Macworld NYC 2002--Show Floor, Day 3

The crowd was definitely down on Friday. We think the attendance will miss IDGs projection of the same attendance as last year but IDG does the count and reports the number. We used this opportunity to walk the whole floor again, pick up a few more gems to report on and see some of the new popular things closer/longer in addition to focussing on the game area in the front of the North Hall.

The Game Area consists of a theater, the game company booths and the Apple Gaming area. The theater offers rotating demos by Ambrosia, Freeverse, nVidia, Aspyr Media, MacPlay, Masque Publishing and Feral Interactive. We watched an terrific nVidia demo that included real time rendering animations of an incredibly detailed wolfman and an underwater scene with a fantastic squid, swaying complex sea fans and schools of small fish. The convergence of real and fantasy in computer graphics is amazing.

Lots of titles were available for demonstration at the publisher's booths and in the Apple gaming area. Aspyr had demos of Medal of Honor, The Sims Hot Date, Harry Potter, Spiderman, 4x4 Evo, Undying, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, The Sims Vacation (pre-release), Star Wars Galactic Battleground, Ghost Recon and Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (pre-release). They were all available to try out on Power Macs with 17" Apple LCD displays or 15" iMacs. After seeing and trying RtCW we couldn't stop ourselves from buying a copy. MacPlay had hands-on demos of the pre-release version of Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix at their booth and the rest of their titles were in the Apple gaming area.

The Apple gaming area had about 26 Power Macs set up with Apple Cinema or 17" flat panel displays and SoundSticks or JBL Creature speaker systems. It also had 10 15" flat panel iMacs. All of the titles available from the publishers present at Macworld plus GameRanger 3.0, an on line gaming service, were there and one could play them all if one had the inclination and time because the crowd was thick even on Friday.

Here are our notes on several additional gems displayed on the show floor: