Throwdown At The Electronic Entertainment Expo
By: Eric Thomas
The Electronic Entertainment Expo started as a festival of geeks. Pasty faces pockmarked with acne bellied up to controllers. The displays were like stations at an electronic store, with dozens of screens sprouting bouquets of plastic appendages. The various kiosks and displays beckoned, offering informed patrons the opportunity to test dive the latest and greatest. The doors yawned open to the public and accepted all comers. If you loved games, you could come for the previews, gather free tchotchkes and bathe in the general glow of the video game industry.
E3 hasn't been that in a long time. The displays are now more akin a Cirque de Soliel show. The floor of the convention is traveled by gorgeous models, slicked head to toe in references they can't possibly get. They shoulder past a series of serious looking men in suits and lanyards who stare at screens admiring games as "units" and "products". They don't see the fun in them, but they can recognize in their reflected value because people will buy them. Gone are the actual fans of gaming. They have been banished into the mist, forced to read other people writing about the industry that has erupted into a festival of cash due to their continued patronage.
It's too bad. At one point gamers would go to E3 in the same way that sports fans would pilgrimage to the Superbowl, or music fans would flock to Coachella. Now it's just a giant press conference that the industry puts on to honor itself.
The good news is you still get to read about the games. Yesterday the top three manufacturers unveiled the products you will drool over next year, provided that they don't get pushed back. Nintendo is the only one who debuted new hardware. Microsoft added some as well, and PS3 decided to offer the most awesome games. We will go through each of the manufacturers individually:
Nintendo - They brought the wood to the proceedings. They debuted their latest console, the WiiU at E3 this year. It's designed for a specific consumer in mind. If you have ever thought to yourself, "Hey! As I sit here with my HD panel television, my computer, my Smartphone, my tablet computer, my mp3 player, my e-ink reader (because the tablet hurts my eyes after a while), and my touch remote, I am just not surrounded by enough screens!"
You are in luck. In years past you could lose yourself in a game. Now you have to figure out what screen to look at. Finally. I can just look down at the controller itself and dry out my contact lenses. Nintendo must have gotten all my letters. The console is launching with titles like (of course) Mario and (awesome) Kid Icarus. Let's hope the Icarus game doesn't suck like the one we have fond memories of but never actually played.
One thing that Nintendo has absolutely fixed is the awesomeness factor. For years then Wii has been relegated to being the console for people who don't like video games. People have been hooking up Wii's to that extra TV in the spare bedroom to distract the drunks so that they don't puke on the good carpet. Or your grandmother would buy one cuz she is going to "finally get back into shape", using the Wii Fit twice before it gathers dust in the crawlspace.
Wii U fixes that. Zombie U looks freaking awesome. There are cool graphics and it looks as violent as a Cormac McCarthy novel. Plus there is a first person game from the Alien cannon where you play a space marine. It's the Metroid we all really wanted. The Wii U will be available in August, so get one before families start disemboweling each other over them around Christmastime.
Sony - Freaking awesome. God of War 4 looks like fun. Like party at Charlie Sheen's house fun. God of War has never misstepped. How awesome is God of War? People kept their PS2s for years even though XBOX 360 and Wii had come out a decade before the PS3 showed up. Oh, and the PS3 sucked until God of War 3 came out. Yes I said it. I felt bad for my PS3 owning friends that had to sell their children into slavery to pick up the $600 console so they could play Little Big Planet. But then we saw the God of War 3 trailer and all ponied up to get a taste. The titan trailer (you remember it) was epic. As amazing as the GOW 4 footage is, there is nothing that quite tops "titan". Nothing probably ever will.
GOW 4 is going to be a very controversial title. In some aspects already is. There are already blogs wringing their hands over the violence. They aren't lying, it's violent. Like it makes the Devil's Rejects look like a Disney movie. But to those bloggers: the characters on screen aren't real. They have been rendered by computers. No need to set up a defense fund. I have a feeling that they are getting all squeamish because Kratos stabs an elephant creature dozens of times before the beast gives up the fight. You did see that the creature wasn't exactly trying to make friends, right? Either way, God of War is going to feature online multiplayer and another group of huge enemies, but the video at E3 revealed none of it.
The other games that Sony debuted were Beyond: Two Souls (which looks awesome, playing with the line between life and death) and Last of Us (zombies!). Looks to be a good year from Sony. As long as you don't bring up the stupid Vita or some garbage thing for kids called wonder book.
Microsoft - They didn't suck nearly as bad as last year. They have that going for them. Last year, they managed to depress the entire XBOX community by announcing hardly any games and focusing on their entertainment apps that no one likes. XBOX has plenty of awesome stand alone games, but for some reason the company feels the need to rip off every other company so that they can get all the money. It makes corporate sense, but adopting what stinks about your competitors can really bum out your fans. If I wanted to see myself represented by some stupid cartoon I would play a Wii. If I want to perform a chainsaw execution, I fire up my XBOX. Don't mix the two just because you like money.
This year, Microsoft just focused on games and didn't bother with the stupid Kinect stuff either. I am sure that people love it but I can't play games by jumping up and down and dancing. My home has windows. If any of my friends saw me dancing in front of my TV, I would have to move out of state again.
They debuted game play footage of Halo 4 and announced a new Gears of War game. This is ironic because both of those games were advertised as closing chapters of a trilogy in their respective last games so it's nice that they actually managed to announce they were liars twice in the same presentation.
The star of the show was SmartGlass. This is XBOX trying to take a page out of Nintendo's play book and of course it's awful. It turns your smart phone into a game component / controller. Terrific. I always felt like my battery didn't drain fast enough in my phone, now I can drain it even quicker when I play video games with it. Microsoft has come up with idea but they aren't entirely what to do with it yet because it's stupid. The only thing they could come up with game wise is that while playing Madden, you can draw up special plays on your Smartphone unbeknown to your opponent. Another way for you to select a fly-route and bomb it to your tallest receiver in double coverage. Super. Race ya there.
