1995 Winter CES Commentary by:
Marty Chinn (vidsourc@netcom.com)


WCES Report Day 2

Greetings from Las Vegas. Welcome to Day 2 of the Winter Consumer Electronics Show. I'd like to thank all those who joined in on the WCES conference. Also for those of you who want to catch a glimpse of what is going on, I'll be making a CES video for $12 plus shipping. For information, please e-mail me. Now on to the report.

Let's start off with 3DO. I know I posted that the showing was mediocre but that was because when I went through the booth, for about a 20 minutes to a half hour, I didn't see any hit titles. I didn't have time to stay and play everything because I wanted to check a little of everything at the show. Now I've gone back and must have spent a good 3 hours there talking to reps and checking out all of the titles.

Policenauts looked great so far. There wasn't much to the game though. Only a shooting gallery. However there was a anime cinematic intro using fmv instead of stills which looked really nice. I'm glad Konami is working on this title and I don't doubt that it will be great. With the success of Snatcher, I don't think I'm going to worry at all.

Killing Time looked interesting. The vision was limited in depth because it was quite dark. You only had access to a hand gun and a shotgun. The weird thing is the only thing that was around were either guys that looked like duck hunters or actual ducks. Now I don't know if they just threw it in there for now or if that is how it will be in the end. I didn't get to talk to a rep about this one. What impressed me was the fluid movement of the enemies. You would shoot a guy in the back and he would turn around as if it was a video clip of him.

Return Fire ships this Wednesday and I'll be one of the first in line to get this hot title.

Flying Nightmares looked very early. The frame rate was ok, not great, but slightly choppy. It looked to be a true flight sim though and hopefully It'll get right what VR Stalkers got wrong.

Although a lot of titles that I've never heard of, a lot looked to be either decent or great. Unfortunately since they are unknown they will probably get overlooked by the general public.

Today, Jer Horwitz, Kraig Kujawa, Anthony Shubert, and I were talking to Rick Reynolds suggesting titles that 3DO should try to get a hold of. Basically we named some of the hottest arcade games. 3DO I guess is going to try and get these titles. Among the titles were Alien vs. Predator, X-Men, the Capcom fighting one, Tekken, Dark Stalkers, Raiden 2, and NBA Jam TE. I'll post more on some other titles tomorrow.

At Atari, I didn't really spend too much time there. I basically looked over Fight For Life. I then went back to FX Fighter.

After putting some good time into FFL, it is much better than FX Fighter, not slightly better. Each character consists of 800-900 polygons and moves at a frame rate of 20 fps. The backgrounds and floor is only temporary right now but will be changed in the near future. Also more textured mapping will be added. There will also be a code that will let you be the boss. There are a total of 8 playable characters. What impressed me about this title was when you pause the game and press to the left, it reverses what has happened and pretty much is an instant replay. Also while you're doing this, you can change the camera view to almost any angle and play the instant replay at the same time. This game is expected to be out by March.

Eternal Champions CD was awesome. I don't know what they did, but in my opinion they took Eternal Champions, which I pretty much hated, and fixed it. I really liked what I played. The play response seemed much better, and smoother in execution. The game also moved at a slightly faster paced. Moves were easy to pull off, and there were combos, something that I don't remember being in the original game. Also it looks as if the backgrounds have been improved too over the original. There is also cinema in the game where they took live actors dressed up as some of the characters and had clips of them fighting each other. I think Sega gave me a tape with the different fatalities on it. This game is definitely worth checking out.

Those of you who know of the Japanese version of Perfect 11, the soccer game, you will be disappointed because the commentary has been taken out. Its disappointing to hear this. The commentary was a big part of the game in my opinion.

No sign of Dracula X from Konami. Mega Man 7 looked great. Shiny is making an Earthworm Jim for the Game Boy, it looked great so far, and so did Donkey Kong Land. Just imagine the games without color. The graphic reproduction from the original 16 bit version has been well done. Big Star Fox 2 and Commanche reviews tomorrow in day 3 report.

Welp this concludes day 2 of the WCES. I'd like to thank those who joined my IRC conferences and those who moderated. Day 3 will pretty much cover everything in depth.

[ed. note: no day three was ever written.]

- Marty


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