Guest Blogger Ethan’s Guide to E3 2009, Part I

Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 in a series on E3, written by highly opinionated gamer and vpgames guest blogger Ethan Yetton. Feel free to disagree with him if you will, but don’t be scared. He’s really a puppy dog at heart.

Part 1 - Microsoft’s Presentation

As of late I’ve had a strong anti-Microsoft sensibility. Being screwed out of a couple hundred dollars worth of downloadable purchases because the company a) can’t engineer a stable system to save their life and b) simultaneously cripple their services with abhorrent DRM can do that to a guy. In any event, I went into E3 2009 trying to keep an open mind.

But why?

Their conference started out with something like twenty minutes devoted to showcasing “Rock Band: The Beatles”, which looks… fine. It has a nice design, triple vocal harmonies, a large catalog of default songs and the promise of oodles of DLC down the line. Of course the Beatles are the single most overrated band in the history of music and I don’t give two craps about them. Thus, I can’t bring myself to actually care about this game, which is a problem for any ”Single Band” music game. If the consumer doesn’t actually like the group showcased, the purchase isn’t going to happen.

To help celebrate the game, Microsoft let a bunch of dorks play an entire song for the audience which… c’mon now. “Rock Band” is a ton of fun to play and, if you’re with friends, it’s fun to watch others play it because you all look like losers and are sharing in the communal spirit of being losers together. Watching complete strangers act like they’re really the Beatles is lame and boring.

Strike One.

Then Microsoft carted out George Harrison’s widow and… Yoko Ono.

Yoko.

Ono.

Strike Two.

Then Microsoft carted out Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, who stood on stage and rambled about the game like they knew what they were talking about. Ringo muttered something about the “nice graphics”, they shared an uncomfortable glance at each other, and I prayed for the magical hooks to protrude from stage left and yank them off.

Strike Three. YER OUT!

From there, Corporate Vice President for John Schappert took over to emcee the rest of the media briefing. He introduced Tony Hawk, who described “Tony Hawk’s RIDE”, which is the next iteration of his much loved (and, as of late, awful) “Pro Skater” series. This game sets a new standard, though! Oh yes… See, it comes with a full-sized skateboard controller that you ride, supposedly like the real thing. Following Mr. Hawk, a video showed gamers and pro skaters actually using the peripheral, which is apparently the most accurate thing ever except for the fact that they just had to raise their heels an inch to send their avatar five billion feet into the air. As with the Beatles stuff, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about this one.

Next up was Infinity Ward’s “Modern Warfare 2”, which I shouldn’t even try to criticize. It’s going to sell a million billion copies on name recognition alone. The first one was a great game, or so I’ve heard. Every time I played it, my character spun around in circles trying to get a shot off on anything, anything at all, while 12 year olds in Iowa shot me to death. I hate dual analog FPS crap. To be fair, the game looks really nice and the level they demoed is very snowbound, which excites me to no end (though no game will ever top Metroid Prime’s Phendrana Drifts for sheer ice-level awesomeness).

At this point it occured me that MS was showboating three huge titles… all of which were multiplatform. All they could really brag about was that “All You Need Is Love” is exclusive to Xbox Live and there is exclusive DLC for “Modern Warfare 2”, but I’m willing to bet all of this will show up on the PS3… someday.

Square Enix was hauled on stage next to show off “Final Fantasy XIII” which, you may recall, was announced at last year’s E3 to have gone multiplatform (this makes #4 on the day...). Again, the game looks nice enough, but the character designs are the typically awful “Final Fantasy” fare and who has really liked this series since Part 9?

Up next was Cliffy B—er, I’m sorry. He wants to be called Cliff Blezinski now. He and some other tool were showing off “Shadow Complex”, which looks like what would happen if you took “Contra” and stripped out all its personality. Cliffy did his best to be ironic by wearing a Bill Gates mugshot shirt. Oh, you silly, silly Cliffy B!

“Left 4 Dead 2”! That came next. I’ve never had a chance (or the friends) to play the first one, but Valve usually brings quality to the table and this looks to be no exception. Anyone want to play that with me when it releases?

Then Ubisoft showed up to talk about the new poor man’s “Metal G—er—“Splinter Cell: Conviction”. The “SC” franchise bores the living heck out of me and Ubisoft has been on a mad streak of phoning it in for a paycheck. I expect nothing better here. Also, when your framerate chugs to hell during your big E3 demo, you know you’re screwed. What, Ubisoft? Were all your good coders tied up with the latest installment of Petz?

“Forza Motorsport 3” left me with mixed emotions. I suck at racing games, but actually kind of like them. Forza 2 is awesome and this new one looks to build on everything that made it great—the realistic racing, the awesome customization. But the developer who spoke on behalf of the team called it “the definitive racing game of this generation” like six times. You bearded bastard. You’re the definitive bearded bastard of this generation, you bearded bastard. Chew on that, you bearded ass.

Joe Staten from Bungie came out next to pimp “Halo 3: ODST”, aka “The Halo games are the Beatles of video gaming and everyone loves them for no good reason… stop making them”. Seriously, I’ve tried all three of the Halo installments and all three put me to sleep faster than a double dose of Vicodin.

Joe then got to show a teaser for what is probably “Halo 4”, which made me think…

If I worked for Bungie, I would kill myself. I imagine every single design meeting going something like this:

Developer 1: I have a great idea for a game!

Team leader: OH! From the Covenant perspective? Awesome!

See what I mean, everyone? If you work for Bungie you will spend every waking hour finding new ways to render Master Chief’s armor.

Remedy came out after this and gave a walkthrough of part of their long-in-development “Alan Wake”. This game was moody, atmospheric, beautiful—and it didn’t try to hard to seem “adult”. It was easily the best thing on display… and it’ll be out sometime in 2010.

Wow.

Schappert took to the stage again to pimp new Xbox Live functionality. Of note:Netflix: now you can add films to your queue from the Xbox 360. No more going to a PC to set that up. Also, you can instantly watch anything without queueing it up.

Video store: everything will be 1080p and load immediately.

Music: Last.fm is coming to Xbox Live.

Avatars: new clothes and accessories are coming soon.

Facebook / Twitter: both will have “seamless” integration with your avatars and Gamertag.

Essentially, Microsoft is making a big push into turning the 360 into the central hub of your living room.

Side note: Here’s where I have a BIG problem, like HUGE.

Anything you buy on Xbox Live is tied to a) your Gamertag and b) the console you purchase it on. Every year you are allowed one transfer to a new machine without penalty. After that, if you don’t have an active connection to XBL, none of your purchased stuff, including game DLC, will work until a year is up and you re-register. So, let’s assume you have, oh, two Xboxes red ring in one day and return them for a new one after having already transferred your licenses over. Yeah, you’re screwed for a year. India says so. This makes my desire to actually spend money on any of the “entertainment” BS Microsoft pushes nonexistent. It’s a one-way transaction. MS gets your cash, and you get a “rental” of whatever content you’re paying for. Then if you are stuck on the one-year moratorium from actually owning your stuff and Live, say, has a massive outage that covers two weeks of the Christmas season (hello, 2007!) you’re royally screwed. At least on the Playstation Network you can register and deregister consoles iTunes style.

On the plus side, MS had Felicia Day come out to show off the Facebook stuff. Rrrraaarrr. You know what I’m talking about geeky guys. I KNOW you do.

Felicia was followed by Hideo Kojima, finally shutting the fanboys up and announcing that the next Metal Gear Solid game, “Metal Gear: Rising” will be coming to Xbox 360, too. Too bad it stars Raiden. Okay, okay. So “MGS 4” made him kind of cool finally. Still, though…

Finally, another talking head took to the stage to unveil “Project Natal”, which is a controller-less motion control system using a “3-D space camera” that lets you pantomime whatever you’re doing on screen. The script was almost identical to the one Nintendo used two years ago to introduce the Wii and the technology looks… interesting… but I have serious doubts that anyone’s going to use it to any great effect. They demoed a bunch of minigames, complete with a model twitching like an epileptic while playing a full-body “Breakout” clone. They also showed how the camera integrates with the Xbox Live dashboard (you can “swipe” through the items on, say, the Netflix queue). Then they brought out Steven Spielberg to talk up the technology (again, JUST LIKE NINTENDO DID)! Lastly, Lionhead’s Peter Molyneaux showed off a freakily believable A.I. “child” who interacted with a live person. She even wrote to the child on a piece of paper and “passed” it to him through the TV, and he recognized what she gave him. It even read her body language/facial movements to gauge her “mood”. It was stellar…

...and it was Peter Molyneaux, which means we’ll never see anything even close to this in reality. Remember “Fable”, Fable II, both “Black and White” games, or “The Movies”? Each one of those was supposed to redefine gaming and each one of those was a minor step at best. The man really believes in the ideas he espouses, but he promises too much and always underdelivers.

Apparently the strongest “real world” application of the technology is on the show floor as a revamped “Need For Speed” demo. You can sit down and “drive” the car with no controller and the camera even picks up your foot pushing in and out on the gas. Now THAT’S awesome.

What was missing? How about “Mass Effect 2”?? EA had its own showcase a few hours later and they did delve into Bioware’s massively-anticipated sequel, but I still think not having it as part of the MS media blitz was a mistake. That game could have really riled the crowd up.

Okay, so in a nutshell, Microsoft talked up lots of third-party cross-platform stuff, showed that unless you’re Cliffy B or “Halo” you won’t be exclusive to the platform, tweaked Xbox Live a bit, and built on the foundation of what Nintendo created two years ago… now they need to deliver on it.

What do you guys think?

- Ethan

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