Saturday, April 29, 2006
Guest Rant: Greg's Pre-E3 Madness
With Tom wrapping up school and myself too busy making sure our E3 is jam-packed with behind-closed-doors goodness, the updating duties have once again fallen on our good buddy Greg, who catches us up to speed nicely on everything I probably should have been talking about over the last week. Enjoy!
"They took simple common sense ideas, plugged them into high technology, and put them out into the world. The tag line should have been 'Wii have nothing to lose'. Right about now Nintendo is the only one playing that way. The only one throwing caution and conventional wisdom to the wind and changing everything that has been known about games (that they revolutionized themselves once not so long ago) in and to truly bring gaming home not just to the mainstream, but to the whole world. You know that old lady down the street with the bad breath? Wii want her. The guy with only one hand who can't use a Dual Shock? Wii want him. That Congresswoman who has probably never had a meaningful gaming experience in her life? Wii really want her. How do wii get them? Just like Tom said - by stepping out of the spotlight that Sony and Microsoft are wrestling for and creating a totally different arena to play in where there is no competition; in the way you interact with it and what you call it. Walkman, iPod, Google, Wii. These are all stupid names. But when they stop being just a name and become a cultural buzz word nobody remembers how stupid they initially sounded. They took simple common sense ideas, plugged them into new technology, and put them out into the world in a slick sexy package, adding new words to our language on the way. Wii could be in for something really big here.
Moving on. I am a little shocked that there has been no mention of the single most compelling reason to buy a PSP. If Mario and Sonic spawned an offspring that got delivered at a hospital in the city from the first Katamari Damacy it could only be named Loco Roco. Oh my God. Half the time I had a huge smile on my face. The other half of the time I was giggling like a four year old at Halloween. Waking up the moon is one of the most delightful things I've ever experienced in a game. If you know what I mean, great. If you don't, borrow somebody's PSP and download this demo. You'll be singing along in a language you don't understand in no time. I still am.
Speaking of downloading, I've watched that new Lost Planet trailer on 360 more times than I can count. It looks like Capcom has jammed a ton of crazy action into this one. We get a demo on May 9th for the game that's not scheduled to be around until 07 sometime. How is this possible you ask? Through the magic of E3. Thanks to Microsoft all of us who can't make it this year will be getting a taste through our 360s in the comfort and privacy of our own Internet connections. MS is promising to get as much content up on Marketplace as they possibly can during the show, and I'd be willing to bet that this two minute Halo 3 teaser will be up and in HD pretty quickly too. It seems like it's Microsoft's stance to make things as transparent as possible, to show the rest of us what's really going on. As impressive as Sony's video showcase was last year, I was more impressed by the balls MS had in showing games that were nowhere near ready for prime time. I found it more exciting because these were real games that were really coming that people were really playing, and however they looked I knew they would end up looking even better when they released. A much different perspective from the ongoing debate over whether Killzone 2 is even possible. For the record, graphical fidelity? You betcha. Actually playing a game where the camera moves like that at all the right times? Probably not. Point is, Live Marketplace is cooler than the coolest kid you went to high school with.
One last bit about Wii. Sadness from unknown developer Nibris has got me totally interested. In case you haven't heard, it's a WWI horror game done all in black and white. Fine, we've seen this sort of thing before, get on with it already. But when discussing how they'll be using the Wii controller they gave three examples: Swing the controller to toss a rope so you can swing across a gap. As a torch to keep nasty snakes at bay. As a piece of glass to cut some baddie's throat. It's this last bit that has my attention, and if this actually ships as a part of the game I'm sure it will get a lot more attention. The knee jerk reaction is "that's disgusting and now that the violence is more realistic there will be even more killer twelve year olds." I think that it could be an enormous leap forward in the maturity of video games. For years random deaths of faceless enemies has been relegated to the A or X buttons. With Dreamcast and Xbox we stepped up to triggers to deepen our immersion. Still an easy maneuver to pull off and execute some poor schlub while reaching for you Doritos. Not this time. Now you actually have a physical investment in the action. If they pull this off well, I'm guessing that this will be one of the most disturbing things anyone has done in a game. We've all seen the insane creatures and settings from Silent Hill and the hopped-up lunatics in Condemned, but to manually perform an action to end a virtual life has my skin crawling. To me this is the next huge step towards emotional involvement, like choosing your brother or your girlfriend in Advent Rising, then having to watch the consequences. Only a much, much larger step."
"They took simple common sense ideas, plugged them into high technology, and put them out into the world. The tag line should have been 'Wii have nothing to lose'. Right about now Nintendo is the only one playing that way. The only one throwing caution and conventional wisdom to the wind and changing everything that has been known about games (that they revolutionized themselves once not so long ago) in and to truly bring gaming home not just to the mainstream, but to the whole world. You know that old lady down the street with the bad breath? Wii want her. The guy with only one hand who can't use a Dual Shock? Wii want him. That Congresswoman who has probably never had a meaningful gaming experience in her life? Wii really want her. How do wii get them? Just like Tom said - by stepping out of the spotlight that Sony and Microsoft are wrestling for and creating a totally different arena to play in where there is no competition; in the way you interact with it and what you call it. Walkman, iPod, Google, Wii. These are all stupid names. But when they stop being just a name and become a cultural buzz word nobody remembers how stupid they initially sounded. They took simple common sense ideas, plugged them into new technology, and put them out into the world in a slick sexy package, adding new words to our language on the way. Wii could be in for something really big here.
Moving on. I am a little shocked that there has been no mention of the single most compelling reason to buy a PSP. If Mario and Sonic spawned an offspring that got delivered at a hospital in the city from the first Katamari Damacy it could only be named Loco Roco. Oh my God. Half the time I had a huge smile on my face. The other half of the time I was giggling like a four year old at Halloween. Waking up the moon is one of the most delightful things I've ever experienced in a game. If you know what I mean, great. If you don't, borrow somebody's PSP and download this demo. You'll be singing along in a language you don't understand in no time. I still am.
Speaking of downloading, I've watched that new Lost Planet trailer on 360 more times than I can count. It looks like Capcom has jammed a ton of crazy action into this one. We get a demo on May 9th for the game that's not scheduled to be around until 07 sometime. How is this possible you ask? Through the magic of E3. Thanks to Microsoft all of us who can't make it this year will be getting a taste through our 360s in the comfort and privacy of our own Internet connections. MS is promising to get as much content up on Marketplace as they possibly can during the show, and I'd be willing to bet that this two minute Halo 3 teaser will be up and in HD pretty quickly too. It seems like it's Microsoft's stance to make things as transparent as possible, to show the rest of us what's really going on. As impressive as Sony's video showcase was last year, I was more impressed by the balls MS had in showing games that were nowhere near ready for prime time. I found it more exciting because these were real games that were really coming that people were really playing, and however they looked I knew they would end up looking even better when they released. A much different perspective from the ongoing debate over whether Killzone 2 is even possible. For the record, graphical fidelity? You betcha. Actually playing a game where the camera moves like that at all the right times? Probably not. Point is, Live Marketplace is cooler than the coolest kid you went to high school with.
One last bit about Wii. Sadness from unknown developer Nibris has got me totally interested. In case you haven't heard, it's a WWI horror game done all in black and white. Fine, we've seen this sort of thing before, get on with it already. But when discussing how they'll be using the Wii controller they gave three examples: Swing the controller to toss a rope so you can swing across a gap. As a torch to keep nasty snakes at bay. As a piece of glass to cut some baddie's throat. It's this last bit that has my attention, and if this actually ships as a part of the game I'm sure it will get a lot more attention. The knee jerk reaction is "that's disgusting and now that the violence is more realistic there will be even more killer twelve year olds." I think that it could be an enormous leap forward in the maturity of video games. For years random deaths of faceless enemies has been relegated to the A or X buttons. With Dreamcast and Xbox we stepped up to triggers to deepen our immersion. Still an easy maneuver to pull off and execute some poor schlub while reaching for you Doritos. Not this time. Now you actually have a physical investment in the action. If they pull this off well, I'm guessing that this will be one of the most disturbing things anyone has done in a game. We've all seen the insane creatures and settings from Silent Hill and the hopped-up lunatics in Condemned, but to manually perform an action to end a virtual life has my skin crawling. To me this is the next huge step towards emotional involvement, like choosing your brother or your girlfriend in Advent Rising, then having to watch the consequences. Only a much, much larger step."
// posted by Nick @ 6:41 AM 
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