G-pinions

Crappity crap crap crap. I guess I didn't expect much from this one, as the couple of months before and after E3 are usually shit for games, but this is just lazy.

Demos:

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Mayhem - I've always hated Scooby Doo with the burning passion of a thousand gonorrheal flesh pustules. It's not funny or scary, and the animation is terrible. This game makes sure to keep those themes of lameness intact, authentic to the end. The voices, sound effects are all spot-on, allowing even blind gamers to at least know without witnessing it that they are involved in some shitty Scooby Doo-related activity. The game itself is a mixed bag of feces and vomit, based solely around repetitive fetch quests and, um, avoiding ghosts. Yes, you can't actually attack any of them, just avoid them as they whittle away your health. Or, run right by them. Your call. Oh, and you can switch at any point between Scooby or Shaggy, with no discernible effect on gameplay. Yay!

MVP Baseball 2004 - I've played fifty times more RBI Baseball than all other baseball games combined, and things will probably stay that way. However, this game still kicks ass. Usual EA Sports quality, meaning the best graphics, animation, presentation, control, and gameplay around. I got my ass handed to me 0-6 in four innings or so, but still loved every minute of it. Once you get the hang of pitching and batting and fielding, and all the little minute choices to be made within each, the game starts to flow really nicely, and really draws you in. Little touches, like having to adjust the throwing power on the fly when tossing it in from the outfield to a base, make it so you have to constantly be paying attention and play your best if you want to compete. This game just drips with quality, and if I gave a damn about baseball, it would be mine.

Ribbit King - A fan favorite around here, apparently. This game isn't that awful, but it really has no business existing. It's basically a very poor, very Japanese man's Hot Shots Golf, except you launch a frog off of a little see-saw instead of a golf ball off of a tee. You basically take turns (you and a caveman panda bear) launching this frog around (the game you play is called Frolf - cute) very open courses, picking up points and power-ups on your way to the hole. The one thing I do like about it is that there is no crappy putting involved, since the hole is huge - you just launch it in once you get close. I guess I also like the various obstacles and such littering the courses, although they sometimes toss your frog further than it needs to be from the hole. The beauty of Hot Shots if that it's ridiculously deep if you want it to be; they took out all sense of depth and strategy in Ribbit King. No curve, no wind, not even an accuracy meter. Just power. Also, Hot Shots lush graphics and soothing, simple golf sounds have been replaced with wanna-be Animal Crossing graphics (without the nice color palette) and little bleeps and bloops to indicate a noble attempt at sound effects. I won't even mention the blatantly homosexual post-game announcer. And by far the worst music ever. My ears shat blood. So, if you're old enough to like the idea of golf, but young enough where you haven't mastered the skill of pressing more than one button on a controller, this may be for you. Still, probably not.

Paperboy & Smash TV - For whatever reason, Sony thought it would be a grand idea to put two demos of games from Midway's first Arcade Treasures collection, when a new, even better one is coming out in a couple of months. I mean, these games are obviously both great, arcade-perfect ports, but if you were at all interested you would own the $20 collection by now. I do.

MLB Slugfest: Loaded - This game seems to be fairly well-liked, but I didn't see anything special about it. MVP Baseball is much better, and the whole 'Xtreme' attitude comes off very gimmicky. Never mind the decades of load time that pass between each menu screen as you creep ever closer to actually playing - hopefully a side effect of the game not being finished. Blah.

Everything else:

There's a sweet video of MGS3, but I've already seen better ones since E3. They've got a nice video on the making of Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves, I've just never really been interested in the series because of the lame art style (IMO). Way of the Samurai 2 and Bujingai: The Forsaken City also look like a lot of fun based on the videos on this disc, so I guess they did their job. That's really it, besides the monthly somewhat-boring GT4 update and completely pointless Rise to Honor launch party coverage. I don't give a FUCK about what Jet Li has to say about videogames.

So, overall...big-time suck.