Games Convention 2004

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Activision

That booth needs some more explanation since it featured several games at once: Star Wars Battlefront (more on that soon), the Call of Duty expansion, some Vampire the Masquerade sequel, Doom 3 and some more I can't remember. Every game was presented in some huge industry containers featuring 4 to 6 consoles or PCs. Every container had access controlls due to age and space-in-there restrictions. In addition every container featured a huge, 4 minute countdown LED display telling the crowd when the next some people could have a look on it.

We focused on the most important container only because it had masses of people infront of everyone of them and the most hyped container with Doom 3 on the upper floor had a nasty 10 minute countdown. But all lucky person who had been in there had been even luckier to be photographed by some amazing babe in an orange dress, taking pictures of the gloomy eyes of the Doom3ed visitors.

Star Wars Battlefront

Well, this game is hyped, definitely, and it's well deserved, definitely. While waiting in the line we remembered Major König's post in the forum to have a look there, tried to use the lady bonus to get in there soon and had been advised by the door blocking guy that no photos are allowed inside. "Game's not released yet so no photos" had been the argument, but in my eyes that was unnecessary: that game looks damn good as it is right now.

To break my chronolocial narration a bit I admit that we played SW:Battlefront twice: first time in then aforementioned container in hall 4 and second time, right before leaving the Games Convention, in the huge, well lit lobby between all the halls. There was the second container and the only difference was that in hall 4 had been 5 XBoxes with 2 controllers each and in the lobby 5 PS2s with 2 contollers each. We are not sure if there are differences but both versions had the same look&feel, only differing in the details. Nevertheless it's not possible to mix players between XBox, PS2 and PC, according to some guy-with-a-badge outside.

Gameplay was exactly like Battlefield: character selection consisted of five classes each side, spawn points had been choosen and off you go to frag and conquer flags. It was very, very familiar to us, due to all the '42 WOLFClashes and of course due to the Battlefield Star Wars mod. Unfortunately my controller had some hated setting (flipped vertical axis) so it did cost me precious game time just to look around and even more game time to go deeeeep through all the menues to set it back on normal again. But at my second trip on the PS2 I had a major killing spree, capping 5 flags and killing over 15 enemies in one run.

But first things first: the game is losely based around Episode 1 and you can choose all sides and all units from that time: Stormtroopers, rebels, trusken raiders, but even trade federation bots and Droidikas! Definitely a cool thing! Can't wait to roll around, getting in position and blasting rebel scum with my two dual laser guns, muahaha! Afterwards you choose respawn and get into action. Screen is splitted for two players, one upper part, one lower part. On the XBox that is quite ok, but on the PS2 this is... I don't know... somehow ridiculous. You run around, you try to spot some dark pixel, hope that this 3 pixel are the enemy, toss a long range grenade at them (yeah, right, Stalingrad nade spam training I had!) or simply point your blasters aiming cross at them. Basically that's the thing you do: aim around and when it gets green it's a friend and when it gets red it's an enemy. Then you shoot. At that some pixel. Which might me a droid, a human, a robot or a damn vehicle. (On a sidenote: there had been AI contolled players in the games playing alongside with the human players)

Concerning vehicles: oh yeah, there are a lot of them and you can all use them: AT-STs, Speederbikes, Tie-Fighters (never ever fly such a woblin goblin with inverted controls....), alliance walkers, trade federation hover tanks, stationary laser guns and more and more. This' gonna be war! This' gonna be epic! For the Emperor! Or against him!

I guess you want to hear about graphic: well, I hope it's better on the PC... the XBox version reminded me very much on Halo, concerning the technological state. Of course it looks different, Star Wars style, but the landscape and the textures are by far not that detailed as e.x. in Battlefield. As I said, more like Halo. On a XBox that is very fine indeed, but ever seen Halo on PC?! No, thanks. That's not the graphic I want to play with, I spent a bunch of bucks for a Radeon 9800 Pro and I wanna see where my money went.

This was definitely a very, very cool thing at the convention. It's a game I will look for and I suppose it will have a very huge fanbase due to the cult setting and the known-to-be-solid gameplay just as in Battlefield. But most interesting thing happened when hexe's PS never finished loading and was rebooted: she was able to go all through the menues and spotted something like "campaign", "1 or 2 players?" and "historic battle of Naboo". She then played with her partner (I was at another console) at trade federations side the invasion of Naboo, very movie stylish everything, with troop transports, hover tanks, masses of droids and poor bastards of Yar Yar Bink's family everywhere. It was like conquest with two human players only and ended in a victory (beware of the tankgirl...). Afterwards the next level loaded and it was some town fighting then, with even more droids to choose from (Droidekas et al). So there seems to be some campaign mode with sequential levels/missions for two players at one console. Baby, where can I buy that game?!?

Ground Control 2

Seen a trailer. On some gorgontual plasma TV. Looked tremendously cool. Featured action. Featured two player cooperative mode. Will be remembered.

X3D - 3 D monitor

Gentlemen, fasten your seat belts, future is coming! That German company offers some plasma TVs and computer monitors with real threedimensional feeling! Yes, no lie, we have seen it, it works. True 3D impression. Had some small quirks and unsharpnesses when you walked around but when you found the perfect position to stand at it was really, really, really impressive. Their racing car simulator was not that cool, since the game sucked, not the monitor, but some adventure style game like Tombraider (called "URU"?) really grabbed our attention. This will come and it will be big. Currently they feature a series of products, from the 50.000 EUR mindblowing 50" screen to the 17" PC monitor for under 1000 EUR in the upcoming weeks. Wow, wow, wow, this is cool and this is affordable. Basically it is working for everything using "correct" 3D information in the graphics engine and has OpenGL or DirectX output. So you need only a special driver for the hardware, a fast-as-hell GPU because it has to render not one but eight images each frame and then you go. Currently the company is trying to convince the game developers to code the "correct" 3D information in their games so there won't be any graphical glitches with those special monitors. And now everybody scribble down on some paper the website: www.x3d.com!

Starship Troopers

Little cube, little entrance, little access control "are you old enough for this?" lady, huge plasma TV inside. Running Starship Troopers trailer. OooOooOooh! OooOOOooOOOOOOH! This is the atmosphere of the movie - and there is much lead in it. Dropships deploying marines, troops manning defense walls, rifles being reloaded, commands being yelled. Dust at the horzion appearing, tremendous noises upcoming, a wave of black and yellow flowing through the valley. Roaring of engines, fighters low on six, flame bombs dropping, gates of hell opening. Inferno calming, black waves raising again, pikes and claws and teeth appearing, sound of mortar explosions. "IIIIIIIINCOMING!" the last yell of the squad leader, then only gunfire. Seconds of unstopped gunfire, minutes of unstopped gunfire. First magazines empty, marines ducking for cover, claws appearing over the front wall. Insectoid legs smashing, slicing, piercing, cutting bodys, full shotgun magazines being emptied into open, screaming mouths. Limbs flying, inwards splattering, pieces, dust, slime and blood everywhere. Uncontrolled gunfire, panicking marines, fallback to dropship. Ship's gattling guns roaring, structures shattering, wave after wave incoming. Carnage. Endless Carnage. Starship Troopers. And you right inbetween...

As far as I can judge from the trailer this gonna be multiplayer - cooperative multiplayer. Many, many marines against manier aliens - maniest aliens - maniestivstive aliens. The graphics itself don't look that good, but, hey, honestly, who does care about graphics if claws rip apart the guy next to you and chitinic limbs are shattered by your rifle bullets?! I'll buy that game and I'll love that game. hoo-YAH!

King Arthur

We'll see the movie this week, hopefully, but the PS2 game alongside looks good. We've seen King Arthur and Lancelot on shiny horses riding some canyon uphill, mowing down incoming enemies with their broadswords right from the horses. Looks like fun, not too complicated, easy gaming for two people, no splitscreen but all the action right in there. Special sword combos, kicking horses, yelling Saxonians. A good-feel game worth a try.

Krawall Gaming Network

Big German gaming company, offering servers and services, sponsering their own clan, being closely in touch with Wings Simulations due to Söldner. They had a two floored booth: down left the K-Forum PCs and some personal dog tag making machine, down right the EA community corner, upper floor gaming PCs with tournaments and restricted access. Hordes of people waiting.

The K-Forums didn't interest us and the dog tags we made right before leaving the convention when visitor numbers lowered again. The EA community corner featured Battlefield (as far as I know) but above all some uncharistmatic, fat, hot dog cramming, EA shirt wearing, VIP-impersonating but definitely no-of-nothing knowing persons. I did communicate with them only searching for the BF Forgotten Hope trailer being made by several WOLFGaming members. Friends, I am sorry, but all the hours at that fair we had not been able to see or even find that particular trailer. We were adivsed by some EA official (I mean real EA, not just some convention hired staff) to try it in the community corner - but that clue was stopped by the wall of uninformation at this special community corner. My best guess is (and that's only an unconfirmed guess) that the trailer was shown at the movie projection screen within that Krawall / EA community corner. Maybe some other German WOLFers had more luck finding that trailer.

At the Krawall booth we did look for familiar faces, and voila, k-clan`Gorom appeared. After some hellos we went past the waiting line *cough* and got upstairs. They must have envied us two, but on the other side they all wanted to play at Krawall's PCs and we were just looking for a spot to talk to a friend without being pushed away by some other visitors flowing up and down the aisles of the convention halls.

After a 20 minute talk and a bottle of water later (heat, sweat, high prices... good to have friends) we departed from Krawall again to continue our journey. The other known Krawaller, Mr Tankman, we met hours later while looking for the fourth time for him at the same booth. Poor, busy man he was. But I guess he brought Krawall some good, new contracts, so for him this was work and for us this was sparetime.

Battlefield 2

Electronic Arts had an immensely sized booth and rigth in the middle it featured a 360 degree cinema, about 20 meters in diameter and 3 meters height. On it were running the trailers for their latest games, e.x. Sims 2, Harry Potter and -taDAA!- Battlefield 2. When explosions or lighting appeared the pictures were supported by flashing light spots and everything was covered in an inhuman atmosphere of loudness. I guess EA had running an experiement like "how loud do we have to turn it to cause an inner ear instabiliy of at least 80% of the visitors". No, it was not nice anymore. I really had pitty for the clerks working there, for they did not have the chance to simply leave again as we had.

Trying to ignore the painful loudness a bit (what was pretty hard...) we watched the movies. Guys I tell you, Battlefield 2 looks awesome, but it looks simply breathtaking when some F-14 Tomcat jet roams from right to left over a 20 times 3 meter screen. Awoooool! That cinema rocked. Even The Sims looked interesting to me, LOL!

Okeydokey, away from the cinema, on the quest for the Battlefield 2 demo PC. Oh, there is no demo PC! No playable version - just some trailer on a big monitor. *sniff* No trying, just watching. So we did. And what we saw... was awesome! I'm not sure whether that trailer is available for download but it went like this: US engineer laying mines on some unfinished embankment dam, enemy buggy approaching, BOOOM, off he goes. US machinegunner running into position, yelling commands. Enemy tank appearing, BLAM, off goes the machinegunner. Is blown away, bangs against some metal bars, falls down on some other bars, smashing on the concrete, falling down the dam. Ok, so much for the physics, we definitely have ragdolls in here, hihi. US commander overwatching the scenery, using binoculars to mark the tank, requesting air support. F-14 roaring by, blasting away the tank with a laser guided missile. Then a Russian Mig (or such) appearing, having a dogfight with the US fighter - and that really was the highlight of the trailer.

I mean everyhting in there looked great, but those two jets were simply amazing! So many details, so good textures, looking so damn realistic. My photos taken off the monitor can not show this. The jets are a blast. The servers will heavily suffer due to planecamping because everybody will want such a cooool jet. Gosh, I definitely need to buy a joystick!!!

BF2 will be a hit. No doubt. And I am looking so forward to play it at the legendary WOLFClashes. Where gameplay is teamplay.

LotR: Battle for Middleearth

Next station in EA's technodrome of disorientation had been "Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middleearth", a RTS game featuring hoooordes of units. It was played on some pretty big flat screen plasma TV displays to righfully bring the game's nice graphics into the right contrast. Because graphics are really good. Especially the landscape is lovely made, including many details at the houses, walls and pillars. Units are quite small, caused by the fact that you obviously control pretty large groups of them (20+) and to keep an overview you need to see a big part of the battlefield. As far as I have witnessed zooming was not possible but my impression was that the screen size is just right: good overview even over many units but still enough details for a nice atmosphere.

What I watched first was the battle at Helm's Deep - or better the preparations for it. The guy who played moved his troops from the inner respawn points onto the walls and positioned the cavalry near the main gate. He had to move quite a lot of units, including the heroes which you can directly access via shortcuts or symbols on the bottom of the screen. While he did all this pretty much in the middle of the screen was some text saying "Isengart's army approaching in 4:37 minutes" with the seconds counting down merciless. A pretty cool feature in my eyes that you can position your troops by your own likings before the battle starts. I have not seen any "base build" or "resource harvesting" but I just might have missed that part. But it didn't matter at that moment since orcs had been sighted at the horizon!

So they appeared from the left: 5, 10, 15, 20 - not units but squads! Each of those containing 10 to 30 units. That had not been just "some orcs", no, that had been a whole valley full of a dense crowd of heads, arms and weapons marching toward the walls! Impressive, folks, really impressive.

Unfortunately I was distracted the next minutes, can't remember by what (D'OH!), but I came back to watch that epic battle at Helm's Deep. It seemed that this maybe 15 year old pupil just had missed the course in "Basic Tactics and Unit Knownledge" in school: his brave Gondorian archers continued to shoot at the enemies standing outside of the castle while two scaling ladders had already been errected and a bunch of orcs had climbed the outer walls. Under them an elite Uruk-Hai hero who brought havoc amoung the distracted archers and slicing with his rusty sword trough their bodies like a hot knife through butter. What a mess...

Meanwhile at the main gate the cavalry should have its glorious moment: he sent 30 of his shiny knights on their shiny horses out through the main gate and down the stone ramp - right into the group of 50 orcish pikemen coming upwards. Outch, that must have hurt, never seen Braveheart, huh?!

I moved my view away from this quite different outcome at Helm's Deep and turned to the other guy playing at the monitor right of it.

There was ongoing a bigger skirmish at a place which might have been the outskirts of Osgoliath. At the outmost right was the Isengart-camp, with filty, little goblins building wooden constructs, from barracks to forges to "mud pools" - whatever those are for...

About 50 meters left of that was a big, white town wall which already suffered a big breach in the middle. Through that breach poored some 15 armed goblins and entered a litte area with three farmhouses around a little columnlike monument. To the northwest of that had been a bridge where the Gondorian troops came from. While those goblins approached one of those farmhouses out of that nice, little farmhouse right into the nice, little farmhousefrontyard steps a nice, little farmer - surprisingly wielding a nice, big war mace. He recieved the goblins' attention and screamed - uhm, ok, wait, that demo PC had no speakers, but I just know that this farmer screamed something like "you damn bastards will enter this house only over my cold, dead body!!!" Said and done, 15 goblins humping the farmer. After humilating the brave but idiotic peon they afterwards humilated his o-so-nice frontyard and finally his farmhouse. Fire, smoke, crash, boom, bang, chearing gobbos, farmhouseruins.

But out of a sudden a group of Gondorian archers appeared southwest of that, maybe 20 of them, starting to shoot down the panicing goblins like chickens on the run. Definitely time for the big guys. Luckily a big, fat, strong but slow stone troll had made his way from respawn to the breach in the wall. He was surrounded by some other armed goblins and it seems those pesky creatures like to be in big guy's shadows because they hope to be neglected while the enemy is focusing on the big guy in front of them. Besides those sociological studies the player clicked on the troll and then clicked on some Gondorian archer - obviously the attack order. So the troll... well... took his time. The situation felt as if some invisible, godly hand had tapped the trolls shoulder saying someting like "uhm, excuse me, you there, Mr Troll, yes, over there are some arches, uhm, could you go over there and smash them?! ... please?!" A little bit irritaded by that voice the troll looked left, then looked right, finally spotted the archers, then obviously send some "move" order down his spine and -at last- "accelerated" towards the archers. No, a troll does not just start walking, no, he does "accelerate".

But before reaching his destination with max speed some foolish Gondorian infantry men come around the corner of the burning farmhouse. Tumble SPLATT goes the first one, backhandswing-by-anrgy-troll BONGK goes the second one (and he goes quite far high and quite far away...) and fist-of-death-from-above SMASH goes the third one. Fast troll carnage.

So the troll got distracted and the player clicks him again. "uhm, sorry, Mr Troll, there are still those archers over there and you even have some arrows already sticking in your butt, might it be possible that you?! Oh, yes, thanks." Troll looking left, troll looking right, taking a awful long moment to activate some of his few brain cells, finally "accelerating" again.

Unfortunately the accompanying goblins have not stopped for the three swordwielding "troll feed" guys but headed towards the easier pray, the long range archers. So now the goblins are standing in a bunch between the archers and the accelerating troll. By clicking every single one of them and telling them to move out of the way the player got the path clear again - only to find the troll wandering elsewhere due to the formerly unreachable and for this reason forgotten target (the archers...).

"Mr Troll, now GO over there and KILL THOSE DAMN ARCHERS!!!" Left look, right look, think-break, accelerating - and finally rumbling into the group of archers, finishing off the last three of them with some mighty swings and blows. But, hey, "last three of them"?!? What happened to the other 17? Well, those had been massacred by the squad of Uruk-Hai who entered through the breach, evaluated the most important strategic enemy and engaged the archers in close combat. Sigh. Distraction. It's all about distraction. And those big guys like Mr Troll just make for a great distraction with all their fancy actions like "Gondorian far throw" and "head squish grip". Dump but impressive.

So what do I wanna tell you with that (maybe a little overillustrated) war story? I'll buy that game! Definitely!

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