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This is it, the official list of winners for the Game Critics Awards: Best of E3 2007. Before you jump to the full list, some stats: More »
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Last week we posted our nominees for the Game Critics Best of E3 awards. Today, the Game Critics announced which games were selected by all of the judges as finalists for the awards handed out for the show. Remember each judging publication gets to vote, then they take those votes, tally the scores and select the finalists. More »
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An overwhelming majority of the E3 Kotaku Fantasy Betting pool have decided that a random drawing would make more sense than more Kotaku faux wagering, so I've used Random.Org to select a winner of the twin Stranglehold gun lighters. More »
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MCV is reporting, source-free, that next year's E3 will not be in Santa Monica. More »
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Looks like we had a 48-way tie. So here's the deal. I'm going to leave it up to the 48 winners of the bet-off. Either I can do a random drawing and give the person selected the prize, ooor, we can do another bet-off among those 48 for what will be shown at Leipzig and I'll find some other cool prize to throw on top of what we're giving away for the E3 prize. More »
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Shigeru Miyamoto was all over E3 this year. As I mentioned in a post last week, one of the major benefits of this year's show was that developers seemed to have a bit more time to get chatty with the competition, seeing each other's stuff, even playing each other's stuff. It was certainly a kinder, gentler E3. More »
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We posted our nominees for the Game Critics Best of E3, now it's time to see what MTV's Stephen Totilo had to say with his nomination form. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=280406&view=rss&microfeed=true Not everyone was exactly delighted with the new E3 format, especially Barker Hanger which magically metamorphosed the bustling expo show floor into a ghost town. I didn't even bother to visit it this year. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=280150&view=rss&microfeed=true Robert Garriott, the Garriott without the cool rat tails, talked up the new partnership with Sony last week during a Global Gaming League interview. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=279993&view=rss&microfeed=true Microsoft's John Porcaro upped this 13 minute gameplay video showing off Viva Pinata Party Animals from last week's big. show. Still not doing it for me. More »
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Back on the Fourth of July we posted up our predictions for E3, some believable, some fanciful, and then gave you odds for them coming true. We also asked you to place your fantasy bets on the predictions for the chance at a cool prize. More »
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OK, you've had an hour or so to argue, debate and decide which games you thought should receive which nominations, including the cherished Best of Show accolade. Now it's our turn. Before you hit the jump to see our picks know this, there was a whole lotta arguing that led up to these final selections and on more than one occasion it came down to votes... on one occasion that vote tied and we had to debate the issue for awhile. Also keep in mind that we made these choices based off of the very specific definitions that The Game Critics Awards follows. So Best of Show gives a lot of weight to buzz. Also, there were two categories that we didn't feel had three worthy nominations, so we didn't include them. They were fighting game and simulation game. More »
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Kotaku was lucky enough to be added to the list of judges for the 2007 Game Critics Awards this year. The E3 judges, there's 36 of us, ramble the show floor and spend tons of time leading up to the show looking for what will end up being the best games of the year's expo. More »
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When Microsoft goes to E3, they go big. In fact, they rented the entire hotel, The Viceroy, and dimmed the lights in romantic hypnotism. The locale was perfect, as if it were summoned from the ground by Peter Moore Don Mattrick himself. Doors were Xbox green, walls were...Xbox white. And even the carpet had X's. I originally thought they repainted the entire building, but PR informed me that The Viceroy had always looked that way. Well...before Microsoft spent the month before E3 cleaning the place up, as a cab driver informed me later. Oh, and that's Gizmodo's Jason Chen wearing an iPhone shirt before an interview with Moore. More »
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MTV's Stephen Totilo is a sharp guy, in fact I'd probably say he's one of the best game journalists around, right up there with the likes of N'Gai Croal and Seth Schiesel, so when he says a game is good, yes even a game about Hannah Montana, you gotta believe. More »
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First we strong-arm Shigeru Miyamoto into telling us that the GameBoy isn't really sticking around much longer and now NOA's veep of marketing George Harrison is saying they may not ever use the name again. More »
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It was a fun three days. We got a chance to catch up with Shigeru Miyamoto, Jack Tretton and Peter Moore, eyeballed the Gears of War movie script, wore blue footies around Santa Monica, were treated like meat by Jade and rode a bull. We also managed to squeeze in time to play oodles of games and write up our various impressions, party with Queens of the Stone Age and catch ten press conferences. More »
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It's got to be an absolute highlight to have Shigeru Miyamoto stroll into your suite just to get his hands on your game... no, I'm not talking about Rock Band, though I'd pay high dollar to see a video of him rocking out to Enter Sandman. No, Miyamoto hit up EA's E3 hotel suite to cheack out NBA Live's family play controls for the Wii and Skate, which Stephen Totilo thinks and I hope could be a sign that he wants to get the Wii's Balance Board to work with it. More »
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When Mark Wilson and I had conflicting E3 impressions on Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, we decided to hash it out online. What we hoped to resolve, through vague impressions, was exactly how awesome the PLAYSTATION 3 sequel was. Totally awesome? Certifiably awesome? Better than an Awesome Blossom? In our first e-mail exchange, in which we ultimately agree on exactly the same thing, Mark and I do our best to express how unquestionably awesome the game will be, based on our E3 reactions, when it ships later this year. More »
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Here's my E3 schwag disclosure: a single Square Enix notebook. I did get a Rock Band shirt and a small poster. I believe the shirt made it to Japan. The crushable poster stayed behind. What I missed out on: GTA IV shirts were being given out at the Take 2 presser. Yet, I didn't take one. Collective members of the gaming press rifling through the stacks, looking for their precious XL sizes made me not want to wear a GTA IV shirt. Like ever. The Square Enix notebook is pretty nice — it's sturdy, has paper and comes with a pen — smart schwag for journalists! In short, it's thoughtful, and I can actually use it. Other companies, take note. More »
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Officially revealed at Sony's E307 presser, the PSP Slim is tweaked version of the PlayStation Portable. The PSP Slim will hit Japan September 20th for ¥19,800 (US $162) and will come in six colors: Piano Black, Ceramic White, Ice Silver, Rose Pink, Lavender Purple and Felicia Blue. Adjectives all around! More »
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How does part-time analyst, full-time soothsayer Michael Pachter describe games? As fate would have it, I was in the Pach's presence at least three separate E3 events: the Nintendo presser, the THQ presser and SEGA's game demos. Apparently, Pachter spent his E3 checking pretty much everything out, only to retire to his lair to shift through burnt embers and put in livestock orders for sacrificial water buffalo. I jotted down some non-newsy worthy E3 quotes the Pach said and present them here taken them totally out of context: More »
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All I can say is, thank the Lord for Superman. And a second thanks for not letting the re-animated corpses of Velvet Revolver take the Troubadour stage for the Rock Band party. Having suffered through a performance from the "might as well be Velvet Revolver" local outfit Camp Freddy at the PS3 launch, attending the EA and Xbox 360-sponsored E3 shindig made even me consider abusing heroin. It was that dire. More »
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Why does this man hate freedom? Perhaps it is because after four days of rushing about from appointment to appointment, walking countless miles across the city of Santa Monica, the promise of a party finds him walking a long and lonely mile down a deserted beachfront along with hundreds of others doing exactly the same thing, which technically negates the deserted and lonely bits I know, but it's my narrative and you can't have it. At roughly 5PM on Friday, July 13th, Gamecock and a couple hundred friends mourned the death of the annual E3 'make the gaming press walk around for days' festival with another mile of walking. More »
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I wrote up my impressions for Killzone 2, but never really got a chance to talk about the party that surrounded the trailer's Tuesday night unveiling. More »
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Konami's first PSP Castlevania showing, Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles, is a kind of half-attempt at bringing a proper Belmont adventure to the Sony portable. It's not quite a full on effort, giving gamers what they asked for—a 2.5D Castlevania release and a localization of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood—just going far enough to meet expectations. It also includes Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but only as an unlockable. So, how does it play? Pretty much exactly like the PC Engine release. More »
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I got a chance to catch up with Everquest Senior Producer Clint Worley at E3 to chat about the state of Everquest the first, an eight year old MMO that is now readying its fourteenth expansion, Secrets of Faydwer. The expansion itself pushes the game's level cap to 80, which makes my moldering level 54 bard incredibly sad, especially considering how terribly behind I am in add-ons, not being able to keep up with the vigorous two a year schedule. Well that two-a-year schedule is now a one-a-year cycle in response to fans of the game that had the same trouble keeping up as I did. Worley said that the focus would be on keeping players in the game and continuing to provide premium free content throughout the year to reward the die-hard fans that make up a subscriber base still larger than its successor, Everquest 2. So what about us old-timers interested in getting back into the game? From now on, every new expansion will be packaged with all the expansions before it, making catching up as easy as waiting for Secrets of Faydwer to hit stores this November. Is that the sweet sound of Selo's I hear in my future? More »
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Perhaps there were oceans of swag at this year's E3 that I just couldn't see due to my gifting of a taxi cab driver with my glasses, but that doesn't mean I walked away empty-handed. I did get a real cool Fallout 3 t-shirt that I kinda technically already had, only three sizes too small for me. Oh! And I did snag a few of those nifty E3 hats that were being given away every time someone got off the shuttle bus at the main convention hangar, which are excellent for soaking up sun-melted Kotaku writer juice. You probably don't want the hats then. Can't say I don't blame you. Oh! And while I was supposed to be at E3 when I missed my initial flight on Tuesday, the nice folks at Bethesda delivered unto me a new lunch box, totally unsullied by airport screeners' hands! I love happy endings, don't you? More »
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While the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title Shadow of Chernobyl had a rather bumpy time in development, the new prequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is shaping up much faster than its delay-plagued older brother. Officially announced on the first day of E3, GSC Game World was ready to show the new title to the press in the form of a short demonstration of a level of game play, highlighting the improvements made over the previous release. As you may have heard this game takes place roughly a year before the events in SoC, following the story of another Stalker as he climbs the ranks of various factions, seeks out the power plant deep in the middle of the zone, and ultimately finds himself at odds with the protagonist of the first game. More »
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This is certainly in the running for best of show, everything from its amazing presentation and faithful adherence to Fallout trivia, to the VaultTech Assisted Targeting and use of deep dialog trees had me jonesing for this game. More »
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Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has analyzed E3 with his patented, non-prescription Analysis Glasses, concluding that Nintendo "won" the E3 Media & Business Summit. Claiming a "decent" software showing and highlighting the introduction of new hardware—including somehow convincing the masses that $19.95 was a bargain for the Wii Zapper—Pachter says the Wii and Nintendo DS manufacturer eked out a victory over its rivals. More »
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We were discussing our personal choices for E3 2007's game of the show at breakfast last week when I started in on some diatribe about how the current glut of first-person shooters—this fall being especially saturated—gave me pause about namechecking an FPS as a "best of" standout. All these games are simply following a too-similar formula, deviating from tired gameplay within a 10% variance. Later that day, I played Turok for the Xbox 360 and started to reevaluate my opinion. More »
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Compared to years past, this E3 suffered a practical swag drought. Sure, Joel got a spiffy iPod and I saw some people, lot of people walking around with World in Conflict skateboards, but for the most part the stuff being handed out consisted mostly of water, food and t-shirts. Funny story, I almost "stole" a bagel from a hotel vendor who had made the mistake of setting up shop in the midst of three developers. Sorry, when I'm at E3 and I see food on a table it means free to me. More »
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Judging a game like The Club is a bit of a challenge at an event like E3. While lines were nonexistent and it was readily available for play at Sega's Barker Hangar booth—that is, when Sega reps weren't chatting about traffic routes in front of kiosks or dominating the game themselves—The Club impresses that it's going to require a hearty time investment to fully appreciate. The demo level was short, mind you, but as the game is largely a third-person shooter Time Attack mode that requires steady aim and intimate knowledge of each level, it's not something that can be wholly grasped in 15 minute bites. More »
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I went to the E3 Media & Business Summit and all I got was this lousy Rock Band t-shirt, a Fracture notebook, a Trauma Center: The New Blood pen and a Microsoft ass cushion. I also was forcefully handed an E3 hat. The notebook I won by placing first in the informal Fracture multiplayer tournament, so one could argue that I deserved to own this piece of schwag. Obviously, in no way does the collection of any of this crap affect my opinion on any of the games I played, press conferences I watched or industry expos I attended. The best news? Some Kotaku reader will be getting this and much, much more. More »
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From the producer of Elebits, the Wii's other hyper-cute Konami exclusive comes Dewy's Adventure. Touching on the same environmental themes from Elebits, Dewy's will use none-too-subtle imagery and gameplay mechanics to drive a global climate change message home. It's also just too goddamn precious. More »
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Ah Lair. You and I, we have quite the tempestuous relationship. When we first met your looks blew me away, but the more I got to know you the less I seemed to like you. You were confusing, needy, shallow, everything I hate in a relationship, but I couldn't stay away. Now I'm happy I didn't. More »
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When news of a Silent Hill prequel for the PlayStation Portable hit, I think the biggest concern fans had was that it would lose some of the haunting atmosphere the game is known for. Playing Silent Hill Origins at Konami's E3 bungalow, I might not have found myself checking over each shoulder for fleshy nurse corpses, but I was engrossed. There are a few concerns about the general look and feel of the game, but it's still a solid entry in the horror franchise. More »
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NCSoft gave intrepid reporters this cool little NCSoft-etched iPod during their hands-on meetings. This might be the schwag of show. I think we know where NCSoft spent all of the money they saved from not having a live band and fire-eaters at their booth this year. - Joel Johnson More »
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E3 seemed to have a very Game Developers Conference vibe this year, which is funny since GDC seemed to have a very E3 vibe this year. While previous E3s had a fun, crazy outer shell with rock bands playing live on the show floor, scantily clad men and women pitching games, tons of giveaways, the core of the experience always felt very serious to me, almost too serious, as if actually enjoying yourself, or at least the developers enjoying themselves was forbidden. More »
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