Although I've never been much of a console gamer myself, it would be kind of hard for me to report on this year's E3 without saying at least a little something about the consoles. After all, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Gamecube both made their E3 debuts this year, and the PlayStation 2 is also still fairly new, especially given how hard it was for the average gamer to find one last year.

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All of the consoles seemed to do about as well as many PCs in terms of the hardware. Granted, Microsoft had some frame rate problems with the Xbox, supposedly due to its use of pre-release hardware, but the Xbox should be impressive if it lives up to its specifications. On the other hand, if the crowds at the various booths were any indication, the Gamecube will be the platform to challenge Sony's present sales.

The title that Microsoft was hyping the most, Halo, looked like the typical kind of first-person shooter that one would expect on a high-end PC. Oddworld: Munch's Odyssee (pictured above) struck me as a funny action/adventure game with strong graphics, but not the kind of title that would compel me to buy a new console. Then again, many people seemed underwhelmed by the PS2's titles at last year's E3, and cynical game reviewers are hardly a match for Microsoft's marketing juggernaut.

 

The biggest news for adventure gamers were the games being shown outside of the console companies' booths. Dreamcatcher has already made plans to bring its PC titles Dracula Resurrection and In Cold Blood to the PlayStation, and LucasArts will bring Escape from Monkey Island to the PlayStation 2. (Well, adventures on consoles may not be news to everyone -- Revolution has been talking about bringing its upcoming Broken Sword 3 to consoles for a while now.)

When I got back from E3 and told some fellow adventure players about these upcoming ports, I was surprised by their generally negative reactions -- console systems are too simple; adventure games belong on the PC, they said.

I don't quite see things that way, though. Although Nintendo is making a conscious effort to go after the younger markets, there's nothing about consoles that necessarily make them bad places to play adventure games. Virtually every recent adventure has relatively low hardware specs -- all you've really needed is a 300 MHz processor, 640x480 resolution, and sometimes minimal 3D acceleration. The controls in adventures are also usually quite simple -- in most games, just a mouse and a few keys or buttons; or for LucasArts' recent titles, four arrow keys and a few more keys to select an action. Nothing a PS2 or Xbox can't handle.

Many adventures also use fairly similar interfaces, even over the course of a couple of years -- look at Dracula: Resurrection, Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, and The Messenger from Dreamcatcher or Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island from LucasArts. Once a publisher's developed the engine for one game, most of the rest of the work in future games is in the story, graphics, and voice-overs. With the possible exception of having to support different resolutions, all of this work can be used across multiple platforms relatively easily.

You might argue that there's something about a console that demands a certain sort of gameplay. It's been said that consoles are best suited for games that people would want to play together in their living rooms, and it's true that you're not going to have multiplayer action in a typical adventure. But as far as "single-player" games go, adventures aren't bad to play with someone else. Most already focus on the story-telling -- something that more than one person can enjoy at a time. I've also heard many players say that it's more fun to solve the puzzles with someone else than by themselves.

Even setting aside the technical and control issues, console games have historically had a different style of play than computer games. Perhaps there will be some challenge in marketing adventures to console owners, who may be used to other genres. On the other hand, Sony claims that it's already ahead of schedule in reaching a broad demographic of users with the PS2. With millions of consoles already in homes, reaching even a fraction of that audience surely couldn't hurt.

We'll have to wait to find out how adventures fare on consoles. If publishers can market their games properly, there are opportunities to reduce the per-unit costs by reusing each game's story and graphics on multiple platforms. Maybe seeing more adventures on consoles is just what this genre needs, even for die-hard PC gamers who will never touch an Xbox themselves.