| This year's E3 seemed like it would be one of the biggest, with three different systems making their grand entrances, but all in all it was a little underwhelming. This was mainly due to how little information there was for most of the things people actually wanted to hear about. The X360 was the only system close enough to launch that it had something to show that was more than pre-rendered hype, and what they had didn't exactly blow anyone away. The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy XII were the only tentpole series that had a new installment coming soon -- the next Gran Turismo or Grand Theft Auto or Mappyland are all pretty far off -- but Zelda had already been unveiled last year and FFXII was only shown in trailer form. So mostly it was a small peek at things to come and then a big reminder of how long you're going to have to wait.
As usual, the big three companies held press conferences on the two days leading up to the first day of E3.
The Sony Conference
Despite debuting what popular vote seems to say is the best system shown, Sony tried their best to bore the hell out of everyone. For two glorious hours, audiences were enraptured by Power Point presentations indicating that the PS3 can generate a much larger bar of Things on a graph than the Xbox 360 can, intercut with speeches from various Sony execs who are such poor public speakers that they either rock back and forth like they're on the bow of a ship:
Arr, the seas be a harsh mistress, rendered in real time with high dynamic range lighting to bring out the fire in her eyes
Or stare up at the teleprompter, which is situated 30 feet in the air for some reason, so it looks like they're telling God how the PS3 can beat Him up.
The upshot of all this, at least, is that with all the speeches and cards coming up on the screen, you get a lot of information. 3.2 GHz CPU. 2.18 teraflops of performance. Supports up to 7 Bluetooth wireless controllers. Blu-ray discs. Backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 games. Powered by ferrets. To demonstrate all this power, the president of Nvidia came out to show a real time tech demo using -- what else? A woman.
It's always a woman. The sample image used in tutorials for programs like Photoshop is almost always a woman. One of the first and most used test images in the development of scanners and digital image compression was a scan from a 1972 issue of Playboy. When I wanted to take a car for a test drive the salesman simply showed me what a naked woman would look like driving it. It doesn't bother me any, of course, I just think about what if the balance of power was a little different and naked men were being used as demonstration models all the time and then I get nauseous.
Anyway, she's very pretty and very detailed and they pull the camera back to further reveal--Oh hey! Nightmare fodder!
Hellspawn, of course, being the second most popular test image.
The demos continued, though I won't bother to narrate them all here. There was one, however, that was a sequel of sorts to the "rubber duck in bathtub" demo used for the PS2 unveiling. At one point, they stood in front of an Eye Toy and used real cups to control virtual cups on the screen, filling them with water and pouring them out. If one could create a reliable control scheme out of this, it holds quite a few possibilities, more than the Power Glove or Activator ever managed to realize. Imagine if, like, you had an Eye Toy and a dildo. Or... Well, that's all I have so far.
Most of the game clips were CG, and the few that weren't had still been animated by hand and rendered on a computer approximating what Sony would like to believe the system will be able to do. If you'd like to sound current during gaming discussions at your next dinner party, the big contention right now is whether the trailer for Killzone 2, the most impressive of the lot, was real-time or not. Sony says yes, my eyes say no way in hell. If Sony ends up being right, well.. holy shit, then.
Finally it was time for the main event, the unveiling of the console itself.
But first, an oversized novelty Zippo, to entertain the fans!
I mean a recreation of an Atari 2600 made of aluminum, to entertain the fans!
A chrome Betamax player, to entertain the fans!
Comes with your choice of refrigerators! To entertain the fans!
No, no, wait, I think that's the thing. Boy, Ken's really blinged out in that third picture, isn't he?
Sony's design highlights their commitment to the balance of form and function, the function of the form being to keep you from being able to stack anything on your console. Sure, you can stand it up vertically, but considering that doing so with a PS2 was pointed to as one of the common causes of disc scratches, I guess I'll just have to find somewhere else to place my Heroes of NASCAR posable figurines. The Dale Earnhardt figure wasn't standing right so I had to strap him down, but then one day he fell off the entertainment center and the straps broke and snapped his head into the TV and it was so ironic I wrote a book about it.
Unfortunately the PS3 controller could not be displayed at the show, as their prototype model was left in Kaz Hirai's car on a hot day and melted.
The Microsoft Conference
The X360's first unveiling was actually a week prior, at a goofy-assed MTV event in which twelve minutes were dedicated to commercials, eight minutes were dedicated to two performances by Gary Numan doing a Robert Smith impression, six minutes were dedicated to the team from Force My Vehicle Into Prostitution turning an Xbox into a ricer pirate's jewelry box, and then 30 seconds were actual game footage. The other three and a half minutes were taken up exclusively by Sway being a douche.
The excuse often heard afterwards was: Well, that was for the benefit of the peons who watch MTV, it wasn't meant for us. We'll get the details from E3. Still, Microsoft had carefully positioned themselves ahead of everyone else and then blew its lead on a lot of lasers and celebrities who came for the free drinks. Those peons don't care about technical specs, that's true, but that just means they care even more about pretty pictures than the geeks do. And what little MS had to show, if one was attuned to receiving information in blipvert form, wasn't exactly overwhelming. In light of Sony's strong presentation, MS needed to hit back hard.
Ooh, but first, pizzas are here! Aw man, who ordered the 4forAll? That thing is retarded. It's like four times the crust. Can't you just eat a normal fucking pepperoni pizza like the rest of the world?
After a brief introductory speech and a not-so brief video with people fucking breakdancing because they love the X360 so much, boy band sensation Sex Box took the stage to perform their smash hit, "Love 4 U 24/7/360 (+5)."
You can tell J's the bad boy because he can't stand straight. And when Dr. Phil goes into his solo he's so DREAMY.
The three take turns orating on how the Xbox is the best console ever and how flawless their plan for the future is. They announce their desire to reach one billion people with their games, and I'd like to take this time to announce my desire to shit gold and spit diamonds. There's optimistic, and then there's hoping that the other two guys in the race forget to show up. It'd be enough of a stretch just against Sony, but Allard also stressed their desire to reach all members of the community, the hardcore and the non-gamers, the latter of which Nintendo's been claiming for a while now. The X360 may have been designed with "international sensibilities", which is the nice way of saying "it won't crush Japanese people", but I still have a hard time seeing the likes of Animal Crossing or Katamari Damacy on it. They can't just slap on Hearts and Bejewelled and expect the non-gamers to come running.
Allard goes on to present their vision of the community they hope to create, where the Xbox 360 acts as a hub to which everything ties in. You watch DVDs on it, you purchase music and movies to play on it, you send pictures to friends with it, etc. One can, of course, see great potential in all this. One has to admire Microsoft for their ambition to create the multimedia center that has been promised by so many ever since PCs first gained the ability to read CDs and play video. The problem comes in with the fundamental flaw of community gaming: It's either the best experience you've ever had, or the worst. When you get together with a group of people who know what they're doing and do it well, it can be an experience no amount of AI coding can match. On the other hand, when you're dealing with the general public -- which is, y'know.. 95% of the time -- you're much more likely to have your enjoyment dragged down by 13-year old xX_GoKu666_Xx who's calling you a nigger-faced Jew douche whenever he's not yelling at his mom because she wants him to take out the trash. Only this time, there will be video chat capabilities so he can also slap his balls against the camera at the same time.
Which brings up a further issue-- wait a minute. Pedophiles! That's where the billion customers are going to come from. Man, those guys do think of everything.
Allard continues to push us down the tracks of Epcot's 360 Land, and we stop at the Marketplace of the Future, where greedy companies can charge a buck to allow you to download an extra car model or t-shirt texture and legions of stupid people will buy it. All with the push of a button! Not only this, but gamers can design custom textures, levels, and race tracks and sell them to other gamers. Allard uses the example of "Velocity Girl", one of those non-gamers they're trying to reach, who "might never pick up a controller, never take a run in the halfpipe, but she'll be able to design and sell stickers, shirts, boards, custom soundtracks, and even her own skatepark" to be sold to other gamers. Because the people who make the best skateparks are those who've never actually used one and think "tricking off your funbox" is what a girl does when she doesn't have a date for Friday night.
The divisions have been made fairly clear: Microsoft's community-friendly machine now or Sony's tech-heavy machine later. Or Nintendo, who.. well what are they up to, anyway?
The Nintendo Conference
Doggie baths! Yeee!
DJs creating music using just two DS units.. And $25,000 worth of remixing equipment! Yeee!
...What? Does this not impress you?
....
Doggies!
...
*sigh* You're not buying it, are you.
Yes, Nintendo had the shortest of the three conferences, even with a DJ performance and Tina Wood from G4 coming out to give her pretend dog a bath for five minutes while talking to it more excitedly than most real dog owners do. There was really nothing to say, other than "we got sum games cummin out on DS" which is not news you build a show around. The only things remotely new and different they showed could be counted off on one hand with fingers left to play some other system.
1. Nintendogs is apparently big in Japan. Undoubtedly it's more popular with the Japanese because they can't fit a real dog into their apartments.
2. The secret behind the Revolution is that it's actually the CD player from a Honda CRX somebody left unlocked in the parking lot.
3. Nintendo will soon launch the next era in fashion technology:
BOWTIE FROM THE YEAR 5000
For the love of God, who the fuck needs a new Gameboy Advance? What runt dwarf complained that the SP was too big? Who vacuum-seals their pants to the point that they can't fit an SP in their pocket? And what jackass decided putting the select and start buttons on the bottom of the system was a good idea?
So Nintendo took an hour to piss in everyone's eye. They didn't even show the new console's controller, as it is said to be the truly revolutionary part of the system and they don't want it stolen the way the analog stick and rumble pack were. The only really exciting news, to my mind anyway, was word of an online-enabled Smash Bros. set to launch with the Revolution, but who knows when that will be.
oh and remember when we said the ds wouldn't compete with the gba well here's a gba game getting a sequel only on the ds lol prankd
I'm such a lovable imp!
The next day, the show began. There were a lot of games to cover, but there did seem to be some overarching themes to be found.
Nintendo Uses The DS To Mock You
I'm always willing to give somebody the benefit of the doubt. I like to give people the chance to prove themselves. The Nintendo DS has been out a year, and it's proven itself to be a waste of a screen.
As it is, the touch screen has to be shoehorned into most games, where you're forced to take your hands off the controls to select an item or menu option from the screen in the middle of gameplay. But their other "innovative" idea, the dual screens, fairs even worse. Nobody can figure it out. With very rare exception, nobody can think of a good use of that second screen. For Chrissake, look at Animal Crossing. IT'S THE SKY. JESUS H. FUCKBUTTER ITS JUST THE FUCKING SKY. In Mario it's just the score. And these are Nintendo's games! They made the Goddamn thing and that's the best they can do! Argh! Fuck! Etcetera!
Things Are Very Bumpy And Grey
The next generation brings an unprecedented level of detail and realism to gaming, and that means the world can finally be rendered the way it truly is: Completely devoid of any and all color. The battlefields of the future are dark and gritty places, and we can't have any faggy pigmentation in there fucking it up. Have some monochromatism, it'll make you a Got-damned sexual ty-ran-toe-sore-ass, like me.
Actually what appears to be a total lack of creativity and artistic direction on the part of the designers is really an insightful and touching social commentary on race relations in the future. Just like that kid at the end of Volcano. I can't tell who my father is, they all look the same! 'Cause, y'know, normally I just look for the black guy. But now I'm all topsy-turvy!
This Is A Classic Movie So Let's Jab A Stick Up Its Peehole
Seemingly out of nowhere, several developers were seized with the desire to take movies from the '70s and one from the '80s and make games out of them. No word yet on a game based on Breaker! Breaker!, but Goddammit, there should be.
Jaws Unleashed - Perhaps it's some comment on the changing tastes of gamers that Jaws on the NES was about hunting a man-eating beast, and Jaws on the PS2 is about being a man-eating beast. You swim around completing missions such as "eat that thing" and "eat that other thing" and "embarrass yourself with a 3D movie." Previews for this game promise scenes such as Jaws fighting a killer whale boss, so it looks like this is the game to watch this fall. Watch it or else it might hurt itself.
Taxi Driver - Much like the Fight Club game released last year, nothing better communicates a film's message about violence in society better than making a game where you kill people. But they're mostly bad people, so it's all okay. Taxi Driver has Travis Bickle driving around New York City, cleaning up the town by killing off mobsters. He can kill anyone, of course, but murdering innocents has effects on Travis' "sanity"; in other words, your vision gets a little squirrelly. Push that busload of nuns off a cliff and you'll pass out and have to restart, having killed so many innocent people that you die of a broken heart. Or something. Fuck these people.
Also coming soon is Crazy Taxi Driver, where you have to clean up the city by making sure mobsters get to KFC on time. Taking innocents to Tower Records when they wanted to go to the Levi Store causes Travis to pass out.
Scarface: The World Is Yours - Like Taxi Driver, the developers just took the story at the end of the movie and said "okay now he has to get revenge n stuff where do we cash our checks." Rather than involve a lengthy, but certainly more satisfying side element where a voodoo priestess reanimates Tony's corpse and he must hunt through Miami seeking out cock-a-BRAAAIINNSSS, they simply rewrite the very end of the movie to allow Tony to live. Boring.
Al Pacino agreed to lend his image to the game, but not his voice, meaning that we'll be stuck with an actor poorly imitating an Italian poorly imitating a Cuban. Ow.
The Godfather - Featuring the voices of Robert Duvall and James Caan, and the inaudible mumbling of Marlon Brando, The Godfather: The Game: The Quickening has been publicly disavowed by trilogy director Francis Ford Coppola. You're not going to believe this, but the game involves running around in a big city and doing missions.
You can access demos of all these games by buying a copy of GTA3.
What The Fuck Is That
Seriously, what the fuck is that.
Odama
There are some things that just go together naturally, and one of those things is not real time strategy and pinball. Yet someone's doing it anyway. In Odama, you have to shoot the pinball/Odama around to clear out enemy troops to allow your troops to carry a giant bell up the stage to a gate at the top. You can issue commands to them through a microphone, such as "left", "right", "go", and "MULTIBALL OH SHIT RUN". You can also generate some troops of your own, who will go up to help fight off enemies and clear the path. And all this is done to a lavish soundscape comparable only to sitting by the bathroom door while your grandpa tries to pound one out. As ridiculous as it all sounds... It actually looks kinda fun. :/
Protip from Gamespot: "But you can buy yourself a little time by firing a giant hamburger onto the playfield, which will distract the enemy and clump them together, making them easy to take out with one well-placed shot of the Odama." Well of course.
Eyedentify
There's a somewhat disturbing dimension to some Japanese anime and video games, the ones that are directed primarily at young men of the geeky variety. They're unabashed in the way they play to their audience -- there's even a term for it, "fanservice", in which they throw something into the show that really isn't necessary but is done as a cheap thrill for the viewer. Usually something along the lines of a certain camera angle that gives you a glimpse up a girl's skirt, or some wacky Three's Company situation where the nerdy hero trips and falls on his buxom friend/classmate/roommate/coworker/bus driver and accidentally grabs her breast. I don't take any real issue with it. If you know who your audience is, and you know what they want, go ahead and give it to them, sure. It may not grant your anime or game a lot of dignity, but most of them that use fanservice aren't interested in being taken seriously anyway.
But that's not the disturbing part. What's strange is that many will go beyond a simple girl in a tight shirt and play to the baser psychological desires of the common nerd, and take it from me that is a weird, dark place to be. A large portion of anime makes no attempt at portraying real women; they portray what nerdy guys wish women, and the subsequent interactions therewith, were like. There's an entire subgenre in anime known as the "harem anime," where Awkward Dork, through no action of his own, comes to have a half dozen beautiful women living with him who all want to jump his bones. There are also a disproportionate number of anime series about maids. It's like a Madonna-whore complex got bitten by radioactive insecurity issues and grew 10 times its size.
Which is what makes my skin crawl when I watch the trailer for Eyedentify. Judging by this footage, which is all we have to go on at this point, the game uses the Eye Toy and acts as a Charlie (as in Angels) simulator, with you standing in front of the camera to give orders to your agents, who happen to be hot anime girls. Of course. You appear on screens throughout the game, talking to the girls and giving them commands to do whatever the fuck it is they're doing. A sample scene:
*tense action music*
Girl #1: Where is he? Time is running out!
Girl #2: Hurry!
[screen appears with fucking nerd in his basement on it] HELLO LADIES
I swear to Christ, it's one step from a greasy comic book collector putting on little scenes with his life-size cardboard cutout of Princess Leia in her slave outfit. "No Darth Vader, you're mean! Oh, I wish Steve were here to save me!" "Oh, but I am!" *punches Vader cutout* "Oh Steve, that was so heroic! Just thinking about it makes me so wet!"
This is all above and beyond the other problems the game will have. It will have to rely on voice recognition along with visual cues from the camera, which, given the history of voice activation, will mean you'll be spending an hour shouting "TAKE THE ENEMY OUT" only to see the girls putting duct tape on a sea anemone that looks like Yao Ming. Then they'll get so turned on by the sound of your voice they'll have to stop and masturbate right then and there.
Obviously I have to pick out all the shit to bitch about or I wouldn't have an article. But here are a couple games you might actually want to pay attention to.
Spore - The semi-digested brain of Wil Wright has escaped the festering bowels of EA just long enough to make a game that isn't SimDollhouse. Spore is possibly the most ambitious game ever made, in which you start out controlling a microbe which will evolve and grow (entirely in ways of your choosing) until, at the end of the game, you're controlling the whole universe. If there's anyone who can pull this off, it's Wil Wright.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was a fantastic game that was hampered by a few things. The world you had to explore was actually too big, meaning a lot of walking time and less detail and design in the large patches of landscape in between towns. The NPCs weren't much more than automatic dialog dispensers, and had little to them to make them seem real. Oblivion shrinks the game world to a more managable-but-still-huge size and improves the NPCs all around, giving them full speech and lip sync as well as personal schedules and dynamic reactions to the world around them. And it's got Patrick Stewart in it, for God's sake. You can't argue with that.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - If you've ever wanted to play an online shooter where you actually did something rather than just ran around in loops in a little DM map testing your aim, go out and get Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. G'head, it's free. When you're done with that, you'll be looking forward to Quake Wars too.
Metal Gear Solid 4 - After MGS3 reaffirmed my faith in the series, I can look forward to this again. The teaser trailer may only make sense if you've played MGS2, but it's funnier than anything in this article and some inside jokes are worth confusing a few people.
Sticky Balls - I don't give two shits about this game, but when the good Lord hands you a title like Sticky Balls, you can't just pass that up. In fact, it's your duty as an American or whatever the hell else you are to use it fully, and to the best of your ability. Try to think of the number of immature ways you can embarrass yourself and the clerk at the local game store when asking for this title. Give them a shot. It will probably be more fun than the game itself.
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