E3 is an absolute mad-house this year. With Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all announcing their next-generation consoles, it"s easy to forget that there are also new PC games coming out too.
Of course, what makes it really easy to forget there are PC games coming out is that the console games seem to be everywhere. I did manage to find Age of Empires 3. Sure, it"s tucked away a tad and you hae to go up a narrow flight of stairs to see it but there it was in all its wonderful glory.
But PC lovers have no need to despair, there were two companies more than happy to brag about the PC -- ATI and nVidia which seem to have picked up the slack and were showing a large number of PC games running on their latest, greatest video hardware. Some of it was pretty impressive.
What wasn"t so impressive, however, was the Xbox 360. Perhaps it"s because the demos are running on systems with 1/3rd the hardware. Perhaps it"s that they looked like they were using Mac hardware behind the curtain. But I wasn"t the only one to walk away thinking "Wow, these looks like two year old PC games." The term Xbox 1.5 came up more than once. To be fair, the final Xbox 360 will be much more capable. But no one forced Microsoft to show off games that weren"t ready to be shown. You get on the cover of Time magazine and people start to get their expectations up.
We"ll have more tomorrow and there"s more details over at TotalGaming.net.