E3 2006 PC gaming

If we took anything away from E3 on the PC side of things, it's that we're in a period of massive transition. From Vista to physics to DirectX 10, there's a lot to be excited about. As always with new tech, it might take a little while for these and other new developments to catch on, but for nearly everything we saw this year, it's only a matter o ... Read more
Nintendo unquestionably stole the show at E3, with some of the hardest hype as well as the longest lines the show has seen in years. Visitors endured hours of waiting in line just to try out the Wii. Big N's little console might not have the best graphics in the world, but the great new control scheme and the sheer number of exclusive titles really ... Read more
Eidos is a publishing house revitalized. Tomb Raider: Legend is the comeback story of the year, and the company's E3 titles look to continue the momentum. Reservoir Dogs is a title that's very reminiscent of one of last year's most pleasant surprises: Rockstar Games' The Warriors. It's based on a rather old license--almost 15 years, at this point- ... Read more
Activision secured its reputation with comic book fans by bringing everyone's favorite mutants to life in the action RPG titles X-Men Legends and X-Men Legends 2. If a dozen or so superheroes was good, the thinking goes, then 50-plus comic book characters must be great--and the upcoming Marvel: Ultimate Alliance brings together a huge roster of her ... Read more
If there's any publisher that's living in the future, it's Ubisoft. While a couple of its titles will be available on the PS2 and Xbox, every one of the games on display in the company's booth are being developed, first and foremost, for the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, and the Wii. Assassin's Creed was probably the best game available in the Ubis ... Read more
Logitech has introduced two new steering wheel peripherals: the high-end G25 Racing Wheel for PC and PS2, and the DriveFX Axial Feedback Wheel for Xbox 360. The G25 is an elaborate peripheral that consists of three sections: the wheel itself, a six-speed gearshift, and a weighted foot pedal base that sports an accelerator, a brake, and a clutch. Th ... Read more
One of the coolest things we saw at E3 this year wasn't even a game. At the Sony Online Entertainment booth, we saw an app called Comic Book Creator, which SOE has licensed for use with Everquest II and Planetside. Created by Planetwide Games, the program lets you take screenshots in games such as EQII and import them into the Comic Book Creator pr ... Read more
We met with Microsoft today and learned a lot about Vista, DirectX 10, its plans for physics, and more. First, Microsoft reiterated its plans to treat Windows gaming as a true platform. As outlined during its Tuesday press conference, Microsoft has shaken up its internal organization and integrated the Windows gaming group with the Xbox gaming grou ... Read more
Online game company NCsoft is working on four new games that can be had without even reaching for your wallet. Dungeon Runners, Exteel, Soccer Fury, and Star Smash will be completely free for anyone who wants to play them. Rather than charge for the game itself--or even for subscription time--NCsoft will make its money by charging for additional co ... Read more
At first glance, the two biggest console titles at EA's booth seem to be par for the course for a company that's often derided for unoriginality. One could argue that Army of Two is just another of the countless futuristic war shooters--as an aside, where's my Revolutionary War FPS?--while Superman is yet another licensed game set to suck alongside ... Read more
Electronic Arts is hard at work at removing its label as the kings of licenses. Just last week, it jettisoned the James Bond franchise, and its PC lineup at this year's show highlighted many new and long-standing original franchises. The most creative title of the bunch was Spore, the brainchild of The Sims creator Will Wright. Consider Spore as T ... Read more
Logitech has extended its gaming mouse and keyboard lines with two new entry-level products. The G3 Laser Mouse includes the same 2,000dpi laser engine as the Logitech's popular G7 and G5 models, but it utilizes an ambidextrous design that will work equally well for left- and right-handed gamers. The G11 gaming keyboard, meanwhile, is identical to ... Read more
Gamers hold certain legendary titles in high regard, even if they appear terribly dated to modern audiences. Next to Goldeneye for the N64, the game most often mentioned in this context is the PC game System Shock 2, which was a first-person shooter with a deep plot and stealth, adventure, and RPG elements. Behind closed doors, 2K Games showed off ... Read more
I had an opportunity to get a closed-door look at two of 2K Games' next-gen heavy hitters, The Darkness and BioShock. We won't see either game until 2007 at the earliest, but both were complete enough to be shown running in playable, real-time form on an Xbox 360. The Darkness is a genre-bending action shooter with some heavy horror elements: name ... Read more
We just got out of our meeting with Ageia, our first with the PhysX chip vendor, and we learned quite a lot. First, despite rumors that Microsoft was shipping a Direct Physics extension to its forthcoming DirectX 10, Ageia told us that although it would be great for game physics development in general if Microsoft did include such a feature, Redmon ... Read more
Bethesda Softworks may be hush-hush about Fallout 3 this year, but the company still has a ton of things to say about its upcoming titles, Star Trek Legacy and Pirates of the Carribean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow. TV and movie tie-ins tend to be mediocre at best, but these two games just might earn the coveted title of Surprisingly Good Licensed Ga ... Read more
Last year's Quake IV failed to impress on either the PC or the Xbox 360, but it's too soon to count the classic FPS series out. Returning to the multiplayer action that made Quake II and Quake III so popular, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars could become the online FPS of choice for a new generation of gamers. At first glance, Quake Wars looks awfully ... Read more
Now that Dell's purchase of Alienware is final, we asked both companies what the sale means to their operations. The story is that there is no story. Both vendors will continue as separate entities, with their own product development, marketing, and sales forces. A Dell marketing rep perhaps summed it up best when he said, "AMD's CPUs have some nic ... Read more
Alienware announced the first iteration of its Area-51 5400 all-in-one desktop at CES this past year. That model (and a similar product from WinBook) never hit the market. But here at the E3 show, Alienware is showing off an updated 5400, now with a 19-inch screen compared to the original version's 17-inch model. Alienware says the new 5400 will go ... Read more
Bethesda Softworks warned us ahead of time that it wouldn't have any Fallout 3 information at E3...but the company lied! Look! A Fallout 3 poster! OK, it's not much, but it's a nifty new poster with the Fallout Boy looking all cheery in a vast wasteland. BethSoft is still being extremely coy with this game, focusing mostly on its upcoming Pirates ... Read more
Intel announced its new Core 2 Duo chips on Monday for both notebooks and laptops, but it's worth mentioning here because they may be the chips that restore Intel to gaming dominance. Without running them through un-Intel-supervised benchmarking, it's too early to tell, but back in March, enthusiast site AnandTech was lucky enough to run some Intel ... Read more
As in years past, Midway has a side room located outside of the main halls here at E3. Unreal Tournament 2007 isn't on display in public--unless you count the giant video screen outside--but we caught a glimpse of two other promising PC titles: Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar and Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War. LOTR Online is, of ... Read more
Alienware announced two new SLI laptop designs, both of which feature dual Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX graphics chips. The 17-inch Aurora m9700 and the 19-inch Aurora mALX each come with two GPUs, as well as AMD Turion 64 processors and Airgo MIMO wireless. The m9700 is significant because no other vendor has built an SLI notebook with a 17-inch scr ... Read more
At the same meeting that it showed off its new XPS desktop, Dell also put on display four concept paint jobs it's considering for a new XPS notebook. The four designs, True Fire, Acid Green, Blue Skulls, and Alien Invasion, will be on display at Dell's Web site, and interesed buyers will be able to vote on their favorite. Dell presumably will be us ... Read more
We actually saw this new XPS desktop from Dell way back at CES in a closed-door meeting. We were impressed then, and we remain impressed today. Dell won't divulge details about the config or the price, and it won't even open up the case entirely, but based purely on aesthetics, we think Dell might finally be starting to "get" what it takes to make ... Read more
Building on its early-mover advantage, Microsoft today unveiled plans for the second half of 2006 and beyond. Unlike rivals Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft has no new console to unveil this year at E3, so the buzz was muted, and the presentation lacked the lead-story punch of the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii. Instead, Microsoft used a highl ... Read more
We were lucky enough to get our hands on a physics accelerator card before the show, thanks to Ageia, the inventor of the PhysX chip. The chip goes on sale for roughly $300 on Monday, May 9, in cards from partners Asus and BFG. Ageia sent us the Asus card, along with a demo of a game called CellFactor. This game was developed specifically to show o ... Read more
Amid all the E3 talk we expect next week about physics acceleration, Quad SLI graphics, Intel's new Conroe chips, and next-gen games, the overarching story for PC gaming at E3 is Windows Vista, or the lack thereof. It's not so much the new OS's aero glass effects we're waiting for, but DirectX 10, the new multimedia instruction set that will only c ... Read more