I also was able to slip into the Lucasarts booth for a bit and got to take a look at the new Indiana Jones game for a couple minutes. The demo I saw had Indy punching someone into a car. This simple action was made that much more lifelike with the use of NaturalMotion’s Euphoria. The technology basically combines animation with the physics engine to make for lifelike game world reactions. In the example being used in Indy, the man hit the car, the car crumpled, the windows shattered, the car shook slightly, and he slumped against the side, then got up again. The interactions where all seamless. To prove his point that you would never see the same action twice, he hit the guy against the car again and it did indeed happen differently and this time the man hit the ground and pushed himself up and grabbed the car’s door handle to steady himself. This level of interactivity is in every aspect of the game, from people shifting their weight to shifting bridges to Indy using his whip to trip them. It was quite impressive and I can’t wait to see it inaction more.

After that, I doubled back for my meeting with Warner Bros. Interactive which was interesting and I got to speak with them about Justice League Heroes. Heroes, which is done by Snowblind Studios, the same company responsible for Champions of Norath. But the bigger story was Dirty Harry, which didn’t actually appear in playable form... in fact didn’t really appear in any form. I went to a limited screening of a trailer for the game, which was a pre-rendered video with the in-game assets as a demonstration for what the game should look like. However, I left with an impression of not knowing any idea of what the game would actually play like or even what type of game it would be. You would think that a company would realize that even a little bit of what the game actually looks like would be better then any pre-rendered mockup, but I guess not.