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Steve's E3 Day 3 Diary

by Steven Thomas - May 14, 2000, 1:16 am EDT

The man, the myth, the legend.

Today I spent most of the day in the South Hall at the Convention Center talking to various developers and publishers to see if we could see any glimmers of Dolphin support. Billy has a huge update coming in the next day or two about all that, so I am not allowed to talk about it in detail now. But, let me tell you this: It is there.

At 1:00 we had our "Official Media Tour" of Nintendo's Booth, and even though we had spent nearly all day of Day 1 in Nintendo's booth ... the tour was a heck of a lot of fun. We learned some additional things about the games on display there that we wouldn't have learned if we just tried to figure them out ourselves. So, many, many thanks to Thom with Nintendo for taking us around and giving us the red carpet treatment. Thanks also the Riley Brennan and Chris Olmstead of Golin-Harris for managing to squeeze us in their insanely tight schedule ... and for all the other cool things that they did for us while we were there.

After that, I wen't back to the South Hall again to surreptitiously extract information about Dolphin out of the developers. Then, I just learned that the show closed at 4:00 pm for Day 3, instead of 5:00 like I thought, and I decided it was time that I squeezed in some time to learn some of the things for me that I wanted to personally see.

First, I tried to track down Rudolph Stember with Factor 5. We were supposed to get together at the show and chat for a bit, but unfortunately that never happened. Rudi wanted to get together on Friday, but since I had to work my real job that day, I couldn't make it. I sent Billy over to Lucas Arts to meet him, but Billy got the brush-off from the Lucas Arts receptionist. So, I tried to see if maybe he was still around on Saturday. I know that I wouldn't have been able to get any Dolphin info out of Rudi, because he is real good at playing the whole NDA game. But, that is not the point ... I have had several online conversations with Rudi in the past, and he just seems like a great guy, and I would have loved to meet him.

Then, I headed over to Microsoft's booth. I wanted to see the X-box. Microsoft had a super-secret meeting hall set up upstairs that only select people were allowed to get in. That little red "media" tag on the bottom of my E3 badge is the coolest thing! I got in, and saw the "new" X-box technical demo.

Let me tell you this: I am not that impressed. Sure, it looks pretty ... but so does anything that is set to run on an nVidia GeForce2. The X-box demo is running on on what is essentially a super-tweaked PC with the NV15 chipset. I think any good PC could do it. Microsoft had some new sound features that they seemed really darn proud of. It was kind of a hack on the environmental audio theme. If any of you have a Soundblaster Live, or any Creative Labs card that supports environmental audio with the LiveWare utilities, you can probably imagine what I am going to talk about. Imagine that utility where on your screen you have you in the center as a listener, and in the four corners you have icons representing speakers. Creative uses a utility similar to this to demonstrate EAX. Microsoft had something similar from a Japanese company that I can't remember the name of. In this case, the center icon represented a source sound ... a sting of music. The icons in the corner represented various dynamic interactive audio effects, for the demo that I was showed; they used "country", "bossanova", "jazz", and "disco". When he dragged the icon for the source audio through each of these effects, it changed the instruments and the tempos appropriately to give the source sound those types of themes. It's real easy to change instruments and tempos in MIDI, so I was not impressed. Microsoft boasted that they have the most powerful audio processor available in any console, and since the only real competition as far as that goes is PS2 and Dreamcast, that really does not say a heck of a lot. Dolphin is not in the equation yet, but Matt tells me that the sound on Dolphin is "absolutely mind-blowing", and since Factor 5 is deeply responsible for the sound capabilities of Dolphin, I think Microsoft had better go back to the drawing board on this one.

Then, I headed down to BioWare's tiny intimate booth ... which was a little larger than a telephone both for a sneak preview of Neverwinter Nights. For those of you unfamiliar with Neverwinter, it is an evolution beyond Baldur's Gate. Sort of. Except this time, instead of using the quasi-3D top-down view scheme that Baldur's Gate and so many other popular RTS's use, Neverwinter is fully 3D from a third person perspective. The demo, again, like X-box, was running on the GeForce2, and it had all of the cool reflection mapping and environmental mapping features (and the real-time shadow-casting features) that Microsoft was all proud of in their X-box. The other thing about Neverwinter, is that it designed to be an multiplayer online game, where you get to create your own adventures using their toolset. The theory is, that anything that you can dream of creating using pen-and-paper Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition rules, can be created as an online game with Neverwinter Nights. Whohoo! The game is about a year out from being completed, but IT LOOKS PRETTY! My jaw was on the floor practically the whole time during the massively gracious 45 minute demonstration that Bioware gave us.

Super-secret side note on Neverwinter: The game uses a unique interface looks remarkably like it would translate to a next-gen console VERY WELL. When I asked Bioware about the possiblilites of Neverwinter being made available on a next-gen console like X-box, PS2, or Dolphin ... I got the official "no-comment", but it was a "no-comment" with a big old smile attached to it. There is something there, friends. Of course, Neverwinter on a console would require some sort of storage device like a hard drive or maybe even a Zip drive or DD style storage unit to keep the modules on, but if any or all of the above mentioned consoles have those storage units, then we could very well see Neverwinter Nights on a console as well. It will probably be X-box, but maybe PS2 and Dolphin as well.

Also, before I forget, we also met up with Ed Shih at E3, and finally also Sisko. Whohoo! Also, I managed to get some super-secret contact information from Peter Main himself. Nintendo likes us, folks, and as Spaceworld and Dolphin come closer and closer, we are positioned to give you the absolute best Dolphin coverage that there is.

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