May’s a comin’ – and with it two extremely cool conferences. First off I’m going to be at the E3 expo in LA seeing the latest in the world of video gaming, and then the following week sees me in San Francisco blogging for work from the JavaOne convention.
So what am I expecting? E3 is going to be huge. We’ve got Nintendo coming clean on the Wii (!!), they’re promising “one more big surprise” (that they changed the name?). Hopefully the console will be playable, and hopefully the Wiimotes will be chained down so they don’t all go missing in the first 20 minutes. So I’m excited for that, not because I’m a huge Nintendo fan but just because I’m curious to see how they’ve pulled off such a technically challenging piece of design. I’m sure that I’ll end up adding one to my colleciton unless it’s truly awful. Sony will be right over the aisle from Nintendo, and they’ve got a lot of people wanting to see the PS3 (well it is due out this year) but I really don’t expect much. There will be talk of course, and almost certainly many pre-rendered videos. But gameplay? Don’t hold your breath. I’ll be surprised if the PS3 is out in the US before 2007. On the flip side I’m a big PSP fan so hopefully they’ll take the opportunity to announce some big news in that area.
And then of course we’ll have the only actual current-gen player – Microsoft. I’m looking forward very much to seeing what’s in store for the 360 in 2006. The inevitable Halo 3 buzz will be palpable I’m sure, but personally Gears of War has me more excited. Plus of course the mystery “sandbox game in an urban setting” we’ve been hearing about. GTA goes Xbox exclusive? Weirder things have happened. Then there’s my personal drug – racing games. PGR3 is wonderul, but Forza 2 is sounding nice too – I’m sure there’ll be info about that. Maybe even a force feedback racing wheel accessory? Make it wireless and you’ve got a sale!
There are of course other companies present, and Sega in particular should be interesting. I have it on good authority we’ll be seeing a lot of Monkey Ball (yay!) and Sonic (yawn!) action, as well as a rather surprising sequal to a recent game.
And then there’s Frisco. JavaOne is the annual Sun conference dedicated to all things Java, and it’s pretty intense. My schedule is currently 8:30am-11:pm each day, so blogging will be restricted to when I have the strength to open a laptop. I’m looking forward to a bunch of it, particularly the informal Q&A sessions with people like Josh Bloch (of Google, author of Essential Java – my bible). There’s a team there from the recent DARPA Grand Challenge discussing the challenge of building a fully autonomous vehicle using Java technology, and a guy who built a Java PlayStation emulator. Wrap all that up in a lot of business stuff (high performance clustering, failover, agile techniques, multi-platform testing, .NET integration, etc) and you’ve got a party. Well, maybe not for everyone, but I’m looking forward to it!
Bring on 2007 and the PDC…
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