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GC 2007 - Day 1

By: Jarno Kokko Aug 23, 2007

GC 2007 entrance hall

The first day of GC 2007 is now behind us, and here is a small recap of some of the major presentations. The highlights of day one were undoubtedly Age of Conan, Crysis and other playable versions of upcoming games. My feet are already killing me, but there's much more to see for the next two days.

EA Press Conference

The show kicked off with the EA press conference. Sadly it was very light on PC-related content. Instead, we got some general comments from the head of EA Germany, followed by demonstrations of Skate, Fifa 08 and Rock Band. Oh, and there was a quick video of Crysis that I almost completely missed while trying to squeeze to a better spot for taking photos.

EA press conference opened with Skate on the Xbox 360.	The Skate presentation emphasized on the completely original control system, using the analog sticks to pull off complex tricks.
The EA show closed with a demo of Rock Band on the Xbox 360.	The (fake) rock band playing - it looked fairly fun if you have four people who want to pretend they are rock stars.

All in all, the EA press conference was almost completely lacking in terms of news. The only thing that caught my ear was that Rock Band is getting localized for Europe, down to the selection of songs - both those included with the game and those that will be available later as downloadable content. I can't wait to see the outrage when some super-popular song gets included in the US version of the game, but not in the European one (or the other way around). While I understand the idea of adjusting the game for local musical tastes, this all sounds to me like EA's real motive is to avoid licensing costs in multiple regions. As you may know, artist and song licensing rights belong to different companies in different regions, which can make licensing very complicated.

Oh, and Rock Band will get a "special" version for the PS2 - at least in the Europe, to "expand the market of the game". "Special" in this case probably translates to "gimped", but I guess you can't expect miracles from the old black box.

EA booth

Crysis was playable on the EA stand, and was easily the most interesting thing on display. It looks stunning and ran very well on the demo systems. Sadly I was unable to find out what was under the hood, so it's hard to say anything final on the performance relative to the hardware used, but at least you can say that the game runs great on some piece existing hardware that you can buy today.

Mmm... Crysis....

Hellgate London was also playable, right next to Crysis, but I couldn't make head nor tail of it because the demo was in German. I also gave Team Fortress 2 and Portal a spin on Xbox 360, and both look like great fun. There were also several other PC games on display, such as Sim City Societies and Medal of Honor Airborne, but I didn't have time to sit down and try them out yet.