Tabula Rasa

E3 Impressions

by Thurston Hillman

Having just completed a demo of Auto Assault at the NCsoft booth, Messiah and I were on our way back to the comforts of the Media Room, where we would write articles while being fed grapes by stowed away booth babes. Well, that was the plan up until we were stopped by the Community Manager for Tabula Rasa, who recognizing us as weak willed followers of TenTonHammer demanded we take two empty seats and try out the demo. Having been a game that Messiah and I had often discussed, there was no argument from us; the booth babe heaven of the Media Room would have to wait…

Given the option of a straight walkthrough demo, or of being thrown right into the “shoot em up” scenario, I opted into the immediate gaming. As with all E3 demo games, there is always a paper detailing the controls of the given game. Tabula Rasa had an exceptionally simple control scheme that mimicked games such as WoW, only with a few more intricate options. The main difference in controls was the “q” and “e” keys that were used to switch between weapons and abilities, as opposed to strafing movement to which they are normally reserved.

Game Postera

The game itself had almost immediate similarities with games like Doom 3 and Quake 4, imitating the photo realistic faces and the feel of the military characters. As I traversed the human base, I found myself feeling like I was playing more of a 3 rd person FPS as opposed to an MMORPG. My distance from the MMORPG world only increased as I left the human settlement, and was immediately after confronted with an orbital bombardment and a giant organic tank walking towards my base. The TenTonHammer was about to fall on this sorry alien scum, and I was going to bring it down.

Apparently the pistol was not the best choice of weaponry to start with, as it did minimal damage to the walking tank-thing of death that was approaching my base. Using the “q” key to switch weapons (it just seems wrong to me!), I frantically searched for a weapon to deal with the oncoming machine of death, and nothing presented itself better then trusty Shotty McShotgun. Sadly, alien tank-things are almost immune to every type of weapon that you carry around, so even my futuristic boomstick gained me no advantage, and only brought attention to me in the form of aggro, followed by streams of high explosive rockets. If you ever go out to play dodge ball, don’t do it with a scary rocket armed tank monster, just stick with your elementary school bully.