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E3: The Good, the Bad and the Casual

Thursday, 17 Jul 2008 09:55
E3: Was it just me that was pretty bored by it all?
Is it just me or was E3 this year just a tad disappointing and slightly bereft of interesting announcements? Let’s start with the most important parts of the whole event: the keynotes.

Nintendo

Nintendo has a very large band of loyal, ‘core’ followers, but even they were left bemused and befuddled by the sheer brevity and lack of ‘true’ games on show at the company’s keynote.

Are Nintendo so totally focused on ‘casual’ games now that they’ve discarded the gamers, customers even, who’ve put them into the position where they can afford to diversify?

Let’s look at what they brought to the table this year. “There’s gonna be a big game for the holiday that gamers will want,” said Nintendo. Unless we all blanked out halfway through the keynote, this wasn’t exactly an accurate statement.

What we did get was casual titles, a GTA game for the DS and a sequel to a game that came bundled with the Wii. Oh, and Wii Music, but whether that can even be called a game, well, it is difficult to say.

The reason most Nintendo fans will be so disappointed is that they were expecting at least vague announcements about Kid Icarus, Pikmin 3, Star Fox Wii, Pilotwings, F-Zero and so on. None of these appeared.

They probably all exist, mind, and are most likely being worked on behind the scenes, out of the public eye. However, some have criticised Nintendo for being too cautious, for withholding all information until a game is close to release.

Both Sony and Microsoft revealed games for the short and the long term, even if the only footage they could or would show didn’t show in-game action. It was still a mention, a name check, which the fans could take away with them.

Nintendo, if you took its keynote at face value, has noting in the pipeline, just a couple of casual games. It isn’t often third-party developers rain heavily on Nintendo’s parade, but that is what has happened this time out.

Are Wii Sports 2 and Wii Music really for ‘core’ Nintendo gamers? Clearly not, but Nintendo seems to believe they are. Is Nintendo perpetuating the ‘gimmick’ tag the Wii has often been labelled with, the ‘get it out at a party for a laugh’ image that its rivals have been creating?

Creating numerous peripherals that promise much isn’t enough – you’re going to need some games to use them with, other than some Frisbee-throwing arse.

Microsoft

Microsoft probably had the most successful keynote of the three major companies, it could be convincingly argued.

Even if they hadn’t, the news that Final Fantasy XIII was coming to the 360 would have pulled the wool over the eyes of most Xbox fans and hidden the lack of real substance before.

In the end, there was more depth to Microsoft’s line-up than the other two, though Sony might want to argue with this.

However, this was perhaps the only “didn’t see that coming” moment of the entire event, certainly from Microsoft. What made more of an impact, in terms of the Xbox, was the amount of no-shows, the stuff that didn’t get announced or revealed.

For a start, Bungie’s new game was mysteriously pulled at the last minute by the game’s publisher, heavily rumoured to be Microsoft itself.

Forza 3, Turn 10’s third entry in its racing series, hasn’t even been hinted at during E3. Alan Wake was also a no show, despite Remedy saying in April that the “media blackout won’t continue for too much longer”.

Two years have gone by since both Alan Wake and Halo Chronicles were last on show, and the latter is even more shrouded in mystery than Mr Wake’s adventures.

The ‘Newton’ Xbox 360 motion controller is the other major ‘announcement’ to be conspicuous by its absence. Many sources had tipped it as “definitely” appearing at E3, but it didn’t.

What we did get was Resident Evil 5 and its co-op mode, Portal: Still Alive, Lips, Rock Band 2’s track listing, Geometry Wars 2 and the aforementioned Final Fantasy XIII.

Virtually everything was previously known of, so the excitement of a couple of little things here and there, Final Fantasy excluded, was kind of minimal.

Sony

Sony spent most of the time talking about how great it was, how amazing the PSP and the PS3 were doing and how Blu-ray and the PlayStation Network were going to rule the world or something.

It took over an hour for them to actually get down to the business of revealing PlayStation 3 games, though.

Even then, most of these had all been seen and discussed before. The major announcements, if they could be called that, were God of War 3 and MAG. The former was utterly expected; the latter at least was new and has caused plenty of discussion on forums all over the place.

Both, however, were only represented by trailers featuring no in-game footage, which was a big let down. MAG will have 256 player multiplayer battles, but whether this is just bluster is the subject of much debate.

Consider the world record is currently 250 players on one TrackMania server and you can see how ambitious/foolish the MAG claims could be viewed as.

All in all, Sony’s keynote was pretty uneventful, with nothing really exciting the increasingly comatose crowd. Nothing really unexpected happened, other than MAG, but at least they talked about proper games, unlike Nintendo.



So, what we learned is generally what we already knew. We heard a lot about games we already knew were coming and had a couple of little surprises here and there – GTA on the DS and Final Fantasy XIII on the 360.

For an event as big as E3, you’d have expected more.

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