Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Mark Rein on the PS3 -- 10:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Mark Rein weighed in on the PS3 calling even the pre-rendered game demos "very achievable." He also had this interesting comment which made me wonder a bit more about what software makes the PS3 go:

Sony's cell demos were extremely cool and inspiring but are totally achievable, and over time even surpassable, by third developers like us because, as Tim Sweeney said, the development environment is made up of parts we're already intimately familiar with: OpenGL, NVIDIA graphics, Linux, and PowerPC. Think about Epic's experience, for example. We rock on NVIDIA hardware. We have been doing OpenGL since Unreal1. We regularly ship our games on Linux and we've won several Macintosh Game of the Year awards including a special World-Wide Design Award directly from Apple for UT2004. We're going to be able to kick serious ass on PS3, and so are a lot of our licensees and other 3rd party developers, in a way that wasn't remotely possible on past consoles.

Linux, eh? Thanks Beyond Unreal.

E3 Video -- 10:00 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespot has some honking-great bandwidth available to bring video directly from E3. If you click on the link for the Sony demonstration, you can see the Unreal Engine 3 demo about 38 minutes in.

Playstation 3 Unveiled -- 9:41 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sony revealed the Playstation 3 to the world at E3 and Anandtech was there. In that article, Anand basically comments briefly on Sony's PowerPoint presentation. The most interesting part of that for me was seeing the Unreal Engine 3 running on PS3 hardware. He also offers his thoughts on the PS3 vis-á-vis the Xbox 360 in his blog. One concern that he and many others have is about the PS3's controller which looks rather, ahem, interesting. Then again, I thought the PS2's Dual-Shock looked odd until I tried it too.

Check out this footage for Killzone 2. I've got to wonder if that's a pre-rendered demo or real-time. If it is real-time . . . wow. Update! Evidently it is pre-rendered. Still, if the actual game can come close to matching that footage . . .

Xbox 360 Backwards Compatible . . . Kinda -- 9:26 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Microsoft has revealed that the Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible, but only with "top selling" Xbox games. It will be interesting to see how many titles are supported and how good the support is. Why do I have this feeling that Halo will be one of those titles :) Thanks Slashdot.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Announced -- 8:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id and Splash Damage have announced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, a squad-based multiplayer game using the DOOM3 engine set in the Quake 2 world. Precious few other details are known right now. Blue managed to get a whopping huge screenshot that you can gawk at.

Gonna See Ep III! -- 12:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just ordered tickets for my wife and me to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on Friday in Green Bay. It's nice that I don't have to wait in any lines. I printed out my tickets so I just have to waltz up to the ticket-taker. After that we'll decide if we can bring my two older boys to see it too.

The Master comments: My current plan is for a Friday viewing as well, but in Appleton. Hopefully this will go through without a hitch. I expect a second viewing sometime later next week as well. We'll see.

Past Two Days' News

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