I was really geeked last year when we got to see all the previews of Age of Empires III. I figured this was the game worth upgrading my desktop for. Sadly, no upgrade came for me and I've yet to get at it. My desktop has been rejuvinated as a Linux server for a few months now, but that's another story. There's an expansion coming out for Age of Empires III. In this one they'll add 3 new races that are native to North America. But wait, you say, AoEIII already has Native Americans! In the expansion you'll be able to play as these civilizations though, instead of just allying with them. The three races will be Iriquois, Sioux, and ... Ha! They're holding out on the third. Everyone wants to keep us guessing on something. Playing as the Iriquois, one of your units will be a Warrior Chief. The Warrior Chief gets some special abilities, kind of like some of the heroes in Age of Mythology, iirc. One of the abilities is a binus for nearby units in his army. Another is the ability to heal. He can also convert some animals to work as units for his tribe. The (very helpful) guy from Ensemble who showed me the game said it's not uncommon to see a Warrior Chief leading a bunch of bears around and sending them into battle against the Europeans.

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To be honest, we sat down at NVidia's booth and listened to the talk about the Dungeon Siege II expansion because we were tired and just wanted to sit. Then we weren't going to hang around for the Supreme Commander demo, but it started before we got around to leaving. Let me just say that I apologize for not making time specifically to come and see this game.

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We got to see a presentation at the NVidia booth by Gas Powered Games where they demoed an upcoming expansion for Dungeon Siege II (I think it was Daniel and Marcy who ran it). I should prefix this with a disclaimer: I've never played Dungeon Siege I or II, so my opinion's not relative to the original. I'm just relating what I remember from the presentation. It started out looking promising. The detail in the artwork impressed me and there are updates to some other effects with more custom shaders for water and reflections. There are two new classes that allow cross-overs from existing classes. I think they were Stone Fist Warrior, who gets some nature magic along with warrior abilities, and a cross-over ranger/mage class. The ranger gets the usual ranger ablities and some "sacrificial magic"; that is the magic abilities allow the ranger to trade some health for a more effective spell. The new ranger also gets some cool-sounding spells whereby she marks selected enemies with a rune, then activates a spell on the marked enemies. The more enemies, the more powerful the spell.

As promised, I've got a whole bunch of pictures from today at E3 2006, and Candace has a whole bunch of her E3 pictures here. Most of them are screenshots of upcoming or recent games. Some are just the show floor. A word of warning: I'm no professional photographer and I'm trying to get as many photos up as I can as fast as I can, so the quality sufferes. Some are dark, some are blurry, if you look close you might find some that are both. Deal with it :P. So far Candace and I hit everything that's worth seeing that we could see in the South Hall. The official theme this year is: Expansions!

We're running a little behind schedule, as Candace mentioned, but that's fine by me. I've never been one for standing in line. We're just going to finish lunch and (hopefully) catch the tail end of the line picking up our badges. We'll see how that goes. Seeing as the last couple years we didn't even get here until the second day, we'll still end up with more oppurtunity to get sa much as we can out of the show. From what I read yesterday, it sounds like there's a lot more playable demos and less of the hype. The real thing never seems to measure up to all the hand-waving and "representative" pre-rendered video. While last year seemed to be all about numbers and specs for next-gen consoles, this year we'll see some real-life examples of the titles that are in production for the Wii and the PS3. And of course demos mean screenshots. Lots of screenshots. Watch this space, at the end of the day today we'll be in the hotel, eating Thai and uploading pics.

Tomorrow night I'll be flying out to Los Angeles for E3. I've been over the floor plans and made some plans of my own. Last year we didn't make it through all of the South Hall in the first day. I've been playing a lot of WoW lately, so I'd like to check out Blizzard first thing. I'd guess they'll get a substantial chunk of the Vivendi booth (1224) in the South Hall.

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Candace has an issue with booth babes, and she's called me out.

I know Rob is going to say that taking the boothbabes out of E3 takes the fun out of the conference - but is that what you really think? Really really? Do you really believe it’s justified to use a woman’s body to sell a game? Would you want your daughter working there?

The daughter card? Right out of the gate? Isn't that something like the thing about losing a thread by comparing the other party to Hitler? I'll go remind her not to stick candy in her butt.

Anyhow, let me say that I don't go to E3 for the booth babes. They're definitely part of the show and I don't try to pretend they're not there either. I don't think losing them would take the fun out of the conference, but when you take away a feature that's enjoyable then, yeah, that takes some fun away. I'm not going to appologize to anyone for being intrigued by attractive women - after all, isn't that why models are used in advertising? Because they attract attention?

Tech Digest has a little more detail on the upcoming Eye Toy: Kinetic. I saw it at E3 earlier this year, and I'll say I was impressed. There are a couple major improvements over previous Eye Toy titles. In the game, they've set up trigger areas that aren't displayed on screen but help keep the camera calibrated for the user. This means better tracking than before.

So I'm going to speculate a little about what's going to be in Age of Empires III: Age of Discovery. I've got quite a bit of play time on previous titles in the series to base my opinions on, and I did talk to some people at E3, but I'm not an expert and I haven't read everything out there. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's get on with the pretty pictures :-)

One of the most exciting games for me to see at E3 this year was Age of Empires III (or AoE3 as it is affectionately abbreviated). I was an avid player of the first and second games in the Age of Empires series, and it was one of the few games I would go out and buy an expansion pack for without doing the usual heaps of research. Jeff and I have spent countless hours playing late night games of AoE, generally two of us versus computer controlled enemies (also called CPU or AI for artificial intelligence). The AI in AoE isn't that brilliant, but there's enough variety in the game types and maps in AoE to keep us entertained for quite a while. I think part of the reason I haven't gotten bored of fighting the AI is that I've never really tried to find a repeatable quick-win strategy. Instead, Jeff and I share some scotch over the internet while we blow an evening with Ensemble Studio's golden child.