The press conferences have come and gone, and for the most part, all that remains at E3 are show-floor demos and journalistic videos. Barring some horrifying revelations from relatively minor publishers, we've basically seen the heavy-hitters of what the show has to offer us. This list will be updated to reflect anything that catches my interest.
The Nintendo conference felt like a lot of flash revolving around a level of nostalgia value that feels like it's been exploited enough that it doesn't really resonate with me anymore. Consider this: The only 3DS game that I anticipate without hesitation is the new Super Mario, and typing the title into the search box brought up a bazillion titles with Super Mario in them, none of which were the game I was looking for. But Wii U, despite its bewildering name, won my heart with its crazy controller, excellent motion mechanics, in-house portability, and other sweet mechanics. Combine this with the fact that it finally brings Nintendo up to our current console graphical limitations -- a spot I'll be fine with videogames staying at for quite a long time -- and it all comes together to form a feature list I'll be anxious to hear more about when Nintendo's requisite pre-TGS event rolls around.
Back when the NGP was announced, nobody was expecting it to reach price-parity with the 3DS -- and yet now I'm considering whether I can afford the extra $50 for mobile broadband functionality. Getting this was already a given, since I love my PSP and enjoy the prospect of popping out its memory stick to put into this, but then they unveiled a series of great-looking games with outstanding graphics and a few neat services to sweeten the deal. For the life of me, I can't think of a single right note they didn't hit.
Dance Central 2 follows the traditional music-game sequel format: the first game comes out and it exists solely as a venue to play the songs, then the sequel appears one year later and turns it into a fully-fledged game. This one introduces career and multiplayer modes, which are great -- but it also does something that no other dancing game has attempted: complete song exportability, making it into a complete platform with over 100 songs available at launch. This is something I've been anticipating since my days of swapping DDR discs for Playstation 2, and it's almost criminal that it hasn't been properly attempted until this point.
This one didn't show up at any of the press conferences, but it was all over the show floor, and has one of the greatest CG trailers in existence. The few minutes of footage shown at GameTrailers's pre-media-briefing livestream made it look as though they took Saints Row 2, fixed its most critical flaw -- that it took place in Mutant Hazeville, USA -- and added enough crazy insane incredible amazingness to it to cement it as the single most brilliant open-world crime game possible until Volition's next one. Kudos to them for yanking Kanye's "Power" out from under Turn 10's feet, also.
Without question, my most pleasant surprise out of E3 had to have been the new SSX's turnaround from "Deadly Descents" to its new reboot-friendly name and aesthetic. I was borderline-trepidatious about this game after the Spike TV trailer, which made it look like they were trying to sculpt this game into a new Call Of Duty with snowboards, but the new trailer revealed bright colors, sick jumps, original characters, avalanches, steep slopes, and slamming techno: everything the SSX brand name has represented in its iconic first three titles.
Speaking as someone who wholeheartedly believes in the core concept behind Microsoft's Kinect, the entire Kinect-focused conference -- less the titles mentioned in this list -- was a borderline-offensive dud. I'm someone who's more than willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play an on-rails Fable game or a Disney theme park adventure, especially with a piece of hardware that clearly only shines on-its-own with dancing games, fitness games, and party games. Ubi is more on the pulse of this hardware than anyone else, because their three Kinect-only releases slotted perfectly into those genres. Raving Rabbids looks like the first crazy-fun party game to come out for this piece of hardware, and just the few minigames they've shown -- the one where you lick chocolate off a Rabbid's face, even -- look fun as hell.
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