E3 2008 has passed and now we have plenty of games to discuss about! I’ll just recap here what were the conferences about and linking some videos, for the full coverage i recommend you the official site.

Microsoft

Microsoft did exactly what everyone would expect from a videogame expo: showing off games. Not many new games announcements with Fallout 3, Gears of War 2 and Fable 2 but everyone of these titles had a great gameplay video and most of them are coming out this year.

The shock came with Square-Enix announcing Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox360 with a glorious HD trailer way better than the one they showed last year. Armors, swords, chicks, badass bullies and ships in the sky like it’s always have been. Poor sony fanboys. I think they feel like Nintendo fanboys when the new Banjo & Kazooie was announced as well.

For their system, Microsoft though of a new dashboard, a bit complicated at first but really enjoyable, and a new (really?) network community, based on full-body avatars like Miis or the PSN that will allow users to share every media they have on their Xbox HDDs. FacebookLiveBunchofcommunities FTW!

Nintendo

From the Industry-leader since 1986 you’d expect tons of new games for their fans but it wasn’t quite what they prepared. I’m sure they have got big hits for the next year but for now we know they’re still targeting the family with their games (you can’t say the Famicom was a bad idea). First, they showed a snowboard game for the Wii Balance Board.

Following the guitar hero stream and aiming to the whole musical audience Miyamoto presented WiiMusic, a game that allows you to “create” your music, instead of just following the notes on coloured bars (a drummer performed solo with incredible precision. I can’t guess how he managed to use the nunchuck like that).

The next news was a WiiSports follow-up: WiiSports Resort. It’ll feature wiimote-based sports like his precursor but set on a tropic isle. What really changes the approach to the game is a new peripheral for the Wiimote that increases his accuracy in detecting rotation and target position. Many of us though that a “slice-for-real” Zelda is on the way because of this.

Another peripheral was announced: a microphone to be placed on top of the sensor bar to communicate worldwide while playing the new Animal Crossing: city folk. yes, voice chat is finally coming to the Wii but I don’t think it’s a good thing to let anybody hear your mother screaming “Dear, dinner’s ready! Your soup’s chilling!”. I want a headset. Period.

Sony

Sony just presented his lineup. Sony fanboys are the most certain about their future at the moment and at least they know what to save money for. A big bunch of games is coming for the three Sony platforms at the moment. Here’s a quick list with video links:

God of War 3, Killzone 2, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, LocoRoco 2, Patapon 2, Resistance: Retribution, Super Stardust Portable, Fl0wer and Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest For Booty.

We don’t own systems but we know our business

Square

Square conference was unusual. Yoshinori Kitase and Shinji Hashimoto sat at a table and listened to the answers from the attendants about Final Fantasy XIII. I think this is also what a press conference is for

Final Fantasy XIII will be still developed for the PS3 first and then it’ll be ported to Xbox360. The game will require just one disk thanks to the blue-ray technology but we’re uncertain about Xbox360’s support at the moment. Currently there’s no footage but it’ll be available soon and the battle system will be and evolution of the classic ATB system.

Capcom

Lost Planet’s movie is on the way, featuring the producer of the first two Spiderman movies and the voice of Solid Snake. Capcom wants to continue its movie ports successes after the big hits Resident Evil and…. Street Fighter (yes, they actually said that).

Megaman 9 (with pixelated graphics) is going to be released for the XboxLive, WiiWare and PSN. Am I the only one excited about this? Well… I like pixels…

Konami

Konami did the same as Sony, it showed its lineup for the year and let the images speak for themselves. In 2008 you’ll get Silent Hill: Homecoming, many DanceDance games and a couple of Castlevania for the Wii: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and Castlevania: Judgment.

Sega

Another lineup list: Empire: Total War, Golden Axe: Beast Rider, Madworld, Samba de Amigo, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, Sonic Unleashed, Space Siege and Stormrise.

EA

New teasers, new demos and new games announced for EA: SimAnimals, Sims 3, Mirror’s Edge, Dragon Age: Origin and Left 4 Dead.

Out of time

Not mentioned during the E3 conferences or just before or after it we still have a couple of trailers that will make you wonder. Enjoy Wario Land: Shake It! and Mirror’s Edge animated story trailer. Sonic & the Black Knight and Pikmin 3 are also under development but we don’t have media at the moment.

Today Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, annouced a new entry in the Ds family. The Nintendo DSi is the response to the recently launched iphone. In fact, the DSi will have a 3 megapixel camera a SD card slot to save music of pictures, it’s thinner and it has wider screens. It’ll also benefit of a new DSWare service similar to WiiWare ant it’s connectivity with the Nintendo Wii will be enhanced. The downside are the removal of the GBA slot and a less durable battery.

Personally, I’d like to see which games are going to support these new features, because (as always) I’m not going to pay for something that doesn’t offer anything new compared to what I already have. Let’s hope for the rumored Metroid Dread or a new 2D, top-view, Zelda like Four Swords. Only time will tell.

Yesterday, or today, morning (depending on where you live) the annual Nintendo Media Summit took place in San Francisco. It was about an hour of release dates, sale data, and trailers. I’ll just list the release dates as they are, considering that there isn’t much we can do about it except saving up.

March 22 – Cave Story Wii
March 28 – Nintendo DSi XL
April 20 – Monster Hunter Tri
May 3 – Picross 3D
May 18 – Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
May 23 – Super Mario Galaxy 2
June 7 – Sin & Punishment: Star Successor
June 27 – Metroid: Other M

All dates are for American release. No european releases yet but if I am right, we should get them a week after.

Enough talking. Here’s the new Super Mario Galaxy 2 trailer, full of drilling and licking. I know you were waiting for this.

I’m still unsure about Metroid: Other M. The gameplay looks fun but the graphics just don’t do justice to the job Retro Studios did with the Prime series. I’ve been re-playing Metroid Prime Trilogy in these days and looking at the new screenshots doesn’t give me neither the “adventure” nor the “loneliness” Metroid always had. We’ll see. We definitely need more gameplay previews.

Time flies. It’s been almost a month after the last post already. I know I should have written this earlier but I had some exams to pass. I passed every one of them by the way and only three remain in October but I have the whole summer to work on those, between some Mario Galaxy and Metroid.

You may have read the latest news on game announcements at E3 but let’s recap, just to make sure what we’re going to buy and why.

Microsoft

Probably the most embarrassing conference I’ve seen, even worse than that Nintendo conference from 2009. Let’s face it, Kinect (Natal’s new name) is just an improved Eye toy and what they showed was a more multimedia box than a gaming console. Movies, Facebook integration and sport events aren’t that interactive when it comes to actually play. And about Skittles, I’m sure that the little girl enjoyed that part as much as we didn’t. You’ll see my comic on this later. There’s at least a really good news in the release of a new 360 model, with built-in wi-fi and larger HDD.

EA

Nice stuff, really. I’ve got a couple of friends overly excited about Battlefield Vietnam just for the lack of Carl Gustav and seeing Dead Space 2 in action with more quick time events was really a bang. I’ve been re-playing Dead Space lately after EA’s big sale on steam and I perfectly recall the adrenaline i felt the first time a drag tentacle grabbed me.

Crysis 2 is nearing completion and it has been optimized for slower machines while faster machines will star in Need for Speed: Hot pursuit featuring multiplayer police car chase.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft presented a handful of very interesting games, starting with Child of Eden, from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and ending with Rayman Origins, passing by Assassin’s creed brotherhood. They also showed a new non-video-game with plastic guns and laser sensors that allows you to battle in your living room or set up checkpoint runs. I don’t know if you have ever seen this but in the 90’s there was a game called “Laser combat” sold with 2 guns and 2 chest sensors. It’s pretty much the same, even in the look.

The most interesting product is probably the UBIart Framework: a new in-house development engine. I hope they release it as free someday, like the Unreal Engine or Quake Engine.

Nintendo

Everyone that wasn’t expecting anything big after the leaks in the months before E3 got terribly shocked. Nintendo threw on screen a huge number of games for both DS, Wii and the new 3DS, finally unveiled. Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Kid Icarus Uprising, Zelda Skyward Sword, Kirby Epic Yarn, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and many more. I really can’t figure out precisely how much I’m going to spend within the next year.

My bad, I couldn’t see the Nintendo 3DS in action as you don’t get the 3d effect from videos but from what I’ve read it works like a window on another world. The black border around the screen helps to isolate the 3d image from the rest and your brain reads it independently. It sounds awkward but it’s possible if your eyes aren’t too close or too far from the screen and not tilted. With the amount of games revealed and awaiting us within the end of Nintendo’s financial year (March 2011) there’s no doubt they owned the show this year.

Sony

Sony’s motion control, named Move, is finally priced at $49.99 and supported by good games and not only tech demos, like Sorcery and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. Media molecule’s Alex Evans unveiled a little more of Little Big Planet 2 and how it will be a platform for games and not just a platform game. I admire their intents but I feel that the LBP franchise would work way better on PC with external applications and a supportive community. Just look at how far Garry’s Mod made it.

The big bomb came with Gabe Newell, announcing that portal 2 will be released on PS3 too. I wonder what made him change his mind considering that coding forPS3 is actually time-consuming, despite his previous statements were jokes or not. Medal of Honor and Dead Space 2 went on the screens again with Dead Space Extraction as bonus playable with the PlayStation Move. The conference ended with a disturbing clown in an ambulance promoting a new Twisted Metal game.

The worst part was Kevin Butler, charging up the crowd  and mocking the products of other companies like Sony invented everything in gaming since the creation of PlayStation. That’s not something you do in front of people who probably owns every console on the market.

Yesterday in Chiba, Japan, Nintendo held the annual Nintendo Conference and finally announced the first release date for the awaited Nintendo 3DS. It’ll be out in japan on February 26 for ¥25.000, almost $300 or €220. It will be released in North America and Europe on March 2011. Sweet birthday.

Sorry to have kept you waiting for today’s comic, but I have a reason for that. I initially didn’t plan to make a wallpaper out of the last panel so i had to work a lot more on it. You can grab it in the download page in two 16:9 sizes, HD and FullHD. Also thanks to Tripas that reminded me that the Oktoberfest is ongoing these weeks and I could have done something with tf2 for it.

The Duke Nukem Forever E3 trailer finally got released. 720p obligatory.

Now, I know that I’ve said that I would have waited the GDC to talk about the Nintendo 3DS but I’ll use this occasion to do it.

It will be out in North America on March 27 and in Europe on March 25 at the cost of 250$. Not european price has been state so far but it’s unfortunately supposable that it will be 250€ as well. Sometimes I really ask myself why did man invent the stock market.

On the other hand there are some good news regarding its online connectivity, with embedded web browser, multitasking (i.e. looking for walkthroughs online) and better friend code management. There will be only one friend code per console and you’ll be able to send it to the people you meet in real life wirelessly, track what they are playing to join the game. Although I really admire this effort into building a better community this is just not enough. Valve, Microsoft and Sony built solid communities ages ago and there’s no copyright on friend lists and nicknames so I don’t understand why Nintendo doesn’t copy the classic traits of a good gaming community.

Back to the 3ds, its battery will last 3 to 8 hours, depending mainly on how you use its wireless connectivity, the screen brightness and 3d features. It also has special StreetPass and SpotPass modes in which it downloads content from wireless access points and other 3DSs, be it newspaper pages, Miis from other players, or unlockable content for games like Super Street Fighter IV.

In my humble opinion this isn’t worth the price. The battery can’t even equal the DSlite battery life and no game has been shown that really makes the most out of the 3d capability. The price is very high, compared to previous DS versions and the main cause is probably the its hardware is expensive, being recent on the market, and the fact that the 3DS is the first handheld of the new generation, without PSP2 or any Microsoft handheld of any sort. Unfortunately, this entitles them to push the price as far as they want. It’s widely known that fanboys buy no matter what.

I can wait, especially for the inevitable “fixed and revised” 3DSlite after a year or so. You’ve heard it here first.

From an artistic point of view, a screen will always display only 2-dimensional images. It doesn’t matter if you cross your eyes, selectively watch light sources or coloured outlines: you’re looking at light coming at you from a rectangle. Then I ask myself “what’s this fuss all about?”. From what I’ve seen, they’re trying to sell us an illusion in a way that’s very different from switching from black and white to color tv or from 2D graphics to 3D. I’m sure everyone of you has at least seen a glasses-3D movie in the recent years so you may have noticed that you don’t have to focus on anything. You just point your eyes at the screen and everything else happens on its own. Even the depth of field has been decided for you by a screenplay writer.

You may have guessed by now that I’ve tried out the latest iteration of the 3D experience, the Nintendo 3DS, and I’m not as impressed as I was when I tried out the DS in February 2005. Back then, touch technology was already well-known but It yet had to be adapted for the videogame medium. Nintendo did it first for the masses and I was amazed how responsive and precise many action could be, ditching the dpad in favor of the stylus. The 3DS tries once again to deliver a brand new experience but this time the “new” 3D effect feels already old, being the same thing you’ve already seen in the movies or on your 3D enabled tv screen. The only difference is that it’s without glasses, but this awesome breakthrough comes to a price. The effect only works if your eyes are in the “sweet spot” as Nintendo itself called it. Shortly, there’s only one (one) distance you can see the 3D effect from. Basically it depends on the distance between your eyes but the real problem is that nobody is going to keep the 3DS in the exact same place all the time while playing. Even while trying it out i was trying to relax my arms but as soon as I moved the 3DS away from me the 3D effect was gone and I had to spend another ten seconds to find the sweet spot again. Forget playing with your 3DS on the bus, train, seaside deck chair: every little misplacement of your arms will mess up.

Furthermore, the actual depth I could see was about 1cm further than the surface of the screen (I’m not going to write the distance in inches. You should have learned the metric system by now) and 1cm of depth for the horizon in Pilotwings Resort is BAD. I hope other games can overcome this limitation or I’m going to call it “paper sheets glued one on top of the other”-D. There’s also a minor glitch I’ve experienced consisting of duplicated images near the left and right edges of the screen, probably due to the proximity of the wrong eye to the light beams directed to the other eye. I’ve combined a stereoscopic screenshot from Mass Effect to give you the idea (click the picture to see it in stereoscopy).

Sure, there’s the slider to turn the 3D effect off, but then I ask Nintendo: “what are you trying to sell”? It’s obvious, if you’ve seen the games at launch, that 3D is an option, even for the augmented reality card games. For the same reason that 3D is an Illusion and it’s expendable, I doubt any game will solidly base its gameplay on it. If you see it from this perspective you’ll realize that the 3DS is on sale because Nintendo wanted to say, once again, “we did it first”. This isn’t bad per se, but it’s not what I would expect from the same Nintendo that changed the direction of gaming with motion controls and openness to a broader audience. It almost feel like they wanted to take the same road Sony was walking on at the cost of forgetting why they build hardware for (suggestion: support the games they want to make).

I’ve read that the best part of the 3DS isn’t the 3D screen but its accessory features. Let’s consider those features then. StreetPass and SpotPass are as useful as the connectivity in games like Farmville and Pet Society and, for you to know, I don’t have a facebook account due to disgust. I’ll mark the aforementioned features as “useless” until I hear of a couple that met through them and successfully married and consummated afterwards. The ability to take pictures in 3D is interesting for artistic applications but as soon as you export them you’re back to the traditional 3D methods and I’ve already seen people doing it with 3D cameras or just two webcams on a stick. The web browser was already installed on the DSi and you know how fun is to find countless protected connections around you. The Icing on the cake is represented by the dreadful friend code comeback. The Prisoner once said “I am not a number. I’m a free man!” so why can’t we all live on the continent, instead of Nintendo’s Island?

Right now I’m only interested in Super Street Fighter IV 3D and I wouldn’t mind buying a new piece of hardware with this gimmick if it weren’t for the absurd price (and knowing the production cost doesn’t help either). I’ll probably wait for the inevitable price cut right after the first big title or  when Sony’s NGP will force Nintendo’s prices to appeal to parents with crying children once again.

In the meantime, I’ll “co-operate” with my friends in Portal 2. Don’t look at me like that. I always help my friends in New Super Mario Bros. Miscalculating gaps… but good intention do count, don’t they?

Another year, another E3. Instead of making a boring list of what happened and what you should look into I’ll just post the IGN E3 video page. You’ll find all the conferences and interviews to the developers in a handy day-by-day list.

Now, on to some impressions:

Konami

Not a proper conference but it’s still nice from them to have a large update on their projects. Kojima needs to make an off-the-wall game as soon as possible. Up to now, he’s been masking his comedian self behind the serious look of metal gear.

Microsoft

Kinect is the word. Lacking a new hardware reveal Microsoft presented a handful of games with Kinect support. I especially liked Mass Effect 3, where you can use voice commands to speed up the action and direct your teammates. Too bad this feature won’t be available for the PC version. After seeing the rest of the games under development I’m starting to think that Kinect should be art installation hardware only. The ways it has been hacked are a lot more interesting.

EA

Nothing special but a handful of gameplay videos of their franchises. Classy and functional. What I didn’t like was the football trio with fake sweat and Sims Social. That last one gave me the shivers as I wondered how low our society is falling.

Ubisoft

I loved Mr Caffeine as much as I hated Kevin Butler last year. That’s a good way to host a show, with the right amount of humor and familiarity with the crowd. Ubisoft’s conference has been really entertaining with retro-styled cutscenes before they presented a game and relating the people in the audience of these events to what they have always been: fans of the medium.

Sony

Their conference has been very humble compared to the previous years,  especially due to the PSN outage, but it still had the kick. Lots of games both for traditional controller and Move and the reveal of the PSVita with some developers demonstrating the capabilities of the new hardware. A very good conference indeed but it could have been better without montage videos of random games and their brand logos. Those just wasted time.

(Mind someone explain me why I can’t stop laughing when I see Yoshinori Ono? Is it his wardrobe?)

Nintendo

Of course they didn’t wait to celebrate Zelda’s 25 years with tons of bonuses and announcements for 3DS, Wii and your real life. That’s a given, I think. As expected we got a step-by-step presentation of all the 3DS games that are to come in the next year and were only rumored or shown in stills last year. Lastly, the reveal of the Wii U, was a little underwhelming with a short video showing new gameplay mechanics, a tech demo and clips of triple-A titles unfortunately captured from their 360, PS3 and PC counterparts. That’s comprehensible though, as the WiiU is still at least one year from launch and can still show what it’s capable of.

I’ll discuss of the PSVita and WiiU reveal later as they deserve their own article, together with some other impressions about upcoming games and recently played.

Now that I had some more time to think I am back to express some more concerns about the current state of the videogame industry.

The first thing I have to say to everyone working outside of it is “calm down”. I’ve seen too many bashing reviews, and light-hearted comments lately and I think it’s time to position myself in neutral ground to show both good and bad sides of a few topics.

PSVita

I like to call it DS 2.0 more for the two touch screens than Sony’s never-ending habit of copying what has already been successfully done by others. Graphics-wise it’s amazing that such a small device can hold that much computing power but the few demonstrations on stage didn’t show anything relevant that hasn’t been done with a DS so far. While touch screens will easily provide a faster control scheme for games like Little Big Planet it’s also true that they will be exposed to dust, scratches and finger grease more than ever. The DS had screen protectors and later version of the system didn’t need them any more because the stylus wasn’t able to scratch the screen any more but placing a layer of (deforming) plastic on the PSV’s screen or any type of dirt carried by your finger kind of misses the point of having awesome graphics. Unfortunately, Sony never provided a proper way to protect the screen without buying a case .

Regarding the touch screen on the back I’m eager to see how developers can interface the player with it, because honestly you can’t see where you’re putting your fingers. I was amused at Sony’s demo of a new Modnation Racers title where you could raise mountain in the track editor by pressing “behind” the PSV or excavate lakes by pressing on the front touch screen but that could have also been done with the front screen only and a raise/lower button. The back screen is kind of unintuitive and unnecessary compared to what the front screen can do alone (it’s not unnecessary per se) and removing it could help Sony to balance better on that $250 price tag.

Oh, you know that I’m italian but… I like the name. It has a good sound.

Wii U

Still on names, I understand that “Wii U : Wii = 3DS : DS” in terms of market and I can’t argue with that. Dolphin, Revolution and Café were just project names but before the announcement I heard the name Beem and I kind of liked it more than Wii U.

To the people that felt deluded watching the conference or attending it, and those who sold their Nintendo shares directly afterwards, I want to ask “what were you expecting?”. Were you expecting a system that runs Crysis Warhead at 300 fps for less than $100, a controller that cures cancer or allows teleportation through the Xen and beyond? Let’s be honest for a moment, if Nintendo revealed a “classic” console with a Gamecube-like controller only with more power maybe you would have felt important for a moment, knowing that Nintendo made a console just for you “gamer” (I would like to avoid this word but it helps you to understand what I mean), ignoring completely the other 80-90% of other Nintendo customers who would feel clumsy and inexperienced once again. Those people are also the “U” in Wii U. What Nintendo is trying to do with the new controller is to convince people that they can have on the big screen those good experiences they had with their DS, be them alone or with friends.

Despite the negative criticism and cold reception of the new controller I saw a lot of fan depictions of possible uses for the controller, from x-ray screen in Trauma Center to micro RTS management in Pikmin, all of which were very intriguing. If fans can figure out gameplay twists like those in half a day I can’t wait to see what developers with their hands on the development kits can do. Easy development and new possibilities are what made the Wii and DS so successful and I don’t see any reason the Wii U can’t be successful too, except the price tag maybe.

My last concern is the shape of the controller itself. While at first it seemed huge I’ve noticed that’s smaller than I thought and it’s lighter than an iPad. I’ve already tried the same type of thumb slide stick in the 3DS an it’s not uncomfortable as it seems. Now I just need to hold it to feel how it rests in my hands. Remember though, both the DS and Wii have been redesigned before and after their launch.

Duke Nukem Forever

Two words: fun shooter. There’s not much else that we should expect from a game inspired to the standards of the early ’90s.

DNF doesn’t have a deep story or new game mechanics but it sure knows how to entertain with any sort of distraction. It really looks that the developers put more time into the jokes and fun stuff you can do than the rest of the game which it’s not a bad thing on its own when you’re laughing.  Basically it’s making fun of every shooter out there and quoting video games here and there. Which other game allows you to microwave a rat, jump on hamburgers and throw turds around?If you don’t find fun running into your enemy’s ankle with an RC car i don’t know what’s wrong with you.

Portal 2

Totally worth playing, both single-player and multi-player mode can be completed in about two weeks without rushing but you know Valve, they always put free DLC and development kits in the mix. Portal 2 further explores the definitions of “in and out”, “forward and reverse” and, above all, “not so fast”. Don’t think that just because there are less white walls the puzzles will be easier to solve.

The Co-op campaign is well built, giving the players tools to see through each other’s eyes or point out elements in the maps, but remember, the best tool is still your microphone.

Brink

After playing for a while you really feel like shooting isn’t worth the trouble, at least not shooting randomly at people. While most players found this game boring after a while I think Splash Damage did a good job putting emphasis on helping the team and building better teamwork than most of the shooters out there, TF2 included. The parkour isn’t as relevant as it is in Mirror’s Edge but it really changes how you approach maps, especially the widest ones.