All You Need Is Games

This year's E3 was tame compared to last year, for one simple reason: This is the first show in recent memory where a price reduction on console hardware hasn't been announced.

To top that, we don't even get any new systems from Sony or Sega! Instead, each company was focused on one thing - games. "Our Games Speak for Themselves," says Sony. But although this year's E3 was a low-key show as far as new hardware goes (the only new video game hardware shown was Tiger's game.com), it was incredible in terms of games.

Sony and Sega are into their third and fourth generation games, and the quality of their software shows. Sega, which has taken third place in the 32+ bit system category, still has software left to keep the platform going. Especially impressive was Sega's willingness to translate Japanese games and release them in the US. The biggest gamble here is Enemy Zero - a title which Sega is putting on the Saturn and PC later this year - which is a very experimental, even revolutionary, game.

Sega's arcade titles were also impressive: Super GT, Lost World, Virtua Striker 2, House of the Dead, and of course, Print Club, all drew crowds.

Sony's booth had a ton of games in a very small space. A majority of them were from third-party companies, but Sony's first-party titles are very impressive. Tucked away was PaRappa the Rapper, a title which really deserves much more attention than Sony was giving it. Crash 2 and Blasto are good games in their own right, but it's too bad that Sony couldn't have given PaRappa a bigger space (and louder sound - you couldn't hear the game). The odd thing is that Sony says PaRappa is 80 percent complete. Gee, last time I played the Japanese version, which has an English text option, it looked complete to me. Let's hope they don't change any of the scenes from the original Japanese.

Finally, Nintendo relied on cartridge-based software this year. The 64DD was nowhere to be found (not even so much as a prototype unit), and F-Zero and Zelda were only shown on videotape. With so many 3-D action platform games copying Mario 64's popularity, it's kind of a disappointment to see Nintendo coming out with Banjo-Kazooie. Although the game is great (don't get me wrong, I like the game), I expected to see a little more. Zelda, F-Zero, and Yoshi would've been nice.

For a show of this magnitude, there weren't too many surprises. Last year there was the announcement of the Nintendo 64, the year before that - the Saturn and PlayStation. The good thing that is coming out of this show are the hundreds of games that console players will be seeing in the upcoming year.

There are simply a lot of great titles. And with game prices being lowered at just about every turn, there's no way that anyone can lose this year.