PC gaming

LOS ANGELES--This is largely a rhetorical question, as Apple is not fond of making appearances at trade shows, including CES and Computex. In fact, Apple dropped out of the one trade show it regularly participated in, the Macworld Expo, a couple of years ago. Additionally, this year has an additional wrinkle, as Apple is hosting its own WWDC conference the very same week as E3.

Yet, the question is not as ridiculous as it seems. One area of interactive entertainment that has experienced tremendous year-over-year growth recently is the mobile games segment currently dominated by iOS and the triple-play of … Read more

Looking back at previous coverage of the annual Electronic Entertainment Exposition, I found several photo galleries of images cobbled together from as far back as 1999.

For the past few years I've largely left the photographic duties to our able staff photographers, who have done an excellent job of chronicling the show, but I thought it might be fun to round up some of the slideshows of personal pics that we've run previously.

With the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo happening simultaneously with the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference this year, those in the habit of making technology-announcement predictions have a big week ahead of them. We've put our collective heads together to make some forecasts, and you're welcome to play along at home and score us on how we do.

To be fair, many of these have been so reliably leaked or telegraphed that they're virtually sure bets. Others seem likely based on corroborating clues we've seen or historical precedent. We've also thrown in a final list of E3 … Read more

Electronic Arts is doubling down on the digital-gaming space with the launch of a new direct-to-consumer platform, called Origin.

Launching later today, Origin will allow gamers to purchase and download over 150 games directly to their PCs. So far, the content on the site is limited to games from EA "and its partners," the company said in a statement today. In the coming months, EA says that it will offer more games, including the highly anticipated Battlefield 3, FIFA 12, Madden NFL 12, and Mass Effect 3.

"Origin is a game service with two fundamental features," … Read more

We've been cautiously optimistic about online streaming game service OnLive since it launched about a year ago. For the uninitiated, it's essentially cloud-based PC gaming that originally allowed nearly any laptop or desktop to play high-end PC games by offloading the CPU- and GPU-intensive tasks of actually running the game software to a remote render farm, then beaming the gameplay back to you as a streaming video.

Later, the company added a MicroConsole--a small box that connects to a TV via HDMI and acts as a streaming dongle for the games, which are played with a wireless controller … Read more

Even though it's supposedly an industry-only trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo is an event of epic proportions for video game aficionados, as evidenced by the legions of fans who follow the show's daily announcements online, through blogs, news outlets, and (a more recent development) video feeds.

But despite its decade-plus place in the public consciousness (I've been attending since 1999), the E3 show has been to the brink of extinction more than once, and while it has pulled off a remarkable recovery over the past couple of years, there's still a chance history may repeat itself.

In brief, what happened was the trade show equivalent of a boom and bust cycle. Throughout the 2000s, game companies competed to outdo each other, with excessive budgets and outlandish displays, creating literal mini cities inside the Los Angeles Convention Center that easily trumped anything seen at the larger Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place in Las Vegas every January.

The trend peaked in 2006, after which the participants collectively realized that entirely too much money was being spent on the show, which had long since stopped being a place for retail buyers to make deals with publishers, and had become essentially a weeklong press conference. Simply put, the week's worth of media hits was judged to be simply not worth the investment.

At the time, the Entertainment Software Association, a trade organization that runs the event, agreed to retrench, scaling down the 2007 version into what then-Entertainment Software Association President Douglas Lowenstein called a "more personal, efficient, and focused" show. E3 went from 60,000 attendees the previous year to about 4,000, and from 400 exhibiting companies to fewer than 40. E3 2008 was a similarly small affair, returning to the Los Angeles Convention Center, but keeping the small, low-cost format.… Read more

E3 is finished, wacky motion controllers and all, but the summer is just starting. In a few months, the holiday season will begin--and with it, companies will release an avalanche of games. While E3 presents a heck of a lot of glitz, promises, and hype, a handful of games always manage to emerge that excite us and give us hope for the gaming year ahead.

Could we have done with a lot fewer sequels? Most definitely. Do we wish Microsoft and Sony hadn't spent so much time hawking motion technology at the show? Undoubtedly. But we still found ourselves … Read more

Nothing makes an E3 show stand out like the collection of costumed characters, full-size monster sculptures, and movielike props that fill the halls, booths, and even the lobbies of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

It's closer at times to a comic book convention than an industry-only trade show, and a pretty good barometer of how the companies involved feel about the overall health of the expo (a frequent topic on conversation over the past few years).

If this last look at E3 2010 has you nostalgic for some of my hands-on hardware testing, trend-spotting, and photo galleries from earlier this week, click past the break for a handy roundup of all my E3 coverage from this year.

… Read more

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo typically concentrates on the games major publishers hope consumers will either purchase or put on their holiday wish lists in the coming year. Though there's always a certain amount of hardware, in the form of controllers, accessories, and PCs, for the most part, this a show about software, not hardware.

The exception is when a new game console is launching, and over the many years I've attended the show, I've seen the launches of the Sega Dreamcast; Sony's PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PSP; Nintendo's GameCube, Wii, and DS; and Microsot's Xbox and Xbox 360. That said, 2010 is the first year without a major living room console launch where I've seen almost all the attention focused firmly on hardware rather than software.

What made this year unique was the presence of both the Microsoft Kinect platform and the PlayStation Move, as well as Nintendo's handheld 3DS console. We'd all seen the Kinect (then called Natal) and Move before, but this was the official holiday season kickoff for both, with finalized names, details, and release dates.

Both motion control systems have their strengths and weaknesses, but I thought that Kinect especially had promise for home entertainment control, and the PlayStation Move provided the kind of precision and accuracy that core gamers would most appreciate.

The 3DS, at risk of being written off as a novelty in the era of me-too 3D, was a surprising success (at least in the small doses it was offered up to attendees), with eyeglass-free 3D that actually seems to work. Though that's only a tiny personal screen for now, it makes those expensive, cumbersome active shutter 3D systems feel like a much tougher sell.

If the technology behind the 3DS holds up, it's really only a matter of time and scale before consumers expect all forms of 3D to not require glasses.

These new hardware devices were impressive in person, but they're all still a tough sell; console add-ons have traditionally not succeeded (from the Sega 32X to the Xbox HD-DVD drive), and Nintendo fans may have upgrade fatigue after the DS, DS Lite, DSi, and DSi XL.

The second major reason this year's E3 felt like it was all about hardware, was that the software largely failed to impress. This left the field wide open for the Kinect, Move, and 3DS to steal the show.

I've already detailed the overreliance on sequels and spin-offs, many on a rapidly accelerated production cycle to feed the need for annual product installments. But, there was a handful of games in development seen either on the show floor or behind closed doors that made my must-play list (and yes, most of them are sequels). In no particular order, they are:… Read more