An Incredibly Late E3 ’09 Recap.
It would appear that E3 is back. It’s possible that it has been for a while, because I specifically stopped caring about E3 after they gutted it. I would eventually get all of the news anyway, so why bother tracking a series of boring press conferences if they don’t have any titties or monster trucks? Thankfully, this is no longer the case, and E3 is fun again. As such, here’s a recap of Day 1 that you’ve already read on other sites. I added dick jokes to make sure it’s worth reading again.
- Microsoft’s Press Conference
- MS started with a fucking bang. They really made an impression on just about everybody. This is exactly what a promotional press conference should be. Laden with plenty of revelations, plenty of actual gameplay videos, and most importantly, plenty of the kind of bullshit that is absolutely necessary for announcements like this.
- The biggest news is pretty much “Project Natal”, also known as “Project EyeToy”. Yet again, another developer misses the point about the Wii, not realizing that it’s having the ability to control something by moving your hand and not always jumping around like a spastic asshat that makes it palatable to everybody. It always seems as though other hardware designers, and sometimes even Wii software designers, see the commercials for the Wii with kids jumping around and assume that that’s the appeal of the system. This EyeToy camera for the 360 basically allows you to do the same thing as the Wii only also with your feet. It also allows for skateboard recognition and real-time dress trying-on. You know, for hardcore gamers, because only the dumb ol’ Wii targets anyone else.
- Crackdown 2 was announced. There’s not really a lot to say because not much was revealed, but I’m very, very excited about it. As I said before, I really enjoyed the first game, for no discernible reason, and I think this new one could be really good if they learn from their mistakes the first time around (I.E. more replay value, better gunplay, more to do outside of fighting racial gangs).
- Halo: ODST was shown, and despite my continued disdain for the Halo series as a whole, this actually looks really good. To be honest, it looks more like Metroid Prime than a Halo game, and the idea of a Metroid game set in the Halo universe could be delicious if executed properly. The environments in Halo games are always very bland, and that’s certainly not a problem with the Metroid series, but this game is to be set on Earth, and as far as Halo environs go, the Earth maps are definitely the most well-designed and interesting, so hopefully it will work out. Also, you don’t play as a hero designed by an 8-year-old (I.E. simplistic, invincible, and utterly devoid of anything even closely resembling personality; in a word, Master Chief), so the game just might stand a chance at being, dare I say it, interesting.
- Forza 3 is absolutely beautiful, and I don’t even like racing sims.
- Peter Molyneux’s new little tech demo is cute at first. After that, terrifying. Once the realization sets in that it’s essentially a tool to allow you to interact with a prepubescent boy in the privacy of your own home without the interference of parents, teachers, or law enforcement, I feel as though, were I to walk into a store and purchase it, I would exit the store only to find Chris Hansen and a couple of armed police officers offering me a seat. Fortunately, the game can be bought in the privacy of one’s own home, so… yeah. I guess it’ll be neat if I ever want to know what to say to little boys to make them like me. Also, this “revolutionary” stuff that Peter Molyneux tries to append to everything he does applies even less here, because this game was already made (in a much more entertaining fashion, for that matter) 10 years ago. It was called Seaman, and it was narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Once again, Japan wins.
- Metal Gear Solid was revealed to be jumping to the Xbox, which leaves Sony with approximately 0 remaining franchises anybody cares about. LittleBigPlanet was totally awesome, but I don’t think the mainstream audience was smart enough to realize that, and Uncharted looks pretty cool, but far too generic in concept to catch anyone who doesn’t already own a PS3′s eye. And Killzone? The only people who bought Killzone were the people who felt they had to buy Killzone, the people who, desperate for something, anything to justify paying so much money for a machine that gets even multiplatform games a year late. Killzone was automatically good, regardless of the product itself. Sony had just told them for so long that it was good. It was required to be true. If you exist outside of that mindset, Killzone was just another generic moderately-well-designed space marine FPS, just like the first game, with nothing new to offer except a “purposely” messed up aiming system. Ok, that was a pretty bad tangent. Anyway, MGS:Rising looks pretty sweet. Kojima is my hero.
- Holy shitting fucks. I don’t even remember hearing about this, but I just looked, and Perfect fucking Dark is being released on XBLA. That’s amazing. It’s not quite the fully updated remake of Goldeneye that almost was, but a slightly updated rerelease of Perfect Dark is still pretty extraordinary.
- Finally, Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm are going to be accessable on XBL. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. I’ve got like 10 devices in my house right now that can access all 3 of those things (and several more), most of which are portable and don’t require me to type either with a clunky chatpad or an even clunkier controller-based interface.
-Sony
- Sony introduced a new PSP, and… hmm. It’s cool in theory, and I think I probably play more downloaded games than I do UMDs, mostly because Jumping Flash and Wild ARMs are available, but I like having the ability to use a UMD when neccesary (I.E. Mega Man: Powered Up), and I certainly don’t want to pay 80 fucking dollars extra for a gimped PSP. Sony claims that all UMD-based games after the new system’s release and that “a majority” of the games released previously would be available for download, but honestly, I just don’t believe anything they say anymore. It’s like they’re just incapable of not lying about things, and that makes me suspect this is just another mistruth.
- Rockstar announced a PS3 exclusive called Agent. I can’t find much information on it, but it’s apparently set in the late 1970s, and that’s cool. I generally trust Rockstar, even though GTAIV wasn’t all that great. I’d kind of like to see what they would do with a non-open world game.
- The Last Guardian looks amazing. “Art” game designers should take a page from Team Ico on how to make a game that is beautiful, unique, innovative, and immersive without having to be pretensious or boring. They manage to pull off what every shit designer thinks they’re doing, creating an environment that is a large part of gameplay while still actually having gameplay, with an often metaphorical plot that speaks about human nature, and again I must state, without being pretensious. It’s a difficult line to tread, but Team Ico has pulled it off every time.
- ModNation Racers looks pretty cute. I like the concept. I don’t have much else to say.
- Gran Turismo is looking pretty sweet. I just pray to god they don’t pull the microtransaction bullshit they discussed at one time.
- Perhaps most importantly, Sony promised 50 new PSOne Classics, which will mean the end of my bank account, and likely my marriage, after I buy Final Fantasy VII, MGS, and like 20 other games. It’ll be worth it though.
- Nintendo
- New Super Mario Bros. looks great. I played the shit out of the first one, and this looks like Super Mario World to the first game’s Super Mario Bros. 3. This is a delicious prospect.
- The new Metroid might be really good, or really insulting to the rest of the series, depending on how Team Ninja handles it. Keep in mind, Tomonobu Itagaki, and honestly, I’m not sure if that makes a case for it being good or bad. In any case, I hope it’s nothing like Ninja Gaiden or especially Dead or Alive. I don’t want to see Samus’s jiggling tits, and I don’t want to rack up a 500-hit combo. I want to play a goddammed Metroid game. Change can be implemented in the Metroid games very well while still keeping the spirit of the series; just look at Metroid Prime. That game was amazing, and it was distinctly a Metroid game, goddammit. Don’t disappoint me, Team Ninja.
- Super Mario Galaxy was the first game to give me the same sense of childlike wonderment I got the first time I played Mario 64, so I hope I get the same effect from the sequel. It’s got Yoshi in it!
- Golden Sun is one of the unsung heroes of the last generation of handhelds, so I hope the new one is successful. I’m already pretty sure it’ll be fun.
- Ubisoft
- Ubisoft had an amazing showing. Hahaha, just kidding. There was nothing even remotely worth reviewing. I can’t even figure out how they got a conference.
That hits basically everything I can think of. If I think of more I’ll add more. It’s too fucking late and I’m not funny anymore. Now that I have this out of the way I’m gonna review the Earthbound strategy guide. Any recommendations on a cbz viewer that takes screenshots? Otherwise I’m either gonna be spending time painstakingly editing menu stuff out, or, more likely, taking sloppy camera phone pictures of the actual pages.
Earthbound Strategy Guide!
I can’t really flesh it out into a real post (although I’m trying to figure out a way to), but I just wanted to let you fuckers know:
I just picked up a mint condition copy of the Earthbound strategy guide, INCLUDING the scratch n’ sniff cards…
for FIVE DOLLARS.
I already own the game, and a slightly messed up copy of the guide, but this is a very, very rare find. If this tells you anything, the guide, in MODERATE condition and without the cards, can go for up to a hundred dollars. I’ve never actually seen a copy that still had the cards in the back, so I don’t know how much they increase the price by.
I may review it later, just because I enjoy looking at it. In the meantime, I’m just gonna look at it.
Red Faction: Guerilla – My Sick New Addiction
There’s really not a whole lot to say about it, but the demo for Red Faction: Guerilla dropped a few days ago on the 360 Marketplace, and I’ve played it over and over and over since then. It’s absolutely remarkable how fun it is to destroy a building wholesale with nothing but a sledgehammer. There’s something primally appealing about driving a truck through a building, then detonating a remote mine and causing the entire thing to collapse. I fear that I will one day be able to purchase this game, as I don’t know that I would ever recover from a month-long binge of it.
Volition is one of my favorite current developers, and this game demostrates exactly why. Overall, a lot of elements of the game aren’t particularly strong, for example the driving mechanics, and the gunplay, but, as with Saints Row 2 and it’s equally satisfying grab-and-toss mechanic, the world’s first game with ACTUAL fully destructible environments manages to transfix me in a way that few games of this generation do. Again, like with Saints Row 2, I don’t think the game is good, in the way of your Bioshocks or your Half-Lifes, but it is incredibly fun, and as strongly as I believe in video games as an art form, I think there’s definitely a place for games like this. Expect to hear more from me when I get an opportunity to play the full version.
Random Reviews – Genesis Fighting Game Roundup
The Genesis is a mixed bag. Several unmistakable classics were released for it, but there was also a lot of unbelievable shit. For every Vectorman, there was a Misadventures of Flink. This extends especially to fighters. For a long time, the Genesis was considered to have the superior versions of both Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, and even had some exclusive hits (like Virtua Fighter 2), but it also had some of the shittiest fighters ever made. A few examples:
Weaponlord (Genesis/SNES, Namco, 1995)
Weaponlord was a fighter in the mid 90′s that is still revered today, largely because it was so different from other fighters in its day. It included a parry system, the ability to rip your opponent’s clothes or hair or even break their weapon, and a different special move system than the norm (more on that later). Unfortunately, none of this makes up for the fact that the game was slow and kinda clumsy. The team really seems to have tried, and a lot of the ideas made it into later games (especially a certain other Namco-developed, weapons-based 3D fighter), but all the innovation in the world doesn’t excuse the fact that some moves simply don’t seem to work because I’m entering the commands too fast. Unless the game was a psychological experiment created to make even the most slothlike gamers feel like the goddamn Flash, a fighting game engine that’s incapable of receving commands entered quickly simply doesn’t work.
Weaponlord is also one of the goriest games ever made, as evidenced by this sweet Manowar album cover-esque shot featuring mighty Korr screaming at the Warrior Moon.
It also doesn’t help that the developers took the classic lazy route to innovation: they turned the special move command system backwards. Instead of entering a directional sequence then pressing a button, you press a button then enter a directional sequence. Like most similar attempts at being innovative in this fashion, it’s different than anything that came before it, but still isn’t creative and offers no advantage over the traditional way of using special moves. Many games have attempted this (just look at how many Tetris and Breakout clones where the action happens on the opposite end of the play area), but few seem to realize that sometimes the basics of a game are what make it fun, and that changing them kind of ruins the game. But hey, if it’s that easy, I can do it too! Check this out: a racing game where the car drives the driver. Oh, sorry, what’s that? I didn’t hear what you said. There was too much noise from the sound of your fucking mind being blown.
Score: 5/10
Poorly thought out special move system aside, the game isn’t too bad. It kind of reminds me of being a kid, playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat with a reliance on regular attacks because I didn’t know how to do special moves. As far as Genesis fighters go, it’s not nearly as clunky as some others are. It’s not exactly smooth, but it’s forgivably slow, as opposed to some other games on this list. Also, the whole game, character design, plot, music and all, are totally fucking metal. It’s like playing a Dragonforce album. Seriously! Look at this motherfucker!
Tell me that son of a bitch didn’t kill his way off a Dio album. In fact, wait a minute:
There the fuck he is.
Eternal Champions (Genesis/Sega CD, Sega, 1993)
I’ll cut right to it. This game simply isn’t very good. The hit detection doesn’t feel right, the AI is unbalanced, and the special move system is fucked up beyond redemption. That said, Eternal Champions succeeds where Weaponlord failed: it makes up for mediocre gameplay with sheer creativity.
Unlike other American-made fighting games in the early-to-mid 90′s, Sega made up their own original characters instead of just ripping them off from other sources (in most cases, comic books, pulp fantasy, and Street Fighter). This resulted in some surprisingly cool characters and settings. They’re all well-designed, well-animated, and have very detailed and, dare I say it, original histories.
Speaking of histories, Eternal Champions has a sort of odd one. It wouldn’t have been considered odd at the time, but looking back on it with what we know now, Eternal Champions presaged several concepts to come in video games, and, hilariously, didn’t presage at least one major one.
You see, Sega really expected this game to be huge. As such, they threw the full force of their advertising at it. Unlike Sega today, this actually meant something in 1993. Just look at this commercial:
Oh shit! Eternal Champions is so badass it’ll eat my copy of Crappy Fighter (released in America as Ultimate Mortal Kombat III)!
Not just limited to a couple of commercials, Sega continued the campaign with a comic strip in Sonic the Comic, a standalone magazine-sized comic, a sticker album (hopefully as gruesome as the game itself), a couple of choose-your-own-adventure books, and even it’s own Slurpee flavor, creatively titled “Sega Eternal Champions Cherry” (presumably after the first suggested name, “That New Fighting Game We’re Working On, Infernal Champions Or Whatever… Cherry” was shot down). A pre-release version of the game was included in an EGM travelling tournament, and a cartoon was even in the works before Sega of Japan shot it down in favor of Virtua Fighter. The fucking thing was even a pack-in game for America’s sweetheart, the Sega Activator! How did this game not get elected President?
As I mentioned above, one thing about the game is, in hindsight, absolutely hilarious. According to Wikipedia, in order to create the game’s character roster, Sega gathered a group of children of all ages to help design all the characters. Sega handed them a selection of archetypes, and asked them to whittle the list down to their favorites. In true 90′s fashion, among the chosen archetypes were “pirate”, “robot”, “ninja”, and “caveman”, which means we were probably a couple of characters away from playing as “fireman” or “BMX bike”. The children narrowed the group down to about 50 characters. After showing them projected designs for the characters, the kids chose their 10 favorites, and the character roster was born.
So why is this funny, you ask? Watch this video:
Jesus shit! Did you see the one on the train? How about the giant blade pit? That is just fucking clownshit. If you didn’t watch the video, you may be thinking I’m just exaggerating for humor’s sake. Not the case. I’ve not seen a game since that can top the level of violence in this game. It’s crazy.
Now, after watching that, can you imagine this game being shown to some 7-year-old kids nowadays? Fuck no. You’d be in jail within the hour. The funniest part, however, is that the kids just helped design these characters because they thought they were cool, and now here they are being ripped apart by a giant fan. I know it’s a fighting game, but how do you think the kids reacted? “So, Timmy, the gangster was your favorite, right? Well, here’s an animation of him being fucked to death by the Devil in Hell. Is he still your favorite or do you prefer the merman? Open your eyes, Timmy. Stop crying. This is important marketing research.”
Score: 6/10
Eternal Champions is great, it really is, but it’s just not very fun to play. It’s a damn shame, because if it had been, it might have been the game to beat Mortal Kombat. It had some memorable characters, an original storyline, and some creative features (including a Danger Room-esque battle arena with customizable environmental hazards!), but at the end of the day, it gets tiring to play more than 3 or 4 matches.
One of the game’s biggest flaws is that your special moves are limited by a small “special meter” that only allowed you to crack off two or three projectiles before you had to wait on a cooldown. The computer-controlled opponent, on the other hand, wasn’t affected at all by this cooldown, meaning they could be obliterating your shit with flaming magic tridents while you’re unable to throw a shuriken due to, I don’t know, your chi being exhausted or some shit. This is a large part of the game’s other big problem: the unbalanced AI.
Picture this: you’re playing basketball, 1-on-1, with your friend Chuck. Chuck is 5’6″, 140 pounds, severly myopic, and has asthma. You’re playing against Chuck, and you’re 20 points ahead of him. All of a sudden, Chuck starts shooting three pointer after three pointer, stealing the ball before you even know you had it, and, as a final fuck you to your preconcieved notions, lifts off from half court NBA-Jam style and soars through the air for what seems like an eternity before crashing down and wresting the goal from its moorings, thus ending the basketball game and getting Chuck noticed by an NBA scout. Chuck becomes a worldwide sensation, and uses his newfound fame to fuck your girlfriend, get you fired from your job, and make an ass of you on television. He continues his assault on you until you can’t take it anymore, and finally end it by your own hand. The last thing you see is Chuck laughing and driving off in a Ferrari full of supermodels and cash as blood trickles down your face and everything goes black.
This is the problem with Eternal Champions AI. You end up beating the living shit out of your opponent until, suddenly, he comes back from behind and becomes goddamn Steven Seagal, somehow decimating you before you even know what’s happening. This happens every time, no matter what opponent you’re playing against. Coupled with only being able to use a special attack roughly every 20 minutes, this doesn’t add up to a very satisfying game experience.
To be perfectly honest, even though I didn’t like the game itself, I’d love to see a resurgence in its popularity. The game had enough style to make up for its lack of substance (to some extent, anyway), and a remake could be amazing, as long as the current Sega didn’t handle it. It still hurts every time I read the last part of that sentence. Sigh… youth lives on hope, old age on rememberance, I suppose.
Deadly Moves (Genesis/SNES (as Power Moves), Kaneko, 1993)
Before saying anything about Deadly Moves, I feel there’s something we need to discuss.
Do you see this shit? Specifically, you need to see this:
Since you’re wondering, no, the game doesn’t look like that. In fact, it looks like this:
It’s not exactly Donkey Kong Country, but it doesn’t look bad. So why did they do that? Why would they give a 6-year-old a box of crayons, poke his eyes out, and ask him to draw whatever he thought Hulk Hogan did in his spare time? These are questions we’ll never know the answer to, because everyone involved with this ad is probably working in lawnmower sales or something. Some of the captions are also mysterious if you’ve played the game. Specifically, the top right caption. This isn’t an advertising slogan, it’s a description of a screenshot, that isn’t really a screenshot, that depicts something that doesn’t even closely resemble something that happens in the game. Why is this here? It might as well have been a picture of a train with a caption that says “The train to Intercourse, PA runs at 8:15, 12:00, 4:30, and 9:00.” It would have made exactly as much sense.
Aside from the terrible faux-screenshots, there are a number of other things going on in this ad. Let’s look at the large picture at the top, which coincidentally is also the cover of the box:
I understand why this guy is getting punched, as he apparently had a glowing jar of marmalade on the side of his face. Alternatively, the glowing, liquidy explosion could have been the result of world’s largest firefly on his cheek, smashed . The only other thing I could think of as an explanation is that this horrible karate man with a Julie Roberts mouth punched a man with a bizarre haircut so hard that it caused a luminescent explosion of blood. Speaking of the blond man’s haircut, what the fuck is that on the back of his head? Is that a handle? Some kind of burrowing worm? It’s not a ponytail, because ponytails don’t grow out of one end of your head and into the other.
Now that we’ve got this… thing… out of the way, we can move on to the game itself.
Deadly Moves is by far the worst game in this list. It’s more awkward and clumsy than a 13-year-old with a boner in gym class. The hit detection is way off, and the special moves don’t really serve any purpose, because the fireball (which seems to use the exact same sound sample as Ryu’s Hadoken in SFII: Special Champion Edition) is so easily blocked, and the only other move, a vertical kick, is at such a sharp angle that it can’t hit anything. Addiing to all this is the fact that the game’s difficulty was so unbalanced. Not only does the difficulty vary by character, it even varies by round. It’s like a being in a tag team match against Betty White and Andre the Giant.
Again, like every other game on this list, the game has a bizarre, almost prophetic element to it. In specific, Deadly Moves predicted the inevitable melding of RPG elements with everything, and especially (of course) with fighting games. There haven’t been a whole lot of them yet (the biggest one so far is Soul Calibur 4), but as far as I can tell, this was the first one ever. It isn’t a large part of the game, but you choose what order you fight opponents in, and depending on the strengths of the character you’re fighting, you gain points in one of 6 different stats. This has the side effect of essentially forcing you to fight the characters in a certain order, since you won’t be strong enough to actually defeat any character outside of the next one in line, just like in Mega Man, except I don’t want to compare it to Mega Man, because fuck this game.
Deadly Moves also implemented a multi-plane fighting environment, kind of like the one from Fatal Fury, but without the need to press a button to jump between them. You just move up and down, Final Fight-style. I would say that this presaged 3D fighters with a greater degree of movement, but shit, I don’t even believe that.
Score: 3/10
Deadly Moves fucking sucks. It could have been worse, but not much worse. It’s not completely without merit, it can be fun for about 5 minutes, if only out of awe at how fucked up the difficulty is, and out of attempts to spite the game for being so hard, but anything past that and you’ll being praying for Eternal Champions’s comparitively serene mediocrity.
As one final note, I’d like to note something about the characters here. Most of them are generic ripoffs of other fighting game characters, but there are two in specifc that deserve note:
Say hello to Baraki and Vagnad.
They appear to be a regular set of characters, Baraki a blatant ripoff of Blanka, and Vagnad a Russian strongman like Zangief (who, curiously, later became gray himself). This is true, but it’s more than that. They are the most racist cariactures this side of Punch-Out!!. Unlike Blanka, who’s just a mutated monster, Baraki is represented as just a regular Kenyan. You know, green hair, bull ring through the nose, skull necklace, loincloth. Vagnad was even worse. Vagnad was indeed Russian, but he got his gray skin from…
The fucking Holocaust.
Fuuuuuuck.
