Directional Pad

DPad @ E3 2006 » inpheaux’s Day 2 Recap

After a wonderful night of attempting to subdue leg pain with Nuprin, we were . . well, I don't think we were really ready for another day of E3, but we didn't really have much choice. We got going kinda late and finally made it to South Hall by around 10:15. We weren't incredibly worried, since we didn't even stay till closing time the day before, but still, late start. Initially we just sorta wandered around in South Hall to kill time until the Mega64 DVD Giveaway / Signing. We sorta knew the Mega64 guys from the internet, and their E3 special edition DVD was being given out, and we can't turn down freebies. So we were there.

Nothing incredibly special there while we waited for things to start in the Ubisoft booth. They had a few games on display, mostly just videos though. Like the Red Steel video they had playing. It was a nice video and a nice display, but it was the same content from the Nintendo press release. Repetitive content makes me sad, but I was starting to get used to it by this point. The highlight of waiting in line was meeting minor internet celebrity Fragmaster, formerly of Planet Half-Life, presently at IGN.

The signing / meet & greet went pretty quick. Pictures were taken, DVDs were acquired, cards with "GAMBIT" written on them were thrown at me, and we all got to watch Frags be a jackass in person rather than just on the internet. Personally, I was sorta glad it went quickly, as we had tons of other stuff to do, like attempt to hit the Nintendo booth.

Unfortunately, the earliest we were able to make our way to the Nintendo Booth on Thursday was 11:45. As we made our way down the line, we quickly realized that whoops, the line had doubled since I last saw it a day earlier. Furthermore, we found that we were following the Nintendo employee who was carrying the big "LINE CLOSED" sign to the end of the line. Said sign indicated that the line had grown to such an extent that even though it was 11:45 (before lunch, even!) they couldn't guarantee that everyone would make it in before the show closed at 5. Suddenly I was made completely aware of how lucky I was to hit the booth first thing on Day 1.

Well, since the Wii exhibit was a bust, we made our way down to the DS Lite bar for a closer look at some of the games I had avoided on Day 1 due to substantial lines. First on my list was a longer demo of Children of Mana. The demo was the first dungeon level, something I had played some of in the Japanese version. It was nice to finally understand what the hell I was doing. There wasn't really a whole lot to talk about with Children of Mana, it's a Mana game. You run around and beat things up. Dungeons like the one in the demo are somewhat new, as in previous Mana games dungeons were generally things you just walked through, and in the demo you were going from floor to floor in one area, but the reason for this kind of change will probably make sense once we have it in the context of the whole game later this year.

On the other side of the bank of DSs that had Children of Mana was a set of four demo stations for Elite Beat Agents. You probably haven't heard of this game. Before E3, no one had, because no one really knew yet how it was going to shake out. About a year ago, a little game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! was released in Japan. It's a music/rhythm game, where you tap markers and lines and such on the screen and thus control an all-male cheer squad, charged with the duty of helping out people in poor spirits. It's sorta like Gitaroo Man's follow-the-line segments meets DDR's feverish tapping, but on the DS. It's also filled with burning shounen power.

So what's the big deal? Well, obviously, it was never released here. It was not incredibly surprising, though, since it was a very Japanese game, steeped in a bunch of cultural references that would have a hard time translating. Plus there'd be the licensing hell of bringing all the music over here. So us rampant fanboys of the game, who imported it a year ago were worried: if they localized the game, how horribly would they screw it up, and in what ways? Or would they do it at all? The answers, luckily are yes they will, no they will not screw it up at all. The game we ended up with is called Elite Beat Agents, which is a complete reworking of the game. New storyline, new characters, new songs, new everything-that-isn't-the-gameplay. All the gameplay is exactly the same as it was, it's just like they went out and made a sequel that was sorta like a completely different game. But not. No release date has been set yet, but the game looks quite far along right now based on the two-song demo. When it comes out, I plan on personally hunting down each and every one of you and forcing you to buy the game. If you don't have a DS you will get one. It will be a hit.

After tearing myself away from that, I got to watch over Lisa's shoulder as she played through the Starfox DS demo. I even took pictures of it! Good News: Starfox DS looks like it'll be more of a Starfox-Starfox game than a Starfox-Adventure game. Control is entirely handled by the touchscreen, like Metroid Prime Hunters but with flying. I think now that Nintendo has shown that they've completely nailed touchscreen based directional control we'll be seeing a lot more of it. Then again, there's also a chance that for Starfox there'll be a more traditional input mode and it'll work better than Metroid Prime Hunters' touchscreen-less mode.

We also found that they were giving out DS Lite cases. You know, for the DS Lites that most people attending the show didn't have yet. I didn't get one, because Nintendo apparently wasn't giving any out for playing the games I played, but I also didn't feel like waiting in line much longer to play a game to get one. They had a whole huge crate full of them, so I figured I'd get one later.

After we rounded everyone else up, we made our way over to the Sony booth for the second or third time, and tried to take a longer look at some of the couple games they had on display. Unfortunately, all the games that looked worth playing had lines I didn't feel like waiting for, so I just got to play the Gundam game that I had seen the day before, and in footage from previous shows. Sony's been pimping it out quite a bit, as a shining example of the kind of game the PS3 can churn out. Now that I've played it, I really have no idea why Sony's been pushing it so hard. I guess because it looks great if it's rehearsed footage with carefully crafted gameplay, since if you actually try to play it the experience is completely different.

Let me set the stage. It's a Gundam game. You run around in your giant robot and fight other giant robots, oh, and you have a lightsaber for reasons I have never really understood. When nothing is moving, the game looks amazing. Sometimes, even when things are moving, it still looks amazing, but when you're actually trying to drive your giant robot around it feels HORRIBLE. Free movement was completely out. You could turn in ~45 degree increments, move forward and backward, but could not move and turn at the same time. You could kill people with your giant pink lightsaber, but the explosion that results from doing so made the game slow to an awful jerky crawl. The little display card explaining the controls also mentioned that the L1 button was for "Rock On", a common engrish error.

The game as a whole was just so bad that I was really amazed they had it on open display. I didn't see a single other game on display that was this woefully incomplete. Shadowrun, which was on closely-guarded display at the assorted Microsoft booths, was somewhat crashy, but it wasn't this bad. It made me feel like I was back in the mid-90's playing early PSX demos. Those ones that looked great compared to other stuff available at the time, and were great technological achievements for the time, but actually played like shit. To be fair, the game-progress-o-meter said it was only at 10-20% completion, but gee, is 10-20% really a point where it's time to start letting people play your game? If they can get the gameplay up to the same level of quality as the graphics it could be a great game, but from where they are now they've still got a long way to go. If we see this game any time in 2006 it'll probably be a good idea to avoid it at all costs. Playing a game this bad on a machine I just payed $600 for would probably reduce me to tears.

With that disappointment out of the way, we had to go get some food. In one of my passes by the entrance nearest to where we had set up camp in the West Hall lobby for lunch, I noticed that said entrance was almost entirely blocked off due to a huge crowd of "Traditional Media Reporters". This was somewhat perplexing, as they were all crowding around one of the generic phone-game developers, and no one has ever cared that much about a mobile phone game ever. I made it as far as seeing that there was a huge "OMG PARIS HILTON" sign, but was unable to confirm if she was actually there because they were closing the entrance altogether due to it being just too crowded. We sent covert operative Lisa in shortly thereafter, and she did confirm that everyone's favorite irrelevant and unbelievably annoying celebrity was there. I only really bring this up because this was the media event where Paris forgot the name of the game she was promoting. The game that is branded with her name. The game whose name was plastered all over the wall behind her. Good job, Paris.

After lunch I had decided I had had enough of all this "walking" stuff, so I settled in for quite a few demos worth watching at the Nvidia Booth. The Nvidia booth had two main sections, one showing off a bunch of games running on Nvidia hardware, and then a demo section on the corner where every halfhour there was a new developer who would slide on in and do a nice long no-line demo of their game. And it wasn't a bunch of no-name stuff, real big name games. The first one I sat down for was the Supreme Commander demo. It didn't really show a whole lot more than the canned video did, but it was very encouraging to see it actually being controlled live and still look as amazing as it did canned.

The commentary from Chris Taylor was also quite insightful, so here's a couple things that were touched on that seemed interesting and worth noting. If you bring in a dropship to collect up some infantry units, they don't just disappear into some pocket dimension until they get redeployed. They get picked up by the ship and in mid flight you can still control them. You can have your happy little guys shooting away from their locked-in position on the dropship. Also mentioned was the fact that even the most basic guns can fire INCREDIBLY long distances. The already huge map that was being shown off in the demo was reportedly small compared to normal maps, and due to the firing range some units have you're going to be spending quite a bit of time zoomed a fair bit out. Farther out than most games ever let you. Another interesting note was something it seemed I heard everywhere I went: Asymmetrical Races. We've seen this before, hell, Starcraft had asymmetrical races, but it really seems like everyone is trying to play this up, trying to make sure that everyone knows that not only are sides in their games different, but they're really different.

The demo concluded with 13 or so nukes being launched all over the place. Everyone loves a good explosion, and Supreme Commander has some of the most impressive nuclear blasts I've ever seen in a game.

Next demo up was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Battlefield meets Quake. Again, Asymmetrical Races were stressed, both the Strogg and GDF have unique classes, weapons, objectives and vehicles. What seems to set Quake Wars apart from something like BF2142 [well, apart from the fact that it's in the Quake world] is that there's a brand new shiny id engine under the hood, with innovative stuff like a brand new physics engine, megatexture technology that I still don't really understand, and vehicles that work. Since it's the part I really understand, lets talk about vehicles. In FPS games, vehicles have always sorta been just bodged together. Sure, we've come a long way from ancient FPS vehicles where to get a plane you just made a plane-looking-thing that could noclip, but in Quake Wars the vehicles really work. When you mash the gas button on your little four-wheel-drive quad bike, your wheels really turn, your traction is controlled by what kind of surface you're on, your drifting ability is controlled by the friction on the surface, and your turning is controlled by the actual turning ability of the wheels. An example of how all this works together is that when they were building the GDF 6-wheel APC, they initially had it so that the front and back wheels were the only ones with steering. This didn't work, because of where the middle wheels were, they'd just drag on the ground and impede movement. To make it work, they had to adjust the steering so that all the wheels turned properly, and then it handled fine. Attention to detail like this is what makes the game special.

The vehicles also have destructibility. There's obvious stuff like functional damage vehicles can take. If you blow out a couple wheels, you're going to have some problems, and vehicle will react accordingly. If your vehicle has resupply points on it like the GDF APC presently has, Strogg players can shoot those off to prevent GDF players from resupplying themselves. Furthermore, some vehicles like that GDF 6-wheel APC I keep talking about are amphibious. Just to prove to us again that the vehicles Really Worked, we were shown that you could take your APC down to the water, shoot all the wheels off it and then push it into the lake. Then, because it was in the lake, it would switch to propellers [which weren't disabled], and would then cruise around like it was working fine. When it was driven back up to the shore, it would go back to limping once the tires met the ground.

I was initially kinda worried about this game because it was another one example of a license being handed out to a third party and they were then let off to go run with it. Please be aware that it seems to have worked out this time. It still feels quite Quake-y. The level we were shown was way out in the open, which somewhat detracted from the Quake-yness of the game, but once you've got a bunch of Strogg badasses flying around on Icarus jetpacks it'll all come back.

The demo that immediately followed was something I didn't feel like sticking around for, so I went off to hit the Hellgate: London booth while I waited for the Shadowrun demo to start. Hellgate: London is, luckily, everything we could have possibly wanted from a sequel to Diablo II. As much as you could have guessed from just hearing who's responsible for the game and what the concept is, it really becomes apparent when you get to see it in action or play it. Everything that makes a Diablo game feel like Diablo except the setting has been recreated here in third-person. Spells, enchanted weapons, unique weapons, summons, giant hellspawn critters and zombies, auto-generated maps that feel like they were handcrafted, it's all there. I only had time to watch, but got a chance to actually play the game on Day 3, more details then.

The last demo worth watching for the day was Shadowrun over at the Nvidia booth again . . but when I got there I found that the Shadowrun demo had been cancelled for the day, and instead some guys were there demoing TimeShift. I had played the beta that was released awhile back, and wasn't really impressed then, but luckily things have changed since they made the transition from being published by Atari to being published by Vivendi. The main gimmick of TimeShift is the ability to slow, stop, or rewind time. While this has been done repeatedly in recent years, TimeShift is different in that the player character is immune to the effects. This means no getting un-shot and no un-falling-off-a-cliff. Further setting the game apart is the quite nice new engine for the game, and rather impressive AI. An example shown for AI control was that if you slow or stop time, you can run up and take a random grunt's assault rifle, and when time comes back he'll first be confused by the lack of a gun he was just shooting, but rather than just giving up he'll take cover and look for a new weapon to use against you.

There are also going to be enemies who have similar time-dilation devices to the one you have, so you can at times have two different battles going on at two different speeds, which should at the very least be interesting and new. Not sure if it'll be fun yet, but, you know, at least it's different. My only real problem with the demo was that the guy running it was sort of a dick. His game was based on a gimmick, and his engine wasn't really anything special compared to Quake Wars, UT2007, HL2, or even BF2142, yet he was trying to hype it up like no one had ever seen terrain deformation or bump-mapped wall decals. He also constantly tried to claim that time manipulation wasn't a gimmick. Sorry, it's a gimmick, but gimmicks can be ok. I can be perfectly happy with a game based around a gimmick, but don't try and claim it isn't one.

After that, we were ready to go somewhere to sit down before leaving for the day, and I still hadn't gotten a DS Lite case, so we made our way back over to the DS Lite Bar. This time I chilled in line for the Single-player demo of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. While in line, I had a nice conversation with some of the other people there, and got to watch the trailer of Smash Bros: Brawl that one of them had on their laptop. Should be an amazing game, once we actually get it. Also while in line, one of the girls behind me mentioned that she just found someone named Reggie in a Pictochat room. Surely it couldn't be Reggie Fils-Aime, NOA VP of Sales/Marketing. It had to be just some guy in the Wii line being a jerk. But no, it really was him, and she was directed back to the Nintendo press meeting rooms where she met, got pictures with, and had her DS signed by Reggie.

Once I finally got my chance to play Phantom Hourglass, any worries I had about the game melted away. I'm always cautiously optimistic about Nintendo first-party titles, especially ones with new control methods like Starfox DS or Phantom Hourglass's complete touchscreen input, but once again Nintendo came through. The game controls wonderfully, even though it's different and not necessarily needed for what you're doing. I played a short little dungeon level, and the puzzles were all classic zelda, red/blue blocks, switches to hit, guards to elude, etc. Unfortunately, when I finished they informed me that if I wanted a DS Lite case I'd have to wait through the New Super Mario Bros line on the other side of the bar. . . but it was far too late for that, so it would have to wait for Day 3: Cleanup & Line day.