Skip to content
Published June 16, 2010

Microsoft:

Early takeaway - Call of Duty: Black Ops is not that bad looking, especially once the player was out of the tunnels. The spooky gameplay didn’t do it for me, but the jungle looked lush and great, and the chopper gameplay was nifty. It reminded me a lot of the main campaign of Bad Company 2. Metal Gear Solid: Rising looks interesting but I’m not all that excited to go back into the confusion that is the MGS universe.

Gears of War 3 looks like - hold on to your hats - Gears of War 3 (not that that’s a bad thing).

I’m actually mildly interested in Halo: Reach‘s single player. I love the move to space combat. Count this as the first title I’m genuinely interested in.

Crytek will be making a game. I love me some Crytek, but that trailer is nothing to get excited for.

Fable 3 will be Fable 3. My girlfriend will sink way too much time into it, and I will enjoy playing it.

Then there’s Kinect. I’m loving the interface options, but the big question is whether or not the price is going to be low enough for a purchase for merely that. I watched the press conference with my girlfriend and she was really excited for Your Shape and Dance Central. I’ll admit that Kinect Adventures looked nifty as a stupid party game, and Kinectimals is admittedly interesting as long as it’s roughly as feature-complete as Nintendogs. (Spoilers: it probably isn’t.)

New 360? Sure. Makes Kinect not need a power plug? Sure. Will I get it this week? No. (I’m secretly hoping for a red ring on my Elite though…)

Handing out free Xboxes is cool if the sites give them away, but you know that people are just keeping them. I’m mostly indifferent to the Oprah ploy, though.

Overall - A workman-like appearance. Not much surprise there. If only ESPN anchors could have hosted the whole presser.

Nintendo:

New Zelda? I can dig the art style, but my experience with the “evolution” of Zelda is that there isn’t much. I’ll wait to get my hands on it before I judge it. As far as the on-stage wonkiness, it may have been interference, but at my home I get “interference” all the time, so I’ll remain skeptical. Then there’s Mario Sports Mix. Moving on. Nintendo reminds us that their games sell well and I remark how only their games sell well (caveat: Just Dance).

Golden Sun, not for me. GoldenEye, don’t need to relive that one. Epic Mickey – boom! – and I’m interested again. I was listening to the show at first and didn’t have a video feed, so I was initially uninterested. But when I watched the game in motion, I was instantly impressed. Mark this as game two I’m interested in. I’ll add Kirby’s Epic Yarn – what’s with the word “epic” on the Wii? –  merely because I was enamored with Kirby Canvas Curse back in the day; game three on my list.

Nothing else jumped out at me. I’m not a huge Donkey Kong Country fan, so I’m not really the person to talk about it, and Other M has me cold until I see something good from it. Then the 3DS deluge began, and I’ll probably be picking one up, but it’s so dependent on seeing one myself that it’s not even fun to read about for me. “Oh man, it looks so good!” Sure, rub it in, why don’t you?

By the way, why is everyone bat-shit crazy for Kid Icarus? I couldn’t care less about it, yet some people act as if it’s the best thing since sliced bread. That being said, the new game seems so far removed from the old game that it might as well be an entirely different IP.

Overall – Games I’m interested in for my Wii? That’s a big W for the big N.

Sony:

For Killzone 3, the non-3D feed looked less sharp than KZ2, but that may just have been the way Sony was streaming. I wasn’t super fond of KZ2, so I’m not on pins and needles waiting for KZ3. I feel like the “pretty and vapid” FPS category has been gobbled up by Rage and Crysis 2. I want to see how trying to focus in 3D works for a game. I know I was pretty irritated watching “Avatar” for a while because I couldn’t choose what to focus on with my eyes. Hopefully, the game will more accurately guess what I want to be in focus.

On to Move. Sorcery looks like the first game to pull off the motion control in a non-gimmicky way, but I’m saying that assuming there is more depth to the gameplay than what was shown. I enjoyed watching someone struggle to hit a golf ball in Tiger Woods, but moments before watching the conference, I had walked to the driving range that’s 500 ft. from where I live.

The Kevin Butler experience? Funny, then awkward and lame. What’s with the buttons thing? Why preach gamer unity and take stabs at other platforms?

The new Time Crisis might sell me on Move before Sorcery. Then we confuse ourselves over God of War PSP game subtitles. Some stuff is announced and I’m running out of typing strength so I’m skipping to the stuff I want to put my two cents on.

Theories concerning Portal 2? Considering the reasoning behind Left 4 Dead 2 not coming out on PS3, and the fact that it’s not even been a year since then, I’m beginning to suspect that Portal 2 may be running on a new version of the Source Engine in some capacity, one built to handle the PS3 architecture.

I’m not into LittleBigPlanet 2 as a creator, but I’ll wait to see how the community fares at making content and how that content rises to the surface. And then there’s the Twisted Metal reveal. Justin talks about this on the show, but having Jaffe make another Twisted Metal seems like such a waste. For me personally, a very strange ending to a show that has me pumped with the release date for Gran Turismo 5, which might be my most anticipated PS3 exclusive.

Overall - Very hit-or-miss for me, but resonates with the Sony base. Very solid showing.

Next time: E3 Miscellany

One Comment

  1. You might be the only person looking forward to a new Time Crisis. Other than myself. Nice.

Leave a Reply