Gears of War Realm

We have put up our first of two parts of my Gears of War preview. This segment of the preview discusses the single player campaign demos we saw at E3 2006. There wasn’t much to see at E3 other than the first level, but I think that first level gives us a good taste of the possibilities the entire game will provide.

Continue on to Part I of the Gears of War Preview.

We should have Part II, which covers the multiplayer aspects of the game, completed early next week. So stay tuned for that, and also remember that we’ll have a Gears of War Xbox 360 Faceplate contest in the coming weeks.

Tomorrow the “music television” channel MTV2 will premiere a special documentary called Gears of War: The Race to E3. The show follows the Epic Games staff preparing our favorite game, Gears of War, for the big show in Los Angeles.

The show is being developed by LivePlanet, a production company founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who was on site at Epic Game’s headquarters in North Carolina to film the documentary. LivePlanet was also behind Project Greenlight and many other projects and feature films. I’m personally happy to see a game documentary in such talented hands.

So be sure to turn your TVs, or set your Tivo, to record MTV2 tomorrow at 10 pm Eastern/Pacific to get a sneak peak behind the scenes at the development of Gears of War. Until then you can also grab some clips of the show from the show page on MTV2.

[UPDATED 5/23/2006]
For those of you without MTV2, or who missed the show, you can now watch it on MTV’s Overdrive service. FYI: MTV’s Overdrive only works with Internet Explorer for Windows XP; Mac and Linux users are out of luck.

Gears of War lead designer Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski has posted his E3 2006 photos over to the Something Awful Forums (SA Forums may be not work safe).

He posted photos of interest from all over Los Angeles including various movie and geek stars he ran into at the various E3 parties this year. Some photos of interest are: CliffyB and his girlfriend posing with Hollywood party girl and new video game spokes-drunk Paris Hilton, a very uninterested Matthew Perry and a shot of Metal Gear Solid designer Hideo Kojima caught playing Gears of War multiplayer. The rest are just Cliff acting goofy in various situations.

The only thing missing this year is CliffyB’s trademark “pimp suits” that he usually adorns for trade shows. I really was disappointed to not see him in one this year.

In another attempt to steal some audience from G4, the “music television” network MTV has yet another video game related show. This time they gathered four big game designers for a pow-wow of sorts discussing the video game industry.

What does this have to do with Gears of War? Well quite a bit because one of the show’s panelists is our beloved Gears of War lead designer Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski. He is joined by Deus Ex designer Harvey Smith, The Sims creator Will Wright and God of War designer David Jaffe. The segment was earlier this month at E3 and is hosted by MTVcorrespondant Gideon Yago.

Unfortantely, MTV themselves didn’t air the whole segment but instead decided to cut it down quite a bit for the air. Luckily MTV’s online video provider Overdrive, has the entire segment unedited.

A word of warning though, if you are not a user of Internet Explorer for Windows you are out of luck. So that leaves all Mac users, like myself, unable to easily view the segment.

Thanks to Joystiq for the heads up!

TeamXbox, has put up a story discussing the inevitable: the sale of the Gears of War Limited Edition Xbox 360 face plates from E3 on eBay. For those who don’t know what the face plates are, during E3 last week, Microsoft was giving away Gears of War faceplates to anyone who was lucky enough to get behind closed doors to play Gears of War at the Xbox booth.

The faceplates are currently selling for as much as $200, and are expected to grab even more. Even CliffyB made a joke during the demo he gave, about getting them to sell on ebay. Even the editors over at TeamXbox are talking about off-loading their face plates, according to their article. While that is a good idea if you want to make a quick buck, I am going to keep mine; which is looking quite good on the front of my Xbox 360 right now (pictured at right).

But before you go out and shell out your hard earned cash on a Gears of War faceplate, you may want to keep on reading. I say this because we here at Gears of War Realm have some extra faceplates; which we don’t intend to sell. Instead, some of the kind contributors at our parent site, Realm Media Networks, gave up their face plates to be given away here on Gears of War Realm to some lucky readers over the months leading up to the release of Gears of War!

Stay tuned for more details on the first faceplate contest, which we expect to fire off sometime around Memorial Day 2006.

During the first day of E3 2006, Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski presented Gears of War to the attendees of a special conference; and we were there to capture the event for all the Gears of War fans out there.

The conference was hosted by Geoff Keighley, contributing writer for Business 2.0. Also present was Hideo Kojima who presented a video of Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PlayStation 3 and Xavier Poixwho who presented Red Steel for the Nintendo Wii.

Personally I believe Gears of War came out on top of this event because it received the largest amount of applause and cheers from the crowd as Cliffy played through the game.

Click Here To Watch The Presentation.

[Update: 5/18/2006]

Thanks to the readers over at Joystiq who pointed out that there is a better quality video over on Google Video from the folks from Team Xbox. It appears they got to sit closer than we did, we were stuck back in the back in the “Media seats” and were told we could not move forward any. So you can also view their video by clicking here.

After a delay, we at Gears of War Realm have uploaded all of our photos from E3 2006 into our Photo Gallery. Gears of War was about everywhere you looked thanks to the fantastic publicity from Microsoft.

We have photos from all around the show including the giant outdoor poster, a day by day viewing of the mural drawing, the Emergence Day sign holding bum, CliffyB’s single player presentation, and exclusive photos of the Gears of War multiplayer mode.

Here are a few notable photos, for the rest please visit the photo gallery.

The guys over at Joystiq have scored shots of a chalk mural being drawn at the E3 show floor in preparation for the show next week. Actually the word is that there is so much work to do, that it wont be complete until the second day of the show (Thursday). There is also a camera there taking photos for what I’m sure will become a time lapsed vide of the creation of the mural.

Head on over to Joystiq’s story for a few photos of the mural. We will also be sure to take some great shots of the mural next week while at the show.

A press release issued by Microsoft today announced a bunch of new features to be given to gamers next week during E3 via the Xbox Live Marketplace. One of the many things mentioned is that a high definition Gears of War trailer will be available to download. I would bet that this will be a whole new trailer, not yet seen.

This is great news for gamers unable to attend E3 because some game demos and trailers that only E3 attendees could see before now will be available simulaneously to the rest of the console owners out there. I see this as a great example of the usefulness of the Xbox Live Marketplace, and hope to see more great ideas like this in the future.

Official Xbox Magazine’s June 2006 issue has an expansive nine page feature on the upcoming Gears of War. OXM paid a visit to Epic Games’ North Carolina offices and came back with an excellent article.

They have some new information including intriguing gameplay features, weapon details and even some information on the Horde. Not to mention some great great full page visuals that really show off the incredible detail to be found in the game. There is also a little level teases in there as well, I do recall something about a rail car sequence from a famous movie?

For the whole article, well you’ll have to pick up the issue which will be available on magazine stands later this month.