Game for anything at industry summit
Music-themed titles and Spores are among highlights of the annual E3 gathering; Cambridge's Harmonix rolls out Rock Band 2
LOS ANGELES - The stars of video gaming turned out for the 2008 E3 Media and Business Summit to show off creations from vulgar horror titles to flying saucers herding sheep.
At this year's event, there were few ground-breaking hardware revelations, as companies focused on specific new video game titles. Perhaps most surprising at E3 this year was the lack of surprises: Very little previously unannounced or rumored news surfaced compared with years past.
Music games were big. Activision, makers of the Guitar Hero franchise, pulled out of E3 this year, but Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems Inc. rolled out Rock Band 2. And Nintendo announced a game called Wii Music. The focus of the game, which follows Nintendo's plan to get nongamers into the Wii, isn't getting points and nailing combinations of notes like the Guitar Hero or Rock Band games. Instead Wii Music encourages enjoying the song and the instruments you can play.
Meanwhile, Electronic Arts Inc. - instead of resting on the past success of its sports titles and The Sims - unveiled three potentially "mature" rated titles, including a sci-fi horror game called Dead Space, where you play an unsuspecting engineer who finds a space station full of dead people and vile aliens.
"This is a departure for EA," said Glen Schofield, head of EA Redwood Shores studio, calling his latest game "very, very M rated."
Electronic Arts also continued the highly popular Spore title, which allows players to make and control their own evolving creatures. Creator Will Wright and EA's Maxis division released the Spore Creature Creator a few weeks back to give fans a chance to try it out before its fall release.
"I was hoping we could get around 100,000 [creatures] by September," Wright said. They surpassed 100,000 creatures in 22 hours; 1 million within a week. Within 18 days, there were more than 1.7 million Spores.
Meanwhile, Bethesda Softworks showed off its upcoming Fallout 3.
Bethesda bought the rights to the Fallout series from struggling Interplay in 2004. Despite the fact that Interplay had already started making the game, Bethesda threw out the original work and started from scratch. The result, which a Globe correspondent had the chance to play on Wednesday, is one of the most visually and audibly appealing video games.
Also during the convention, Square Enix said it would release a version of Final Fantasy XIII for Microsoft's Xbox 360, despite early promises that it would be a PlayStation 3 exclusive. Sony, which makes PlayStation, answered with DC Universe Online, the first massively multiplayer online game that allows fans to roam Jim Lee's comic book universe as a hero or villain.
E3 also marked a comeback for Atari, which has been through everything from management changes to financial woes. Its lineup of games included The Witcher: Enhanced Edition, a director's cut of the critically acclaimed role-playing game; three great portable games; and Smash Court Tennis 3.
