Honestly, if anything in the show was just totally worth it to be there for. It was this. Activision introduced comedian / cultural icon / personality, Jamie Kennedy into the mix as the head of their little show. Activision going with a more personal theme using an isolated seating arrangement for the host and guests. It's not that he was actually funny, or doing some off the wall stunts, it was the fact that Activision made a choice to try and be kind of a show icon with a hired celebrity and it flopped horribly. This show will probably go down as one of the most hillarious instances of things going wrong at E3 and anyone that saw it live or was in the room can probably agree, I'm working on formatting a copy of the whole show for download so we'll see how that goes.

In the meantime though, lets get on with it.

Call of Duty 4 is coming to next-gen systems and it's in development by the all too infamous Infinity Ward, the creators behind the original Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2. This time around the team has gone from the hot action of WW2 into the demolished landscapes of the modern era, taking from the previous games the latest COD installs the use of a group scripted system for action, honestly it might be getting a little old these days but I think for now it can still work because for those who aren't into the online gaming scene or just hate doing arena like battles with bots, this can serve a good purpose especially when scaling the AI up on the game. COD4 has also launched their first wave of public beta applications and plans to continue along this path as they lead up to release. Honestly it's been a while since someone tried to take a new crack at the modern war genre, hopefully Infinity Ward has been studying up and they plan to bring out some new things to the gaming population.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has skipped out of the common fps realm and into the ever growing online market, going in a different direction from COD4, ET:QW is bringing gamers to the future of warfare with the growing battle against the Strogg forces in an online environment. Much like how games like BF2 have essentially gone online focused, ET:QW plans to go into that route as well and tap the userbase that's already aching for more. If they can beat out the original BF2 and 2142? that will be the test by consumers. As it stands right now, the game is polishing up quite well outside of some details about weapon behavior that will probably be balanced once the release hits soon. Given that I don't think most people want a highly twitchy scope running around it'll probably be patched quite fast. Graphically the game is intense, I mean it was quite a thing to imagine an ID game going full environment, but thanks to things like megatexture it seems like they were able to cross over and give a game that really brings the battle in. Unfortunately the play system was pretty dead without a variety of online opponents so hopefully those already in the public beta will be able to shed some light on performance versus currently available games.

Of course this isn't all, Guitar Hero III is the latest title for the company, this coming after a series of negotiations and talks and deals with Redoctane to help bring the Guitar Hero fame to a new level and hopefully increase distribution as well given the growing demand for it. With a new dev team and all-star cast we'll see if they can preserve and grow the franchise, personally from what they have so far, I think the company is onto a decent run with the game right now since it maintains many of the characteristics and plays to the same levels for the most part, there were some deviations in how the keys were picked off as they came down.