photos by Gary Fixler
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They have several years of E3 pics submitted by folks like me. I even submitted a few this year. You can use their search and type my name in and see them. They pale in comparison to many others on that site, so I'm probably not going to bother uploading any more. They've got that whole thing covered...
BTW, this pic is of Lisa Gleave, voted by most for the last few years as E3's hottest babe (Tecmo has hired her for about 4 years running). She's an Australian model who lives in Venice Beach, a few miles north of me (woo hoo!), with her model husband (dang!). Now that that's out of everyone's system, on to E3!
Ticketing this year was done with barcodes you printed from emails. That killed all sign-in lines. I walked up to the counter and got my badge in under 2 minutes! Last year took about 2 hours. Technology rules!
It also wins my vote for most confusing and pointless acronym. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but when someone's dropping dead from a stopped heart, my eyes don't frantically scour the surroundings in hopes of finding the letters "AED." If it just said "DEFIBRILLATOR," there's a much higher chance people would a) see it, b) remember it, c) use it when the time for such things was upon us.
Furthermore, "Automated External Defibrillator" means almost nothing to me. "Automated?" It does this whole saving lives through electrical shocks thing for you? Does it seek out victims? And what exactly does an "Internal" defibrillator look like? I'm thinking "pacemaker." I'm also thinking people need to let go of the acronyms and just pick a word or two that best describes what's going on. "AED" has 19 other meanings.
"Defibrillator" has 2, and they're both the same.
Then I woke up, screaming. It had all been a dream.
This year, They built something akin to inverted buttresses that had ceiling height, roughly 2' wide LED screens on their outer edges. They had ethereal imagery flowing over them much of the time, but every now and then, all the thin, tall screens would have the same Super Mario character on them, bouncing up and down erratically.
I don't know... Personally I liked the Nintendo booth better last year. I know it's criminal to be critical when so many are dying to go to this event but can't. Still, last year Nintendo had about 40 GBA SP's in as many colors under World's Fair style acrylic domes, and a race track with cars you controlled from your GBA. This year, they just had the longest line I've ever seen in my life of people waiting to play the new split-screen GBA. I wasn't nearly that interested. I can just tape my SP to my old original GBA and pretend :)
Everyone has to have a dream... I wonder how hot my room would get with all those LEDs?
They had some games that looked pretty nice. There's a new GameCube Metroid on the horizon. I finally had a go at F-Zero on the GBA. I was totally into the retro feel of it (just like the old days) when some hottie Nintendo booth babe came up and tried to strike up a conversation about how the graphics didn't seem too hot on the GBA F-Zero. She doesn't get the whole retro gaming thing. Totally broke my concentration. ;)
Oh yeah, on a trip back through later, I noticed they had cartoons for GBA coming out soon (Cartoon Network kinda stuff). You would buy about 5 or so on a single cart and watch them on your GBA. If you bothered to have them hook headphones up for you to listen to a cartoon, even for a few minutes, you got to keep the headphones. GBA has a proprietary connector, so now I have some nice GBA-specific headphones (not earbuds, actual headphones) for free. Finally!
Anyway, it just seemed that whenever I thought "Oh hey, that's cool," it was yet again, something for the PS2. I've never liked it, really, but maybe I've been wrong.
This sounds like a bad idea at first, but hear me out. If you or I, or anyone wanted to make a game for GameCube, PS2, or XBox, we couldn't. You have to be a game company, you have to submit builds of the game along the way and get their approval at each step, and then you have to get licensed by them. I was with a company that failed the Sony licensing process 2x before finally being accepted, with 20 people working night and day to get it. Sony ultimately REVOKED our license and said they wouldn't allow our game on PS2 (losing us 70% of the market) after they gave us a list of 4 things to do to keep the license. We did them in the time allotted, and they STILL revoked it. You have to know people, or just be a huge company to do battle with these huge names. PS2 don't need you now - they're big enough, and they'll squash a small company's efforts in a single phone call.
Let's skip ahead and say you DO manage to build a nice, working game. You're not allowed to publish it. You have to hand it over to Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo, and THEY make it. You pay them to do it, and then they get residuals off everything sold. It's against copyright laws for you to manufacture any games for any of the big 3 consoles. They get money from every direction.
The Phantom gets around that by simply being a PC. I asked a woman working one of the sofa areas how I could get a game on the Phantom, just speculatively. She said all your game has to be is a PC-playable game. They're very interested in indie efforts, and it's conceivable I could actually create a fun little game over the course of a few months, hand them the master on CD, and get the game up in the online library. I'd get paid for every download. Obviously, games would be priced according to what they offer. You can currently download Unreal Tournament (as they demonstrated), and it's probably a slight bit cheaper, since you don't get the packaging, etc. A game I made would be far cheaper, but if it's pretty fun, and only $3 or so, word of mouth might get a lot of people to try it out.
This could start a trend of vaporware consoles, and of startup indie games makers, both at the small company and talented hobbyist levels. Remember that the whole Doom franchise was started by John Carmack - a very talented programmer with a games design sense. Also, very quickly, thousands of games could be ready to go - everything already for PC is all ready to go already. I hope they have an approval process, or some kind of funness ratings board, so people don't get stuck with crap. You can read a quick blurb on each game from the selection screen - better than nothing for now. If this takes off, games magazines will probably do the work of rating these Phantom games for us, and keep in mind, you'll be able to play any normal game that's for PC, provided the company gives them a master to put up for download. It's a very easy extra revenue stream for any company, so I imagine most won't mind handing over a copy of anything they've published. Another attractive feature for games makers is that without a physical medium (cartridges, CDs, DVDs), and having to download everything straight from the online service, it'll be extremely difficult to pirate the games.
Indie efforts could hold some pretty fun stuff. I might just be saying this because of how much I still love the simplistic and über-addictive Robotron (play it free on Shockwave!)
