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Now this is more like it. For the first time in two years, the CGW editors were able to enjoy the annual E3 convention in Los Angeles without once having to endure the dreaded “What’s up with PC gaming?” question. Why? Because this year, the answer was all over the show floor: It’s thriving.

With the hype and novelty of next-gen consoles wearing off, PC gaming reasserted itself in a big way, grabbing a surprisingly significant share of the E3 buzz. We need offer no more proof than Half-Life 2, which was by everyone’s account the hands-down game of the show, regardless of platform. At times, the lines to see the Half-Life 2 demo were four hours long—that’s how excited people were. And the amazing demo only justified the hype.

The bigger story, however, was not this one game, but the fact that there were so many PC games—and so many promising ones. We went into this show a little weary and jaded—because that’s how we are here—but we left completely invigorated and excited, remembering why we love this job.

If this E3 was any indication, it’s going to be a hell of a year for PC games. Read the next 10 pages to find out why.

HALF-LIFE 2 OR DOOM III?

THIS IS PRETTY DAMN easy, since we saw a full-blown Half-Life 2 demo and only a looping trailer of Doom III. Since Half-Life 2 was the one at the show with a presence, it kinda wins the “best PC shooter of E3” question by default. Doom III still has an amazing engine with the best lighting around, but Half-Life 2 totally dominated the show with its use of characters, graphics, physics, and gameplay. Id has a lot to live up to—Half-Life 2 is pretty much making straightforward shooting galleries irrelevant.

RPG AND RTS MIA? WTF?

Thankfully, the days of everyone and their great aunt making an RTS are long gone. After all—does mankind really need another Tribal Rage or Dominion? With few exceptions, the real-time strategy genre was notably unrepresented at E3. In fact, the closest things to big-time traditional RTS titles were add-ons for WarCraft III and Age of Mythology. Empires: Dawn of the Modern Age is OK, but struck us as little more than a tightly focused Empire Earth, while Lords of the Realm III and War of the Ring are just depressing. The one truly bright light is Kohan’s sequel. In short, it’s looking like the real-time genre is right about where RPGs were a few years back—a bit played out and in need of fresh ideas.

And it looks like RPGs are once again in need of those ideas, at least for lone players. The vast majority of the RPG genre seems to be moving online—Lineage II, Mythica, EverQuest II, and on and on and on. Oh, Bethesda was showing the latest Morrowind expansion and Pirates of the Caribbean, but those two titles alone made up almost half the single-player RPGs shown. Knights of the Old Republic looks like a perfectly serviceable RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil is impressive, and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines is just too sad for words. Bottom line: If you’re looking to role-play over the next year, be prepared to do it with strangers.

MMORPGS: TOO MUCH OF AN OK THING?

Massively multiplayer games were out in strong force at E3—more than 20 titles were shown. While the kinds of games ranged from medieval fantasy (most popular) to superhero to an occult western (Priest), there was one notable design trend across the board: story-driven content. Designers hope to achieve this through numerous quests and something many of them referred to as “pocket dungeons.”

Pocket dungeons are private areas spawned for individual players or groups. For example, in the superhero game City of Heroes, we tried a pocket dungeon mission that took us into a lost city beneath the bustling metropolis. That secret area was created just for our group of spandex-wearing do-gooders—no other players could come in. Many other games, including World of WarCraft, Mythica, and Guild Wars, have similar schemes. Will these kinds of innovations be enough to excite gamers who may view the MMORPG genre as flooded with clones? Probably not, since the basic gameplay doesn't seem to have changed much. We expect many to hang on as niche titles, if they hang on at all.

Notable games at E3 included Mythica and Guild Wars (see Top Ten for more info); The Matrix Online, which showed off some cool slow-motion action moves; Warhammer Online, with some amazingly detailed character graphics; Middle-earth Online (you can be evil and still fight Sauron!); Horizons, which promises to be a “crafter’s dream”; and Mu, a nifty-looking Diablo clone from Korea. Most are 2004 titles, so expect bandwidth to be sucked up next year.

WHO’S MAKING MEDAL OF WAR?

SINCE EA’S SUCCESSFUL Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, three major historical-combat games have been announced, and we’ve seen some confusing moves among the developers. Let the trusty, crusty soldiers here at CGW set you straight on who’s making what.

Let’s start with EA’s Medal of Honor franchise. Allied Assault was developed by 2015. EA unceremoniously dumped 2015 in favor of developing the sequel (Pacific Assault) itself at its Los Angeles studio (EALA). 2015, high and dry, decided to make a Vietnam-era shooter (Men of Valor: Vietnam), which actually looked damned good at E3.

But some 2015 employees didn’t want to make a Vietnam-era shooter, so they drafted up ideas for improving upon a Medal of Honor–style game. They broke off from 2015 to create a new company (Infinity Ward) and a new WWII shooter, Call of Duty, which earned a berth in our Top 10 E3 games list.

Of these three games, the only one we haven’t seen running is Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. But we know that all of these titles have unique features, and we believe each will be a worthy contender for the FPS combat crown.

So, are you ready for the quiz? Here’s your cheat sheet.

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, World War II, EALA/EA

Call of Duty, World War II, Infinity Ward/Activision

Men of Valor: Vietnam, Vietnam War (duh), 2015/Vivendi

ARE CROSS-PLATFORM GAMES BAD FOR THE PC?

This is a loaded question because cross-platform titles can be both good and bad. On one hand, some titles are coded for the lowest common denominator—that is, if a game comes out on all platforms, you’ll often find that the PC version is an afterthought (hello, 007: NightFire!). When done right, though, it’s magical, and you wind up with a great game that looks awesome on a hopped-up PC. Case in point: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Yes, the PS2 had it more than six months ago, but the PC version looks crisp, and what the hell—if the gameplay ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

As for the trend progressing upward, we’re starting to see some good come of this, thanks to the latest powerhouse platforms. Take Xbox, for example. Since Xbox games are based on the Windows 2K kernel, some serious cross-pollination with the PC only makes sense. Already, titles like Doom III, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life 2 are Xbox-bound. With all the good console games we’ve seen, who’s to say that pattern can’t work in reverse? For cross-platform games to really work, we need each version to take full advantage of the system it was made for. Hey, Rockstar! If you’re listening, how’s about a 32-player riot in Vice City?

PLEASANT SURPRISES AT E3

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME

We’ll admit that we almost steered clear of Ubi Soft’s booth in hopes of avoiding another Dragon’s Lair 3D–like debacle. But after girding our collective loins (not a pretty sight, trust us), we got an eyeful of this cool-looking revamp. Is this the heir apparent to Jordan Mechner’s classic? That’s still to be determined, but this 3D tilt on the original shows serious promise.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: THE TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL

We were hesitant about this, as we really looked forward to Troika’s Arcanum only to find ourselves with mixed feelings about it. But it looks like Troika both fixed what was wrong with Arcanum and preserved and enhanced the mix of Fallout and Dungeons & Dragons, which puts this game into our Top 10 list.

LINEAGE II

Lineage, Korea’s biggest MMORPG, never really grabbed our attention—but its sequel certainly has. Lineage II makes the Unreal engine its own, creating a world of towering buildings that features tremendous depth and layering, incredible spell effects, and mind-blowingly beautiful player-controlled dragons. Riding those dragons will be a key part of Lineage II’s enormous castle sieges when it ships this winter.

IS IT ALL ABOUT THE SEQUELS NOW?

Past E3s have been sequel-driven, but this year’s show seemed especially so. At first glance, most games we saw were either direct sequels (we noticed a lot of games with a “2” after the title—and one with a “5,” if you can believe that), or re-visits of older franchises. This trend is affecting both PC games and consoles—folks were all aflutter over Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, and even the revised Pac-Man game. In years past, we’ve managed to find a standout new game to proclaim as Game of Show (such as the original Halo, Star Wars Galaxies, and even Republic), but this year, our big titles tended to have numbers after their names. Even the grand guru of PC gaming, Sid Meier, announced Pirates 2, a sequel to a 16-year-old game. Thankfully, there are still some original games to watch for, despite this year’s sequeliciousness—and the originals constitute more than half of our Top 10 games from the show.

ARE THERE ANY GOOD LICENSED GAMES?

A few. For years, licensed games—games based on other media, like TV shows, movies, or comics—were practically guaranteed to suck. Gamers recognized the games for what they were: cheap, lazy shovelware cynically designed to take fans’ dollars without bothering to provide decent gameplay. Those kind of licensed games still exist, for sure (hi, Farscape!), though more common is the licensed game that tries to be good but still can’t rise above the mediocre (hi, Enter the Matrix!). This year’s E3 was crammed, as usual, with licensed games—American Idol, Buffy, Futurama, Starsky and Hutch—that we avoided like the plague. But a notable few that we saw—Tron 2.0, Return of the King, Star Wars: Galaxies—give us hope that a license does not have to equal “teh suck.” Call us crazy. Call us naïve. But if kicking ass as Gandalf turns out to be as cool as it looked at E3, we may eventually forget all about the trauma that was Survivor.

DOES MICROSOFT EVEN MAKE PC GAMES ANYMORE?

That depends on whether you consider Microsoft Train Simulator 2.0 to be an actual game or an interactive screensaver. OK, that may be a little harsh, but the truth is that this year’s E3 featured tons and tons of Microsoft games on Xbox and something less than a handful of titles for the PC—hardly surprising, considering that a highly placed Microsoft staffer admitted to us that Microsoft has no plans to announce any new PC titles before the year’s end. Ouch. So what—other than the choo-choos—was Microsoft showing this year? A trailer for the sequel to Dungeon Siege, a new Flight Simulator, the Rise of the Titans expansion for Age of Mythology, the Xbox port Halo, and—the only truly new title—the MMORPG Mythica. None of these titles was godawful—Mythica looks promising and the graphically upgraded Halo appears to have absolutely killer multiplayer—but compared to recent history, it’s hard not to conclude that the giant from Redmond is throwing all of its resources behind its console and leaving the PC behind. Only time will tell if this refocusing is a permanent thing.

GAMES WE’RE WORRIED ABOUT

LORDS OF THE REALM III

Giddy anticipation rapidly became bitter letdown when we saw the latest incarnation of this storied series. By going fully 3D, completely real-time, and really focusing on multiplayer, Lords has seemingly abandoned everything that made us love this game, and has instead become a pallid Total War clone.

BLACK & WHITE 2

Maybe we’re overcompensating for our Black & White review, but we’re not sure whether the sequel can redeem the original. Graphically, the game looks great, and Lionhead will make creatures smarter and easier to train. But adding Age of Empires–style city-building and armies could make the game unwieldy or unfocused.

FULL THROTTLE: HELL ON WHEELS

Maybe it’s because it was running on a PS2. Or maybe it’s because it was a too-short demo in a too-loud room at E3. Whatever the reason, we walked away a bit worried about this one because it looked far more action-oriented than we expected. Stay tuned, though. We could be totally wrong

WHAT’S UP WITH ALL THESE FOREIGNERS?

It used to be that the majority of good PC games came from American developers. Now, we’re seeing development houses all over the world bring in top-notch titles for the PC. Why is that? Well, while the big boys stateside are looking to make games for consoles, foreign developers with a PC in the basement and a dream are putting together some fantastic stuff. Where do you think last year’s hit, Battlefield 1942, came from?

We risked the tiny booths scattered around E3 andcame away with a look at some very cool—and very promising—stuff from those dang furr-in-errs. Take GSC’s Stalker: Oblivion Lost. We’ve had an eye on this game for a while, and before the start of E3, THQ announced it was picking up the North American rights. Clearly, we were on to something there. Another nod to the underdogs: You’re not hearing much talk about Encore’s Cold Zero, Tri Synergy’s UFO: Aftermath, or stuff from the Korean contingent (JC Entertainment’s Call of Cthulhu–inspired horror/western MMORPG Priest and NCsoft’s Guild Wars)

SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT PORTABLE GAMING?

After this year’s showing at E3, we’d have to say “Hell yes!” Though maybe someone should ask Jeff again, since he’s too busy playing Pokémon Sapphire on his GBA SP. Sprint PCS is quick to show how dedicated it is to pushing the gaming segment for its users. Sanyo’s 8100 is the current cream of the crop, doing a pretty tight job on graphics and games. Even cooler still is what’s on the horizon: Samsung’s SPH-A600, which will let you flip the LCD screen over on itself and dock the phone in a mini gamepad, so it handles like a GBA. Sprint’s game selection looks promising but is still best suited for less taxing titles—we played friggin’ Deer Hunter 3D (it wasn’t) and Ms. Pac-Man.

Nokia is trying to explode in the cell phone–gaming space with the N-Gage—a chunky, funky cell phone that’ll play games, MP3s, and even radio when you’re not chewing up talk-time. It’ll sell on October 7 to the tune of $300 with 10 launch titles. Are you ready to spend that kind of money? We’re not. This ambitious cellie strives to be more than a phone, but while the games we knocked around—such as Tomb Raider—looked OK, we’ve seen better.

That kind of dough for a souped-up cell phone may seem excessive, but that’s cheap for a powerful PDA. Enter Tapwave. This tiny company showed off the Helix (tentative codename) behind closed doors and impressed the hell out of us. This thing boasts more features than we have room to go on about here, including a 3.8-inch LCD with 480x320 resolution, ATI 2D graphics chip, Fathammer’s 3D software engine, two SD card slots, and IR and Bluetooth support. Tapwave has already signed on Activision, Atari, and Midway to make Helix-specific games. And let’s not forget that this is also a fully functional Palm OS 5 PDA, able to juggle contacts, play MP3s, and show crisp video at 40 frames per second!

Sony threw down the gauntlet by announcing a portable PlayStation (PSP, for short), which the company is touting as the Walkman for the 21st century. Still more than a year away, it’s an interesting notion: PS1-caliber games on a tiny handheld. No prices cited, no games announced—there wasn’t even a prototype device to show off! Still, Sony promises extensive support from the likes of Electronic Arts, a built-in memory stick slot (for digital audio), and an optical drive that’ll play tiny 1.8GB discs. We wonder how much juice the disk drive and LCD will eat up—and if we can wait until the official release in fall 2004.

So, what is the venerable GBA doing in light of all this competition? Nintendo is trying to bolster all its GameCube games with GBA support (some cool Pac-Man and Link adventures are in store), but after the announcement of Sony’s PSP, Nintendo’s stock has dipped lower than Mario’s mustache.

Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.

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