Tom Hunt reporting from E3

Tom Hunt reporting from E3

What happens when you squeeze a US$24 billion a year industry into an arena in the middle of downtown LA?

E3 happens.

If you like games, if you like bleeding edge technology and if you simply like women dressed up as blood-sucking ninja assassins, then E3 is the place for you.

Gaming is an industry that has meshed itself into every part of modern life.

Games become films – Lara Croft – films become games – The Matrix – and games now rake in more profits than movies. Musicians such as Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent release songs on games before they drop albums. The world has witnessed the rapid growth of an incredible visual medium that is about to get a whole lot bigger.

First Party Titles for Xbox 360

The calibre of the next generation gaming experience is going to be defined by the combination of three essential parts – the hardware, the software and the services such as online play.

Xbox 360 combines the best of these three elements and will undoubtedly deliver the richest and most exciting games in the next generation. So what juggernaut titles will Microsoft launch Xenon with?

What better place to start than the innovative and twisted development studio, Rare, resurrecting the acrobatic Joanna Dark, who previously stalked the N64. Perfect Dark Zero.

Follow Joanna Dark into a world webbed with global conspiracies and intricate corporate espionage. Perfect Dark comes at you in incredible definition. There is a single player mode and when you are ready you can take Joanna onto Live, where you and 50 players – did you read right? Yes, 50 players – can compete. If that is not enough there are also multiple multi-player options, from four-player split to cooperative.

Plus there’s the visceral and violent Gears of War – a game that’s built to show and flex the incredible strength of the next generation in action.

However Lest We Forget the Last Generation
More than half a billion copies of current Xbox games have been sold worldwide. And it doesn’t stop there. There will continue to be anther 500 Xbox games released over the next 12 months.

Conker
Xbox 1 remains a powerful gaming system and what better way to show its full capacity than by bringing back to life a cigar-chomping Tourette’s suffering militant squirrel. The crazed army of bucktooth warriors has returned and this time on the powerful engine of Xbox – Conker: Live and Reloaded. Still pulsing with Rare’s irreverent humour this is a must for those in the mood for an hysterical first-squirrel-shoot-‘em-up.

Also Half-Life 2 – another stellar PC title – is about to take advantage of the console’s power. Half-Life looks and sounds beautiful.

Third Party Games
And the third parties have upped their game yet again.

EA
The Godfather for Xbox
EA is about to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Visually stunning and capturing one of Marlon Brando’s last voice performances ever, this is a game that stretches across the full range of the trilogy’s murky and bloody history.

Plus petrol-heads will get their next adrenalin shot with Burnout Revenge and Need for Speed: Most Wanted – and the mysterious shooter Black is also looking impressive.

Eidos
Lara Croft Returns in Tomb Raider: Legend
And Eidos are bringing back the sassy raider of tombs. Lara Croft is about to make a come-back and we can but hope that it will see Angelina Jolie slip into her silver suit one more time.

Tomorrow we talk Ubisoft, King Kong and a ridiculous amount of new games to sate your fiddly fingers

For now this is Tom Hunt reporting from the centre of La-La Land.

ENDS

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