DPad @ E3 2006 » inpheaux’s Day 1 Recap
by inpheauxI've taken possibly a bit too long thinking about how to best summarize my time at E3. E3 was big, and I'm not incredibly good at condensing so much information into something coherent and useful. Or, at least, I don't think I am, so it'd probably just be best if I started from the beginning.
Day One. First stop. Nintendo. I had no clue going in exactly how huge it would be, if there would be a line, how long the line would be, or anything really. No one did. But I knew if I had one thing I knew I absolutely had to see it was Nintendo, so that's where I went first. This worked out well since as everyone has seen by now the line grew at an unprecedented rate. After about half an hour of waiting I made my way in and was eventually presented with my first look at the Wii.
I was somewhat worried going in. All this time I've been concerned if Nintendo's new direction - targeting the vast untapped masses of people who are turned off of games due to some kind of unseen confusion barrier - would mean those of us who grew up with traditional Nintendo consoles would be left out in the cold. I worried about if Nintendo felt I was an audience worth catering to anymore. I find a lot of things to worry about.
Please let me say, as if you haven't heard this enough since it's Nintendo's new Wii slogan, playing really is believing. I got to play most of the 27 demos they had on display way back in the back row of the Wii display. I hit the assorted sports demos, the revamped multiplayer Duck Hunt, Super Monkey Ball, Wario Ware, Excite Truck, and quite a few other games. What I didn't have time to wait to play I made a point to watch intently. Some of the games were misses, like the Orchestra game, but everything else was really compelling. Nintendo has - roughly six months before release - shown again that being first to market, having the most powerful hardware, having the highest resolution output and forcing online multiplayer is irrelevant. What matters are fun compelling games and innovation beyond just a "bigger and better version of last year's model". This is exactly what they have lined up for the Wii. If you don't think you get it now, you will once you play it.
Unfortunately, I was torn from the gaming orgy occuring in the Wii exhibit after about an hour of hopping from display to display. I had previously set a time with Andy to meet up over at the RedOctane booth in Kentia Hall to check out Guitar Hero 2, see Drist, and generally catch up since we hadn't seen eachother in about four years. I got there early and had a chance to get a first look at how far along Guitar Hero 2 was. There were two demos running at the show, ones at RedOctane's booth and ones elsewhere like at the Sony booth. Both had about six songs, single and coop multiplayer, and a couple special demo arenas. The main difference was that the RedOctane demo had a couple extra songs, like one from Tuesday's featured band Drist. There's not really a lot to say about Guitar Hero 2, except that coop multiplayer works really well, and on higher difficulties some of the bass tracks are pretty amazing. The Hard and Expert-mode bass tracks for YYZ will destroy you.
Unfortunately, Andy couldn't stick around long on Wednesday, so I was left to fend for myself in the horrible twisted netherworld that is Kentia Hall. I've been told for years now that Kentia Hall is unbelievably lame, but really, to understand it you have to see it. The fun Kentia Hall game of the week was "spot a game or company you have ever heard of". RedOctane and the Retro Game Museum didn't count. It was a hard game.
After making a hasty escape from Kentia Hall, I hit South Hall for awhile. I really didn't stick around at any booth much, I was mostly getting a feel for what was where, and tried to get a feel for what lines were huge or not. I also liberated a copy of the Nvidia demo schedule for the rest of the week, and made a point to head back when interesting stuff was going on. Then it was time to make my first pass at the Sony booth.
Sony's booth was . . poorly designed. Unlike Nintendo's main draw, which was a nice big orderly line, which led to an uncrowded progressively more interactive experience culminating in tons of playable demos, Sony's booth was just a big free for all. The main entrance led you into a room with a huge display showing assorted prerendered PS3 cutscenes most of us saw during the press conference. On either side were two rows of PS3 demos . . none of which were running on production hardware. There were about 32 displays set up, but only a couple actual games, most were multiple copies of the same game. For all the hype, and Sony's rush to get official release dates nailed down I would have thought Sony would have had more actual stuff to show, but what was on display was either just uninteresting [hooray! racing games that aren't Gran Turismo!] or broken and horribly incomplete [like the Gundam game]. But then, the games were sorta irrlevant since everyone was stuck in a huge crowd staring glassy-eyed at the big screen of videos, blocking the way to the actual games.
Luckily, that wasn't all of Sony's booth. Once you got out of the huge crowded mess that was the PS3 area, everything thinned out pretty quickly. I didn't spend a whole lot of time examining the PSP games, since they were PSP games. Lemmings was fun, but not fun enough to make me buy another console to play Lemmings on. The other side of the Sony booth was PS2 stuff, which luckily Sony is actually planning on supporting for another couple years. And amazingly, they actually had games I wanted to play like Okami, FF12, Disgaea 2 and God of War 2. Good News: Okami and Disgaea 2 are everything I could possibly want. Bad News: FF12 hasn't changed significantly since Dragon Quest 8 demo and I hate God of War 2 for all the reasons I hated God of War.
It should also be noted that FF12 was my first disappointing experience of several with Squeenix at E3 2006. And not just because it was bad. After playing and turning the demo over to someone else, I pulled back to get a picture. Upon taking said picture, a Sony or Squeenix employee jumped in to bitch at me about taking the picture. I can only assume that Square Enix is afraid of people taking pictures of and reporting about how really bad their latest offerings for the PS2 are. The truth must be told. More on this in the Day 3 recap, when I hit the full proper Squeenix booth.
After that lovely experience, Sony's booth conveniently dumped me out to the DS Lite Bar. All the space at Nintendo's booth that wasn't dedicated to the Wii or the line for the Wii was allocated to the DS Lite and the forthcoming set of wonderful new DS games. I imported my DS Lite a week earlier, and had already gotten over the shock of the wonderful new hardware, so the main draw here for me was the huge assortment of new games. I didn't have a whole ton of time to check out everything on the first day, but I made a point to check out Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Megaman ZX, Yoshi's Island 2 and Children of Mana. All were wonderful, just as expected.
My time with Megaman ZX was a massive relief. It seemed sorta up-in-the-air as to if ZX would really be a worthwhile game, but it is. It's effectively all the great things about the Zero series for the GBA, but in addition to the Megaman Zero-style reinvisioning of Zero, there's also a similar reinvisioning of X. Plus there's a new storyline and a world reboot. Portrait of Ruin is yet-another-2d-Castlevania game. But you should know by now that this is far from a Bad Thing. We should consider ourselves lucky if we manage to get so many 2d Castlevania games that they become passe.
I was getting exhausted by this point. Running around a quite sizable expo hall for six hours straight when you're used to spending 90% of your waking hours infront of a computer is not fun. Somehow I managed to drag myself over to South hall and found a giant turret housing a Supreme Commander video after wandering past the Blizzard "All-WoW-All-The-Time" booth. The Supreme Commander video was a short little thing showing some combat. It has since been made available on YouTube. I won't worry about describing it, since you can see it yourself, but let me say this: it is all in game footage. All of it. The only thing i could find fault with in the video was that the shadows were lame, but considering everything else that was going on, and the fact that you won't be spending all your time zoomed in to that level, I can forgive them.
After being sufficiently wowed by that, I met up with Vinnie over at the Konami booth to catch the hourly showing of the extended version of the Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer. This thing was long. Still no ingame footage, but the main extended bits were fight scenes. First was a quite substantial fight scene between Snake and a couple of the bipedal robots. The second huge extended fight scene was a longer version of the Raiden fight that just made a quick appearance near the end of the trailer shown at the Sony Press conference. Good stuff. I hope the full version of the trailer shows up online soon.
We wrapped up our first day with some comedy. I'll admit it, I have a secret crush on games that are awful beyond comprehension. Games where I just have no idea how or why anyone ever thought they would remotely be a good idea. You know, stuff like Crazy Frog Racer. The only semi-high-profile game we've got on the horizon that falls along these lines is Left Behind: The Game. Yes, that Left Behind. There was a demo of Left Behind being held at the Nvidia booth late on the first afternoon of the show, so we stopped by.
There was a crowd. There was a crowd watching Left Behind. I could probably spend hours explaining all the things ridiculously awful and/or hilarious about the Left Behind game, but I'll try to be quick:
- It is Left Behind: The Game. It is a game based on Apocalyptic Christian Fanfiction.
- It claims to be balanced, but is hilariously not. Every few sentences the Dev demoing the game would say ridiculously contradictory things. Like how the game was balanced and different, and how you wouldn't be penalized if you decided to play as the Antichrist, but wait, if you play as the Antichrist everything is against you and the game is hard.
- It claims to have "innovative" features that aren't new, or make no sense. First they tried to say this was the first game where prayer was an integral feature. They have clearly not played Earthbound. They also claimed they had a feature where one of their winning conditions in multiplayer was to kill the least number of people. Then they said they didn't really have that yet, but were going to, and it was going to be so totally awesome.
- They digitized all of New York City for no discernable reason. Apparently Left Behind: The Book: The Game isn't fun unless it's in an exact digital replica of NYC. (Un?)Fortunately, this leads to our next point. .
- The game runs like crap. It runs like crap on the Nvidia Demo Station, packing SLi 7800's, or something equally ridiculously over powerful. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that they kept trying to render huge amounts of unique buildings for no reason or if it was them trying to amass an army of 8 billion people to fling themselves at the enemy, or if their engine just isn't that good. I suggest they start praying for code optimization.
- "The ANTICHRIST forces get the control of ROCK STARS, not to say that ROCK STARS are EVIL or anything, but . . YOU HAVE ANGELS and must FIGHT THE HORRIBLE ROCK STARS!" I am not kidding. This is a near-verbatim quote. I'd have a more exact quote but I was too busy laughing uncontrollably to find my recorder at the time. This is a video game demo, not your personal insane ranting soapbox.
I've got a feeling that somewhere down the line, someone is going to realize that they could sell their super amazing NYC 3d data to Google for use in Google Maps, and end up making more money than trying to sell this . . thing . . as a game. Still a great source of comedy either way, though.
With that, we'd had enough. My goal on Day One was to cover as much of West Hall as possible, and then get a feel for what was in South before dedicating real time over there. I would quickly find that actually getting in to see the Wii was an amazing accomplishment in itself. But that realization wouldn't come until the next day. I was content, but as I said, incredibly exhausted. Days 2 and 3 would need more pacing if I was going to make it through Friday. The night was largely uneventful, save for the announcement of Smash Bros. Brawl, but we weren't special enough to get invited to that event. Maybe next year.
So that's Day 1. On Day 2, we meet internet celebrities, play DS games, gasp in horror at PS3 games, and watch many more live demos at the Nvidia booth. A full recap of all that will be coming shortly.