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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land The idea of going to E3 for me was nothing less than a dream come true, seriously. About a week before we embarked to Los Angeles Crecente sent a letter of how the housing situation as going to work, along with a few friendly reminders.
So of course I took a look at my roommate situation and saw that Michael Fahey and I were going to be bunk mates for the next few days. No more than a minute later I get this hysterical laugh from Owen on instant message. “Adam, good luck trying to sleep BWA HA HA HA” he says. I was dumbfounded. There was no way I could have possibly been prepared for what was in store.
My E3 dreams were shattered when it came time to go to sleep. The great thing about being the Kotaku video intern (at the time) was that I got to capture all of the wonderful Hallmark moments. Video, after the jump.
When Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw isn’t reviewing video games like Age of Conan or Alone in the Dark, he’s meeting his contractual obligations with The Escapist, weighing in on things like trailers shown at E3. In four minutes and forty seconds, Yahtzee picks apart non-playable previews for games like Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy XIII, Resident Evil 5 and Fallout 3 with sexy results. Actually, that should’ve been hilarious results. We were still thinking about the pus covered roulette wheel and anal shielding imagery from this episode. Two of our choicest fetishes!
Zero Punctuation: The E3 Trailer Park [The Escapist]
Let’s just say we shant be getting any job offers to be Michael Pachter’s trusted aide, as our incorrect guesses about what we thought we’d see at E3 this year grossly outnumbered our correct ones. In our defence, we cast a wide net with our E3 ’08 predictions, with some clearly outrageous bets that were ground more in fantasy than reality. Plus, E3 sucked.
While we were surprised to see a lack of X-waggle and to learn that Kid Icarus was a no-show, that Duffy performance clearly came out of nowhere. Hit the jump for the final tally and keep your eyes peeled for the winner — and possible tie-breaker — of our E3 Fantasy Betting Pool contest. Woot!
Each year journalists from 36 North America media outlets come together to select what they believe are the best games of E3. The annual Game Critics Awards are meant to recognise the games that “will shape the future of interactive entertainment”.
The only rule? They have to be playable by the judges at E3.
The winning games haven’t quite been selected yet, but the judges (including myself) have selected the finalists. Best of show nominees are Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, LittleBigPlanet, Mirror’s Edge and Spore. LittleBigPlanet managed to get the most nominations across the board, with five, while both Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead nabbed four nominations. EA was the publisher with the most nominations, pulling in a whopping 21.
While I mostly agree with the list, there is one stand-out. Early on in the process we were told that Street Fighter IV the arcade machine was eligible for awards. Personally, as much as I love the game, I don’t think that’s fair. It’s not a video game in the true sense of the word. When it does hit consoles that’s fine, but I think mixing in arcade games with console and PC titles sets a bad precedent.
During my practically nonexistent downtime, I wandered down to check out the offerings at the E3 installation of Indiecade 2008. Indiecade is, as the name implies, a celebration of a variety of indie games ranging from ‘art games’ to more mainstream-type titles. We’ve covered at least two of the games here on Kotaku — Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation and The Odd Gentlemen’s The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (begun as an MFA thesis at the University of Southern California). I had a chance to check out some of the games, talk to the people behind Indiecade, and watch the goings on — which included a surprising amount of hubbub and talent scouts from several companies lurking around. And there was more than just games: art prints were featured from various games (I even spied a screen from Blueberry Garden), plus videos of ARGs and installation games. My impressions and some pictures after the jump.
The playable games at this year’s exhibition spanned an incredibly wide range:
We’ve chewed this topic to death, but it’s always interesting to know how others see you. And The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel comes up with a rather solid analogy to describe the backlash to the parade of dross we saw in Nintendo’s E3 presser (and, to a lesser extent, others).
Call it nerd rage. Like loyalists of a once-partisan politician who tacks toward the centre later in an election cycle, old-school gamers are coming to terms with the ramifications of their favourite’s newfound popularity. Though they have long craved mainstream respectability for video games, players sometimes resent the concessions their champion must make to attract mainstream adherents.
Here’s the E3 trailer for Naruto: The Broken Bond, the Ubisoft follow up to Rise of the Ninja on the Xbox 360, a game I enjoyed very much. This next installment is due out this fall, picking up where Rise left off with the Return of Itachi and Sasuke Retrieval story arcs. They’ve spiced up the fighting side of things this time around with 25 player characters, so if they at least maintain the quality of gameplay that they featured in RotN Ubisoft will have another winning Naruto title on their hands.
In our last video featuring Sega of America’s Simon Jeffery, the president of the company explains why we haven’t seen any System 16 or System 24 games on Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network. He also talks about his reluctance to put some of those games on Live due to Microsoft’s requirement to update a game’s graphics before porting.
Tecmo, sensing a disturbance in the fanboy force, sent out a preemptive email today explaining to anyone and everyone why Fatal Frame 4 was not at E3 this year.
Actually, to be fair it’s more like they passed the buck… preemptively:
Several of you asked about Tecmo’s other titles that have been announced in Japan which were not on display at the show. Fatal Frame 4 (Wii) will be published by Nintendo, so please contact your Nintendo PR contact for further information. Rygar: The Battle of Argus (Wii) is in development and we are planning to provide more information this fall.
I contacted Nintendo for comment and take their stony silence as complete confusion. We’ll update you as soon as they update us.
God Hand 2? Viewtiful Joe 3? Not coming, at least not from the Platinum Games, formerly Clover, guys. But that doesn’t mean we wont’ be seeing echoes of those games in their fancy, new Sega published games.
