Hey diddle diddle

The Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3) is the largest trade show of its kind in the world, showcasing the seven billion dollar electronic entertainment industry. In the spacious halls of the Los Angeles convention center, come together videogame developers, publishers, press and retailers. Developers without publishing agreements come seeking publishers. Publishers showcase their upcoming wares to press and retailers hoping to garner the lion's share of press praise and retail space from the retailers who come to determine how many shelves to reserve for each game system and publisher. It's three days of flash, glitter and raucous noise as each company attempts to outdo the other. A good or bad showing at E3 can make or break a product and recent years have centered around the three-way battle for console dominance waged by Sony, Nintendo and Sega.

The cat and the fiddle

The general pre-show expectation was that E3 2000 was to be Sony's great coming out party, the triumphal dawning of PlayStation 2 and while this was, indeed, the first year that the PlayStation 2 and its games were at E3, Sony's fiddling led to very little spontaneous jigging.

Sony's indicative press conference focused three-quarters of its effort on expounding the popularity of the PlayStation brand and Sony's vision of the broadband future of entertainment with the PlayStation 2 serving as DVD/CD playing, internet surfing hub. Scant time was spent on a technically glitchy presentation of games and the games themselves, at least the ones that will be ready for launch, and especially the first party titles published by Sony, were less outstanding than many had come expecting. There will be great games for the system, there were hints of brilliance to come, it'll just mostly begin arriving late in 2001. Sony seems content to rely on their branding and marketing strategy and let the games play second fiddle.

The cow jumped over the moon

Again, the expectation was clear, the Dreamcast was a transitional system and while they had one nice year, Sega was doomed; only someone forgot to tell Big Blue. For the second year running, Sega's monster booth was packed with hundreds of games and hundreds of people standing in line to play them. The titles were incredibly diverse, ranging from the enigmatic Shenmue to the maraca shaking Samba de Amigo and the bombastic, internet-ready Quake III Arena.

In a one step forward, two steps back then charge forward game plan, Sega has returned full force to repeating like a mantra that the half-the-price-of-a-PlayStation 2 Dreamcast is not only internet ready out of the box, which the PlayStation 2 is not, but that there are also soon to be a deluge of internet ready titles and Sega will refund all of your purchase money if you use SegaNet as your internet provider. With a deprecatory nod, Sega of America's COO Peter Moore announced to the world at a louder than Hell Filter concert that while Sony may think they are the future of entertainment, the Dreamcast and SegaNet are the future of videogaming.

We'll see.

The little dog laughed to see such sport

Nintendo on the other hand proved that they are confident enough of their business model that they'll ignore all of the posturing out of the Sony and Sega camps and give gamers what Nintendo wants when Nintendo wants and laugh all the way to the bank. Nintendo refused even to speak of the Dolphin and mentioned the Game Boy Advance only to inform the world that it is completed but will not be released until after Nintendo has made the remaining billions that they plan to gather on the backs of Pokemon and the Game Boy Color. "Let's make money," crowed Peter Main, Nintendo of America Executive Vice President. There were scant few third party titles for the Nintendo 64 yet Nintendo is confident that their own Miyamoto and Rare developed titles are good enough to sell N64s, damn the third party publishers and any other torpedoes in their path. The heck of it is they're right. There may not be many games coming for the Nintendo 64 but they are, every single one of them brilliant: Conker's Bad Fur Day is an astounding departure for Nintendo, the new Zelda and Pokemon titles are guaranteed to sell consoles and Perfect Dark is, in fact, damn near perfect.

And the dish

Microsoft's X-Box, announced at the Game Developer's Conference earlier this year, was the sexy new darling of the videogame world and while there are nowhere near any games for it, Microsoft pretended that they, like Nintendo didn't even want to bring their next-generation super console to the party but "the fans demanded it" so they brought it and showed off the arousing video demos that were unveiled at GDC in March. The X-Box presentation also featured a demo of DirectMusic, a MIDI music standard that Microsoft spent millions developing for Windows and that most developers who can help it refuse to use, although it does nicely blend country and western music into disco and vice versa. Make no bones about it, the X-Box is sexy and Microsoft is serious about their console endeavor with plenty of muscle to back their pony.

ran away with the spoon

While the big dogs fought over the food dish in the big halls, and despite Sega's impressive showing, it was a couple of small fry with big dreams who ran away with the show for many and made us all smile and remember that, after all, we're talking about videogames.

There's just no keeping those renegades at Bleem down. "Those guys are like a wasp," said one Sony exec, swatting at his head as if Bleem were indeed a small winged insect buzzing about his ear, "they're bugging me but I've got more important things to worry about."

Yeah, right! Bleem announced their newest product which lets gamers play their PlayStation games on a Dreamcast, and not only play them in their ugly old pixelated pajamas, but play them with a high resolution paint job that improves the look of the games four fold. Outstanding!

Nuon is back, repositioned as they should be as a mass market consumer product that greatly enhances DVD playback, allowing smooth fast forward and camera zooms as well as internet connectivity and, as an added bonus, the ability to play a few games, including Jeff Minter's newest remake of that classic of classics, Tempest. A Nuon enhanced DVD player is what to get your relatives this Christmas.

And despite many rumors to the contrary and editorials even in magazines such as PC Gamer, PC gaming is nowhere near dead. While there did seem to be fewer PC titles at E3 than at most previous shows, PCs continue to evolve into faster, more graphically powerful, gameplay potent beasts by the hour and game developers are tech junkies of the highest order. They will always want to make their games on the biggest, fastest machines possible and very many of the best looking games at E3, particularly in genres like strategy, RPG and especially online gaming are PC titles. There were even a few Macintosh games for those of you surfing on translucent berry flavoured icomputers.

Most intriguing, with the biggest dreams of all was a company named Indrema announcing their Linux based console of X-Box power, customizable, upgradeable and open source: a 600 mhz of processor powered, nVidia's next-generation graphical processored, DVD playing $300 US marvel named Indrema. They had nothing to show but dreams and a brave plan to spoon out their console to compete with Sony's holiday launch.

It's a whole new world.

Following are EP's picks of best, most interesting and otherwise noteworthy products that we saw at E3. We have collaborated to preview the standout title and indicate the top ten (in no particular order) of each category. This is the future of videogaming. Or is that entertainment? Depends on who you ask.

-Jules Grant
Executive Editor
Electric Playground

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