E3 Fever

First of all, I'm really dorky excited right now because I got one of the 5 highest grades in my CS class. It doesn't mean much, but it's just really cool that Professor Downing recognized the other 4 top scorers and myself and I dunno, it's just cool to succeed in what you love to do. Anyway, that was augmented by IGN's coverage today of all three press conferences of the console developers. Yes, I watched all of them (the interesting stuff at least) and I do have the E3 fever now. It was only provided to Insiders, and so I'll provide some impressions for the rest of you. It was hard to name a clear winner because Microsoft had a great presentation with clever wording and impressive marketing. However, Sony really showed the muscle of the PS3 and showed that their latest offering is not a force to be reckoned with as it is 35 times more powerful than the PS2. It has 7 3.2 Ghz core processors! That means that you can do a lot more processes at once and graphics can have a level of realism that we've only dreamed of. Say goodbye to prerendered cut scenes, because it'll all be in real time. The lineup looks great so far, and the console is attractive, but unfortunately they were very vague on the online aspect of it. This is where Microsoft knocked them out of the park. There will be a free tier of Xbox Live and a paid one with extra features. Both developers came out swinging, and though I was more impressed by Sony I've gotta give props to Microsoft for coming up with some innovative stuff. Nintendo, meanwhile, showcased stuff for the current generation and only provided a prototype of the Revolution. The only thing that was awesome about their press conference was the fact that the Revolution is backwards compatible with all previous games (NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube). How? Through downloads. PS3 is backwards compatible with all of its predecessors as well, and the Xbox 360 will have to use an emulator to play Xbox games due to the change in chipset but it will have limited backwards compatibility. I'll likely say more about E3 tomorrow, so stay tuned.

So what else is going on today for nerds? It's been confirmed that IE7 will feature tabbed browsing, which shows that Microsoft is acknoledging the prowess of Firefox and is trying to compensate. It should amount to an interesting battle. They're also firing shots on the desktop search front with a final version of their offering. I haven't had time to try it out myself so I won't say much else about that. The BBC may be starting a revolution today as it unveils plans to put a program called iMP into trial, which is a service they're playing around with to download television shows on demand. They want it to be analogous to iTunes and music, and the greatest advantage of it could be that shows that receive great reviews later (like Lost or 24) can be easily attained online and, hence, boost ratings. Let's hope American executives wake up to this possibility. And lastly, I wanted to share this look at the history of Apple computers.

There's so much going on in movies today that I'll go through everything briefly, starting with multimedia. Yahoo! Movies is showcasing an exclusive clip from A History of Violence, which features Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn from Lord of the Rings). You can see a great trailer of that movie over here. There's a new commercial out there featuring the Fantastic Four but strangely without any movie footage. There are some less notable trailers from Cannes over here for those are interested. There's some bad news today: Lindsey Lohan will be in Mission Impossible 3. I don't know why, but she better not ruin it. Now to balance with good news: principal photography on Casino Royale will start this summer, so we could see it as soon as summer of 2007. Want more good news? True Lies 2 is in the works and is planned to start seriously after the Governor of California is free to work on it. There's now word that Sony has given its approval on a Tekken movie, and lets hope it doesn't blow. Lastly, here's a shot of the Batmobile from E3:



I've gotta go watch Sideways now, so no meme today. Sorry!