E3 Day One: My feet hurt

I don't know how many miles I've walked today around the various show halls at E3, but my feet can certainly tell you. Man I'm tired, really tired, and I have to do it all again tomorrow and the day after that.

However I did get to see some very interesting games. But not on the Sony stand.

The PlayStation 3 games on show there didn’t seem much more exciting than they did when they were shown off at the Sony press conference. The version of Gran Turismo is a joke, an insult really, and the other games on show although strong visually didn't seem to offer what we might call next-gen gameplay.

So was this fabled next-gen gameplay to be found anywhere in Los Angeles today? Yes, it could be found over in the LucasArts stand. Here the company was demonstrating the technologies that drive the new Indiana Jones game, which is scheduled for release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 next year.

The game offers two exciting innovations. The first is the Euphoria animation system. In action it means that characters are in control of their own actions and aware of their surrounds. So for example if Indy throws a bad guy against a car sometimes he may put his hand out to steady himself, sometimes the bad guy will fall to the floor, sometimes he will recover. Euphoria signals an end to scripted animation and physics and certainly was very eye-catching in operation. Secondly the game features Digital Molecular Matter. This is really a fancy way of saying that stuff behaves like the stuff it is made from. Traditionally a wooden door in a game might be split into several pieces when broken, the splits are create by the artists and the door will always break this way. Thanks to DMM, a door can be given the properties of any type of wood and will bend, break, shatter and splinter dynamically based on the forces applied to it. Again, an end to scripting.

Both these technologies were on show within the new Indiana Jones game and the game itself looked very interesting in its own right. Alas there were no exotic locations demo-ed, but the levels shown in San Francisco were certainly very attractive. This is definitely a game to keep your eye on.

Another game that caught my eye today was The Darkness by 2K Games. Here you play a hitman who has been gifted, though perhaps that’s the wrong word, with diabolical powers. Initially it appears to look like a regular first person shooter. But in the darkness the hero’s powers are revealed and we see tentacles and snake heads emerging from him. These can be used to sneak through air ducts to attack targets and manipulate objects, for example throwing cars around.

Well I'll bring you another report tomorrow. I'll be taking a look at the new games on offer behind closed doors at Ubisoft and Electronic Arts.