Ubisoft

This briefing was hugely entertaining for all the wrong reasons. If you’ve been following E3 there’s no way you don’t know about Mr. Caffeine, but fuck, I keep having to stop and remind myself that the Ubisoft press conference in my head was actually what happened. I mean he was pretty much pulling up pictures that looked like they’d come out of Fail Blog and laughing at them at one point. I never thought I’d say this but I want Joel McHale back, what we saw was like the French version of Konami’s 2010 press conference. Okay, I need to get back on track because if I start ranting about Mr. Caffeine again we’ll be here all day

Rayman Origins

I can’t say I was raving over this game like everyone else seemed to be but the art style looked very nice and it at very least seems to be a solid platform game they’ve got there.

Far Cry 3

Okay, this looked genuinely good. The environments were vivid and picturesque, the characters were well-done and I loved the looped nature of the whole thing.

Brothers in Arms: Furious 4

This probably would have looked a lot better to me if it hadn’t been unfortunately similar to the Overstrike trailer. Gearbox seem to have gone insane at this point.

The Adventures of Tintin

At this point I assume there must have been some kind of bizarre tear in the fabric of our dimension because apparently Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are making a video game about Tintin... What? Just to put this in perspective, one of games being released in the coming years that Ubisoft considered most notable for showcasing was a video game based on a comic strip originating in late 1920s France about a Belgian child reporter and his dog sidekick   You couldn’t make this shit up.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

At this point in the day I was really starting to feel the shooter fatigue set in. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good shooter game, but after Modern Warfare 3, Gears of War 3, the last demo of Future Soldier, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 4, Overstrike, Battlefield 3, Far Cry 3, and Brothers in Arms: Furious 4 I found my brow severely furrowed. I’m sure you’ve heard it said elsewhere but yes, I was specifically more tired of the modern military FPS variety than anything else. This isn’t to say that the new Tom Clancy couldn’t be a solid game though.

Trackmania 2

Trackmania 2 looks like a pretty good game but it’s still a little unclear how this ManiaPlanet stuff is all supposed to fit together or what the other two games in the ManiaPlanet franchise really even are. None the less it makes me infinitely happy to know that someone, somewhere out there is developing a game called Shootmania.

Kinect

I was frankly surprised they didn’t show more motion control games but the Kinect seems like a good new territory for the Rabbids to venture into. I could see the Just Dance series coming to an end now though with it being repeatedly redundant to have players actually holding something in their hands while they play a dancing rhythm game.

Rocksmith

What Ubisoft wanted me to hear: Here is a game which will revolutionise everything you know about the rhythm genre. What I heard: We’re making PowerGig. Okay, perhaps that’s a little harsh, I mean at least this game has some people behind it who’ve already developed some decent games. The problem is that when you’re asking people to fork out for an entire guitar to play this game you need a rather excellent game to justify that request, and while Rock Band 3s Pro Guitar works as a side feature, when you have a game entirely based around the idea of teaching people real guitar you need to know it works and works well.

The three worrying things about Rocksmith are that despite them more than once showing footage of the game there’s nothing to suggest it’s that well fleshed out, the interface that will supposedly teach you guitar looks excruciatingly impractical and if they’re really saying you can use your own guitar then the games ability to judge whether you’re hitting the notes or not could be very shaky. So yes, maybe they are making PowerGig.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Ideally for me Ubisoft would just go straight ahead and make Assassin’s Creed III but I can’t deny what they showed of Revelations looked good. It could have done without the turret sequence and I might have been more enthused for it if I wasn’t so worn down by the events that lead up to this point but I like the new character design for Ezio, the environments looked excellent and if this instalment is anywhere near as good as Bortherhood it’ll be one hell of a game.

Sony

The PSN Outage Apology

You know what? I really thought there was a chance they were going to try and handle the PSN outage apology poorly. It could have been too late in the show, they could have made jokes about it, it could have been a Kevin Butler skit, but they did very well by dealing with it right at the top of the press conference and being entirely serious about it.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

Uncharted 3 had some of the most spectacular graphics I’ve seen on a console and as a programmer the way Nathan Drake wobbled about on-deck and the fact that the whole thing was running on one big simulated ocean kind of blew my mind. I’m sure Uncharted fans aren’t going to be disappointed.

Resistance 3

Considering the prominence of this title I felt I had to mention it but I have next to zero idea of anything about the Resistance series and through all the shooter fatigue the only thought which really came to mind when looking at this game was “Yeah, that seems okay I guess”.

Playstation TV Thingy

This was certainly a surprise and I really don’t know how to feel about it. For a 3D TV Sony seem to be offering it surprisingly cheap and the idea of two different people seeing two different images on the same TV is pretty cool but I’m still not convinced that 3D gaming is the future and I don’t have high hopes for this product specifically. I have to say though, for all of the marketing spin that goes on at the conferences Sony aren’t lying when they say they’re committed to 3D.

Playstation Move

Considering the disappointing sales of the Move I was interested to see where Sony were going to take this one and it doesn’t look like they’re really pushing to do too much different with it. If people aren’t playing it now I doubt Medieval Moves is going to tempt them to pick this stuff up and it’s still stuck at too much of a half-way point between the Kinect and the Wii to grab either audience, especially with the base price of a PS3 as it is.

Bunch of Games It’s Not Worth Putting Individual Titles Up For

LittleBigPlanet 2 still looks amazing and Infamous 2 looks good but there’s only so much I can say here. I’ve never really had any interest in Warhawk or Sly Cooper though, so sorry guys, that’s just not my thing.

Dust 514

With the unique and intelligent world that CCP have created with Eve Online and the promise that the gameplay actions in Dust will be seamlessly integrated with that world, Dust is certainly a game to watch. CCP have yet to display that they can build good a solid FPS design at the base level but they could be building a kind of game integration here like we’ve never seen before. I was expecting a little more of the game to be shown at E3 but it’s certainly something I’ll look out for in the future.

Bioshock Infinite

Ho-ly-crap, this game sounds good. Bioshock Infinite was certainly one of the most impressive sounding games at the show this year. The gameplay trailer looked stunning, the interviews with Ken Levine have been very promising and the demo has gained a near-legendary status among the critics who have played it. It’s also good to hear that Levine might have some genuinely good applications for the Playstation Move in his work, even if all ideas at this point are purely conceptual.

Playstation Suite

Was it just me in my bleary-eyed 2 a.m. state or was the whole announcement of Playstation Suite really vague? As it turns out this is a service by which Playstation One games can be played on phones, but with the Sony Xperia currently being the only phone this service seems available on, it all feels very limited right now.

Playstation Vita

I guess the rumour mill was pretty much spot-on with this one, huh. Sony were obviously very concerned about keeping the PSP aesthetic with this one but the front and back touch screens, the cameras, and perhaps most importantly two analog sticks. I have some issues with the device though and those gripes are mostly the same ones many of us made about the PSP. Sony still seem to be simply providing lower resolution, less practical versions of full console games instead of games that are more adapted to handheld gaming.

I’m willing to give this thing some leeway though, I can understand why they might want to refrain from competing head-on with Nintendo in some circumstances, it’s still early days for the device, the tools are at least there to provide something more suited to a handheld device and there are some games that genuinely seem to take advantage of the new features on the Vita to produce something great. Little Deviants, LittleBigPlanet 2 and ModNation Racers all look like really strong games on the device, especially with the way they’re utilising both the front and rear touch screens. The way Uncharted used the touch screen though, much less impressive.

Duder, It’s Over

Once again thanks for reading and my final E3 post this year will go up on the weekend as usual. Good luck, have Bomb.

-Gamer_152