S: July 2008 Archives

Last night my headache had pretty much disappeared so I stayed awake to watch nintendo's press conference. It was worth it, but I was shocked at first when some woman came onto the stage instead of Reggie.

Thankfully after a snowboarding demonstration Iwata appeared, then Reggie. All was well.

Nintendo announced Animal Crossing for the Wii, which will include a bundled microphone. At last! Voice chat in Wii online games. Here's hoping it will work with Mario Kart. Probably not but I can dream, right?

They also mentioned a new GTA game coming to the DS, a new Wii Sports and Wii Music. Apart from those the conference was mostly about telling us how well they're doing. Wii Music looks good. It's aimed at letting you make music even if you don't know how to play instruments, and works quite well.

Sony's was as uninteresting as last year's. Jack Tretton seemed to be focusing a lot on PS2 sales. He showed off Resistance 2 - the sequel that nobody wanted as well as a downloadable Ratchet & Clank game. He also talked a bit about Gran Tursimo's TV feature - where you'll be able to watch races and things like that from the PS store.

Probably the most interesting thing in their conference was the announcement of MAG. MAG stands for Massive Action Game. Original title. It is special because it has 256 player battles. That isn't going to go badly. If every single copy of this game doesn't come with a headset then it will fail so hard. Even if it does, can you imagine the insanity of 200 14 year olds running around doing whatever the hell they want while the other 50-odd are sitting there trying to play the game properly. The game will be madness. Part of me is interested in trying it but I just know, judging by the actions of people in this kind of game, that it will be anarchy.

Actually, I lie. They showed more of LittleBigPlanet. Like last year, that was the most interesting thing coming to the PS3. It'll be out in October too, apparently.

Migraine headaches are no fun. They're made even less fun when you discover you can't drive to the doctor because when you last closed the door of your car it got caught in the seatbelt, causing the battery to run completely flat even though you have the overhead light turned off and the only that changes when the door is open is a small light on the dashboard. $80 and 3 hours for a medical certificate.

It's also E3 time. I had no idea the date was July 14th already. After a while I got way too uncomfortable in bed and stumbled out onto the couch. While I was there I turned on the TV and watched IGN's stream of the Microsoft press conference. The streaming actually worked quite well, for once. It was also a very nice resolution. Switching to National Geographic HD afterwards to catch the latest episode of "Street Monkeys", it looked almost the same quality.

Anyhow, the actual conference was rather average. Their main aim seemed to be "PARTYGAMES WOOOO!" and ripping off borrowing the whole idea of Miis. Later this year they're planning to change the entire XBOX 360 dashboard to some bastardised child of the PS3 XMB and an avatar based system. They also beat Sony to the punch in the US market by announcing a trivia game almost identical to Buzz! (which has only been launched in Europe) on the PS3.

They showed some Fallout 3 footage and it looks pretty good. Not sure why it's been refused classification in Australia though, as it seems like every other first person game. Cliff Bleessszzz CliffyB also showed some Gears of War 2 footage, and also showed that he's now 53 years old. Good stuff Clifford.

The new Banjo Kazooie game isn't looking too bad either. Not nearly as bad as the comments I've heard about it on podcasts. They're also going to be offering the original as a downloadable game. That's something I'm excited about.

The worst part of the conference was easily Lips. It's a Singstar clone styled game made by none other than iNiS (creators of Ouendan!). How iNiS have gone from making good games to Lips I'm not sure, but I'm willing to bet there was large sacks of money involved. They dragged some singing woman who I'd never heard of named Duffy out on stage to sing a song of hers that's in the game.

The song went on for 3 hours. During the time one of my cats looked very alarmed. I had to inform her that there wasn't actually a cat dying in the vicinity and all was okay. Duffy hit about half the notes on the screen and then forgot the words improvised. Overall it was bad. Not RIIIIIIIIDGE RACERRRRRRRRRR bad, but bad.

A little closer to Kaz Hirai territory was You're in the Movies. This game uses the Live vision camera to track your movements and insert them into Z-grade movies that you can direct, apparently. I was lying there picturing the pitch meeting...

Executive: "What the hell are we going to do with these useless cameras? Why the hell did we even make them? They don't even work. WAIT! Get me a developer!"
Developer: "You had something in mind?"
Executive: "MINIGAMES!!!!!!"
Developer: "Wait, this isn't the nintendo buil..."
Executive: "INNOVATIONPETERMOLYNUEX!!!!"

The demonstration was awful. The game looks awful. The vision camera sucks. You need full sunlight pouring into the room for it to detect your movements. Who opens up the curtains to play a game? You can't see the screen under all of the sunglare. Stupid.

Then they bought out some SquareEnix guy. After about 44 minutes of cutscene it was announced that Final Fantasy 13 would be on the 360. The word exclusive wasn't said though, so I'm guessing that there still won't be any consoles sold in Japan.

That was Microsoft, I guess. Nintendo's conference starts at midnight. I'm going to be awake for all of it. May Reggie lurk in my dreams.