Entering the South Hall for the last day, visitors werre greeted by this believer in the Gears of War. Speaking of which, the floor mural shown in day 1's coverage was finished so I grabbed you all a shot only because it was so way cool to pass up.
Inside the South Hall, Day 3 it was no less crowed than the first two days. Working towards the left of the Hall towards the nVidia booth, the Konami booth (guys famous for Sillent Hill) was a very popular place to stop and watch the huge overhead screen for games to be released. The trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4 was just spectacular, serious samuri action vs various baddies including some very large block hopping walker mechs. After reaching the nVidia booth it was time to sit down and play F.E.A.R. on the Pentium D 3.6 GHz Dell XPS's equiped with dual 7900 GTX's in SLI.
nVidia was awarding T-Shirts to people completing a short 13 question scavenger hunt. First on the hit list leaving nVidia, was the God's and Hero's display to get the name of the Lady with snake s for hair and can turn you to stone with her gaze. Battlefield 2142 was also part of the nVidia quest. What was needed was the names of the two faction players would choose to join. Graphics were very good and from remarks people were enjoying the demo. By the way, the two factions are EU and PAC, or European Union and Pan Asian Coaltion. The Euro forces dress in lighter colored uniforms and the PAC forces in dark green, The color contrast means that players need to be aware of their surronding, something most FPSers already knew.
In the South Hall, Electronic Art's booth was center stage as people came through the main doors. For all trade shows this is a prime spot. Gaming rigs filled the inde of EA's booth, while the 20 foot high rim had projection screens completing a loop 360 degrees around. There were a few more vendors upstais, like Microsoft Flight Simulator (apparently the game ships with 24,000 airports to plan youir route about). After watching several trailers and getting cool in the Quake4 RV, I headed for Kentia Hall below to search for more info. On the way to the Techland booth to see Call of Juarez, I slipped on some VR goggles and took Deck 17 for a spin, litterally!. To change players direction I needed to actually point my face towards where I wanted to aim my gun. Movement was achieved by buttons on the gun muzzle, while fire was obviously the trigger.
Last stop before picking up some nVidia T-shirts was the Cool-It booth in Kentia. Cool-It makes Peltier coolers, like a nifty USB unit to keep your cold beverages chilled. Recently they have been getting awards on the net and PC magazines for their PC cooling solutions. Their first foray into the arena was the Freezone cpu cooler. The freezone is a salf contained sealed system that fits inside most computer cases. Jamie Ericson (the Cool It girl) pointed out some of the new models not yet released: the Eliminator, a budget cpu cooler within 25% of the performance of the Freezone, and the Ice Hawk, a dual graphics processor chip cooler for your SLI needs. And yes, in the pic with Jamie above the black rig is a chilled XBox360 that will also be available a a mod to your existing unit. To top it off, Alienware's Aurora ALX systems will feature Cool-It technology.
Well that's about it from me on E3 2006. I have planty of swag to slog through over the next few days. In addition to t-shirts and game magazines, there's numerous demo disks, and even full games, like the new America's Army. The AA guys estimate one more revision before the switch to Unreal3 so stay tuned. Other items like toys, trinkets, clip lights, mouse pads brochures from nearly every booth weighed down various stash bags adorned with exhibitor advertising. I want to thank the guys at Prodigal Interactive for getting me into E3 and helping take photos. Good luck on your up coming Unreal Powered game, you guys rock!