G-pinions

Show's over, the booth babes are clothing themselves, and ridiculously large statues of uninteresting videogame characters are being torn down. It wasn't quite the mind-blowing tri-system funsplosion that everyone was anticipating, but it was certainly a solid year. As I said in my last post, surprises were few and far between, but we did see some interesting evolutions of solid ideas.

Mercenaries 2 was basically exactly what I was expecting, which is more a relief than anything else. It's the same openeded awesomeness, with a new type of environment to explore (Venezuela, which is infinitely more interesting than North Korea), co-op, and visuals which already looked damn good considering they've only had their dev kits for a couple of months. The original engine was probably my favorite outside of Halo, but they've built the new one from the ground up so I'm expecting some ridiculous possibilities (a highlight of the demo was the destruction of an entire oil rig with completely dynamic physics).

As Tom mentioned, Bioshock was stunning. While almost every new shooter as the show uses Havok and the Unreal 3 engine, the art design, lighting and general gameplay approach really separate it from the pack. The Darkness is also looking really good; shooting out lights and hiding in the shadows gives you some very cool abilities like summon little Darklings to do your dirty work and black holes to suck in everything in a room (people, lamps, pool tables). The TVs you find in the environments show actual live-action video, and they seem to have some interesting plans in store for them if you feel like taking a break to watch.

I also managed to get a gameplay demonstration of the new Turok, which was much more impressive than screenshots have implied. The dinosaurs looked great, with a terrifyingly fast pack of raptors attacking your squadmates and you, and an enormous T-Rex that was lured into eating the enemies. The main character is indeed named Joseph Turok, but he's still native American and apparently the story will explain why he looks like a white guy. Or something. Anyhow, it's looking great, and with ninty people working on it it has no reason not to be fantastic.

I'm also happy to say that almost every 360 game I was looking forward to and played was quite good. Shadowrun was a complete embarassment, but Dead Rising and Saint's Row both seem like a good seventy hours of cringe-inducing violent fun. I put a pie on a zombie's face and then shot said pie and face off with a shotgun in the former, and parked a car on a guy and then destroyed the pair with a rocket launcher in the latter. Chromehounds felt solid, and finally doesn't look like a Dreamcast game. Table Tennis is Fight Night for pacifists, and Ninty-Nine Nights is Dynasty Warriors made by people with an imagination.

I never managed to make Jaffe's game materialize, but I assume he's hard at work as we speak making sure I still feel justified in owning a PSP a year from now. I expected the PSP to have a gangbuster show, but without a new Loco Roco demo or a reasonable environment to sample Every Extend Extra or Lumines 2 in, there wasn't much worth spending time with. To be fair, the DS had quite the uncreative show, but if they're going to spend their money on sequels as least it's Yoshi's Island and not Socom.

Then there are the games I was psyched to play coming into the show, but thought better of once I was here. I'm sure God of War 2 and Guitar Hero 2 will be the tits when they hit, but they're not the types of games I need to be sampling in advance.

Alright, the media center is closing in ten minutes, and I think I'll end this now instead of rush it. More soon!