TTD EVENT: Electronic Media Exposition Explodes with Dragonly Summations

The Entertainment Software Association's E3 Media Briefing Event has just concluded, and we were right in the thick of it! Or rather, we intended to be; after scoping the show floor out from the rafters, we each decided that getting hot sandwiches at the local Shakey's was a far more appealing prospect than walking around a sweltering convention hall, our nostrils afire with the stink of obese nerds as we attempt to hustle our way into playing the world's newest (and therefore most exciting) game demos with PR representatives staring over our shoulders. Still, thanks to the magic of backdoor entrances and flimsy security guards, we were both able to keep up with the press conferences of three of the big four hardware manufacturers! (Apple's apparently hasn't happened yet, and we couldn't find their booth anywhere. Readers: Let us know if there's something we missed!)

Biggest Surprise

Not pictured: handclaps, cymbal crashes, entire audience of straight-laced game-journos dancing in unison.

PHEN: Child of Eden. Tetsuya Mizuguchi opened up this year's Ubisoft media briefing, holding absolutely nothing as he waved his hands in front of a psychadelic landscape synced up with a driving trance beat. As strange-looking ships flew into view, an on-screen cursor swept across and targeted each of them, sending beams of light out that destroyed each ship, and I realized: this is a Rez sequel. Not only that, but it was shown being played on Kinect! Microsoft's announced Kinect titles made me feel wary about the platform, but Mizuguchi has me immediately pumped and ready to spend real-world dollars for the opportunity to flail my way through another surely-amazing Q? Entertainment product.

SVET: Nintendo 3DS. The existence of the system itself barely counts as a 'surprise'. However, given that we were initially told about this new hardware less than half a year ago with a projected an arrival date of Fall 2011, that Nintendo had screenshots/real-time footage of so many games from first and third-party publishers, that they had hardware that wasn't just an empty, lifeless husk of a case-design (as in years-past), but real, working prototypes attached to some chemical-tasting-but-ultimately-delicious female models... well. Add it all together and you have one of the biggest showstoppers in the history of the event. My favorite part is how the enthusiast community's biggest traditional problem with Nintendo systems (not enough third-party support + limited to games-for-kids) was taken care of with a massive confirmed release-list that includes THQ releasing a damn Saints Row game on a portable Nintendo platform. They even had a promotional video outlining the ways 3DS Will Kill You, for godsake!

Biggest Disappointment

"Annoying" and "black" seems to be the unintentionally-racist combination a lot of nerds are throwing around! Fair enough; he's now white and talks the same way. Have fun!

P: Twisted Metal. Admittedly, I was never a particularly big fan of Twisted Metal, and David Jaffe's newest entry in the franchise was a big contender for my Least Anticipated game this year as well. But I have no beef with Jaffe; my disappointment lies with Sony for choosing Twisted Metal as the final surprise for its media briefing. Sony devoted nearly ten minutes to Twisted Metal discussion, starting with a commercial in which two cabbies argue about how awesome and kick-ass the Twisted Metal series has been, segueing to a guy dressed as Sweet Tooth hanging out in an ice cream truck while Jaffe and Scott Campbell talked about their brand-new Twisted Metal game, including a live Team Death Match demo and concluding with an extended trailer for Nuke mode. The entire presentation seemed to cater to long-time fans of the series, leaving Twisted Metal virgins like myself shrugging our collective shoulders and wishing Sony had ended their show with a real show-stopper like The Last Guardian or the much-anticipated Jet Moto 4.

S: PlayStation Portable. Lately I've found myself in the middle of a cinematic montage in which I offer flowers to/ride a tandem bicycle with/watch movies with-but-not-on my PSP, because I've ultimately grown to love the thing. This is a rare case, though; the PSP still suffers from an image problem, and many people consider it as having run its course, despite how great games continue to come out on it even today. So, no worries; Sony can make up for it with the announcement of a new gaming device with the same on-train-playability that Japanese gamers crave, that capitalizes on the PSP's core strengths with a few interface adjustments and a big hardware boost! In theory, at least. What we ended up getting was a promotional video showing off mostly-already-announced games, a CG trailer for the new God of War, and the announcement of a bold new ad campaign in which Sony faux-executive Kevin Butler takes advice from a tweenage boy about how many suckers to consume every day. I never thought Chewbacca's onstage presence at Sony's 2007 keynote would be considered anything other than the bottom of the barrel, but it was better than virtually nothing at all.

Most Confusing Moment

This isn't what humans look like inside, though! If you like, I can prove it. >:T

P: Rod Humble. Eschewing any formal introduction during the EA media briefing, Rod Humble walked on-stage, scratched his head, and asked, "Did we have any choice in being here today?" This launched into a speech about free will, Greek mythology, emergent gameplay, chaos theory, and the unconscious mind, finally announcing after several minutes of waxing philosophy that The Sims 3 was coming to consoles and concluding his presentation with a short montage video to remind us that The Sims 3 exists. It didn't sound like EA was introducing any new twist on Sim logic for the console release; Humble's presentation could probably have been boiled down to a single slide that said "Sims think for themselves, duders."

S: Ubi Homeopathy. Ubisoft's presentation was riddled with curious moments that toed the line of balls-to-the-wall crazy; they turned a skateboarding game into Okami, showed off the natural comfort of cubes-as-furniture, revealed the superpowers you get from throwing yourself into a coma, and ended with a spontaneous, contextless tribute to Michael Jackson that they forgot to pair with a game announcement. The biggest offender by far, however, has to be the segment in which NBC sitcom Community's Joel McHale helped demonstrate Innergy, where they hooked a sensor to his fingertip and told him to breathe in and out in a steady, relaxed way -- while having his involuntary bodily functions tracked by the entire audience and holding a conversation with the game's representative. As though that wasn't enough, the Innergy guy started criticizing him when his breathing began to fluctuate beyond normal levels, causing him to have to apologize, which really sent the meter off-track. Once the sales-pitch was made and McHale was left to host the rest of the show, I swear he had to physically restrain himself from belting out an under-his-breath "Ooookay..."

Most Anticipated

Kids: with a steady diet of gunpowder, you too can develop the steel resolve necessary to slice bad-guys into dozens of airborne chunklets!

P: Metal Gear Solid: Rising. Bulletstorm was a close contender for this category; both it and MGS: Rising prominently feature combat that looks totally over-the top in a really fun way, scratching the same itch in that respect as God Hand or Painkiller. However, while Bulletstorm's kill-with-skill mechanic assigns a specific name and point value to the act of grappling a baddie into a point-blank shotgun blast, MGS: Rising apparently allows players to slow down time and dice an enemy to bits with a sword, and the footage released so far has left me grinning like an idiot.

S: Kinect. For most gamers who define their tastes outside the sphere of doing jumping-jacks to get coins/getting fake-tickled by a pretend-tiger, most of Microsoft's Kinect lineup leaves a lot to be desired. However, there are two things that most can agree the Kinect does well, even if it doesn't necessarily appeal to them: games that relate specifically to real-life full-body activities that can be reasonably mimiced while standing in-place without the practice coming off as totally absoludicrous. Dancing and aerobics fall squarely into this category; because of this, the back-to-back Dance Central and Your Shape: Fitness Evolved segments of the Microsoft press conference ended up holding bucketfuls of raw appeal for me. It was certainly better than the workhorse-like way in which the conference opened, in which they alternated back-and-forth between shooting-and-sword games before launching directly into talk of sports -- as though the press conference was laid out as boy segment -> girl segment -> mom segment -> cool segment -> hey look at this Ferrari.

Least Anticipated

Fogerty says some folks are born made to wave the flag, but it ain't me.

P: Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam. Vietnam is rapidly approaching the Invasion of Normandy and the Battle of Hoth in terms of market saturation. It's been well-established that Vietnam was a mess -- Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick taught us that ages ago -- and another full-motion-video jungle warzone montage set to Creedence Clearwater Revival isn't approaching the narrative in any new or exciting way. And there's really no new or exciting way to approach Vietnam, since the historical narrative doesn't lend itself to what-if scenarios like the ones explored in C&C: Red Alert or Freedom Fighters. It also doesn't help EA's case that they used the same CCR song six years ago when they debuted a similar game with "Battlefield" and "Vietnam" in the title.

S: Sorcery. While Kinect's offerings to the motion-control format displayed some promise (even if it was mostly outside the realm of "gamer-games"), Sony had a much harder time attempting to distinguish their Playstation Move from a Wii remote with MotionPlus attached. On paper, Sorcery makes as much sense for the Playstation Move wand controller as Dance Central and Your Shape make for Kinect. This analogy falls apart when you consider what kind of games "Wizard Game", "Dancing Game", and "Aerobics Game" individually end up being. Unlike the other two genres at play, Wizard Game requires you to contextualize the action, since human wizards don't actually exist. There are many ways to do this, but Sony chose to present their wizard-game through what looks like a serious story presented in third-person action-adventure format -- and stories that are formed based on business decisions rarely turn out well. Personally, I'm looking forward to the rumored Ape Escape game in development for the device! Nobody-but-nobody cares about the stories in those games.

Who won the media briefings?

"With this device, we plan on printing money in new, three-dimensional formats, the likes of which humanity has never seen."

P: Nintendo. Wii MotionPlus technical issues aside, Nintendo dropped a lot of bombshells at this year's E3 and seemed to have something for everyone: new Zelda, new Golden Sun, new GoldenEye, new Kirby, new Dragon Quest, new Donkey Kong Country, new Kid Icarus, new DS, and Epic Mickey. Svet's already talked in-depth about the 3DS, so I'll just add this about GoldenEye: I can get my late-90s-console-shooter multiplayer fix from Perfect Dark on XBLA, but I'm genuinely interested in how Eurocom's reimagined the singleplayer campaign to fit in with the premise that it stars the Bond from Quantum of Solace.

S: Nintendo. Not to be the GameInformer-style 9.25 to Phen's 9.0, but your tastes would really have to vary wildly from either of ours to dispute this. Nintendo's conference was compact and efficient, running from trailer-to-trailer with very little CNN-targeted business jargon in between, jamming on the nostalgia buttons of every gamer who owned a Nintendo system earlier than 2001 (sorry, Pikmin fans). Most of all, Nintendo's showing displayed their utter dominance of a genre of game that other console manufacturers rarely attempt to enter: the Cartoon Character Action Game. Though new intellectual properties were few and far-between at this conference in particular (there's a characterless submarine game in development for 3DS, I hear), even if Nintendo decided to paste an entirely new set of characters onto the exact same mechanics of any of their star games, the resulting excitement and froth would be comparable to what they are now, if not exactly the same.

May Was Games, Part 1

Ignoring the precedent set by the May months of previous years, May of 2010 played host to one of the largest barrages of mid-year quality the game industry has ever seen -- after Activision took their prospective sales hostage with the release of Modern Warfare 2 last fall, it's understandable that rival publishers wouldn't want to compete. In part one of this four-part series, our two heroes take on a cubic-pixel sandwich encasing a delicious skateboard in the middle.

Picross 3D - May 3rd

The nation of Blockica has been overrun by "Grey Ones", an evil attacking force of grid-adorned rectangular prisms! It's up to you and your pet stylus Wisp to fight back against these evil creatures and quite literally carve out a new civilization for your countrymen, cheered on by a talking motor-duck and his clip-art compatriots.

Svet: This game sets my imagination afire! There are like a million puzzles in this thing, all of which are perfect for playing while lazing about with something else in the background -- cool jazz, Newsradio reruns, crazy cartoons, masturbation, and especially newspapers. The models you make are a little pixelated; I'd have preferred to work at a higher resolution -- carving out individual triangles and normal-map layers to create a stellar rendition of current-gen Mario's face, let's say. It would take several hours for each item to complete, but at least I'd be able to justify giving my Game-Reviewer's-Template review for this game a graphics score higher than a 2.5 out of 10.

Phen: After an extended playsession of Tetris, I often find myself picturing theoretical arrangements of a game in progress and where to place the next hypothetical piece. Very few puzzle games grip my attention long enough that I start getting Tetris-Vision, but Picross 3D is one of them. After solving a few puzzles, I'd set the game down and look around my cave, only to find that I'm seeing numbers scattered across the walls, describing the number of spaces separating every nook and cranny and providing clues on which spaces still need to be carved out. It turns out it's a platypus!

Skate 3 - May 11th

After your numerous adventures in San Vanelona in Skate (alternate titles: "skate.", "Skate OG") and Skate 2, you wake up in a newer, more colorful city filled with impossible architecture that just-so-happens to be brilliantly navigable with the control system provided to you! Your task is to rid this skater's Valhalla of as many neon blue icons as possible and help fill a progress bar with a million skateboards, preferably aided by up to three friends at once.

S: I've been playing this almost universally online with Phen! We spend endless hours dogpaddling in city water fixtures, throwing ourselves off tall buildings to break as many of our human avatars' bones as possible, and stacking ramps on top of each other to create more and more interesting ways to kill ourselves on park-editor architecture. My only complaint is the amount of useless numbers and multipliers that obstruct an otherwise-perfect view of the bottom of the screen, but I suppose they have to save some refinements for Skate 4.

P: I've been playing this game offline behind Svet's back, as well! The score-attack challenges are great, and I've been having a blast with the photo challenges -- especially the new Team Ads, which let you place a camera anywhere in the game world and snap a photo of your skater doing whatever you please, bails and inappropriate hand-gestures included. However, I know next to nothing about skater culture, so Skate 3's occasional name-dropping doesn't elicit from me the excited response I think the game expects from its audience. Playing S.K.A.T.E. against celebrity skaters is no longer required to progress in Skate 3, but it's been replaced with one-on-one score battles, and I still feel like my success is dependent on the game arbitrarily deciding whether my opponent bails at any given time.

3D Dot Game Heroes - May 11th

As a randomized cluster of dynamically-lit cubes that hover in a scattershot fashion above a 2.5-dimensional playing field, endowed with the mystical ability to sprout a giant sword from its center-mass, your task is to rescue the Princess of Oldschule from the Evil Draygun of Blast Processing, or some other such nonsense.

S: Hey, all right! Idea Factory apparently took some time out from creating stellar spinoffs of the Metal Wolf Chaos IP to revive the original Legend of Zelda in bootleg form, with the same snazzy washed-out colors, individually outlined pixels, and depth-of-field effects you remember from the NES days. I'm looking forward to the cheeky asides added-in by Atlus's brilliant localization team, which may serve as adequate field-dressing for what my preconceived biases have already labeled a barely-functional workhorse of a story. Haven't picked this one up yet, but I might when the clerk at my local Target isn't looking.

P: I also haven't picked this one up just yet, mostly due to the sheer amount of games on the table I need to plow through first! I'm looking forward to generating custom content that's as symmetrical as it is uninspired, just like I do with every other build-your-own-game game. Also, I never played a top-down Zelda game -- shame on me, I know -- and 3DDGH seems as good an analog as any.

Join us next time, where we wrestle pirate wolves, ghoulish nighttime townsfolk, and grizzly bears.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is more fun with a friend

In between our single-player runs of amazing titles like Just Cause 2 and Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, my pear-shaped comrade and I have found time to enjoy each other's company while we snap necks and turn out lights with deadly force in Splinter Cell: Conviction on the XBOX 360. A formal review of the solo campaign is inevitably forthcoming, but this'll have to do for now: "game's pretty fun."


The four-chapter co-op campaign serves as a prequel to the solo campaign, with players playing the role of two Agents, Archer (American, working for Third Echelon) and Kestrel (Russian, working for Voron). Gameplay in SC:C's co-op campaign is nigh-identical to its single-player counterpart, its stealth-action sequences bookended by weapon-stash checkpoints and co-op objectives that force both players to join up. Technically, one player could blast through the stealth-action sequence and wait at the checkpoint for his buddy -- the co-op maneuvers offered by previous Splinter Cell games have been stripped away for a more streamlined experience -- but where's the fun in that?


Even without specific co-op maneuvers, there's still plenty of opportunities for players to help each other out. If two targets are in each other's line-of-sight, both players can sneak up behind their targets and simultaneously choke-hold them before the other target gets a chance to radio for backup. Both players have a separate bank of Mark-and-Execute tokens, as well; if either player melee-kills an enemy, both players' tokens are replenished, and players can execute each other's marks. By flanking a large room from two entrance points and splitting up, each player has a different angle of attack and enemies visible on sonar. Since a fully-upgraded Five-Seven allows for up to four marks, a well-coordinated duo could drop eight targets with a single press of a button.


Screwing up in SC:C's co-op campaign isn't the end of the world, either. While setting off an alarm in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's co-op campaign meant guards donned body armor and whipped out their biggest guns, in SC:C it mostly just a few more guards come in and everyone's more alert, and results in a lower score at the end of the campaign. It's definitely easier to get through a level when players avoid detection entirely, though.


Ultimately, SC:C's co-op campaign is as entertaining as two players are willing to make it. While a team could play the game by sending one player in guns blazing until he reaches the checkpoint and waits for his buddy to catch up, the real thrill comes from infiltrating a room together, silently snapping the necks of every guard inside and reaching the next area without setting off any alarms. If you have a co-op buddy and you've been looking to scratch that stealth-action itch together, SC:C is the game for you.

Until Peace Walker drops, at least.

Phen's Incredible Backlog, Part 1

Keeping one's library of dragony things in a massive pile is great for lounging and rollng around on top of it, but not so great for keeping things organized! As a result, my massive collection of games to beat and review here -- for that is the true purpose of this blog -- keeps getting buried under other games, movies, peripherals, baseball caps, myself and occasionally a good friend. So, what haven't I been playing lately?

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)

Last known position: Link just turned into a wolf! This game is awesome.

Reason for hiatus: I picked up this game at launch; every time I sit down to play it, something even more amazing comes out and pulls me away. I've been told the game gets better than what I've seen so far; the bar's already been set pretty high!

Resident Evil 4 (GCN)

Last known position: I have to escort the President's daughter through a fork in the road!

Reason for hiatus: it's hard to refamiliarize myself with the game's controls and plot points when I'm thrust headlong into an escort mission! My pear-shaped companion assures me that the Wii version is better; one of these days, I'll borrow hers and start fresh.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (PSP)

Last known position: I just fought and bested this game's Mr. Freeze analog!

Reason for hiatus: said fight was a major pain! The fight itself was a kick in the jaw when I'd gone through the game leading up to it without firing a shot, came into the level without any weapons, and had to restart the mission with more adequate equipment. On top of this, I had to cheese the fight itself, due to poor controls. I'm pretty pumped for Peace Walker, and letting this game collect dust until that one comes out is starting to sound more and more appealing...

So, there it is! As much as I hope to get through these games soon, the next few months promise to be a sexplosion of even more amazing media to consume, so my hopes aren't very high.

Moral Choices

While I don't play as many role-playing games as my pear-shaped counterpart, I've noticed a pervasive trend in her games where the player is forced to make a decision that will upset the very balance of good-and-evil in the game's universe depending on the choice the player makes. This choice typically boils down to selecting between two clean-cut dialogue options or actions; buying a seasonal gift for the crippled boy with the funny accent is Good, while torching his village and laughing as he awkwardly hobbles away is Bad.

I don't mind this perceived open-endedness – it makes the game's plot seem less on-rails, even if it sometimes just forks into two paths of equal length – but it seems like developers keep trying to make the moral choices exceptionally "game-y" by linking them to a slider that arbitrarily shifts between More Good and Less Good. I'm sure this is easier from a design perspective: the plot can fork based on the world's general perception of a character, rather than having the world specifically reference the player's various Good and Bad actions. But it leads to an unintended gameplay mechanic where "morality" becomes another meaningless stat for the player to level up, or down.

Because I have some personal experience with it, I'll loosely use Fallout 3 as an example here. If I pick some guy's lock, my Karma takes a small hit. If I pick several hundred locks, my Karma plummets until I become The Dreaded Baron Phenoix, Picker Of Locks, feared across the lands for my lock-picking ways, and I'll even get a shout-out from the Galaxy News Radio DJ, Three-Dog, about how dreadfully feared I am. However, if I then give some bottled water to a beggar a thousand times, I'm a Paragon Of All That Is Good again and I can venture into a distant town and walk the old lady across the street. Picking all of John Q. Owns-A-House's locks should put me on bad terms with John Q., and rightly so, and I wouldn't find it unfair if John Q. subsequently packed up his locks and skipped town before I could do him any favors. But I would think I could pick every lock in town and still maintain a moral high-ground over someone who dropped a bomb on it.

As far as moral choices in dialog options goes, in Fallout 3, it usually works out like this: if you ask to be paid, you're a bad person. As a result, during my Good Guy run, I did everything everyone asked and refused their rewards at every turn, not because I'd "feel bad" if I asked for compensation, but because I didn't want my Karma to go down. Conversely, on my Bad Guy run, I still did everything everyone asked, but made sure to ask for a hearty reward for my efforts.

Fallout 3 almost does a few things right. For example, it's possible to put a bullet in Three-Dog's head. This isn't the result of a dialogue tree nor is it guided by some sort of prompt, the game simply puts the player in a situation where one is armed and in the same room as Three-Dog. Killing him actually effects the world: he'll no longer DJ GNR and his plot missions and sidequests will be inaccessable. However, this causes other characters to be annoyed with you at worst, and at best indifferent toward you after you've satiated that thirsty beggar a few times.

Maybe on my next playthrough I'll just rummage through Three-Dog's stuff and steal his wallet. That'll show him.

Salutations!

I see Svet's already taken the wind out of my sails, as waterborne dragons are wont to do. Nevertheless, from my cozy little crevice in Mount Hood to yours: greetings, welcome, and, as my number-one comrade has so eloquently put, hi there.

For those of you not living in a cave -- and I suspect there are still many of you -- I am Phenoix, resident Eastern-descendant dragon of the Two Timid Dragons web-log. Like my pear-shaped partner, I have cut back on townsfolk and livestock in favor of modern media-based consumables: good videogames, bad movies, pulpy books, and so on. Such things are easy to obtain; a few daring locals have taken to conquering the slopes on this side of the mountain, and those who fail along the way make for particularly easy prey. I am of course referring to preying on their wallets, and sometimes a thing or two for my hoard.

Oh, and sorry about your snowboard. You know who you are.