Wow, I love GDC. This was my first year, and there is nothing better in this world than getting shit from guys that work at Sony that are tanked off their ass at parties where they're just glad to be done demoing for the day and getting free food. It's the anti-E3, where nobody's guarded and drunk guys standing right next to their bosses in a circle will say shit like "no I don't give a fuck if you talk about this, it'll be on some gaming blog site tomorrow anyway!" and everyone just has a good laugh.
Of course free booze has the power to twist one's take on reality. Apparently I was telling people I was from Vancouver and was hardcore Canadian. I think I did an interview, and I'm almost positive I agreed to speak at some college. Whoops.
So, fun stuff I overheard at the show, PS3-wise (it came from the lips of real people, but they were also real drunk so I desperately want half of this to be true -- and some already has been confirmed, hence why I'm repeating it):
-Region free deliciousness, but it goes beyond the games. This was indeed done to help them move systems around on a bi-monthly basis to the places where they see stupid high sell-through (like SF) as opposed to Bumfuck, Iowa without having to change a goddamn thing if units have to be moved en masse somewhere worldwide. Supposedly you'll just drill through a bunch of menus when you first boot up your system to determine region and what kind of TV setup you have. An auto-detect will let the system guess from the start, but you can fine-tune things to your exact setup, including up/downconversion and so on. My "uhhhhh, but what about people with really old TVs? And that plus the UK?" was met with laughter and then I think someone made me do a shot. Well played, fancy pants...
-The HDD is so stupid crucial to the business, that they reversed their decision to leave the bay there for future upgrades and just include it because of the desire to get into the fucking "casual games market" buzzphrase that was almost as overused as inappropriate as "procedural". When Geo Wars went nuclear on XBL, and (obviously) guys from Sony played it, they suddenly "got" that fostering growth here is important. This is vitally important because (and this is VERY well known in the halls of at least Foster City dev groups) MS opened up Live and are pushing XNA like CRAZY to get people to develop stuff in C++ or what have you and port it seamlessly to the XBL Arcade to become a pay-for-download.
-"Work fucking sucks, but I'm supposed to say things are 'good... you know....' and leave it at that." A (I hope) high producer talking about working on dealing with CELL stuff. About half a dozen programmers I talked to that had jobs and literally EVERY other one that was trying to get one said that job postings right now are listing CELL experience as a requirement for some positions. Final dev kits don't go out for another couple months and they want people with experience in making a game on them? Wow.
-The tech demos (and the keynote, which I'll get to in a bit) were lame (to be honest), but that fact that you as an attendee could actually pick up a DualShock 2 and influence shit that was running on a PS3 in some form make the Sony spaz in me wig out.
-NOBODY (someone screamed this at me with the kind of anger only alcohol gives you) knows the price, nor the final design of the controller yet. Apparently the latter is something that isn't going to change much and the former will be "literally decided before or the day of E3." And it might still change. Uh, rad.
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The Keynote.
I know this is turning into a novel, but I want to get all this out before I go to bed, and rather than doing it on my own goddamn site, I love you guys more and do it here.
I was really, honestly, deeply unimpressed. It wasn't that there wasn't stuff announced or said that was interesting. e-Distro? Fucking rad, you need do it and Sony sees that on both PSP and PS3. Fucking rawk. Making it stupid obvious that 50 gigs is a good fucking idea for a storage medium? THANK YOU. I love that there are still people that somehow think it's a bad thing to be able to put more on a disc. Blah blah spin-tastic PowerPoint slides? Snoooooooore. Oh, and yes, if you forgot, the PSP is doing awesome, despite what anyone says. Public awareness and price point? Naaaah, man, fuck that shit.
Tech demos? Completely unexpected and yet still mostly underwhelming. I know this isn't an event for the press. If it was, we would have had booze IVs in our arms like 45 minutes before the show started. Still, you've read up about stuff, and I figure more perspectives aren't a bad thing, so I'll go game by game, with personal, no-BS stuff from a guy who's HAPPY to say he's a PlayStation fanboy.
-Heavenly Sword: I love me some ragdoll, and I enjoy watching bodies fly around, but I honestly hope I wasn't the only guy that thought that's the kind of stuff you SHOULD see in a next-gen system, physics-wise. Dropping a thousand or so guys into a scene and then dropping physics bombs around to make them go flying with awesome screams to match? Sweet, but not something that sold me on the PS3
-Microtransaction implementation: The skinned menus for buying stuff are rad, if only because it means the tools are there to keep it in-game and fiarly seamless. The SingStar-style interface for downloadable stuff done by the UK design guys? Pure ocular sex, and I only wish we had licensed tracks for music games -- particularly the ones where you sing.
-MotorStorm: Creating real, physics-based grooves and deformable terrain = yum. Particles that are no more than fattened brown blobs? Bad idea. I like how they translate directly into high-res bump- or normal-mapped textures (yes, I'm too stupid to know which is better or what I saw) when they're thrown on flat surfaces, it looked great, and I like how as the mud dries, it affects the suspension on cars on a per-wheel basis. Again, though, I feel these things are expected.
-WarHawk: FUCKING HOT SHIT. This game is going to be awesome, and not just because the water is both sexy as hell (I particularly enjoyed the random whitecaps and foam on random procedural (!) waves), but because the scale of the fights will really feel next-gen -- especially when we have terrain in there too.
-Resistance: The visuals were on par with what you'd expect from a fairly militaristic, urban FPS. Nothing too impressive, but then this is Insomniac, and the one area where the game will be cool -- weapons -- was represented here very, very nicely. I think most tend to tune out aliens in an FPS, but they did look and react well to things -- though there were only a few variants.
-Ratchet: RAD RAD RAD RAD RAD. The fact that they made it a really nice, slow build through a corridor of turning gears into something that you think is just going to be a basic high-res, high-geometry version of the Ratchet games and then zooms down in an homage to The Fifth Element means I just love it that much more. Nice, even use of HDR lights and tons of geometry mean the engine -- and I hope this is tech being shared with the guys at Naughty Dog again -- is already very, very sound and Ted Price made it clear they were just getting to know how to use the SPEs.
-The Sony Network Platform Interface: The OBVIOUS work-in-progress overlays that made it clear Sony was going to work the whole video/audio live chat was a nice touch, but they need the guys that did the SingStar promo to rock the interface for everything else. God, it was like XP MCE given the Sony design touch, and it was great.
I do realize this wasn't meant to be a show for the press, though it became that because of the lack of info, and they handled it well, but still, E3 has and will continue to be the showcase for the system, and I'm just praying the 12 months of time between shows will mean we see some really cool, real-time demos of games that have people talking about things as much in a month and a half as they did a year ago -- and for the right reasons.
