| E3
Madness 2004! The Jason Schachat Floor Report Part 4:
The Final Countdown
part
1, part 2, part
3
Jason
continues his desperate dispatches. We think this may be the
last. We haven't heard from him since Saturday. On the other
hand, we also haven't seen any news reports mention his name,
and that can only be a good thing.
A pleasant night’s rest would have done me good.
Much more so than the two hours I got on the floor of a
Best Western. As it was, my paranoia had increased to the
point that I was paranoid about being paranoid.
Who
was to blame? Who’d set loose that yeti in the exhibit
hall? Why did everything smell like french fries? Did Derek
suspect the Bolshevik propaganda I was inserting into my
reviews? Why was Mr. Sprinkles staring at me like that?
Gah!
Sprinkles! Where’d he come from?
“You
okay, man?” he asked. “You… you were talking
to your shadow.”
Eavesdropping,
eh? Without even the common courtesy of using an eave.
“Dammit,
Sprinkles, don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“You
doing that Hunter Thompson thing again?”
He was
on to me.
“Hell
no. What are you talking about? Weren’t you stalking
booth bunnies?”
“Booth
babes, yeah.”
Sprinkles
was annoyed at my refusal to use the standard term for hot
chicks at booths. Hey, if Neal Stephenson can get away with
changing the definition of “BIOS”, I should
get at least this much:
From
what I’ve seen, any significantly attractive woman
wearing slightly showy makeup and flaunting her figure at
a convention can get called a booth babe these days. Even
if she’s Director of Marketing. And you can’t
even use costumes as a criteria since so many of them are
running around in jeans and little t-shirts. Besides, L.A.’s
overrun with hot chicks already.
But,
you can be sure a babe at a con has been hired to sell you
something if she looks like she just stepped out of the
Playboy Mansion. Hence…
“See
any bunnies you liked?”
“Naw.
I think I must’ve found the trailer trash booth.”
Poor
Mr. Sprinkles had wandered through some of the lesser booths
(ones which actually rang true to the definition of “booth”)
and his standards, artificially raised by the amount of
flesh on the floor, had left him totally open for the tragic
moment when a woman in hot pants who really didn’t
belong in hot pants crossed his path. I think a little part
of him died that day, but I’m also pretty sure no
one will miss it.
A sudden
wave of drunkenness passed over me, not so much inspiring
action as making me stumble in a certain direction and continue
walking like I had a destination in mind. I took Mr. Sprinkles
by the camera and attempted to lead him towards a stone
structure surrounded by the jungle of flat panel displays
for Ubi Soft’s myriad games. But there, in that temple,
was possibly the prettiest playable demo I saw at E3: Prince
Of Persia 2.
Oh,
and there were some really hot booth bunnies for Sprinkles,
if he hadn’t ducked out of the camera strap and run
away for a smoke.
But
the game looked so sweet it gave me a toothache. Building
off Prince Of Persia: The
Sands of Time, it takes the same basic format and bounds
off in insane new directions. The Prince himself is different,
but the immediate, eye-catching element was just how big
everything had gotten. The lighting and particle effects
were like a goddamn wet dream, but the sheer scope of everything,
the way backgrounds could stretch on and fade out in the
distance… It made a lot of sense, actually, since
there were shots where the Prince was fighting an enemy
so large he had to climb up his back to land a hit on the
torso, but damn, was it nice.
The
motion of it all had to be the most interesting thing, though.
The camera didn’t feel too static or too insanely
jerky and the way the characters moved as time sped up and
slowed down was both precise and natural. Well, natural
for time stopping.
It might
not have been as shockingly gorgeous as some of the big
demos behind closed doors (which we weren’t allowed
to take pictures of) but here was a game we could actually
play that looked like it would be almost as delicious on
the consoles as on PC.
However,
like Prince Of Persia 2, time seemed to speed up around
me as the exhibition came to a close. Bunnies had changed
into street clothes and run off as fast as their platform
sandals could carry them. Everyone but the exhibitors was
being round up (presumably to be sent off to death camps),
and big screens were blanking out and turning tired shades
of blue.
The
yeti was nowhere to be seen.
I leapt
into action with Sprinkles’ purloined camera, frantically
taking pictures of sets and exhibits as they were being
torn apart like turkish taffy. A whole row of Agent Smith
mannequins was cordoned off as security swept through, exhibitors
wrapping CAUTION tape around their booths and rolling up
lengths of sticky-backed carpet, exposing the hard, shiny
concrete underneath.
The
Namco stage where so many had been entranced was dark and
empty, police gathering just across from it for when security
gave up and left us stragglers to the long arm of the law.
Logitech’s waterfall display (which is nearly impossible
to photograph) had been shut down and makita’d apart
while the rear projector still flickered for a few final
moments. Konami and Blizzard’s beloved big displays
were silenced and switched to their screensavers.
Aside
from a few inaccessible decorations like The Punisher dangling
a criminal from a rooftop and Jack Skellington straddling
the Halloweentown fountain, nothing was allowed to die with
very much dignity.
As I
was ushered out kicking and screaming by security, I looked
one last time to the Halflife 2 booth. No more gamers tangled
around the big cube, it looked about as interesting as a
giant doorstop. Which is pretty interesting, now that I
think about it, but not the same as the powerful totem that
had once attracted so many into its dark recesses.
Oh,
the horror. The horror.
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