E3 Observations

This week marked the passing of E3 2009, and while it was great to see the show back at the Los Angeles Convention Center, I felt it was a bit restrained and diminished in scope compared to shows of years past.

To me, the glory days of E3 were the shows held in the years just before and during the dot-com boom, 1998 - 2000. Game companies produced TONS of free giveaway items, T-Shirts, posters and knick-knacks. People on the show floor would literally need large bags to take home all of the swag that was given out. CAPCOM sticks out in my mind as having once had a great booth, with girls up on stage and a DJ that threw free T-shirts out into a frenzied crowd.

This year, freebies were almost non-existant, and I don't know if they'll really ever be back. The show, which once took up three whole halls, was cut down to two. Kentia Hall used to be the place for small, independent game vendors and innovators to set up tiny booths - and this year, a bunch of them were present in the main hall!

The main halls had booths that were spread out, as since many companies didn't attend, there was lots of extra room. Blizzard Entertainment was a no-show, surprisingly. SONY's booth was the most impressive, with its lines of people waiting to get a taste of God of War III. The XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii also had nice booths, but they seemed a bit scaled down in comparison to SONY's.

Regarding the games, there was a lot of games on display for the Wii, but unless they were actually made by Nintendo, they weren't impressive. Sadly, it's becoming apparent that 3rd party developers just don't know how to make a good Wii game, and are increasingly putting out shovelware simply to get some quick cash. Nintendo on the other hand knows its hardware the best, and fun games such as, "New Super Mario Bros. Wii."

SONY's PlayStation 3 had a strong showing with incredibly beautiful games such as "God of War III" and "Uncharted 2: Among Thieves," which I felt was one of the best games of the show. SONY's "PSP GO" seemed like a neat device, but wether people will buy it remains to be seen. While some people might like the fact that it only plays games downloaded from the internet, some people clearly prefer having UMD backups. Also, the PSP GO's screen was notably smaller than that of the original PSP, so why would people be rushing to upgrade?

Microsoft had some excellent games at the show, since it has played all of its cards in terms of hardware by this point in the game. The excellent games on show will continue to make it the console of choice, although SONY's strong first-party offerings might steal some of its limelight in the months to come. "Mass Effect 2," "Assassin's Creed 2" looked fantastic.

Other excellent games at the show, many of which were cross platform, were "Arkham Asylum," and "Modern Warfare 2," the sequel to "Call of Duty 4." Both games really seemed to be taking advantage of the power of the PS3 and XBOX. I was surprised to not see much news about Final Fantasy XIII, despite huge banners promoting it all over Los Angeles. Square-Enix's booth was neat, and they had some interesting titles in the pipeline such as a WWII PC real-time strategy title called "Order of War."

Definitely check out these titles mentioned above over the upcoming year, they're sure to be good.

E3: Mini Video Roundup

Lots of good demos or trailers were released or shown at E3, so I gathered a few of them below. This is not all the good ones... or even the best four. Consider this list a teaser for the library of quality video that emerged from E3.

Heavy Rain
Much of this looks to be in game footage, fairly impressive in game footage. This title looks interesting in a cult hit, not for everyone kind of way. I like games that are heavily story driven, and this appears to fit the bill. Intriguing. Gorgeous.

ModNation Racer
For me, this was one of the biggest surprises to come out of the Sony press conference. This game appears to take the concept of easy and fun level creation into whole new territory. This video is the unveiling of the title after which the developers create a new track live on stage. Fun, is the best word for this. There is nothing better than watching game developers having fun playing their own games.

The Last Guardian
You've probably seen this one already. It seems to be just about the most popular video to come out of E3. It isn't the best piece of cinematic work to be shown, not by a long shot. It is, however, a beautifully crafted piece.

Super Mario Bros Wii
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And there is nothing broken about the good old fashioned Mario platformers. And they aren't changing a thing except the graphics. This looks to be everything a Mario platform title should be, right down to the music. When you make your Christmas list, this will be near the top.

E3: Much Ado About Dante

Many of us read the literary classic of Dante Alighieri in college. It is the story of a man who is lead through the circles of hell by Virgil. It is not a standalone work, though it is often read as one, but is part of The Divine Comedy. If you have not yet read the entire work, do so. This work deserves its place as a literary classic.

But this is a gaming blog, so enough with literature.

The Dante's Inferno that is drawing attention this week is a Visceral Games title to be published by EA. Basically, take God of War, set it in hell as imagined by Dante Alighieri, and crank the gore to eleven. Interestingly, it also drew protesters.

Yes, protesters. Somewhere EA executives and smacking themselves wondering why they didn't hire enough protesters to make this a bigger deal. As Grand Theft Auto has taught us, nothing sells a game like people sayings its bad.

But the controversy will come, and much of it will be literary. To say the developers took liberties with the story line of The Inferno when making this game is roughly the same as saying that vegetarians take liberties with the recipe for meatloaf when cooking one. From what I can tell from the trailers, if EA didn't tell us this game was based on The Inferno, we would never know. Going to hell certainly isn't a new concept in gaming. Diablo went there in extremely creepy fashion thirteen years ago, and gaming hasn't been the same since ***.

And yet, I'm not sure I can complain. Reviews from E3 seem fairly good. If the game had a different title, I don't think anyone would think twice about it. Besides, we all know by now that no story can survive unchanged from book to movie or from movie to game. Should it come as all that great a surprise that Dante's Inferno the game seems to have only a passing resemblance to Dante's Inferno the book?

What matters is that the flavor the original is kept. The book is an exploration of nature of man (please, literature majors, hold your fire: I'm trying to be brief here). If the game keeps that as its defining metric, I think it will deserve its title.

The horror should be palpable. I don't mean cheap slasher movie kind of horror. I mean Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker, Dante Alighieri horror. Action titles soaked in blood are a dime a dozen. Dante deserves better than that. Give me a title so disturbing I don't want to play, but so addicting I cannot stop. Give me raw despair in digital form, and this game will do its namesake justice. A high standard, but Dante's Inferno deserves no less.


***A related side note: fire up Diablo, the original, and play through it again. Notice the artwork... namely the naked and somewhat dismembered torsos contorted into horrible positions and bound with barbed wire. Could anyone get away with that callous and gratuitous a flogging of our senses in a game today? And is that a bad thing? Thats another topic, I think.

DIVINE COMEDY

There's like three or so people "protesting" (maybe) outside E3 regarding EA's upcoming title based on the literary classic Dante's Inferno. They got fliers and epiphets and even signs that read "EA = Electronic Anti-Christ" (well duh). This adds a bit of surrealism to a title that frankly already has a lot of it; In the original poem, Dante pities and scorns the ignorance and plight of Hell's miserable wretches, whereas in this videogame, he's gonna stomp them out instead. It's ok though, they captured his girlfriend.

No one's sure whether or not this is for real yet; being that LA's population veers more towards out-of-work "actors" rather than evangelicals, I say "PR stunt". Then again, in light of the very real problem of our nation's religious crazies out there, including the recent murder of an abortion doctor, this could very well either A) be real, or B) rank right up there with past "did you really think this through?" PR stunts like Sony lopping off a goat's head. Let's hope for their sakes they don't run afoul of these "Italians" protesting Mario; they don't look like they are in the mood to see a true Italian like Dante Alighieri getting slagged.

Future of Gaming? We'll See.

Project Natal. The Future of Gaming. The End of Controllers. The Biggest Revolution in Gaming Since Dice. You've seen the headlines, maybe watched the demos, and will no doubt see endless information on this system before it makes it to market.

For some genres, this system will be amazing. Wii will no longer be the unchallenged king of party games. It is possible that some sports titles will embrace it, but I am skeptical there for a number of reasons. Can it really detect the fine nuances that separate a curveball from a slider, or a good tee shot from a hook into the pond? Maybe, but it is hard to say as yet. Regardless, no doubt whole new styles of gameplay will emerge to take advantage of it.

And Natal will have no bearing on Fable 3 except, perhaps, as a way to look through menus and inventory screens.

You doubt me? Alright, lets try it out. Get a friend, one who is very familiar with Fable, fire up your XBox 360 and pop in Fable 2. Give your friend the controller and have him sit where he can see you but not the screen. You stand in front of your TV. And go play Fable. I wonder how far you'll advance your blacksmithing skill before your arm falls off. Or how badly your feet will hurt after walking in place that long.

Not a fair comparison you say? I agree. Your friend has much, much more processing capability than that whatever leftovers the XBox 360 will be able to throw at Natal. Your friend will be much better at recognizing your movements and guessing what you actually want to happen than any chunk of code that could be written. Natal cannot compare to the human brain. It isn't a fair comparison at all.

Feel free to come up with as many shortcuts and optimizations to help you play the game with the controller in your friend's hand and he unable to see the screen. Maybe you say "Walk" to walk instead of walking in place. That would certainly help the fatigue factor. Maybe you can call out the names of spells to be cast, or agree on particular hand motions for different spells. With a touch of patience, you can have your fully integrated totally motion controlled game play experience right now.

And no doubt you think I'm a lunatic of even suggesting you try something so absurd. We could improve this scenario greatly by a hybrid system. Place a small controller in one had that you can use for more onerous tasks, like walking or leveling your blacksmithing, and only use the motion capture system for stuff thats fun.

That's called a wiimote, and I know exactly 0 people who swing it like a lightsaber when playing Lego StarWars. If we don't swing our lightsabers, will we really act out changing a tire as part of a pit crew? More than once or twice anyway? I have my doubts. Who wants to play the first Natal equipped version of Madden, where you have to run in place to get down the field and jump to catch the pass? Who is sure enough they won't jump into their TV trying to block a field goal and cost themselves a couple grand in the process?

Natal is not the future of gaming. It is not the beginning of the end of the controller. It is not a revolution. It is an evolution, a logical progression, and nothing more. At the end of the day, motion capture controllers get in the way more than they add to the experience in most games. Eventually, I think all consoles and computers will have a hybrid of motion capture and controllers for gaming control. The future lies in linking them together in ways that add to games and does not distract from the very reasons we play in the first place. Because, at the end of the day, it is all about gameplay. Handing papers to virtual boy might be cool as a tech demo, but is the fun factor really all that significant for long term play? We'll see. Acting out the changing of a tire or fighting in an arena might be interesting as a tech demo, but will you choose to play that way over pressing a few buttons? We'll see.

It is much too early to draw any concrete conclusions. But, as it was with the wiimote before it, I think how we wind up using the device will turn out to be rather different than the original hype surrounding it.

Schmee-3

"I hate E3 like this", says John Riccitiello, CEO of EA. "Terrible", laments Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft North America. "The Walking Dead", cries Will Wright of SimCity and Spore fame. "[Insert reports of complaints, as well as complaints of your own]", reported gaming journos ad nauseum.

They were all talking about the "E3 Media and Business Summit 2008", of course. Back in the day, the gianormous trade show, E3, was once the rousing Mecca of Videogameslam, where a medium and those that love it can crow to the world at its ever-growing influence, letting them all know that the videogame industry has credibility, and is here to stay.

But as with the industry itself, a great deal of money and men became involved, and E3 eventually went from Mecca to Sodom, a ludicrously over-crowded, chaotic, expensive, exclusive circus-slash-"escalating arms race", as Wright had cleverly put it. A wretched, prohibitively pricey, gaudy spectacle (See this tacky Gizmondo set? $5 million. BTW, what was Gizmondo? I forget.) A vehicle seemingly designed to enrich the ESA at the expense of, well, everything else; The 2005 show reportedly wrought enough strain to LA's power grid t0 cause blackouts, and by 2006, the show was such a crazed mess that the companies, finally fed up with spending millions of dollars on floor space alone just to promote clearly-rushed product from desperate dev teams (only to drown each other out in cacophony anyway), firmly demanded change, with the whole-hearted support of exhausted gaming journos.

So since 2006, E3 was promptly rechristened with the What-PowerPoint-Did-This-Shit-Fall-Out-From-Under moniker "E3 Media and Business Summit". No more spectacle. No more circuses. No more hordes of filthy nerds. No more booth babes. No more...nothing. Just business. That's ultimately why there's even an E3, after all, and so to business it shall be.

And of course, as you can see above, the industry, along with the aforementioned journos, promptly whined about it anyway.

Some were rightly irked that the gaming faithful were so callously cut out of the picture in favor of the suits, like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. Some miss the excitement but still contend correctly that the old format was ultimately "untenable". But most of the rest naturally complained about the now-total lack of circus, or as this IGN reporter flatly states: "The videogame industry needs a spectacle, it needs a circus... and yes, it even needs the booth babes."

"What's the problem", you ask? "I thought we wanted the circus gone", you say? Actually, what the ESA quickly discovered was that the industry and (especially) the press wanted was the OLD-old E3. The one that was still a massive, yet more private circus, or a fun "hobnob", as a former-industry friend of mine put it to me recently. An era in where it became less about games or giving the industry "credibility" and instead more about egos, cool swag, and an atmosphere that lets (often pasty, nerdy) men revel in it like a rockstar. Booth babes? They aren't ridiculous credibility-sapping promo-people that serve as a pseudo-harem for attendees, a trap for dipshit journos, and a massive turn-off for girl gamers everywhere. No, you see, according to this insider, "having those sexy booth babes on the show floor feels like a refreshment to our eyes in all the madness that covering an event like this implies" and that "there are some people that don’t get booth babes. Like those unable to understand absurd humor, there’s nothing to be understood or explained about babes. "

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the show is no longer about industry credibility.

But because the industry and the journos were mostly willing to kid themselves about what E3 really was all about, messages became confused, and to their chagrin E3 became the "walking dead". But the most kidded were too many of the filthy nerd hordes themselves; years of hype from journo publications had drilled into their collective minds that E3 was some sort of mystical Shangri-La of gaming. And it was. For the journos and suits. Hence, "hobnob". For the actual gamers, however (you know, the people actually buying this stuff), they eventually became a mass of peons, getting in the way of the "hobnob", er, that is, the "reporting" and "business deals" in progress. Yet as a result of the hype too many gamers still eagerly defend an event that promptly kicked them to the curb when it was feasible. A "hobnob" that tends to shut out every organization not an 800 lb gorilla (which is especially unfair to many smaller companies and indie devs that, unlike say EA, can at least say they aren't losing money by the barrel). A circus that costs a hefty sum of monies that could've instead gone to paying developers and especially testers fairer wages. And run by an organization that is ruthlessly hostile against competitors, such as they were with PAX, an expo that cares more for gamers than the likes of E3 ever would.

At any rate, the demands of journos, industry men, and some gamers (and the writing on the wall) to "bring E3 back" were enough for the ESA to try just that. And so the ESA this year is attempting to literally have their cake and eat it too; booth babes, glitz, and a bigger (but not too big) audience. Day 1 has ended, and we'll see how the rest of it goes; so far, some of the events were interesting (Beatles' appearance), and some not so much (the James Cameron mega-speech). Either way, it perhaps doesn't look all that great for the once-mighty E3. Several big names have long since dropped out, much to the ESA's ire, with some having smartly decided that it's cheaper to use the Internetz for promoting, or even to just have your own kick-ass show. The smaller companies and indies, most of them tired of being snubbed, have learned to thrive without it. The gamers now have PAX, the craftsmen GDC, and the Europeans the Liepzig GC. And the industry itself has long ago earned worldwide respect and no longer needs spectacles to garner attention; last I checked, it was the Iron Man movie that feared Grand Theft Auto 4's debut and not the other way around. Which leaves the journos and suits begging for the return of booth babes and circuses, to which I suggest they stop beating around the bush and just head to any massage brothel in Downtown with a bottle of JD and a Nintendo DS. It's much cheaper than spending millions of bucks.

Unsung Heroes

On the eve of the largest celebration of million dollar titles and billion dollar publishers, lets not forget the unpaid masses. Games today are often defined by what the community does after the game is released. WarCraft 3, like most strategy games these days, shipped with a map editor. One of the projects that emerged from the WC3 community thanks to that editor was a style of map call "Defense of the Ancients." Demigod, the recently released strategy title is of a similar style to that built and polished by the private coders who worked on the DotA maps. Demigod, then, becomes the latest in a list of major titles that are built on or heavily inspired by the work of private individuals who make maps for the fun of it. Counter Strike is likely the most famous of these mod-to-monetized title success stories, but CS and Demigod by no means stand alone. The mod programmers and map makers and addon developers that we often take for granted are major players in the world of modern gaming, and they cannot be given too much recognition.

Of course, as Bethesda Softworks can tell you, third party addons may not always be a good thing for games. Oblivion found itself re-rated by the ESRB, in part because of a mod put together by some in the community.

Now, regarding E3, I will not be on the floor this year. However, I'll be roaming the Internet looking for the best of E3 news, reviews, interviews, and so forth. The best information I can find I will link here at the Chuckwagon. Plenty of interesting rumors flying around about this years show; should be an interesting couple of days.