At the time of writing, I’m three days into a week-long series of presentations from game developers and publishers (there will be a second such week soon) in advance of the July E3 Media & Business Summit in Los Angeles, California. So far, I’ve been hosted by Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sega, Ubisoft and PlatinumGames, and with a few exceptions I find myself generally underwhelmed.

It was only last month that I wrote a column titled ‘Write What You See’ in which I explored the difficulty I face in properly calibrating my response to seeing games during the preview stage of development. But this seemed different, as if something else was at work.

Finally, on day three of the week, it dawned on me that I was not only coming off of a couple of weeks of playing GTA IV on my Xbox 360 and Echochrome on my PlayStation 3 with weekly post-DLC sessions of Rock Band to boot, my view of the games being showcased was also being jaundiced by last year’s high standards of excellence: Desktop Tower Defense, Everyday Shooter, Portal, BioShock, Halo 3, God Of War II, Super Stardust HD, Geometry Wars Galaxies and Call Of Duty 4. I’m not going to get into whether or not 2007 was the best year for gaming, but it’s certainly up there. Still, the level of ambition, polish, innovation and/or immersion has clearly raised the bar in a way that I didn’t quite expect – and it was causing me to look at these works in progress and find them wanting.

What did I witness that was so disappointing? A realtime strategy game whose online innovations were masked by a sci-fi-tinged fantasy art direction and rendering techniques that look depressingly like any other western fantasy title I’ve seen (BattleForge). Mascot games whose novel features were either being placed alongside gameplay concepts that have yet to really work (the 3D camera and controls in Sonic Unleashed) or user customization modes that are too difficult for even adults to easily make use of, let alone the young target audience (Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts). A hack-and-slash retread whose visuals and mechanics are located at the intersection of mediocre and barely inspired (Golden Axe).

None of this made for an auspicious debut. And while I realize that the impact of 2007’s hits won’t truly manifest itself for another 12 to 18 months, when one previews editor told me that a tear was being shed for the industry’s future based on the first 72 hours of our week, that sense of despair was clearly mutual.

There were some bright spots, however. I remain unmoved by the visual design of the enemies in EA’s sci-fi survival horror title Dead Space, but the enemy behaviors are well thought out, while the integration of the interface into the world and the ambient sound design are thoroughly evocative and atmospheric. The ex-Capcom, ex-Clover Studio, ex-Seeds, now PlatinumGames team unveiled MadWorld, the first playable title in a four-game deal with Sega. Imagine a cross between Manhunt (gory brutality) and God Hand (over-the-top action) as seen through the lens of Frank Miller’s Sin City stark black-and-white-and-bloody-as-all-hell-red art direction) and you’ve got a Wii game whose visuals alone redeemed Sega’s pre-E3 event. Left 4 Dead’s asymmetric approach to multiplayer looked promising, if unforgiving. Meanwhile, the holiday king of 2006, Gears Of War, reeked of if-it-ain’t-broke, just-crank-it-up-to-11 confidence for the sequel, marrying its justly praised cover mechanics to deftly scripted set pieces that finally give the action a scale that’s, well, epic.

The most gratifying product lineup so far, though, came from Ubisoft. Yes, it was a downer that the teaser trailer for the next Prince Of Persia demonstrates that the company is still struggling with the Prince’s post-Sands Of Time character design (hint: adult-ifying the enemy designs is fine, but there’s really no need to do the same to the Prince). But Tom Clancy’s HAWX looked like it might be able to get beyond the Ace Combat ghetto with a color-coded system for pursuing enemies and dodging enemy fire that turns targeting into a minigame (optionally so, of course).

Far Cry 2 transforms healing your character into a visual flourish, as you pull shrapnel out of your hands, reset broken fingers and cauterize open wounds with white-hot flares. But most intriguing of all was my hands-on time with Tom Clancy’s EndWar, whose voice-driven command-and-control system demonstrates that it might do for realtime strategy games what Halo did for shooters: create an experience that’s so compelling that the genre itself tips irrevocably in the console’s direction. I have no idea whether it will live up to this promise, but midway through my west-coast swing, EndWar – as well as the small handful of previously mentioned titles – restored my faith in AAA games.

N’Gai Croal writes about technology for Newsweek. His blog can be found here.


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