E3 Underload

Well now that the dust has settled on E3, I figured it was time to comment on it, but the problem is that I didn’t know exactly how I felt about it.   In fact, I still don’t.   There are some things that are clear to me, mainly that Nintendo is going so far in a direction that I truly couldn’t care about that the creator’s of some of my all time favorite games have basically stuck their middle finger up at me and are saying “sorry, our new friends have more money.”   And money is the name of the game, they certainly are printing their own at this point with sales of the DS and Wii… but nothing happening on either platform got me excited in the least bit.

As for Sony and Microsoft…  well, it was just a bunch of stuff I already knew, for the most part.  Resistance 2? Yep, looks awesome.  Gears of War 2? Yep, looks awesome. Motorstorm2? Socom?   Little Big Planet? Yep, yep and yep.   And then there were head scratchers like Massive Action Game and God of War 3, which both are interesting, but they had so little to show and the release dates are so far off why did they bother?

Don’t get me wrong, i think we are in for an absolutely amazing fall and winter release schedule.   I think, just like last year, that so many good games will come out that i’ll be still needing to pick some up this time next year (kinda like I just got around to Mass Effect).

The biggest surprises to me were actually the little things.   A little PSN game called Fat Princess where the concept is 16v16 swords and sorcery type of gameplay where you try to capture the other team’s princess, but the other team is also trying to fatten her up so she is harder to carry back to your base.  If pulled off correctly I think this could be as fun a game that comes out all year.    I was also really happy to see MS’s plans for the dashboard overhaul.   And while having an “avatar” isn’t anything that’s high on my list of wants, I can kinda see why they went that way.   But MS wasn’t stupid, they saw what the Wii did right and they read about everything Home was planning on doing and they went ahead and came up with their own version.   It’s kinda hard to get behind copy-catting, but if there is any place where it’s needed, it’s in UI’s… because so few are done right.   I am just hoping the new dashboard is faster, because at this point in time it can take me several minutes between when I power up my system and I get into a downloaded game.   The current blades (especially the games blade) are just so slow, especially if you are like me and have like 80 downloaded games).   So here is to hoping for a speed increase also.

So E3 came and went, it was rather unremarkable, but I am fine with that.   And part of it might be that I am just getting to the age where i’ve seen so many of these things year after year that they are starting to become pretty predictable.   But I guess it’s a good thing that what was predictable was that we were gonna see a bunch of really good games, and we did.  Hooray for that.