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« on: May 17, 2003, 06:13:15 PM »
I wasn't there but from what i've seen...
Nintendo - 6.5/10
Not a poor showing, just not that great. Pokemon and Zelda games were anti-climaxes, basically no-one cares about a new Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon TV sounds mildly interesting at best. Also the Zelda games were a complete joke, why they even showed them is beyond me. Something escaped from the NCL labs while the guards were on a break. They look like freeware PC games made by 16 year old programmers. 16-bit games might have *just* cut it a generation ago, but they sure as hell don't today. Geist was a pleasant surprise with a wonderful concept, and if some heavy work is put in by N-Space AND Nintendo, this could just be a Halo killer. The Twin Snakes got DOMINATED by MGS3: Snake Eater, Nintendo should have just had SK working with Konami to port Snake Eater to the cube. Remakes are sooo two years ago. F-Zero looks great, Starfox looks average, 1080 looks almost redundant. Mario Party 5 and Mario Golf should be huge sellers in Japan, so a sensible (if not obvious) move on that one. The whole GBA->GC connectivity feature looks stupider everyday, time to drop it guys.
Microsoft - 6/10
Halo 2 being unplayable makes it utterly pointless, nothing more than a glorified tech demo. Rare's games looked somewhat interesting but i'd say the selling potential of a game titled "Grabbed By The Ghoulies" is questionable at best. Ultimately nothing particularily exciting from Rare, for the $250 odd million they put in, Rare looks to be a dog of an investment, with nothing your average studio couldn't do. Doom III is exciting, but somewhat nullified by it being released on PC as well. Microsoft seems to be aiming for the PC gamer in a way, so we'll see what happens there. Xbox Live is really the only thing selling Xboxes (but rightly so). The line from MS this year seems to be "Japan? Where is that!?!", good on them for having the balls for cutting their losses, I feel sorry for the 3-5 Japanese gamers who are now stuck with living with a box, maybe they'll find some use for it as a table.
Sony - 6/10
Forget PSP, a poor attempt to rattle Nintendo to disguise a fairly poor showing. Nontheless it seems to have worked, the heat is on now for the GBA and Nintendo, however it doesn't mean much to Joe Public, as no one really cares about a sheet of specs to be made reality a year and a half from now. GT4 yawn, it's GT, again and there is really not much else to it. Castlevania yawn, we've seen it butchered in 3D by Konami before, looks like they're coming back for an encore. MGS: Snake Eater looks exceptional, Konami seems to be leaving the Xbox version in never-neverland where it belongs for this one. Sony had nothing else interesting at all really.
All in all this year i'd say there were no winners, just losers. In comparison to last years amazing show, this one was pretty run of the mill. If anything it was the 3rd parties who put on the show.
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