E3! First time I got to see it, and here's what I have to report so far.

First of, I want to point out that I feel I have no bias either towards Microsoft or Sony. I have an XBox and a PS2, and I like them both. Frankly, I feel both consoles' games are about equivalent in processing power requirements. The PS2's controls more comfortable, but the XBox tends to have better games in my opinion. So what of the XBox360 and PS3? To me, it's quite clear. The PS3 kicks the 360's ass. Big time.

Most of the time spent at the Microsoft press conference was how they were trying to go for a bigger market. The example they gave, "Velocity Girl" was a girl who doesn't even play video games, but got the XBox because she wanted to make custom content and sell it on the Marketplace. Remember the Marketplace? It's basically an XBox version of eBay in which you can sell stuff. So Velocity Girl would plunk down $300 for an XBox360, then another $60 for Tony Hawk, and then spend hours making maps for Tony Hawk, and then sell it on the Marketplace for like... what? 5 cents? 20 cents? At most a dollar right? Yeah right.

Also, here's a major letdown. I wasn't expecting the 360 to be backwards compatible with the XBox 1 in any way, but the presenter decided to bring that up. "A lot of people were asking us if the 360 would be backwards compatible with the XBox," (I'm paraphrasing here 'cause I didn't record his exact words). "I'm very pleased to announce that you'll be able to play the top selling games XBox on the 360." The crowd started cheering, but my jaw was dropping. I'll be able to play the top selling games on the 360? What the fuck does that mean? It could mean they're going to port Halo from the XBox to the 360 (and of course they'll add in like 1 new level to justify forcing you to actually pay money for it); so in other words, no, the 360 is not backwards compatible with the XBox.

The saddest part of the conference, I think, is that the presenter decided to focus on talking about how there's a huge about of XBox games out there. Notice I said Xbox. Not XBox360. We don't give a damn about the XBox anymore. We didn't come to E3 to hear about the XBox. We wanted to hear about the XBox 360. There was pretty much no XBox 360 demos at the press conference itself, which was really disapointing. However, there WERE XBox 360 booths where you could actually play some of the games yourself. Contrast that with the PS3, where you could watch demos of the presenters playing games, but not play them yourselves.

The PS3 conference was jaw dropping. They showed a rubber duck demo in which they had realistic rippling water, and to prove it was being done in real time, the presenter took two (real life physical) cups, and manipulated them in real space. An EyeToy hooked up to the PS3 capture the motions of those cups and made two virtual cups behave identically in the game world. The virtual cups could scoop up water, pour it from one water to another, and so on. Very impressive. Then he showed ups a "vortex" demo, in which a storm of a lot of leaves (tens of thousands?) were swirling around, and he said that the cell processor had enough pwoer to give each leaf its own dedicated sound channel and mix that into 5.1 surround in real time. As an example of how that power might be used in practice, he said you could now have battlefields with 3000 NPCs, all with their own AI working independently. Previously in massive battles like that, games would "cheat" and assign "group AIs" so that a group would have one thought process like "attack this point" and all the soldiers in that group would pretty much behave essentially. He then showed us the Killzone 2 demo.

Oh my God. The Killzone demo was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my entire life. We're talking Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within quality shit being done in real time. The demo was simply stunning graphics, with realistics smoke, fire, with vehicles that, when destroyed, actually broke down into their components (as opposed to just having a burst of flame, and having the actual model of the vehicle mysteriously disapear). As an inspiration for the individual AI stuff, you saw one bad guy get shot, in the shoulder, causing him to drop his weapon and fall over a bridge, but just manage to cling onto the ledge. Another bad guy sees this, and runs over to give him cover fire as he tries to climb back up. Then THAT guy gets shot, and falls over on top of the first guy, and they both hit the group realistically. No clipping problems where one body overlaps the other. One guy's on the floor, and the other guy's draped on top of him, and against the wall. I say this is merely inspiration for AI, as opposed to an actual demo of it, because I think this was all scripted, though I have no doubt that the PS3 has the processing power to handle this kind of complexity.

Then Square Enix showed the "FF7 Tech Demo" which looks cool, but was devoid of any technical content. Basically, Square Enix made a movie featuring the characters from FF7. It was completely pre-rendered, not even done on PS3 hardware, but completely on computers, and was supposed to demonstrated what the PS3 is capable of. Whatever. Contrast that with Killzone 2, for which Sony's official statement is "This is real time, gameplay footage". People were pretty skeptic because the Killzone 2 demo is fucking beautiful, so the people at Sony got asked again and again "Tell us the truth, is the Killzone 2 demo real or pre-rendered?" The North America president of Sony stated that that is all done in real time, absolutely zero post processing cheats or effects, and that is not an intro movie, but actual gameplay. When you actually play the game, it'll look that good. Another guy, the marketting director I think it was, amended that statement saying that that demo was not actually running on a finalized PS3 (there is no PS3 yet), but a devkit designed to emulate the PS3's performance exactly to spec, so yes, the actual game will look exactly that good, if not better.

Nintendo... well, they didn't say much. Their console is called the "Revolution", and it'll be backwards compatible with the NES, the SNES, the N64 and the GameCube. There aren't 5 different cartridge slots on the Rev though: you'll be able to download your old games off of the Internet to play them. To me that's only a so-so feature. I mean, if I spent $150 on a Revolution, I don't want to be playing fucking Duck Hunt on it. Plus, how much am I gonna be charged for downloading games I already bought 10 years ago? Nintendo's biggest secret seems to be their controller. Nobody knows what it looks like, and nobody will say anything about it other than the fact that it'll be wireless, just like XBox's and Sony's. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer of Nintendo, did say something about this, though really it's more of a teaser than an actual hint. He pointed out that the Revolution can play games for the all of Nintendo's past consoles, and these past consoles all have wildly different controllers. So imagine what the Revolution's controller must be like to be able to handle all of these. Hmm...

Unreal Tournament 2007! The in-game graphics for UT2K7 are better than the pre-rendered graphics for UT2K4. Dai-yamn. In fact, during the PS3 conference, they showed a demo of UT2K7, and one presenter said to the other "There's no way that's in real time" (which was my thoughts exactly, as this blew the "Vortex" and "water" demos away, but the "Killzone 2" demo had not yet been shown), so the other presenter said "Oh yeah?" and paused the game, rotated the camera to show the scene from different angles. Gameplay wise, they said they're keeping the rocket launcher and the flak cannon, and they're going to add "necro" vehicles. They also said that the Assault mode will now feature huge levels. They're talking GTA3 size levels, where you're fighting at one battle front, and once you've captured the control point, you seemless move onto another front to do more battling there.

Ghost Recon 3 looks hot. Takes place in the future, in some town in Mexico where the president is being held hostage. The interface is crisp and futuristic, and it looks like it's third person like Splinter Cell, until you aim your gun, in which case it turns first person. Your allies are contoured in green and the bad guys are contoured in red, as if you had some sort of Terminator 2 style friend or foe identification system. It also looks like there's going to be a lot of scripted events, Half Life style, so there'll be a lot more emphasis in story and dramatic events than just running around (or walking around, it is a Tom Clancy game after all) and shooting. For instance, when an explosion happens, you actually see your character crouch down and cover his head (remember it's 3rd person).

Eyedentify. I want desperately want this game to be good, but I'm so sure it's going to turn out bad. Why? It's a fanservice game that got translated to English. Eyedentify uses your Eyetoy (the PS2/3 webcam) and a microphone as the main controls. Not sure yet if you also use the standard PS controller or not. The story is, you're the brains at HQ, and you give intelligence to your two secret agents. Who both happen to be super hot girls. The demo shown starts off with the game apparently paused, as the two girls are just sitting around doing nothing. As soon as the player sits back down, the PS3 is able to do facial recognition and one girl says "There you are!", while the other says "Are you ready yet?" The player says "Yes, let's go" and the game unpauses via voice recognition. In another scene, you see the two girls walking down the street. The player says "How's it going in there?" and the girl responds "Target's in sight. All goint according to plan. Boring." The player responds "Okay, let's switch to OUR plan." The other girl responds "Roger. We'll go in, but keep an eye on us, okay?" Depending on how much that is fake, that voice recognition is fucking impressive. I wonder how much vocabulary the game is able to recognize. And I wonder how naked the girls get. I'll probably want to get the Japanese version. The American ports tend to get censored.

The Movies. This is a Sim style game in which you manage your own movie studio, hiring actors, build scenes and making movies. I want to get this game, not 'cause I'm into the whole Sim thing, but because you can actually export the movie you make from the game, perhaps even to AVI/OGM files. There's a lot of emphasis on making this an actual semi-serious tool for making movies.

Metal Gear Solid 4. Didn't look all that visually impressive, to tell you the truth, but I think the game is way, way, way in the early development stages. In fact, the demo was just Snake walking around on an infinite plane, hiding behind a building, with some terrorists there. A bomb drops out of the sky, which causes the building to collapses. The terrorist turn around, see Snake, exclamation marks appear above their head, and they chase him. Other than being funny, and an announcement of "yes, we ARE working on MGS4", this demo didn't do much.

During the interview with the representative from UT2K7, the interviewed asked which was his favorite platform. "We love all our children equally" was the answer. When pressed, he said "Well, as a gamer, I've got to get both anyway, right?" Ouch, total diss to Nintendo there.

Sony released a lot of specs on the PS3. It'll support 7 controllers wirelessly via bluetooth, it has 6 USB ports, and it has other media readers (I can't remember what; flash media? Sony memory stick? Who really cares, right?), and wifi support so it can connect to the PSP wirelessly. Sony also released some whitepapers on the Cell processor they're using, and while it's almost comparing apples to oranges, think about 50 times faster than the latest desktop chip out these days, or 9 years ahead in terms of Moore's Law. Microsoft released relatively little specs. I think it was a 3 core CPU, each one running at 1.5Ghz, 512MB of RAM, and 10 megs of "embedded SDRAM" (What's "embedded SDRAM"? Level 3 cache?) So an XBox representative was asked, how did he think the XBox 360 stacks up against the PS3.

Before I get to the answer, let me say it again. Killzone 2 demo. Holy shit. If I were working for Microsoft and I saw that demo, my legs would get wobbly, I'd feel weak, I think my vision would white out and I'd collapse to the floor. I mean, Ghost Recon 3 is for the 360, and it looks nice, but it's nowhere near the complexity and level of detail of Killzone 2. I think the 360 has pretty much already lost the console war, unless Sony was lying about all that realtime stuff and they fail to deliver.

So now, the answer. The interviewer asked how did the XBox 360 stack up against the PS3. The representative answered "Well, it doesn't really matter. It's all about the games." Ouch. Bad answer. That's basically saying "We've lost, and we know it." The rep went on to point out that they've got "Live!", and that it's going to be absolutely core to the XBox 360 experience, and that Sony doesn't have any online system at all. True. But if I had to choose between online play and Killzone 2, fuck the online play.