Surfergeeks

Okay, I didn’t get to go to E3 this year. This isn’t different than any past year. Neither will it be different than any future year. That knowledge still does nothing to diminish my desire to go to E3. For those that don’t game, E3 is THE video-game expo of the year. It is the place where all the developers roll-out their plans for the next year (or two) and where all us geeks drool over the games.

So, since I’m not part of the elite industry (oh, did I mention that E3 is for industry/media types only) and have no prospects of becoming part of said industry, I must get all my information from the media/industry. Grrr.

So, what was big this year? Only one thing as far as I’m concerned: Blizzard Software did NOT announce Starcraft 2! This is HUGE! It really, really concerns me for a couple reasons: 1) No Starcraft 2. 2) This makes the distinct possibility that SC2 will NEVER be released very real. Here is my thinking behind this: All Blizzard announced/talked about was World of Warcraft and Starcraft: Ghost. Ghost isn’t even planned for release until the second half of 2006, which means that there are no new sources of income for Blizzard except for the continued growth of WoW. This sucks. If they run into any more delays there’s a very real chance that Ghost will get cancelled and Blizzard will effectively shut down, except for a skeleton staff maintaining the WoW servers. Again, this sucks.

Oh yeah, there was also a couple other little things such as the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3. Both look incredible. I love the look of both of them (except for the PS3 controller reminds of the Bat-a-rang from the 1960′s Batman). We haven’t seen any true playability from the PS3 only some video “built to spec”. The playable stuff on the 360 apparently wasn’t actually running on the 360 but instead was running on development boxes – Apple G5 computers – and was only running at 30% speed. Still, with a November launch for the 360 I think that Microsoft is going to get a HUGE jump on Sony (who, even if they do a simultaneous launch in North America and Japan, still won’t be releasing it here until April of ’06 – something unlikely to happen – look for more of a September launch in NA), which could be enough of a head start to give this round of the console wars to the Beast from Redmond!

But still, the most important thing to take away from E3 – NO STARCRAFT 2!!!!!! GAAAHHHHHH!!!!