E3 Roundup

Well, E3 is over for this year, and with WWDC starting on Monday (w00t!), I think now is an appropriate time for me to go over the most cool and laughable stuff from E3. (Thanks for G4, Co-op, Joystiq and Destructoid for providing all of the information!) First up, the press conferences. Nintendo’s was a cavalcade of mediocrity (or should that be a cavalcade of Wii-diocrity?) with ‘new’ Mario, (although one is a sequel that is almost the same, and one is a port from the DS) and then we come to their new peripherals. My friend Scott is a Nintendo fanboy, and he was almost crying with laughter when talking about the Wii Vitality add-on. It’s so ridiculous, I’m not even going to bother pointing out how crap it is, because it’s self evident, and I just know that Nintendo will manage to do again what they did for the Wii Fit, and take something totally idiotic, and get it to sell millions.

Next up, Sony. I couldn’t give even a quarter of a fig about the Final Fantasy games, so most of the interesting stuff was another Metal Gear for PSP (which my brother should be happy about), MAG (which looks quite awesome), God of War III (likewise), and that thing with the camera and the ball on a stick, sort of a hybrid of Wiimote and Natal (about which more later). It seems to be able to do what the Wii aspired to do, which is 1:1 responsiveness, and the demo they showed looked quite cool. I think that they have managed to combine the best aspects of the other two products – the accuracy of the camera with the tactile sensation and feedback of the remote, which is quite clever. Oh, and they showed the PSP Go! but not meaning any offense to them, bringing out another PSP without another analog stick is like… well, in all honesty, probably like a clever analogy – easy to think up, difficult to implement well. That didn’t really work, did it?

Microsoft had a presentation that had a lot of great stuff, but some of it not platform-exclusive, so there was Assassin’s Creed II (which was pre-rendered cinematic, but a cool one), and Splinter Cell Conviction. Speaking as a Splinter Cell fan, this looks like the best game yet. No night-vision goggles, but it looks like a great blend of stealth and action, and I especially liked the whole ‘tagging’ thing. Halo 3 ODST looked… like Halo 3, and I don’t imaging it will deviate much from such a successful (and awesome) formula. Project Natal (pronounce it how you will) looked quite good, although the fact that it lacks tactile sensation might count against it. Milo looked like quite an interesting project, until someone pointed out to me that a) it’s not going to be released for ages, b)it apparantly took many tries to get the take we saw, c) Peter Molyneux is promoting it, and he has a reputation for hyping up things still in development and leaving the audience with a vague sense that somewhere his promises were kneecapped by the harsh enforcers of reality, and d) the thing wasn’t running off an 360, it was running off a 360 plugged into a computer off-screen. The thing with the avatar movement, and the whole ‘want to see the sole of an avatar’s foot?’ moment was quite funny.

Other things that interested me from the show were Dark Void (I really like the idea of jet-packing around, and it looks AWESOME), Shadow Complex ( a tad generic, but looks great for an XBLA game), Mass Effect 2 (if it’s like the first one, it should be good), Left 4 Dead 2 (again, the same) and Batman: Arkham Asylum (looks like a decent Batman game).

On balance, the idea of a return to the ‘old style’ E3 was a good one, and it definitely seemed better than last year (at least from I could percieve from the other side of the world).