Volition also decided to make one of the very few new game announcements at E3 by revealing their new FPS title, Red Faction. Although the engine for the game, dubbed Geo-Mod, includes skeletal deformation and interpolation, object shadow casting and locational damage, the most impressive feature of the game looks set to be the real time geometry modification. What this means for the gamer is that bullets will chip walls and the more powerful weapons such as rocket launchers will tear huge craters in the ground that remains. The Prey engine from 3D Realms was supposed to similarly allow destruction of geometry but it now looks like that game won't be appearing for a good time yet, if at all. Voliton is also promising an advanced physics system, controllable vehicles like APCs and submarines and an immersive story line. You could argue that almost everyone promises an immerse story line with few companies actually delivering, but looking at their track record, Volition are in a good position to deliver on that promise compared to other developers.

With their legal wrangling with Sony out of the way, Bleem! is now ready to move forward with some new PlayStation emulation software. The most exciting news from the Bleem! guys was regarding a Dreamcast version of their software. Soon, anyone with a Dreamcast will be able to run PlayStation games at 640x480 with smoother graphics thanks to the bilinear filtering of the Dreamcast. They've also come up with an interesting way to avoid the compatibility issues that plagued previous versions of the software. They'll be releasing four versions of Bleem!, each guaranteed to support 100 titles for 20 bucks. While the cynical might see this as a cunning money making plan it does mean that if you buy any one of these four Bleem! versions you'll know for certain that the games mentioned on the back will be emulated 100%. The PC versions of Bleem! will be released a few months after the Dreamcast ones although for compatibility reasons software rendering support has now gone out the window. Finally, they're also considering making PlayStation style controllers for both systems to make the games easier to play.

Interplay undoubtedly had one of the best lineups at E3 this year. Bioware's new Dungeons and Dragons title Neverwinter Nights and Shiny's new strategy title Sacrifice were both on show and looking fantastic. We should have E3 First Glimpses of both titles available soon as we discovered more about them than can really be divulged here. Giants was on show again, this time in playable form. We only managed to give the Mecharins (the cockney space pirates) a go but it was pretty fun. The terrain looks fantastic in motion as do the characters and we liked one particular detail they added. Giants is going to be one of the few titles to avoid vanishing corpse syndrome. When creatures die, things best described as land piranhas swarm up from the earth and munch them down to nothing. We didn't get a chance to play either Icewind Dale and Baldurs Gate 2 but they both looked just as nice in real life as they do in the screen shots.