DPad @ E3 2006 » inpheaux’s Day 3 Recap
by inpheauxWelcome to Day 3! Having seen our failings in previous days, we had a clear plan of attack laid out for our last day at the show. We had a specific list of stuff to hit, starting with yet another shot at the Nintendo Booth. We got there right at the show opening like on Day 1, but even then, the line was somehow already of epic proportions. The line stretched beyond where it ended on Day 2, and stretched all the way across the expo hall, ending up somewhere behind the Wizards of the Coast booth. We had things to do, things that involved waiting in other wonderful lines, so yet again we gave up. Luckily, I did have the chance to see it back on Day 1, but I really wanted to make a second pass, and the rest of our crew wanted a chance to see it too, but that just didn't work out. So, again, I went back for last pass by the DS Lite Bar to play New Super Mario Bros and collect my free case.
That meant yet another line, but I really wanted that case. I could go on about how great New SMB was, but I'll save that for the full review I'll be doing this weekend, since I picked it up Tuesday. Once I collected my case I hit a couple of the other DS demo stations like Kirby DS, Yoshi's Island 2 and Final Fantasy 3. These games are, unfortunately [or, fortunately?] exactly what you think they are. Kirby DS is a proper Kirby game, Yoshi's Island 2 is a proper sequel to Yoshi's Island and FF3 is a great mix of "just enough" 3D in a classic Final Fantasy game.
After finishing there, I met up with Vinnie in the line for the periodic Unreal Tournament 2007 demo. Apart from the brand new shiny UT2007 engine, they showed off a ton of new features. First main one was the play mode, a new one called "Warfare". This mode was quite strange, like a mix between Assault, Onslaught, and comedy-option Bombing Run. Players had to get from one side of the map to the other, completing varied objectives as you went along. Unlike Assault, both sides started their mirrored objectives at the same time, there didn't seem to be a offense/defense teams. The objectives seemed to be a mix of Onslaught and Bombing Run, sometimes you had to deliver a power core (ball) to a socket (net), other times you had to take out a giant spinning sphere and charge the point with your link gun. It also has all the Onslaught vehicles available, plus a few more like the personal hoverboard everyone gets by default now. Also on display were the new vehicles, like all the things from the alien invader team, like a HL2-Stalker-esque War-of-the-Worlds tripod of death.
I love how every time people claim PC gaming is dead stuff like this rolls around.
After that demo, it was time for another line, this time the line for the Spore demo. We weren't lucky enough to get a celebrity demo, not one by Will Wright himself, or a special guest like Robin Williams, but it was still a quality show. Apart from standard stuff we've seen before in previous demos, like the creature editor and the basic creature-level game, we saw some new content. First tidbit of new stuff was that each generation of your creatures are going to be played from child to adult, and when you start a new generation depending on how many eggs survived from the last round you may have a couple siblings to cruise around with as a pack. The procedural texturing system also seems to be in place now, so you can skin your critters in the same procedural generation way everything else is done in Spore. In previous demos we've seen, Will Wright just had to say "we don't really have texturing done yet", but now they do.
Once we were taken out to the space level of the demo, we were shown the brand new Sporepedia. The Sporepedia is a deck of cards cataloging every bit of user-generated content you've come across in the game. Creatures, Plants, Cities, Vehicles, Buildings, Planets, Stars, everything gets a card. The card shows off vital stats, a picture, and the first time we've seen this sort of thing - creator name. This is the first kind of "ownership" we've seen in Spore, and we were told that because you now have an ability to see who made what, you'll be able to make an in-game friends list. So if you decide you really like all the weird stuff made by that "inpheaux" guy from the internet, you can bookmark me and Spore will preferentially seed your universe with my stuff when it comes time for you to need new content. While it's still not "real" multiplayer, it's a nice happy medium.
The demo also showed off missions. Once you get to the interplanetary and interstellar levels of the game (and possibly back during the city-level), you'll get missions to save a planet, or help out some civilization, or get recalled to your home planet if you make some enemies and the decide to attack.
After Spore, we headed off for some lunch, but passed by the Konami booth on the way out. At the Konami booth, we were offered copies of "Show Maybe?". Every day of the show had tons of magazines out, but the official one was the Show Daily, an obviously daily mag with all manner of pertinent articles relating to stuff going on that day. "Show Maybe?" was Hideo Kojima's spoof of it, full of primarily articles about the assorted upcoming Metal Gear Solid projects, plus articles about other Konami products, interviews with Kojima and the rest of his crew, and random other stuff like maps of MGS levels in the same style as the Expo Hall maps from the Show Daily. It was a good magazine, I enjoy a good parody, especially one with as such high production value as "Show Maybe?".
While foraging for food, I walked by the Lucasarts booth. For the first two days of the show the LEC booth was open by appointment only, an appointment I couldn't be bothered to set. And of course, on day 3 there was a line stretching into adjacent exhibits. I guess this worked out well, since there wasn't anything I really wanted to see there anyway, even though I've dealt with LEC's press people in the past due to Jedi-Outcast.com. Well, except for Lego Star Wars 2, which is awesome, but not awesome enough to wait in a line that long.
Having finished lunch, I broke off and went to clean up the last couple of South Hall booths I ignored during the first two days of the show. First on my list was the Square Enix booth. A Squeenix employee yelled at me at the Sony booth back on day 1, so I was already put in a bad mood by them. When I took time to actually play their games it just got worse. First up was Dirge of Cerberus. It was bad. I had heard lukewarm responses based on the Japanese version of the game, but now that I've played it. . wow. They took a game concept that could have been good, it could have been Devil May Cry: Vincent Edition, but no, it's a clunky over-the-shoulder shooter. Will I end up buying it? Definitely not. Rent it? Only if I'm desperate.
Then I went around the corner to the FF12 demo and again, was thoroughly disappointed. It hadn't changed significantly from the Dragon Quest 8 demo, and it really just didn't feel fun. Sure, it's great that they've done away with the delays of starting and stopping battles, but in doing so it's like they forgot to make it fun. I'm not sure exactly how you'd salvage FF12, though. Despite the fact that nothing I have played of FF12 has made me want to play it, I'm probably going to end up buying it anyway, because I'm a sucker. If it has received such fantastic reviews from people I generally agree with like Famitsu, I figure I must just be missing something.
The other stuff Squeenix had on display, like the assorted Valkyrie Profile stuff, and the assorted PSP products, I just wasn't interested. I tried to care, but failed. Same with stuff like FF11, I just have a hard time caring. So I left. Thanks, Square Enix!
After all that disappointment, it was time to make my way to the Microsoft booth, the only big booth I ignored all week. I'm not really sure why I ignored it, I just sorta don't really care all that much about Microsoft products. I skipped them last generation, and was planning on skipping them this generation, but now that we know how expensive the PS3 is going to be, I might be changing my stance on that. Of the stuff they had on display, only three games really stood out to me.
First up: Viva Piñata. Saw this game being demoed right around the first corner of the booth. I saw a lot of weird games at E3, but Viva Piñata was pretty high up there on the weirdness scale. Viva Piñata takes place in a world populated by, ur, piñatas. Living ones. 60 species of them. You have to build your little corner of the world to attract piñatas, and protect them from their natural enemies: nasty things with sticks. I'm not really sure how a massively multiplayer online garden sim is going to really work, but if anyone can pull it off it's Microsoft and Rare. Next game on the list: Prey. I didn't really spend a whole lot of time watching Prey, but it was nice to see it actually being real, even though it took nearly a decade to get to that point. Still planning on getting the PCversion of this, though.
Last game on the list was Shadowrun. When I heard Microsoft was resurrecting the Shadowrun license I was ecstatic. Then I heard it was First Person, and I held out hope that it could still be an RPG like Morrowind / Oblivion. Then last Tuesday I heard it was a Squad-based Multiplayer FPS. By then, my expectations had hit rock bottom. They took a huge deep complex world and chopped it down to an FPS. When I actually got a chance to see it, my hopes were raised just slightly. At least it looks good. At least it seems to play well. Though, they weren't letting actual people play the game, it was devs only. We'll see why down at the Games for Windows booth.
It still has a slight chance of being salvaged, they're trying new ground with it, as it will be one of the first games to have compatible multiplayer between the 360 version and the PC version. It's far from the game I wanted, but it looks like Microsoft isn't interested in giving people the games they want. So I guess I should just be glad they didn't turn it into some manner of . . I don't know . . arcadey rail shooter? Puzzle game? I'm not sure how you could really make it worse, they already stripped the soul from the game. I'll try to give this a more fair shot once it gets closer to release.
Way back in the corner of the expo hall, in a tiny tiny sliver of the Microsoft booth, stuffed down next to the Logitech booth was the Games for Windows booth, which I just like to call "Games", but I guess you can't have a booth just called "GAMES!" at E3. The booth had a bunch of rather uninteresting stuff, like MS Flight Simulator X (which was at least set up on a nicely sized Elumens Dome so it looked impressive) and the latest Age of Empires III expansion, but there was some stuff worth talking about. First was the PC version of Shadowrun, which was still being demoed by Microsoft employees, probably because they were running a network game and it crashed twice in the couple minutes I was standing there watching it. Around the corner from that was a setup of Neverwinter Nights 2 which was neat and all, but what I was really looking for was way back in the corner: an unattended demo station of Hellgate: London.
I've raved about this game at nearly every chance I've been given. Please believe me when I say it really is amazing. It's seriously everything awesome and fun about Diablo II but in 3d. And in London. All the fun of running around and slaughtering zombies and hellspawn with your friends while feverishly clicking (so often that you decide you should get a special "Diablo II Mouse" so your normal use mouse doesn't get worn out). Early on I was somewhat concerned about how the whole "shooter game with no ammo" thing would work, but it does, really. The spell system is also nice and straightforward like Diablo II's. In my 20 minute demo session I wandered around two levels, a subway and a marketplace area, shooting all kinds of guys, wandering through the very pretty randomly generated map, summoning little hellspawn of my own to help shoot large people, and collecting loot. Hellgate London will probably be the game that gets me to finally upgrade my PC, something I've been putting off for awhile.
Last stop of the show was the Ageia PhysX booth, home to the game Cellfactor. Perhaps you've seen the demo video. When I got to this, it felt like the Day 2 Gundam demo all over again. Sure, the demo video looked pretty, and even in person it looked pretty, but it played horribly. In the multiplayer game I played, I died repeatedly for unexplained reasons. I would spawn, run forward, and explode. No one got credit for a kill, no crate flew across the screen to kill me, nothing. Then there was the problem that sometimes you could get killed by some guy abusing the super omg physics, spawn, and then get killed again - immmediately - because the shockwave hadn't dissipated yet. The weapons and vehicles also just weren't impressive compared to all the other stuff I saw at the show. It felt like the most generic FPS ever, but with omg physics. But now that I've seen and played it, physics that requires its own card to calculate just isn't necessary right now, and a game like CellFactor isn't worth getting one.
I think we may just be at a point right now where Physics is the New Colored Lighting. The early adopters have no idea how to use it tastefully or realistically, so we're getting things like Mysteries of the Sith. The Industry will get over it, though. And maybe after the upcoming crop of PC games, we'll get stuff that makes use of, needs, and is actually worthy of a physics card. We just aren't there yet.
With that, I had enough. It was nearing the close of the last day, and I had to get my car returned and make my way to LAX. The show was definitely worth it, it gave me a very good idea about what's coming, what's worth it, and how all this Next Gen stuff might play out. It reassured me on some games, and showed me others to avoid at all costs. Before closing up coverage, I've got one more recap to do: whole show opinions, best and worst of E3 awards, and predictions for the coming year and beyond.