Long-dubbed “The Greatest Show on Earth” within the games industry, E3 is on again and the hype machine has already fired up.
With the event proper about to throw open its doors to the world’s games press, every major console manufacturer and publisher has already made their major announcements at pre-show briefings. Here's our top five of the most interesting announcements so far:
1)The new “MotionPlus” attachment for Wii controllers: In a nutshell, the Wii Remote (which was shown to be lacking in some games) will benefit from a big dose of greater accuracy so future games should be even more immersive. We can’t wait to see which third-party publishers take advantage of the attachment.
2)Big on-line action for console gamers: The new PS3 game MAG might be a yet-another war game, but MAG is set to support 256 players on-line which dwarves the 60 players that Resistance 2 will support. Should be at least reasonably impressive: it’s from the makers of the SOCOM games, but don’t expect it until sometime 2009.
3)Wii Music: Nintendo is now set to grab a slice of the massive music market (Guitar Hero alone has made over $1.2 billion since the first game launched) with Wii Music, which will simulate musical instruments – 60 of them, no less.
4)80GB hard drive for PS3: No exact word yet on what’s going to happen locally but it’s got to be good news that the PS3 is NOT set for a price drop, but rather will get a bigger hard drive model. An 80GB version is in the works, which will come in handy for future games and downloads. Americans will get $400 80GB PS3s from September. We’ll get ours any time after that.
5)iD and EA: iD software (the developers behind some of the most innovative games of their time) will partner with EA (the company often criticised for their year-on-year sequel releases) to publish iD’s new Rage game, which has created plenty of intrigue since first announced at 2007’s QuakeCon.