One of the big surprises of the show, came when we were getting a demonstration of American McGee's Alice, the upcoming third person, Quake III Arena engine title from Electronic Arts and Rogue Entertainment. According to PR coordinator Jason Andersen, the game will not feature a multiplayer component. Originally the plan was to include a separate, first-person deathmatch mode, but this has been scrapped, as they have decided to focus exclusively on the single player game.

Another interesting tidbit we picked up from the show floor, is word that Ground Control, a 3D strategy game from Massive Entertainment that is currently in a limited beta, is expected to go gold, "any day now" and could very likely be gold before the show is over. We were told the game would be available on store shelves "two to three weeks."

Westwood's revamped official Command & Conquer: Renegade site has released a new movie featuring some very impressive gameplay footage from this upcoming third person action game (thanks CnCRenegade.com). The movie is roughly a 9 meg download, and in MPEG format.

Screenshots and a movie in Quicktime format from Red Faction, Volition's just announced first person shooter (story) have been posted at Daily Radar. The movie demonstrates their engine's much talked about deformable terrain feature, and the shots depict the environment in various states of destruction.

The Reviewboard has posted four screenshots from Fallout: Tactics, a previously unknown title in the Fallout series of RPGs. They are said to be, "sneak prevue screen shots" and no source is credited.

This being E3, there are lots of general pieces up for your reading enjoyment:

• Telefragged's Day One writeup is up, featuring a look at Deus Ex amongst other games.
• Black & White fan site The Citadel has been posting their E3 coverage, which features a Q&A with Peter Molyneux as well as their overall report.
• GameSpot UK's coverage sports impressions of Warcraft III, Oni, Hitman, and the newly resurfaced Starship Troopers in addition to others.
• IMG Magazine's coverage features a look at the show from a Mac gamer's perspective.
• General news from the E3 floor can be found at GameSpot, PC.IGN, and Gamers.com, as well as Stomped@E3, and WRE's E3 page.

Raven's Kenn Hoekstra has written an editorial at Soldier-of-Fortune.com that features a look back at the Herculean task of writing a strategy guide for Soldier of Fortune. It's an interesting read, and answers the question of how the heck he got roped into writing the guide to begin with, as well as others related to the creation of the book.

Stomped@E3 has conducted a Q&A with none other than Bruce Campbell, best known to readers of this site as the star of the Evil Dead series of films. They talk about the upcoming Evil Dead video game, as well as Bruce's acting career.

A new version 3.23 of Fightclub, a configuration utility for Quake III Arena has been released. This new version corrects a few bugs that popped up in the initial 3.23 release, and is available as a full download, or a small patch for people that downloaded the last version.

• CPU Review has updated their Athlon/Pentium3 Price Comparison Guide.
• Another day, another addition to Christopher Hill's GeForce FAQ.
• New Windows 2000 drivers for the Diamond Viper II Z200 are available at S3's FTP site.
• S3 has released new X-Window drivers for Savage 2000 cards, Savage 4 cards, and Savage 3D cards (direct FTP links). Thanks SavageNews for those last two.

A brief interview with Chris Taylor is up at Well Rounded Entertainment, talking to the designer about his work on the upcoming 3D RPG Dungeon Siege, including how the game uses its 3D environments, and a look at some similarities between this, and Taylor's last major game release, the RTS title Total Annihilation.

The Linux Game Modification Center has released Linux-native compiled versions of the Quake III Arena 1.17 game source (thanks Jacek Fedoryñski). Like their Windows counterparts, players can expect a mild framerate improvement by using these.

ICQ 2000a Beta v.4.30 build #3141 is now available for download (thanks Ant). There is no word of new features or changes in this version, although it should be pointed out that it is a legitimate release, and not a leaked alpha version.

Part five of Machinima.com's tutorial on creating game models using the shareware program MilkShape 3D is up. This edition focuses on actually getting your models into an engine, using Quake III Arena as an example.

Daily Radar has posted their preview of Digital Anvil's Freelancer, which like many of this morning's previews is based on a demonstration given here at E3 (thanks LancerNews). The preview features three new screenshots in addition to glowing praise from the author.

Version 1.7 of GameLaunch 3D, a program that automatically configures games to best meet your hardware, is available, adding support for GeForce based video cards, and Quake III Arena.

• Evolva on EuroGamer.
• Martian Gothic on DeadAlfs 2000.
• Shadow Watch on GA-RPG.
• Soldier of Fortune on Alloy Gaming.
• Thief 2: The Metal Age on Alloy Gaming.

• ABIT KA7 on VIAHardware.com.
• Intel Pentium III 866 Mhz on 3D Rage.
• SoundBlaster Live Platinum and Cambridge Desktop Theatre 2500 (combo review) on PCStats.

Well, here we are, one day into E3 2000. I saw a number of great titles today (you'll see some news bits above from a few of them) and there are a lot more to see before the show winds down. I'm running on little, if any sleep (by the time I finally landed in Los Angeles it was 4:00 AM and I had to get up at 6:00) so don't expect any major reports just yet. I think those will have to wait until I've had a few nights of pure, uninterrupted sleep.

Link of the Day: The World Population Counter. Now how the heck do you suppose they calculate this one? (Thanks Andre').