As always: personal opinions, not those of EA/Sims/etc.
Everything discussed here was shown publicly at E3. All games/characters copyright
their respective owners. All the bad photographs are by me -- sorry, you know
how it is trying to take photos of video screens.
Here's a more detailed report on stuff I saw at the show. Other than the Wii
intro being first, it's not in any particular order.
Nintendo Wii Introduction
The line to get into
the Nintendo booth was heinous all three days, but hey, that's where
the best stuff at the show was. After getting inside, you saw a bunch
of demos in the middle. They showed several demos you would get to play
later -- the table tennis demo, the conductor demo, Metroid -- and one
you wouldn't, a great drumming demo using the Wii controller. |
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| Ubisoft had a cool first-person shooter/swordplay game called
Red Steel being demoed. By
the time I played I had memorized the level, so I had a pretty good time
mowing down Yakuza by pointing the Wii remote at the screen and moving
with the Nunchaku analog stick. The guy running the demo took pity on me
and showed me the hidden area with the boss, which was a swordplay battle.
If you've seen the original Nintendo promotional film for the Wii you know
pretty much how swordfighting in a Wii game works -- you swing the remote
like a sword. Yeah. I'm down with that. I really enjoyed RedSteel, but
in talking to other folks who got to play, I found there's a bit of split
opinion -- many people enjoyed it as much as I did, but others really thought
the control via the Wii remote was awkward. I wonder whether that kind
of split will persist all the way through when it ships? |
There are a bunch of better Red Steel images on
GameSpot.
The boss I got to fight is here. |
| Metroid Wii was on display and just like on the Gamecube, it's pretty much the
best-looking game on the platform. |
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| Inside, you got a crack at the symphony demo yourself. You wave the Wii controller
like a music baton and the orchestra follows along slower or faster. |
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| The table tennis demo worked pretty well -- you pushed the controller in and out.
Although I didn't get to take a picture of it, the tennis demo worked even better --
you swing the controller like a tennis racket, it reconignizes forehand and backhand moves...
totally fun!!! |
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This demo was a different idea for the controller -- essentially, your
little character is spinning through the maze and you guide them to avoid
obstacles or grab powerups using the controller as a pointer.
Another game that used the controller effectively, I heard, was the
Tony Hawk game for Wii (Tony Hawk's Downhill Run). You lean right and
left by turning the controller -- I didn't get to try it though. |
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| The baseball demo was totally fun. You stand sideways to the screen and
swing the controller like a bat -- and it works right- or left-handed!
In general I thought sports games will be one of the areas the Wii totally
rules. EA (house plug!) showed Madden Wii in the booth elsewhere, and it
really takes advantage of the controller too. Sports games are just more
fun on the Wii than elsewhere! |
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| WarioWare -- the endless series of mini-games -- is a natural for the
new controller. They came up with a lot of different ways you have to use
it, my favorite was the one where you put it on your head and squat up
and down twice quickly! |
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| Elebits is... well, I didn't understand the story, but you basically
suck the energy out of everything in a domestic setting by pointing with
the controller. |
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| SD Gundam was my overlooked-gem nominee of all the games in the Nintendo
booth. You're a cute little giant robot and you basically have a flail
-- a giant spiked ball on the end of a chain. You swing the controller
like it was the chain, and the spiked ball moves accordingly. The principle
of the game is simple -- destroy everything using either your flail or
your energy sword! Buildings, enemies -- flail 'em all! It was a blast,
I played all the way through a completed level. |
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If you look at the pictures above carefully, you'll see that Sony's
PS3 system is actually quite large. If you squared out the dimensions,
it would probably be about the size of an XBox 1 (but admittedley
the curves make it more graceful).
By far the standout game for PS3 for me was Warhawk, shown
in the three pictures at right. You fly a futuristic plane-ish thing
and try to defeat the attacking hordes. It was the only game at the
show to use the attitude-sensitivity of the new PS3 controller -- see
the middle picture -- which is what made it. Once you got the hang
of turning by banking the controller, I thought it was a total blast
(similar to the Tony Hawk's Downhill Run game for Wii, which I didn't
get to play).
I did talk to some friends who didn't like Warhawk though; one because
he didn't like the control and one because he thought it was repetitive.
I loved it, but it still didn't convince me I'd want to shell out $600
for a PS3.
Heavenly Sword was an impressive PS3 title, it seemed like
a Dynasty Warriors kind of experience. It looked good and had tight
controls -- I didn't get any decent photos of it though.
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| Genji was a swordplay game. I played
it for awhile -- and had a video camera stuck in my face for a quote
during the process -- but it just seems like another Onimusha. |
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There was a Gran Turismo for PS3,
of course looking and playing great!
Another game I didn't take any photos of was SingStar, the
European equivalent of Karaoke Revolution. There really wasn't anything
great about the PS3 version that I could tell -- it played a whole
lot like KR -- but I hadn't played any version of SingStar before,
so it was good to check it out. Another random attendee and I had
a blast belting out "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" in falsetto
:-) |
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| Virtua Tennis looked absolutely fantastic,
and played just like all other versions of Virtua Tennis ;-) |
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| Sega showed off the new Sonic game on PS3. |
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There was a really interesting game demo
called Eye of Judgement. It comes with a peripheral (sorry for
the blurry picture) which is a camera that points down at the table.
The game is a magic-the-gathering style card game, and the camera recognizes
the identity, position, and orientation of the cards you've put on
the table, then adds CG onscreen to act out the battles between your
proxy monsters.
It is a neat idea, but in the end I thought trying to computerize
the game made it less fun than just playing it as a card game. There's
a lot of "after playing this card, remove it," or "be
sure not to have the cards overlap," etc., etc. In the end I
don't think this version of the idea will really go anywhere, but
it's a neat observation that a camera can keep track of the cards. |
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| I played Resistance: Fall of Man for
awhile. It's another multi-player LAN game a la Battlefield. It was fine,
but I can't say there was anything extraordinary about it. |
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| Back on the boring old PS2, Level 5 (the
folks who did Dragon Quest 8) showed off Rogue Galaxy, a last-hurrah
Japanese RPG for PS2. It looked fun, they certainly understand that RPG
thing! |
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| And of course there's a God of War sequel on the
way. |
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| There were a lot of great-looking RTSes for
PC (and several for XB360) at the show. The three screens above are from
a particularly attractive one called Titan Quest from Iron Lore for the
PC. Like all RTSes, it was hard to spend enough time with it at the show
to evaluate how fun it is to play. |
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Ubisoft was showing off Call
of Juarez, a western-themed FPS for the
PC. It looks good so far, I hope it comes out well - good westerns are
almost as satisfying as good WWII shooters :-). It's being developed by
a Polish company. |
The Conan online game was being shown again. Just like last year, it's
a very attractive game (didn't get a chance to play). |
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Shadowrun was being shown at the Games for Windows booth -- it's a multi-player
LAN FPS from Microsoft. For those of you who know Evan Hirsch, this is
what he's working on now.
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The Ship is a graphic adventure game being developed by a small company
using the Source engine from Valve. |
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Prey was being shown at the 2K Games booth (for the second time, IIRC). |
My old co-worker Thomas Vu was at the show demoing the new Warhammer RTS. It's definitely up there in terms of pretty! |
Thomas explained several of the cooler points of gameplay, but I've always
thought it's hard to appreciate an RTS on the show floor. |
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Lost Planet is an FPS for PC and XB360 from Capcom. It looks great... |
...and the even better news is that it plays great. I played all the
way through this snow level at the Capcom booth, and I can't wait to play
this! It's probably the biggest reason I might get a 360. |
This was my favorite picture of E3. I don't know why they wrote my name
on this pylon, but they did! |
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Activision once again had the giant halfpipe for skaters and BMX in their
booth on the show floor. |
You may regard it as pointless spectacle, but any time I get to watch
Tony Hawk -- yeah, that Tony Hawk -- skate in person is OK by me. |
I suppose it won't come as a surprise that I thought this game was terrible. |
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And this was the other masterpiece of interactive entertainment being
shown along with it! Yup, that's Garfield all right. |
A pretty great slogan for a PSP accessories company. |
Pandemic was showing off the sequel to Destroy All
Humans. |
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Konami had a beat-em-up Powerstone-like game called Xaolin
Showdown with
attractive outlined, flat-shaded characters (which there were a lot of
this year). I didn't find out until after the show that this is based
on a Kids-WB animated series. |
There's a new Spy Hunter game (Nowhere to Run), and it's a pretty attractive
NFS-Undergound-like racer. |
Amazingly, it was on XBox 1. This was one of the few XB1 games to be
found at the show. |
| I checked out the videogame based on the upcoming Pixar
movie Cars mostly to see what the characters for the movie look like. |
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Another year, another DDR -- this
year's is called Dance Dance Revolution Universe. This year the
graphics are flat-shaded, outlined characters, and there's a little
bit more going on graphically. |
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| Besides showing off the new PS2 game, Konami had an arcade
version in their booth. |
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They brought in quite a few awesome DDR players to work
the pads in the booth. The guy pictured at center was smokin'. |
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Another targeted
game: Rockstar's Table Tennis for XB360 at the Microsoft booth. I guess
Ping-pong afficianados can be considered "hardcore" in their own way.
Everyone I saw playing this game was Asian; conclude what you will.
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Within the Microsoft booth, they had a little area for
XBox Live Arcade games. They were showing off the forthcoming Diner
Dash for
XB360. If you haven't played it, Diner Dash is an addictive casual
game about running a diner. It was awesome watching this woman play in
the booth -- she was gone, immersed in the game. She was quite
a ways in, so I think she'd been there awhile. |
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| 2K games' sports games look really nice, just as they did
when Sega sold them. Visual Concepts does a nice job with these -- at right,
NBA 2K7. |
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Yedang Online, a Chinese online company, was showing off Dance
Battle Audition, a multiplayer online dance competition game. |
It certainly was talking to its audience -- I think I was the only Caucasian
in the booth. |
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The
characters are cute, they were certainly working for the audience. |
I tried to play the game, and didn't really care for it (I play DDR some). |
This game is designed to use the PC keyboard, presumably so it can
be easily played in PC rooms in Asia. |
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Yedang was also showing off LaxeLore... |
...Shooro... |
....and this cute, "casual" MMO called Wiki, pictured
above and in the row of pictures below . |
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Buena Vista is making a game out of Desperate
Housewives (collapse of
western civilization imminent, etc.). |
It may turn out to be just a bad licensed game, but it has a lot of Sims-like
interfaces and elements. |
And, when I actually stopped and watched the game, I gotta tell ya, the
dialog was really funny. It could turn out to be popular outside the core
gamers! |
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Games I Played: Dungeon Runners from NCSoft. Man there are a lot of MMOs
out there. I spent 20-30 minutes playing this, and couldn't get a grasp
on why I'd rather play this than WoW. |
Games I Played: Yakuza isn't the most amazing-looking game, but it was
pretty fun to pick up and play. That makes sense because it's about brawling
using anything you can pick up in the environment! |
I thought Sega had good floor promos, too. For Yakuza they were handing
out temporary tattoos. It's a PS2 game out in September. |
Games I Played: I happened to pick up and play Virtua
Tennis, never having
tried it before. It's really fun! I think they sold a copy. |
The new Total War game is Medieval; YABRTS (Yet Another Beautiful Real-Time
Strategy) game. It looks really fun to play as well, but I didn't take
the time on the floor. |
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| Dark Messiah from Ubisoft is a first-person
fighting game on PC. Your hands are shown on-screen to try and make first-person
work for fighting. It's using the Source engine. |
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Konami did it -- they're bringing out
a full-on dating sim for the U.S., called Brooktown Senior Year.
Apart from avoiding senioritis, you try to appeal to the individual interests
of the hotties in your class.
See remark above about collapse of western civilization, etc. |
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| Games I played, cont'd: I spent about 30 minutes
with Namco/Bandai's Eureka Seven, a new mech game. It took a little
while to get used to the control scheme, but it was definitely fun. Unfortunately,
too much of the gameplay ended up being flying around in circles trying
to get a bead on the other guy (scarily reminescent of WWII dogfight games).
It's pretty and the sense of flying is pretty compelling, though. |
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Capcom's Clover Studio was showing
off two games, the beautiful, epic Okami at left and the new brawler God
Hand at right. Okami remains
a work of art; exquisitely graceful and strikingly rendered. Unfortunately,
many of the attendees had facial expressions that suggested they didn't
get it; I hope that isn't a leading indicator of what will happen to this
work of art. God Hand is... er... simpler to understand. Looked like a
fun if mindless action game. |
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This is Dead
Rising,
a zombie survival game for XB360 at Capcom's booth. It was great fun --
you can pick up anything in the environment to beat the zombies senseless
with (other than Nazis, there aren't many game fodder better than zombies!).
It's set in a shopping mall to up the Romero factor. |
 Woo-hoo!
Street Fighter Kubricks!
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GundamPS3-1 |
