It’s the biggest show of the year, where Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo deliver keynote presentations, and, even though it’s easy to get caught up in Project Natal and the PSP Go, plenty of exciting PC news has emerged from E3.

Here, we’ve sifted through the dodgy RTS titles and lazy console ports to pick out the most important PC gaming stories to emerge from the three-day conference, so take a look at our top stories and let us know what you think.

The Return of Monkey Island – it’s been off the radar since “Escape From…” was released at the turn of the Millennium, but Tales of Monkey Island has been announced as a five-part episodic release in a similar vein to the last couple of Sam & Max titles.

Original Monkey Island impresario Ron Gilbert was only involved in the initial conceptual stages, but the project is headed up by Dave Grossman, who helped write and program the first two titles, and several other key team members – including composer Michael Land – are working on the project. And, unlike several ‘release TBA’ games from the conference, the first episode is set to be released on 7 July.

Oh, and did we mention that The Secret of Monkey Island is also being re-released, with revamped graphics, re-recorded music and new voice-overs? Superb.

Crysis 2 announced – the original is still one of the most demanding titles that a PC can face, with the majority of machines in the PC Pro Labs unable to run the game on its highest settings.

Crysis 2 looks to be just as technically challenging. It’s the first game to use the CryEngine 3, which Crytek has promised will work with both a broader range of PC hardware as well as PS3 and Xbox 360. As of yet, there’s no release date so, by the time it eventually emerges, the ATI 6000-series – or whatever the latest GPU is then – might be able to cope.

Mass Effect 2 – the first Mass Effect was a revelation: fantastic sci-fi storytelling mixed with action-packed combat and production levels that put plenty of movies to shame.

The sequel promises all this and more, with a world crammed with more detail and better graphics: Alan Shepard had 20 cover animations in the first game, we’re now assured he has around 200. Overkill? Perhaps. We’ll have to wait until spring 2010, though, for this hugely anticipated sequel.

Indie Innovation – Indiecade is a roving organisation that celebrates independent development, and its booth at E3 is ‘the de facto lounge for indie developers’ according to Celia Pearce, Indiecade’s E3 Festival Chair. The last two years’ E3 finalists have included Braid, And Yet It Moves, Machinarium and Everyday Shooter, so there’s plenty for this year’s contenders to live up to.

They might have a good chance of that, too: Blueberry Garden has already won an award at 2009’s Independent Games Festival and indie star And Yet It Moves is now being ported to the Nintendo Wii. The 2009 winners are announced in October, so keep an eye out.

Aliens vs Predator – the last PC AvP game was 2002’s woeful Primal Hunt. Sega’s reboot of the franchise, though, has fans excited – not least because it’s being developed by Rebellion, the studio behind the classic 1999 release of the same name. Once again, spring 2010 is listed as the release date, so you’ve got some time to stock up on  fresh underwear before taking to those dark corridors once again.

Left 4 Dead 2 – making its unexpected debut at E3 was Left 4 Dead 2, the sequel to Valve’s tense, action-packed and zombie-fuelled shooter. Gabe Newell’s groundbreaking studio has promised more sophistication this time around, including AI that learns your strengths and weakness, alongside new classes and weapons.

However, keen players of the original have lambasted Valve for neglecting the original title in favour of its sequel, even calling for a boycott of the game. Nevertheless, it’s looking superb – wade into the zombie apocalypse from 17 November.

Star Wars: The Old Republic – Star Wars games have a chequered history: for every TIE Fighter there’s a Rebel Assault 2. Luckily, The Old Republic is a sequel to the two Knights of the Old Republic titles, developed by Bioware (of Mass Effect, Neverwinter Knights and Baulders’ Gate fame) and taking place 3,700 years before the movies.

While previous games have been single player, this new title is an MMORPG, with your character siding with either the Galactic Republic or Sith Empire. So, just to recap, it’s an MMO set in the Star Wars universe and developed by masters of the RPG art. A World of Warcraft beater? It’s a big ask but, surely, no other franchise has as much potential as this. It’s just a shame that no firm release date has been confirmed.

Franchise Players – While plenty of original titles were announced at the expo, plenty of established franchises have seen new titles introduced, too. Just Cause 2 promises bigger guns, better bad guys and more action movie madness, and DIRT 2 will include a better world tour mode and new stadium events.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the sequel to Call of Duty 4 and details are scarce at the moment: we know that at least some of the game is set in Russia, Afghanistan and Brazil. Two more highly-anticipated sequels, Supreme Commander 2 and the online-only Final Fantasy XIV, are both slated for release next year.

Brink – Splash Damage began life as mod-makers in 2001, making highly-popular mods for Quake 3 and custom maps for LAN parties and TV shows. Its map-making prowess was recognised by id Software, who tasked it with creating successful multiplayer titles Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Brink is Splash Damage’s first original IP and first title since partnering with Fallout 3 publisher Bethesda. Little is known about the new FPS, which has been described by Bethesda MD Sean Brennan as being a ‘killer app’, a ‘genre breaker’ and ‘along the same lines as Fallout 3’ for quality and scope. Potentially revolutionary.

Delay of OnLive in Europe – OnLive made a huge, incredulous splash when its creators announced a system for streaming any game to a PC or Mac, no matter what its specification. In theory, it could mean Crysis on a nettop, and it’s been backed by Warner Bros and other big games – Tom Clancy’s HAWX, Race Driver GRID and Crysis Warhead are already listed by OnLive’s site.

However, for no news to emerge during E3 seems fishy – and has done little to dissipate the gaming community’s assumption that OnLive is far, far too good to be true. It’ll debut in America before the end of the year but there’s no European release data yet, so the days of upgrading graphics cards might not be quite so numbered after all.

So, those are our ten top stories to have emerged from three frantic days of launches, press conferences and schmoozing – but what do you think? Which games are you looking forward to and which do you reckon will crash and burn? Let us know your E3 thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: Read the full review of the Asus W90.

Asus might be most famous for its low-cost netbooks, but its latest multimedia powerhouse is the kind of laptop that’ll give your average desktop PC an inferiority complex.

Let me whet your appetite with some tasty morsels from the W90’s specifications – for starters there’s a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 garnished with 6GB of RAM and two 320GB hard disks and, for the main course, not one but two ATI Mobility Radeon HD4870 graphics chipsets with 512MB memory apiece. If you’ve still not had your fill, there’s a tasty 18.4in Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 LED-backlist display for dessert. Asus also assure us that the DVD writer in our pre-production model will make way for a BluRay drive in production models.

And, in a refreshing departure from the gaming laptop norm, it doesn’t light up like a neon pound-shop Xmas tree every time you turn it on. Instead, the W90 finds itself finished in altogether more stylish, sombre tones. Brushed aluminium spans its giant-sized lid and its interior glimmers with gloss black and touch sensitive controls which light up with a subtle blue glow.

The 18.4in display is crisp and bright, and the full-sized keyboard below it is fantastically comfortable, too. As a desktop replacement, the W90 has much to recommend it, but as a laptop, well not so much. Indeed, unless your lap is the size of Manuel Uribe’s, the average person will want to keep the W90s 6.1kg bulk firmly desk-bound. Factor in the 1.34kg power brick and this is one laptop you don’t want to carry around. Ever.

The W90 more than makes up for its considerable bulk with world-class gaming performance, though. Crysis’ graphical splendour is enough to turn even the most able of gaming laptops into jibbering, flaccid wrecks, but not so the W90. With its two HD4870’s in Crossfire, the W90 careered through our most demanding Crysis benchmark with ease, managing 35 frames per second at 1,600 x 1,200 resolution and High detail. Cranking up the difficulty, we reran our benchmark at 1,920 x 1,080, and the W90 responded with an impressive 32 frames per second. Even upping the stakes with detail set to Very High only saw the average framerate drop to an almost playable 26 frames per second.

Asus suggested that the W90 will eventually retail just shy of the £2000 pound mark, but with this kind of performance wrapped up in such a gorgeous, understated figure, it almost begins to look like reasonably good value for money.

Ask any avid PC gamer and they’ll regale you with stories of the many hours spent getting their machine to work at all. Putting in a new graphics card sounds like a basic upgrade but can often deteriorate into a horrendous rigmarole of driver updates and seemingly random problems and crashes. And that’s a relatively simple upgrade.

I should know the pain of upgrading: I recently built a new PC from scratch. My old rig really wasn’t cut out for gaming any more – it ran on integrated graphics and had no PCI Express slot – so it was definitely time for a change.

Stuart Turton recently wrote that computers no longer have a soul, but I disagree. After installing the motherboard as well as everything else, I had to rip it all apart again and re-seat the CPU heatsink the correct way round; I was convinced that my PC had a soul, and also convinced that it was demonic and needed to be thrown through the nearest window, alongside the rest of the components.

When it was built – and I’d made sure that every header and connector on the motherboard was plugged into the right sockets – I sat back and prodded the power button. Against all odds, the little access light flickered and the fans chugged into life. It was true – I’d built my own computer. We put together many rigs in the PC Pro Labs, but those are different – they normally sit on specially-designed test beds and lack many of the mod-cons that feature in the average home PC.

This was different. My very own PC, assembled from the ground up. Sure, neither the hard disk or the optical drive were actually secured into the chassis – instead, they had been crammed into the respective bays and left to lean on struts of metal – but it didn’t matter. Neither did it matter when I realised that my fan, which was purchased because it had automatic control, needed to run at full pelt to keep the CPU cooled. I simply turned up the speakers and zoned it out, marvelling at the stunning graphics that the new rig enabled me to see.

Hopefully, the point of this long and rambling rant is that computers – and gaming on computers – really shouldn’t be discounted. People claim that playing PC games is far more expensive than playing them on consoles – but I’m not so sure. A reasonable processor, graphics card and couple of gigabytes of RAM can be had for under £200 and will still let you play modern titles at decent levels of quality – and take any of your slightly older games and play them at the highest levels of graphical excellence, as they were originally intended. Up your budget to £300 – which is how much the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost until recently, don’t forget – and your upgrade will have you playing at with many of the settings ramped up to the max, even in the newest games.

There’s a huge amount of satisfaction when it comes to upgrading or building a machine. I recently spent a morning in the office ripping apart an old Shuttle machine and rebuilding it for some Blu-ray testing – and, remarkably, it was pretty enjoyable. Granted, it wasn’t as fun when I realised that I’d got the wrong RAM and had to trek downstairs to get some more, but to see it burst into life at the end of the re-build made me feel like a proud father.

Building or upgrading a PC immediately guarantees that you’ll have more of an emotional connection to a machine than you would with a console. I have a PS3 and the set-up process consisted of no more than getting it out of the box, plugging it, and registering a new account. It’s a remarkable thing and has delivered many hours of gaming pleasure – but, as Stuart pointed out in regards to his current PC, it’s a mere machine. The same could be said of my PS2 and PSX; the only consoles that differ are my old Megadrive and Atari, and those are probably tainted with the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia more than anything else.

My computer is something different entirely. Turton may argue that now, with machines no more than incremental upgrades over the last expensive, must-have part, they offer little in the way of personality to compare to the past. Not true. I know the various grunts and groans from my hard disk, recognise the exact moment to turn my fan down if I want any silence at all, and can predict when I’ll come a cropper because I’ve been a bit greedy and turned a few settings up too high.

Also consider that new console games cost £40, whereas the latest PC releases are almost never this expensive. Grand Theft Auto 4 costs less than £25 including VAT on Amazon for PC – fifteen pounds cheaper than it did when released on PS3 and Xbox 360 earlier in the year. You’ll soon recoup your potentially higher investment as you work your way through the year’s top releases.

There’s also the overriding factor when it comes to PC gaming: some games are just better played on a desktop. David Bayon will argue against this, but first-person shooter games demand a mouse and keyboard. RTS titles are the same. Whack a decent graphics card in your PC, and almost all PC games will look better than their console equivalents, too. Invest in a gamepad or steering wheel and you’ve got a machine that will put any console in its place.

Consoles do have their charms: I love playing FIFA 09 on my PS3, and I’ll concede that plenty of games – such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band – are better played in front of the TV. There’s something different about PC gaming, though – from the whirring, juddering machine in the corner crafted by my own hands to the better graphics and sheer depth of software available – that means it’s my favourite format. And I don’t care how many people slag it off.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/12/10/in-defence-of-patching-crashing-and-tinkering/feed/ 17 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/06/18/why-pc-gaming-should-be-celebrated/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/06/18/why-pc-gaming-should-be-celebrated/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:09:46 +0000 Stuart Turton http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=1929

We’re an argumentative bunch at Pro. Finding two people who agree on anything, even the colour of the carpet, is something of a chore but put a new piece of hardware in front of us and it’s worth ducking for cover unless you’re a fan of vitriol showers. However, aside from the green issues (brilliantly covered in comrade Sparkes’ green gadgets feature this month), the one thing that’s brought us closest to laughably inept fisticuffs is the hideously expensive GeForce GTX 280.

Now, the pocket dynamo David Bayon holds it up as everything that’s wrong with PC gaming – an overpriced piece of silicon indicative of the rising technological barriers holding PC gaming back. His argument, best read on his blog, but paraphrased for your enjoyment here, is that times have changed, gaming’s changed and Nvidia can’t get away with this any more. He’s a socialist gamer, beating a flag and storming the pickets of niche gaming – demanding ease of use for all. Insert disc, play. No hassle.

Now, it’s not his fault he’s an idiot. He’s a lovable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. I love the GTX 280, though more in idea than execution. It exists for those who want it. It’s a niche, certainly, but it doesn’t make PC gaming niche. The problem is that if you play a game on a console, all those juicy graphical options are hidden away. You’re probably playing games on -what the PC would consider- medium settings. It still looks good, you can’t see the word medium, and you’re happy to get on and play.

The PC, however, gets a bad rap for laying those options bare. People want the very best, even though they’d be perfectly happy with medium settings if they didn’t know better. The truth is, it isn’t difficult to play games on a PC. Most games play at brilliant frame rates and look great if you’re just willing to turn a few settings down – but we don’t want to do that and then complain when it runs like a two legged dog trying to cross a trampoline.

At the end of the day, PCs are all about the technology inside. We care about the processor, RAM, graphics card. Consoles, hide this away, console owners don’t care about this stuff, don’t want to.

To my mind, this technology focus bolsters PC developers more than it hinders them, by giving them scope rather than bars for their ambition. And occasionally it allows them to produce something truly ground breaking such as Crysis – which is then somehow used to beat the PC scene over the head, when it should be at the forefront of the celebration.

If all we had were consoles, there’d be no Quake 2 or Crysis, because they were built to test the technology, to show what could be achieved in the next generation. You can’t do that on consoles, because the next generation is at best five years away. With the PC, for better or worse, it’ll be here tomorrow. I find that brilliant, and for that reason the GTX 280 brilliant – but I’d never buy one, I’d just turn the settings on my game down.

Today’s launch (and review) of Nvidia’s latest enthusiast cards staggered me. The GeForce GTX 280 is fast, blisteringly so; but it’s also mind-bendingly, incomprehensibly, ball-achingly expensive. It’s certainly not the first – every new launch seems to have such prices attached – and it won’t be the last. But £430 for a graphics card?

Let me set my stall out right from the outset: I once spent in excess of £300 on a Radeon 9800 Pro with a fancy blue cooler just to play Far Cry in all its glory. Being a student, I had no money and even less sense, but it just seemed like something I had to do – how else would I experience something so beautiful?

A launch like the GTX 280 should be like technological Viagra to me, then, shouldn’t it?

In a word, no. Times have changed; I’ve changed; gaming has changed. And it’s all down to the current generation of consoles. (Praise be to Sony. Amen.)

My gaming sessions go a little like this: I buy a game; put the disc in my Blu-ray drive (an added bonus); I press a button; I wait a few seconds; I enjoy high definition gaming of the highest quality on a 40in television from the comfort of my sofa. Cold beer optional.

Contrast this with the Labs: I install the game; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; install the latest graphics drivers; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; install the latest Crysis patch; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; fiddle with graphics settings; daydream about sofa and PS3; check no one can see me, then cry a little; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis.

Have a break; spend it breathing deeply and thinking of dolphins and flowers and swaying forests of calmness (on my big TV).

Get back to work; lower resolution to a level I last used in 1998 on my 15in CRT; lower settings to Medium, thus defeating the whole point of Crysis; daydream about cold beer; finally get Crysis running; realise Crysis at these settings looks like Far Cry; sob into hands; spend £430 or smash up £1,000 review PC.

Is it any wonder the PC games industry is in decline when a single graphics card can hit the market (to much fanfare and positive reviews) with a price higher than that of an entire PlayStation 3? And the fact that it exists at all means games get more and more demanding and your PC is left playing catch-up.

The only PC game I’ve bought in as long as I can remember is Football Manager. And I think it’s safe to say I don’t need to spend £430 on a graphics card to play that.

Essentially, it’s a screen for a projector, albeit one that wraps the image around you, immersing the eager gamer in a 180 degree world. The possibilities, surely, are endless: tramping through the lush jungles of Crysis will be even more immersive, and you really can be a Supreme Commander if the battlefield is stretched around you. World in Conflict, Unreal Tournament 3, Tabula Rasa: all will benefit.

Imagine, if you will, Football Manager: statistics as far as the eye can see, and the 2D match engine will surely look revolutionary when you’re surrounded by it.

The uses, then, are endless, and I’m sure that the adult film industry is already working on a way to exploit the new technology. The best thing about it, though, is the price. Surely a piece of kit like this will cost thousands? Maybe not – depending on funding being sought, the creator aims to sell the jDome for between $125 and $200. A totally immersive, semi-circular screen for little more than a couple of games? Count me in.