I heard several comments from the interviewee's that turn-based strategy is making a comeback and I think that is exciting to hear as I barely consider most RTS titles to be strategy titles. For those still on the RTS bandwagon, I think Demigod is on the right track of keeping the size but letting the player focus on a (much) reduced load of unit ordering. It was refreshing to see Chris Taylor not trying as hard as some of the others to advertise their current products. It would have been refreshing to see some more strategy-focused developers interviewed of course. Sid is on the right track with the more casual-focused Revolutions product but now that that has worked out I hope they reach for something more ambitious. It is unfortunate that most of the best strategy products in the last year have come from Eastern Europe. Not unfortunate for them of course, but I think a lot of big US developers are chasing old dinosaurs instead of risking with innovation.

I have two systems at home with almost identical software installed. Spore consistantly crashes at the end of the creature phase on the older system so there is likely a hardware issue there. That system has WinXP SP2, Athlon 3000+ (1.8GHz), 2 GB RAM, 256MB 8800 GT and plenty of hard drive space. It runs fine through the first two stages until it crashes at that transition to tribal stage. Performance, as the Gamespot reviewers noted, is not an issue at all.

To say that the 2006 E3 was bloated is just blatantly false or indicates that you guys never go into Kentia Hall. Sure the Big Guys in North and West Halls were blowing a lot of dough but Kentia, where most of the European and Korean titles of past were shown was almost empty except for a bar, which was never there that I remember in the previous six years. I get the impression you guys only follow US/Japanese published games (with maybe 2 exceptions, Ubisoft and NCSoft) and don't care if the big guys feel threatened by the other developers and want to squeeze them out of the picture. Imo, however, that is where the innovation is occurring and that is why the big guys felt threatened enough to tightly control the latest E3. You even admit that the control was so tight that you didn't even get to see half of the handful of games that were being shown. Just the titles you were told to look at. Sadly, your opinions become suspect in the end anyways since you were carefully invited and if you draw any negative conclusions about any of the products you saw or the show in general you can just as easily be carefully uninvited next year. Go ahead and say anything negative about E3 now, I dare you.

I made the last 7 E3's so I have seen the changes coming. Most of those years I was there as a member of the press. In April of 2005 I went to my local Gamestop store and asked the minimum wage people at the counter if there was anything they wanted me to check into for them. They said "No need, I think the whole store is going." This is in a relatively small town about 120 miles from LA and half these people didn't even look 18. Gamestop/E3 was letting the whole store attend. Sure enough that year E3 was a nightmare of overcrowding. Not that previous years were not but this was truly insane. This last year (2006) they made it much harder to get in (which was good) but it was still too crowded. They also had this huge flap over the NCSoft booth. In years past the Blizzard booth would steal the show. Now in the last two years the NCSoft booth was the favorite and all the other big players next to that booth were getting upset. They sent their employees over to the NCSoft booth with decible readers to see if the band (Mutaytor) would exceed the limit, then they would rat out to the E3 staff. E3 then fined NCSoft and the head guy from NCSoft there threatened to take their toys and have a rival con outide of E3 next year. Clearly things had gotten ugly and could not have gone on much longer. As far as Kentia being the place for all the small fish, this year the place was half empty and a bar was in the middle of the room. It looked aweful and there were not even 20% of the number of small fish there that there used to be in years past. I don't know if the price in Kentia (we call it the E3 ghetto) had gotten too high for the small guys or if there was another reason. The small fish I worry about the most these days, having been a writer for a relatively small site (max hits was around 600k daily) , is the independent media sources. More and more companies have been spending money flying out retail media, spending lavishly on them, to show them their products. These media sources (I won't point any fingers) cannot call themselves independent from the game producers since they take so much money from same producers. Then you see glowing previews of products that often are clearly in horrible shape because the "Media" members want to be invited back to the next junket. Do a search of what some popular sights gave Star Wars Galaxies when it came out to see a good example. News sites that don't accept bribes or advertising dollars are too difficult to control and don't get invited to game company-sponsored demos. If E3 moves to this format then you can kiss the small media fish goodbye. So in my eyes the new E3 format means less (small) games showing, and media channeled through a much smaller (and easier to control) pipeline. Sounds like a huge win/win for the biggest game companies and a similarly huge loss/loss for the gaming consumer. Sarcerok Senior Writer of the now defunct www.UnknownPlayer.com