~Report from the E3 Show. Report obtained off the internet and written by Brian. (roddy@morpheus.xo.com) Extracted from the SEGA newsgroup so all the info concerned is to do with the SEGA SATURN. Well, I'm back from E3 and my head hurts. Overall the conference was a lot of fun. I played literally a dozen VF rip-offs. Lots of derivative junk filled the place. Sega showed a ton of things and I played them all. The only thing about VF3 was a video (the one the screenshots are from and that's been shown elsewhere). I'll go down the list of games. ~Nights I, like everyone else, want this game. The controller works really well and feels good in the hands. The analog pad is like a ball with a notch for your thumb. The left and right shift buttons are underneath the controller and feel like two triggers. Overall it feels very comfortable. Both the male and female character were available. You start in the "level of consciousness" which is the outdoorsy area you've seen in screen shots. You run around on the ground and the controller moves you in the x and z directions. When you see Nights you can jump into him and you become him. You can then fly around. The controller then handles the x and y direction, with the z direction on a track. The movement is very smooth. You can fly through hoops and appear to get bonuses for going through a series of them consecutively. There's a special type of hoop that gives you a very long cloth-like trail that twists as you fly. by flying around in a circle and making a loop with the trail you get a bonus. If you smash into the ground while flying, you end up having tumbling down the hill for a moment till nights recovers and jumps back into the air. Looks great. There's also a train you can get on (clockwork night style) and it travels all around. By flying through enough consecutive hoops and collecting the gems in the air you can enter this weird translucent diamond to move to the next stage. There are a bunch of stages in each level, (ala bug), but it loads during the bonus screen so you don't notice it. The level of dreams which has the large dragon like creatures is really psychedelic and pretty fun. Overall it looks great. The levels were sparse of enemies (my panzer dragoon-esque healthometer never really went down) and the camera occassionally went into the landscape, but it could easily make it out in America soon. ~Sonic Extreme The video looked neat. The biggest thing was how the whole world seemed to rotate around sonic at at least 30fps. The only playable "level" was a giant square with a spiral of rings in the middle. Sonic runs around and jumps in the usual way. The graphics looked neat but obviously the game is just starting development. ~Virtua Cop 2 The level with the car chase was playable and very fun. Overall it seems like a minor upgrade from the original (though they say it's only 40% done, so who knows). ~Three Dirty Dwarves A side scrolling Final Fight style game with cartoon graphics. The controller attached to the machine was screwed up so I didn't get to play it. ~Gun Griffon All the text seems to have been converted. I found the control a bit odd, but the graphics were great. A finished jewel case sat next to it. ~Legend of Oasis This game looks awesome. It appears to run in high res mode and the art is beautiful. There were lots of villagers around to talk with. One character in the game asked me "What's the name on the vase", so it appears there are lots of puzzles to solve. In the piece I played all the dialog was in English, so it can't be too far from release. ~F1 Nice control, some popup, average game. ~Major Damage Prerendered side scroller that supports two characters at a time. Unimpressive. ~VF Kids Great eye candy, but it's pretty dumb. It's not much more than VF2 saturn with different character design. They claimed new moves that I didn't see, so who knows. The character selection screen had tiny cartoons of the characters and gave you an option of "Normal" or "Kids" style play. The only difference I noticed was that "Kids" made it easier to execute some moves (like wolf's drop sweep). ~Dark Savior Claims to be "the first fully polygon based RPG". Looks as good as the screen shots, but as to polygons, the characters seem to be prerendered sprites that move in the eight directions. ~Destruction Derby The graphics look a little blocky (and the exhaust is opaque), but the game runs very smoothly and plays just like the PSX. ~Working Designs They were the only external developer with a booth inside the Sega section. Shining Wisdom and Rayearth were there and seemed solid. ~Mr. Bones (or something like this) This game surprised me. It was one of the best things I saw. It looks 3-D platformer with Resident Evil style controls. As you get damaged, parts of you body fall off. At one point I was just a skull sitting on a spine bouncing around like a pogo stick. There was neat lighting effects and neatest of all were these two rapidly moving monster shadows on the wall that attacked you when you got close. It looked right out of a cartoon. There was also a giant chained t-rex that looked and moved really beautifully. ~Elsewhere were ~-------------- ~Scorcher and Amok Amok was demoing on the saturn. You control this spider-like robot over rocky terrain and shoot things. The land is surrounded by "fog" so it draws in like offworld interceptor. The neatest part of the game was the little people scurrying around attacking you and fleeing. I played Scorcher on the PC, and it was a great racer. Tomb raider seemed further along, though the PC version looked a lot better than the saturn (maybe because they had a 5000 dollar 3D accelerated pentium running it on a high res monitor). The female character could go swimming and leap out of the pool. It played like 3-D Prince of Persia. The Scavenger folks were very friendly and seemed to love their work. Their other games like Into the Shadows and Tarantula were incredibly cool games. I hope they port them soon. ~Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain Played it on the PSX, though they said the Saturn was very similar. It's an over head view on polygonal looking characters. You can wander out side or enter buildings to explore further. The main character can take five forms: wolf, vampire, bat, human and something else. As a vampire, you wield a huge sword. When you hit a monster, it gets stunned. You can then do a move which causes you to lean back as a stream of blood flies out of the monsters head into your mouth. As a human, people don't notice you so you can wander freely. There were a lot of cool spells as well. One of them causes your opponents skin to fly off in a particle spiral of red. The particle based stuff looked very neat. I talked to one of the developers for a while (great guy), and he said they are now targeting October though they won't release it till they're satisfied with it. ~Area 51 At the Williams booth they had a 20% "work in progress" with no real fanfare, but there was a Stunner coming out of the wall, so I assume it's a Saturn. I like this game at the arcade and the play seemed the same. Unfortunately, the background video was blocky. ~Earthworm Jim 2 and Skeleton Warriors Both of these were nice prerendered (or drawn) side-scrolling platformers. SW had a lot of explosions when you killed things(?!?). EWJ was impressive in the number of background layers. Both of these showed a finished box. ~Power Slave (or something like this from Time Warner) This is a doom clone where the player is a mage that shoots things from his hands. The one interesting thing was the lighting effects. Fireballs added a colored glow to the walls as they travel along. ~Pacific Theatre of Operations 2 and Aerobiz Koei had a nice booth but all of the games were complicated and completely in Japanese so I have no idea how these two titles are. ~Heart of Darkness The prerendered stuff was brilliant. The actual play was like prince of persia. I saw the game on low res mode on the PC, but everything looked good because of anti-aliasing. ~Werewolf Not much completed on this. The only selectable character was a werewolf (there appears to be 7-8 characters). You then wander around a forest from a 3/4 perspective. You can jump and swipe, but nothing in the environment moved. ~Contra 96 Two players game with a 3/4 perspective. Reminded me of Total Carnage with a more serious theme. ~In non-saturn things Wipeout XL (or Wipeout 2) was the best PSX game I saw. Lots of great additions, including exhaust from the ship, moving tracks, more ships, etc. Die Hard Trilogy came in a surprisingly close second. I'm hoping for both of these asap.