E3, the calamitous warzone known to take the life of many a weeping Zelda fan, has finally come and gone. Journalists and sweaty Gamestop managers spread across the show floor, waiting in lines for hours and dehydrating, while assholes like me sat at home and watched hella internet streams. I probably digested over 10 hours of coverage over the week, (partly because I wanted to write about it, and partly because this is what my life has become), and now present the best, the worst, and the best worst parts of E3 2011.
The Best:
Uncharted 3 still looks amazing.
Sony’s press conference was just as, if not more, awkward than the rest of the events going on this year, but it started out with a defiant bang in Uncharted 3. Uncharted may remain the only series that looks truly cinematic without ever really taking the action of your hands. Over the course of the demo, Nathan Drake stealthily took out some guards, traversed his way across the inside of a cargo boat, got involved in some gunplay, flooded said boat, and swam to safety. Other games would have to letterbox the screen and quicktime event their way out of stuff like this, but Uncharted does it so naturally that you wonder what kind of witchcraft the guys at Naughty Dog use to make their games.
Nintendo gives you some reasons to actually own a 3DS.
While it’s undeniable the 3DS is an amazing piece of technology, the games have been slim pickings for the most part. Outside of maybe three games and the mind-screwing AR cards packed with the device, there hasn’t been much to actually play on that fancy new handheld. Nintendo didn’t hold back this year, assuring early adopters that Kid Icarus, a new Mario game, Luigi’s Mansion 2, Starfox 64, Mario Kart, and Smash Brothers will all be available on the handheld soon, most of them before next year.
Platformers are the new black.
In the early days of the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, the market was flooded with generic 3D platformers. This eventually died out and gave way to generic World War II-era shooters, which are now, of course, generic modern-day military shooters. While this E3 was definitely bogged down with its fair share of dark gun games, Sony’s surprise announcement of a new Sly Cooper game along with Ubisoft’s downright charming demo of Rayman: Origins pumped my brain full colorful, happy endorphins. There was a time all these games were the tiring norm, but anyone who has played games long enough knows it’s a cyclical business. Here’s to hoping enough games like this come out so that we can get sick of them again.
Lara is interesting again.
Nobody knows how much of the new Tomb Raider game will be tightly scripted quicktime events, nor does anyone know how good the rest of the game will be. The important part, though, is that the Tomb Raider reboot looks really promising and has people talking about the franchise for the first time in years. A new younger and inexperienced Lara (with more believable measurements) stars in what is being pitched as a “survival” game, getting through being stranded on an island with insane natives trying to stab you with whatever you can find. It looks thrilling, visually amazing, and most of all, innovative; a word Tomb Raider needs to be affiliated with once more.
The Worst
More motion-based games you probably don’t care about.
Both Sony and Microsoft dedicated a large portion of their show to both the Move and Kinect, respectively. While none of the games looked particularly bad, not many of them looked exciting, either. Mostly everything was an on-rails experience with the player occasionally shooting or interacting with something in designated spots. The real cherry on top of this shit sundae are the actors(?) they trot out to display the games. Hiring kids to come out on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people and pretend to enjoy the game you made that may not even work that great is creepy as sin, as is pretending to be a voyeur watching someone in their living room talk about their favorite movies or new puppy over some kind of voice chat peripheral.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5C5hCypT64
Mr. Caffiene.
Oh, God. Ubisoft has had some bad hosts for their press conferences in the past, but somehow this idiot managed to make Jamie Kennedy look like Richard Pryor. Between not getting the audience to laugh or even play along with his act and failing to make dick jokes, “Mr. Caffeine” (whose real name escapes me because I was having an aneurism while watching) was a conduit to the already bad theme of the press conference, focusing on what their games “would have looked like” 20 years ago, in some weird attempt to celebrate 20 years of Ubisoft and not just be a goddamn press conference (which is what it was). Before every game demo, this gel-haired motherfucker came out and said “I wonder what this game would look like 20 years ago!,” followed by him doing a bad impression of the dream “doodle-doos” as seen in the classic film Wayne’s World. He even managed to sneak in the phrase “EPIC FAIL” into a talk about sharing photos via social networking. I want to punch him.
Great games, boring demos.
Potentially amazing games like Mass Effect 3, Street Fighter X Tekken, and Battlefield 3 (among others) were all victims of fairly underwhelming on-stage demos. The head-scratching one was definitely Battlefield, which just showed a tank shooting other tanks in the desert for a good nine minutes. I can understand the people watching this on Spike TV may not want to see Commander Shepard exhaust all his options in a dialogue wheel, but showing nothing but turret sequences and cutscenes really don’t do these games justice.
The Best Worst
Nintendo confuses the shit out of everyone.
I can’t say anything about the Wii U until I’ve been able to play it, but I will say this: it was presented in the most incoherent way possible. First of all, they called it the Wii U, which is dreadful, and that means something in a world where we call things “Kinect” and “HTC Thunderbolt.” They then showed a video of this new handheld, which wasn’t actually a handheld, but a controller with a screen and touchpad. The stock photo actors in the video did some Wii things with it, then there was a montage of PS3, 360, and PC footage, one of which with the Fraps watermark on the screen, claiming the Wii U will play these things. They also showed a bird at some point, and I’m not entirely sure why that happened. There were no on-stage demos, no sign of the actual console itself, and every piece of software shown was pointed out to not be a game, but a proof of concept. The word is these were actually pretty fun to play and the actual console shows potential, but it was definitely the most confusing point of the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJUDlT38VIM
Jeremy didn’t speak in class today, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Sony presented “Medieval Moves,” a new game for the Move. The presenter had a sense of apathy about this game that bordered on sarcasm, and then straight up abrasiveness. I remember absolutely nothing about this game, but I will always remember Jeremy. Great job, Jeremy.
Giant Enemy AT&T
E3 is awkward by nature. When you get people who make games for a living to address giant crowds and interact with celebrities, you know things will be a little uneasy; this is expected. I’d like to think I’ve built up a resistance to this type of thing, but nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for the stomach churning moment in which Kaz Harai unveiled the 3G network for the new Sony Vita handheld: AT&T. Instead of the crowd just going silent, it went into a muffled groan, pockets of laughter, and flat out booing. Booing! These are journalists, and they are booing someone because Sony managed to find the one thing that makes them more angry than anything else in the world, including identity theft!