game trailblazer

Chapter 276 E3 Storm

Sorry, I didn't have time to update yesterday due to some reasons, so I will make it up now.There will be another chapter around [-]:[-] tonight, I hope book friends will forgive me!

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This year is already the fifth E3 exhibition. Since this session, the venue of the exhibition has been moved from the Atlanta World Congress Center to the Los Angeles Convention Center. It is said that the reason is that most game companies in the United States are concentrated near Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. It is very inconvenient for most manufacturers to rush to Atlanta. IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association), which is in charge of the E3 exhibition, followed the trend and moved back the exhibition that was relocated to Atlanta in response to the Olympic fashion.

Last year's E3 exhibition gave people the impression of the world of 3D games, and even the monogram of E3 became a full 3D image with a three-dimensional sense of space for the first time.However, this year's exhibition gave people the most direct feeling of war. Even before the exhibition started, the prelude had already begun.

The day before the start of the E3 exhibition, Nintendo and Panasonic suddenly held a joint press conference in RB's Tokyo, officially released the development plan for the new generation of game consoles - "Dolphin", and also announced in detail the "Dolphin". Some details of the "Dolphin" host, such as the "Gekko (Moonlight)" 400MHz processor provided by IBM, the image processor developed by ArtX, etc., among which the DVD-ROM from Panasonic is the most attractive Attention, some people even said that when the spokesperson of Nintendo spit out the letters "DVD" from his mouth, many game developers on the scene cheered.

"The game world is facing a major turning point..." President Hiroshi Yamauchi made a generous statement at the press conference, as if returning to the starting point of the past glory.

When a reporter asked about game development, Hiroshi Yamauchi talked eloquently: "...the game will be developed by Nintendo and its partner companies,...we are not interested in the third company. First of all, Nintendo will be mainly responsible for game development. If other companies With a good plan, we can make backup considerations...Nintendo will not change its original stance..."

This speech immediately chilled some of the game developers present, and they couldn't help muttering in their hearts: "I dare you Nintendo still doesn't look down on us third parties, so what should everyone do in the future? Go play by yourself!"

On the same day, Nintendo North America also held a press conference in Raymond, but as a data party, although Arakawa also mentioned some games that will appear on the "Dolphin" console in the future, his focus is still on In terms of the performance of the "Dolphin" host, for example, how much stronger the "Moonlight" processor is than PS2's EE, how big is the memory bandwidth, and so on.

However, Sony, Sega and other companies are silent at this time, and the situation seems a bit abnormal...

On May 5, the E13 exhibition that players and the game industry have been looking forward to finally kicked off at the Convention and Exhibition Center in the southwest corner of Los Angeles.After a renovation, the area of ​​the exhibition center has been enlarged, and it is even more than enough to accommodate 3 Boeing 14 airliners.About 747 companies participated in this exhibition, exhibiting a total of 400 products in 13 categories, of which 2600 are game products for computer and game console platforms, including action, adventure (decryption), role-playing, simulation, sports ( racing), strategy, and even games specifically for women.

Ye Tiantian is from the north, but his family lives in Shanghai. He was just an ordinary person who loves games, but by chance, he joined Ubisoft Shanghai Branch and became a member of the game development department.This time Ubisoft organized a delegation to participate in the E3 exhibition, and he was also very lucky to be one of them, and even luckier, after finishing the preparatory work, he was not assigned other tasks, but got three days Perhaps this is a reward for his hard work during the preparation period.

Los Angeles in May is a city full of vitality and a place where flowers are in full bloom. No matter how you look at it, it can be called an ideal tourist city on the west coast. According to Ye Tiantian, who participated in the E3 exhibition in the past two years My colleagues said that this place is much better than Atlanta, which is known as the largest city in the South.However, as a person who loves games, Ye Tiantian will definitely not leave the game exhibition in front of him and go wandering in the street, so at nine o'clock in the morning on the first day of the exhibition, he arrived at the venue on time and hung up. Putting on my badge, I walked into the Los Angeles Convention Center.

After glancing around in the venue, Ye Tiantian's first impression was that it was lively and crowded, but what he heard from his colleagues said that it was not as good as last year, maybe because there were too many sequels, like What "Diablo 2", "Age of Empires 2", "Dungeon Guardian 2", "Adventure King 2", "Civilization 3" and other "new games" with 2 or 3, or "Sweep Thousands" This is another form of sequel, but for someone like him who participated in the E3 exhibition for the first time, he would not consider these aspects. Anyway, for him, everything is so Fresh.

Ye Tiantian's second feeling at the exhibition was the impact of movies on the game industry. Los Angeles is indeed a city close to Hollywood, and even professional game exhibitions cannot do without the presence of the movie industry.Perhaps it is because of the release of a popular movie "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" in May, not only the action game of the same name produced by Lucas Art and the racing game "Fast Speed" from China, but even A game called "Pharaoh" produced by Sierra Mountain has a slogan like "Any trilogy has a prequel" printed on the promotional leaflets.

The established company Fox Films also has its own game company, but it has always been unknown. This time they came to the exhibition to bring an action game "The World of Apes" adapted from an old movie. It is the story of an expedition to space, only to find that the ruler of the earth has turned into a group of gorillas when they return.The story is very old-fashioned, but Fox is worthy of playing movies, and the booth it arranged is more attractive than ordinary companies. When Ye Tiantian saw it for the first time, he almost couldn't close his mouth in surprise.

The first thing that caught Ye Tiantian's eyes was a huge, half-buried Statue of Liberty, as if implying the decline of human civilization in the game.There is a large iron cage on a platform behind the Statue of Liberty, and inside it are two naked men and women who are shown to the public like animals. The man is holding a wooden stick in his hand and knocking on the cage from time to time, as if Expressing the last trace of resistance, the woman sat in the cage blankly, her eyes full of despair and helplessness.

Around the cage stood a few well-dressed and mighty "gorilla guards", as meticulous as real guards.When Ye Tiantian walked over, he happened to meet this group of "gorilla guards" pulling a woman as if they were planning to go to a parade. After meeting him, the gorillas immediately made the woman kneel down, and then waved the leather in their hands. The whip put on a vicious look.

The scene that suddenly appeared in front of him startled Ye Tiantian. Fortunately, some of his companions knew the routine, and immediately took out their cameras, laughing and taking pictures around the gorillas. Only then did he realize that what he was seeing was just a performance. That's all.Although it was a performance, Ye Tiantian was amazed by the fine makeup of the gorillas. The gorillas in front of him were all dressed up to the professional level in the movie. The rubber headgear vividly portrayed the faces of the orangutans. There were not only young and strong orangutans, There are also old orangutans with white hair.What surprised Ye Tiantian was that the combination of the orangutan's face and the actor's eyes was so natural that he couldn't tell the difference even if he looked at it from a close distance.

Also as a film company, Disney, which was born in animation, still seems to have a very different style from Fox. Among the huge booths, there are many cartoon characters played by real people such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, or cartoon models with rich poses.But the most interesting thing is the Buzz Lightyear from "Toy Story" on the scene. In the movie, Buzz is a self-righteous trendy toy, but this Buzz played by a real person is a guy with a big smile. From time to time, he moved his plastic body and made frequent appearances around the booth, which made Ye Tiantian excitedly run over to take several photos with him before giving up.

Exhibitions will never be without beautiful women to help out, and the E3 exhibition is also the same. When Ye Tiantian wanders around the venue, he will meet all kinds of beautiful girls from time to time. Some are dressed as game characters and pose. For example, the popularity is always high. Laura, who is not too small, the model who plays her not only has to take photos with the over-enthusiastic visitors, but also constantly changes various poses between the group photos.In addition to this kind of cosplay-like fashion show, there are also hot dancing on stage, or distributing materials at throats such as corridors and stairs. They can be seen everywhere, and some relatively large ones made Ye Tiantian, who was going abroad for the first time, blush and heartbeat.

It is said that the United States is a country that lives on wheels. Originally, Ye Tiantian only limited himself to some brief introductions on TV or books, but this trip to E3 made him realize that this is true.It is said that the imprint of car culture is deeply imprinted on every level of American culture, and games are no exception. Ye Tiantian went around and saw at least ten cars of different styles at the booth.

Activision, one of the well-known game distribution companies, had a huge bus inserted obliquely on the ground at its booth. A lot of demonstration work was carried out directly in the bus. According to one of Ye Tiantian’s colleagues, Said that Activision was like this at the E3 exhibition a few years ago, even the license plate of the bus was not changed.3DFX, the most popular 3D graphics card developer in the past two years, brought Voodoo3 to this exhibition, a sharp weapon trying to fight back many pursuers behind them, and a beautiful red Volkswagen Beetle was parked on their booth , and the 3DFX trademark is specially sprayed on the shell.

The coolest thing is the booth of Ye Tiantian's owner Ubisoft, not to mention the area of ​​thousands of square meters, hundreds of exhibitors, numerous new game displays and special Lehman cartoons, just the bat I don't know how many people are envious of Xia Xia's black sports car.According to the mechanic guarding the Batmobile, this car is an authentic Warner Company prop car, and it was specially driven from the studio. In the movie, Chris O'Donnell drove this car.According to the mechanic, the body of the Batmobile is made of fiberglass, and it is not an empty shell of props, but can actually be driven.The Batmobile not only has an engine that can easily reach a speed of 140 kilometers per hour, but also has six special rocket nozzles installed at the rear. After pressing the switch, it can spray flames by burning alcohol. Of course, it is different from the movie. The flame is only for decoration and does not produce the explosive force to speed up the car.The attractiveness of the real guy is different. The Batmobile is full of onlookers. If there were no guards, many people might not be able to resist the car in front of them, and even got into it to experience it. .

Ye Tiantian is a PC guy. Of course, this is mainly related to the environment he lives in. In his early years, he also started playing Nintendo red and white machines. Later, he experienced the glory days of Super Nintendo and Sega MD consoles. With the rise of computer games and the lag in the development of domestic home game consoles, his interest has gradually shifted to computers with more sources and types. Therefore, at this exhibition, he is mainly interested in computer games.

I saw a lot of news about computer games at the E3 exhibition. Among them, there are two that Ye Tiantian is most concerned about. One is the demo of the PC version of "Final Fantasy 8". In fact, two days before the exhibition, he heard Said that Square Enix plans to port "Final Fantasy 8" to the computer. He didn't expect that he saw the demo of the game at the exhibition not long ago. It seems that the news about the porting before was not groundless, and he couldn't help thinking about it. I am full of expectations. After all, the computer platform has enough potential to achieve a more perfect performance than the PS version in terms of character details and facial expressions.

Another news that Ye Tiantian cares about is the comeback of "Civilization". Since Sid Meier left MicroProse, "Civilization 2" has almost become a swan song, although MicroProse has not given up on this cash cow, and has also launched a big The expansion packs are used to make money, but without Sid Meier, "Civilization" seems to have no soul, and it is a pity for many players time and time again.Now I can finally let go of the regret. When Ye Tiantian passed by the Activision booth, he found that there was actually a promotional poster marked "Civilization 3". I hooked up with Firaxis, which was re-established by Sid Meier, one party owns the copyright of "Civilization", and the other party has always wanted to develop a new version of "Civilization". The result is like dry wood meeting a raging fire. It hit it off, so after many years, the development of "Civilization" led by Sid Meier appeared again.

(End of this chapter)