Sleepy Time in Gamesville

Even though I've dragged myself into work today I've been feeling a bit under the weather since yesterday, so I didn't feel up to casting my net and dragging in the choice catch from E3 so far, but it looks like it may be slim pickings at any rate. I'm going to wait for everything to wrap up (today is the final day) and try to put together a selection of highlights.

-K.

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E3 Day Zero Talkabout

I guess yesterday didn't really count as a real day of E3 for some reason, even though there was a very long procession of announcements and demonstrations. Microsoft kicked things off with their press conference that everyone but myself seems to be raving about. I guess I had to be there. The major buzz seems to be surrounding Project Natal, Microsoft's latest attempt to outdo the Wii. Project Natal is a camera peripheral that senses gestures, voice and facial expressions to control games. I remain perfectly comfortable with a controller. They also had Felicia Day come out and tell us there would be integrated Facebook and Twitter support for the 360, because why the fuck not. Hideo Kojima emerged from the depths of his shattered psyche to inform the world that the 360 would be getting a Metal Gear game, not the port of Metal Gear Solid 4 everyone was expecting (and hoping for), but rather a brand-new title featuring Raiden, a character that, to my knowledge, is the most hated of the franchise. Thanks, Hideo. Towards the end, Peter Molyneux had a discussion through Project Natal with a "digital boy" on-screen that was created by Lionhead, and by all accounts was apparently an intensely creepy experience.
There was very little in terms of new game announcements or developments, or at least ones that I care about at any rate, but there were a couple of note:

• In a somewhat surprising announcement that has, obviously, sparked anger on the internet, Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2. The argument is that many people believed Left 4 Dead would receieve free, continual gameplay updates, like in Team Fortress 2, and that Valve announcing a sequel that, I assume, will be a fully-priced retail product, is some sort of betrayal. I, too, felt that pang of entitlement momentarily, but quickly reconciled that with knowing I probably got $50 out of the first game, and also never recalled Valve promising additional content at the game's release. In this interview with project lead Chet Faliszek, he says that support for the original game will not suddenly disappear, though whether this translates to more content remains to be seen. Anyway, it's more Left 4 Dead except in the south, with new characters, a stronger focus on melee weapons, and other new improvements. I'm excited. You can check out the trailer and also take a look at this hands-on preview.
• Max Payne-creators Remedy finally emerged from their underground lair in Finland to show off Alan Wake, which has been MIA for a couple of years now, a game I've been excited about without knowing what the hell it actually is because they've never shown any gameplay until now. And it looks like a video game, thank god for that.
• It feels weird that I'm only going to be talking about three games and one of them is a downloadable release. Produced by Epic and Chair, Shadow Complex is a game I didn't bother digging any deeper into until I read "Metroid-like" somewhere. So it seems.

I trust that tomorrow, the first official day of the show, will provide more visual stimulation.

-K.

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Highlights of E3: Day Two

Apparently last night's EA-sponsored, Rock Band-themed after-party featured an unannounced live performance by The Who, I guess as sort of a tie-in since the The Who's "Best Of" song pack for Rock Band went online last night, which seems like it was pretty rad. They were originally supposed to be bringing to full album of Who's Next to the game, but I guess after a few months of waiting Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey came out and said "Yeah, we sort of lost the master tracks for a few of those songs." They've still got "Baba O'Riley" in there, so it's all good. Not much to talk about announcement or press conference wise, other than Shigeru Miyamoto saying that they are making another Pikmin game, which is something I've been waiting to here for a long time. Now with the show:

• Destructoid offers more hands-on impressions of Fallout 3, reinforcing my feeling that the presentation just sucked and the game itself, in a much richer context than simply showing combat alone allows, will still be awesome.
  
• Shacknews goes hands-on with Resident Evil 5, coming away with some fully expected palpable enthusiasm.
• It's annoyingly shaky-cam, but Evil Avatar sister site Co-Optimus offers up some footage of them playing Left 4 Dead, and I really want to play it.
• Post-apocalypse seems to be the order of the day, with id's Rage, Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Gearbox's Borderlands, and I'm very fine with that. The Brothers in Arms-developer trotted out the game, its first public appearance, by putting on a lengthy presentation of the FPS/RPG hybrid, and it looks really good. You can read some of the major features they're promising here, and the presentation itself is split into three parts, here's Part #1, Part #2, and Part #3. The most important thing to bring up, I think, is that it looks like you can wander around the world and play through the entire game in co-op.
  
• Capcom presented some gameplay footage of Airtight Studios' third-person shooter Dark Void, and I'm looking forward to it. Running around shooting guys on the ground looks very much like Gears of War except while wearing a jetpack, and I'm okay with that. Though you can jack UFOs and go dogfighting with them, which should be great considering these are the guys behind Crimson Skies. I'm digging the sort of darker version of a 40's serial aesthetic that they're going for, and the "vertical combat" also looks pretty sweet.
• I played a little bit of Baldur's Gate II a while ago and it was not as completely horrible as I remember it, so maybe BioWare's so-called "spiritual successor" to that celebrated franchise Dragon Age: Origins will be better received by me, but based on this gameplay footage I'm still on the fence.
• Lastly, here's a poser: It's E3, you've recently announced your new game, but you don't really have anything to show off yet and you don't have the resources to hire a team to make a CG trailer, what do you do? My answer is don't go ahead make a trailer anyway. But those small inconveniences did not stop a reformed Apogee Software from releasing a trailer for their upcoming handheld-only Duke Nukem Trilogy. Seriously? Why did you even take the time to make this? I've seen fake YouTube fan trailers a million times better than what I just saw.

Also, let's never bring up Army of Two ever again.

-K.

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Highlights of E3: Day One (For Reals)

I guess, even though it was listed as a date on the official schedule, Monday was a "pre-E3" day and not considered to be the actual first day of the event. Even though Microsoft held their big press event and lots of publishers showed off their games on Monday. Anyway, here's the poop from yesterday:

I'd talk about the highlights of the Sony and Nintendo press conferences, except the problem is that there really weren't any. Sony's video download service launched late last night and they showed off Killzone 2 and Resistance 2. Sony's Jack Tretton also brought out a new game that they described as an MMO MAG (Massive Action Game, or something to that effect) and I guess they're calling it "MAG." He's saying it will support up to 256 players in one match, which sounds like a clusterfuck, and went on to say this kind of game hasn't been done before and wouldn't be possible on any platform except for the PS3. He didn't really give any reasons why you couldn't do it on the 360, because I'm pretty sure you could, and I should mention it has been done before, by the same company he works for, no less.
The reps from Nintendo spent a lot of time talking about the casual market, the importance of trying to cater to the female market, backing that up with some enthralling charts and graphs showing that Nintendo DS ownership is nearly split right down the middle between men and women. They talked about Wii Sports 2 being included with the new "MotionPlus" peripheral which is a new controller attachment that is supposed to create more realistic and accurate 1:1 motion with the controller, which is kind of something it should've had to begin with. Also they announced a new DS-exclusive Grand Theft Auto game called Chinatown Wars, set in Liberty City, but did not show off anything from the game itself. Capcom also stated that Dead Rising will be coming to the Wii, but still no PC version or mention of a sequel.

And now, flashing lights and pretty pictures:

• More media and an official trailer for the new Ghostbusters game can be found here. The game itself does not look particularly great, but it's very hard not to be excited knowing that the original cast is involved and that Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd are writing the script and are being very hands-on with the development.
• Shacknews has a new preview of Valve's Left 4 Dead, which has gone through a big facelift apparently, and Rock Paper Shotgun has some hands-on impressions. Also here's some raw footage of the game. Since last we saw it they've redesigned the characters, changed some weapons and commented about two-player split-screen for the 360. For a while now the game has supposedly been content complete and is going through the rigorous Valve playtesting wringer, and as much as I'd like to play it now the quality of The Orange Box speaks volumes about how valuable that process is.
• Shacknews also has some hands-on impressions of Bethesda's Fallout 3, which leaves me a little more hopeful about it than their demonstration video left me feeling. Like what many have been saying is that what made the Fallout games great was not the combat but the dialogue and atmosphere, but that's not really something you can show off effectively in a five minute presentation.
• Ubisoft's Far Cry 2, which is not being developed by Crytek, is something that I've been looking forward to for quite some time, and even though it bears the title it has little resemblance to any of the previous titles (Which apart from the PC original were kind of crap). Set in Africa, they're promising a non-linear adventure in which you explore a 50km open world space, trying to seek out and eliminate an arms dealer known as The Jackal, and along the way you'll take on side missions so you can buy bigger and better guns. They put out an official trailer and some new media, and just for kicks, here's an interview with Ubi's Clint Hocking from a couple days ago.
• EA also showed off a trailer and some walkthrough footage of their upcoming third-person horror-themed shooter Dead Space, which to me sort of looks like they're trying to combine Doom 3 and Resident Evil 4, with a splash of System Shock 2. I'm really hoping they can pull it off, but while what they're showing off here is interesting, it's not terribly impressive.
• Raven has finally come out of whatever dark basement they've been laboring in and showed off a teaser trailer for the new Wolfenstein game. I know everybody and their mom loves to bitch about how played out and stale World War II games are getting, but I've always maintained that as long as it's a good game I'll play it. I played through Return to Castle Wolfenstein again recently, and barring the forced stealth sections, it still holds up relatively well. I'm completely down for another game where I get to kill Nazis and zombies.

With the exception of the new Wolfenstein, all of the games I've talked about, including Gears of War 2, are slated to hit this Fall. It should be a fun (and expensive) time to be a gamer.

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Highlights of E3: Day One

Even though publishers and developers were breaking off ties with the ESA in droves, this year's slimmed-down E3 has so far still provided plenty of exciting and interesting demonstrations and revelations. I think it's funny that John Carmack, head of id Software, one of the first to split from the ESA (The group that puts E3 together) he still showed up, under the wing of new publisher Electronic Arts, to show off their upcoming FPS Rage. Which to me seems like telling someone their birthday is a waste of time and money but still showing up to the party. But I digress, here's what I dug:

It was a big day for Microsoft, or M$ to the disgruntled Square fanboys, as they announced that previously PS3-exclusive heavy-hitter Final Fantasy XIII will be heading for the XBox 360 as well. I'm not going to buy it and I don't know if I'll even try it, but it's both funny and frustrating to watch the hardcore PS3/Square zealots bang their cups and shake their cages, as if Square announced it wasn't coming to the PS3 at all. Any forum will no doubt provide hilarious commentary about Microsoft being the big bully trying to monopolize the industry and painting Sony as the "little guy" being kicked around. Sony is not the little guy; There are no little guys in this fight. It would be more accurate to describe Sony as arrogant and lazy, resting on their laurels, you could see it in the earliest press releases and even those following, where they were expecting you to buy the PlayStation based on the name and promise of Blu-ray alone, even if the games weren't there, and to some degree, still aren't. It's hubris, and will probably end up being a good thing for this never-ending console war, it will actually make Sony start to act like a competitor.

Microsoft also showed off all the features of revamped Dashboard, to be included in the next major update. The major upgrades I'm looking forward to are optional game installs, which we're being promised works with all previous titles and future ones, though to make that a viable proposition to the current install base they really need to bring down their ridiculous hard drive prices (Currently the 120GB XBox 360 hard drive is $179.99), because the 20GB hard drive that I, and many others, have really wouldn't be able to fit more than two or three games, and that's if we completely get rid of demos, videos and Live Arcade titles. Microsoft also made an exclusive deal with Netflix to bring streaming movies to XBox Live, which already being a Netflix customer is something I should have read about more, but I can only hope and assume this means I'll be able to take advantage of this at no extra charge. Also they're saying the Dashboard will be tied-in with the Guide, meaning that you'll be able to switch to a different game or a video or whatever from whatever you're playing/watching without having to quit and go back to the menu, which is kind of hot. Lastly they're set to replace the regular Gamertag pictures with "Avatars," 3D representations of yourself that you create, which screams as a "me too" move to copy the Wii (Or would that be "Mii too?").

And now, the games:

• Bethesda has finally released some gameplay footage of Fallout 3, in the form of a new official trailer and a slightly lackluster demonstration video, which I'm hoping I can put down to it just being a hastily thrown together presentation.
• EA showed off the extremely impressive DICE-developed, Parkour-influenced FPS Mirror's Edge, which also comes in the form of an official trailer and demonstration video. I'm really hoping they can pull this off because it's looking like it could be something very special. They're promising that you can play through the game without firing a shot, and as someone that goes out of his way to get a melee kill, that sounds pretty awesome to me. Though I also thought you could probably play through F.E.A.R. without firing a shot, it would just be really difficult.
• Capcom took some time to show off some of the online co-op in Resident Evil 5, which is pretty much all you need to know about the game in order to secure a purchase.
• Epic was also around, showing off some of the gameplay in Gears of War 2, but that footage is secondary to the much more important announcement that the game will feature 5-player co-op. They're promising to have it out by early November, and more of you guys need to buy 360's.

That's all for now, since I'm at work all week I can't really track the goings-on of today, so expect another summary of today's events tomorrow morning.

-K.

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