E3 2006 Day 1

[jAkUp]

Wow, what a busy day.

Tried to cram so much in, but not an easy job. Overall it was a great day at E3.

There was good news, and bad news, the baddest of all news is that our tripod broke, so, for now we only have Shakeycam® footage, however, we have purchased a new tripod, and will be using it tommorrow.

Enough yapping, here are the pics!

Here are a few quick pictures of the outside of the building, the banners this year were huge! Also, you can see the large banner for Wii.


In the crowded inside, you will immediately see a huge Turok banner:


Also, this cool chalk drawing was on the floor in the entrance. Funny story is right before I took this picture, a guy walked right over it on accident! Somehow security missed him.


The first thing we did this year was go straight to the Crysis booth. We have video of this, and will get it uploaded soon. For now, below you will find a picture of what the booth looks like.

Overall, the graphics were very impressive, however, as expected, the framerate was extremely sluggish and times, and the game even crashed more than once. Other than that, the graphics are fantastic, and you can see soon for yourself once we get the video uploaded.

As for the system specs, the reps were unsure, however, I can confirm that it was some sort of ATI card running on an Intel machine.


Right next to the Crysis booth, as a booth for BF2142. Graphically, the game looks virtually identical to BF2. However, as many know, they have added quite a few twists to BF2142 including mech's, cloaking, and many other interesting gameplay additions. Unfortunately, I only had a quick look today, but promise to get footage and hands on with BF2142 tomorrow. Here is the booth:


Afterwards we head over to the Nvidia booth, and notice they have Quake Wars fully playable. I watched the presentation for a good while, and was especially impressed with the physics for vehicles. These seem pretty dead on accurate. Powerslides, realistic suspension, etc. Overall it was pretty amazing. We also have footage of this and hope to have it uploaded soon. Here is what the main Nvidia booth looked like:


Browsing around the games on display in the Nvidia booth, I came across Flatout 2. To be completely honost, it looks almost identical to the original Flatout. I would go even as far to say that someone could easily mistake one for the other.

I did notice however, the car physics seemed to be slightly tuned for the better, and there are even more physics objects to collide with.


Oh yea, a quad SLI Nvidia system powering Flight Simulator X:


Throughout the entire event, we were constantly on the lookout for Conroe... and we found it! In a small Intel booth upstairs, we found 4 Conroe systems, one of them being a Quad SLI system! They would not tell us what chipset was being used, although I can say it was a dell machine.. Most of the other systems with Crossfire machines on a 975X board.

All of the demo machines were running Quake4, and as expected, were totally smooth.

Also, the Intel rep pretty much confirmed a shipping month of July for Conroe. Here are two of the Conroe machines, the one on the left is the Crossfire system, on the right is the Quad SLI machine.


Downstairs we found a small Sapphire booth, and that was the ONLY ATI booth at E3. On the picture to the right, you will see Sapphire's watercooling solution for graphics cards, somewhat interesting, a self contained cooler that fits in a PCI slot.


Oh yea, we also got to check out Bianca Beauchamp and Cindy Synette posing as Elexis Sinclaire and Jessica Cannon as some of you desperately wanted. Many screenshots and even video, you guys definetely won't be disappointed,

However I will leave those for another thread, when I have the full video and all the screenshots to post. However, here is a teaser:

[jAkUp]

Last but not least, we found some interesting cooling solutions from CoolIt... Even a liquid cooled Xbox360!!


Until tomorrow! Tomorrow should be the Tim Sweeney day, so hopefully we can get some answers for you guys

[LiquidX]

Great stuff Jakup. Thanks. I have a question. How were the graphics on Quake Wars? Some are saying it looks toned down. Also any console info or pics coming?

[jAkUp]

Lots of PS3 stuff, will get that up in another thread. We have video of almost every ps3 game

[SH64]

Turok banner! hmm I'm interested in any Turok related news ..

bummer that BF2142 & Flatout2 dont look better than thier predecessorS , but i think that wont matter much in BF's case.

nice summary & pics Jakup/nrdstrm!! oh & the last shot pwns!!!!!!11

keep up the good work

[retsam]

great job guys, thanks for going out of your way to do this for us!!!...

[retsam]

bummer that BF2142 & Flatout2 dont look better than thier predecessorS , but i think that wont matter much in BF's case.

actually im quite happy to hear the is the case. i mean the game played like ass with a gig of ram and took 2 gigs to be playable. what would be needed next?.. 4 gigs.

[einstein_314]

Good work guys Looking forward to the videos. I would have thought that one of the things that the reps for crysis would have know was the specs of the machine running it. I mean, obviously everyone is going to ask what the specs are. Oh well. Do you figure it was a single ATI card or Crossfire?

[jAkUp]

I would assume XFire, but I will try to find out for sure tomorrow. Also, Quake Wars looked very good, but TBH it does look a little toned down.

[einstein_314]

Oh and in the BF2142 pic, it looks like the HUD (well the map anyways) for the game is stretched on the widescreen display it's being run on...I would have thought they would have fixed the widescreen issues if they were going to run it on a widescreen monitor at E3...Oh well.

[jAkUp]

Yea alot were, Crysis was stretched also.

[nrdstrm]

First vid will be up shortly...had to practice and refamiliarise myself with Premiere first...I'm still working on compresion techniques...so what would you guys rather have...the one I'm doing is about 2 and a half mins and is 30mb...I did one early that was 2 and a half mins at 8 mb, and it looked like a*s...what do ya think...Jakup? The rest of you?