Sleuthing Out the Next Big Thing

As you already know by now, this year's E3 was bereft of big surprises. In fact, the biggest surprise was what didn't happen at the show - namely, a price drop on one or more of the next generation console systems. Stick around though - it's bound to happen sometime this year (I'm standing by my prediction of a US$99 PlayStation by Christmas).

In the PC market, 3Dfx seems to have won the accelerator war, at least with regard to being the preferred demo platform. Games running on 3Dfx hardware were omnipresent at this show. While it's comforting to see that the PC market finally seems to have settled on a 3-D hardware platform, one couldn't help but notice a certain visual homogeneity among the 3Dfx titles - let's hope that standardization doesn't mean a end to graphic diversity on the PC.

There wasn't a lot of original thinking on display at this year's show. It seems that we've hit a plateau in game development, with most of the dollars going into already proven genres. This will begin to change next year. The raw horsepower of the Pentium II, combined with the services of next generation 3-D accelerator cards, will allow designers to spend a lot more processing cycles on computer AI, which in turn will result in some radical new game concepts.

It's ironic, but by the time the multiplayer gaming services take off, computer AI may have advanced to the point that the experience of playing a human opponent is essentially the same as playing against a silicon chip.

My favorite games from the show? Prey, Daikatana, and Quake II are all obviously on the list, but I also came across a couple of relative unknowns that really captured my attention. The first is Assault, an absolutely beautiful online-only game from (surprise) Trilobyte, creator of The 7th Guest. Assault has the concept, look, and feel to be one of the best multiplayer games released this year.

My other pick is Westwood Studio's Blade Runner, a difficult to describe but wondrous to behold game based on the film of the same name. Besides a thoroughly original gameplay concept, Blade Runner features the most convincing computer-generated characters yet created and displays an aesthetic consistency never before seen in a computer game. Look for more on both of these titles on GameSpot in the not too distant future.