E3 Awards...?

[SonicMarmalade]

Although I'm sure there is a place for your consistently amusing <posing> on this forum, this thread is not it. The vast majority of the people in here are taking the time to type up considered responses which help move the issue forward, please have the courtesy to do the same - Gari

[Garibaldi Biscuit]

Indeed, I understand the opinion of not basing a game on fractured snippets and glitzy demo reels but, as Chief said, E3 is simply not a good environment to judge playable builds. The vast majority of the games seen there are, by definition, incomplete, and as such the view that actually laying our hands on one can tell us more than watching an informative video which covers all the bases is entirely subjective - the argument against judging footage which could not live up to the final product also applies equally to playable games, most of which are made playable especially for E3. How could they possibily present a realistic side being 40% through development and allowing journalists to play a five minute snippet of carefully chosen levels on a blaring exhibition floor which causes many reporters to say "well, it may very well have had great atmosphere, but I couldn't tell due to the noise"?

Of course there's hype and of course there's bull****, it's the nature of the industry, any industry, but to scoff at an utterly impressive and promising video over a playable build which could just as easily let you down when you finally get it home seems foolish, IMO.

As Chief pointed out so well, Valve were candid, they laid their cards on the table and didn't try to glitz things up using smoke and mirrors, they said precisely 'this is what you'll be playing', something that came back to bite Kojima on the ass ( nice example, btw ) with his focussing entirely on the tanker section of MGS2, he thought people would like the suprise inclusion of Raiden - they didn't, how much do you think he would liked to have been able to avoid that mistake, regardless of how successful MGS2 has been anyway?

I said it before and I'll keep saying it to anyone who'll listen, those Half-Life2 vids put E3 into an entirely new light for me, I no longer saw it as an event after which all you did was watch grainy video footage of games which had been bandaged together so they could appear in a playable form, or movies consisting entirely of cutscenes and no gameplay whatsoever, but rather a place that can provide appetizers which you chew over and over again while going 'roll on September' with a smile on your face.