot to work on. Compared to Half Life2, this one looks somewhat less attractive because of the indoor scenery only and the fact that all action takes place in mostly gloomy corridors and hallways. Well, Doom is a pretty well-known well settled name in the market, so they shouldn’t worry about their sales even provided that their graphics and textures are not so realistic and diverse as those of Half Life 2 or other competing products. However, in my opinion, Doom 3 loses significantly to Half Life 2 and Stalker as far as physics and realism go.