E3 2012 Part 1 - Microsoft

The biggest press event in the gaming calendar is here! E3 2012 started today and I'll be attempting to watch all of the press conferences and write about what has been sparking my interest.

Microsoft Press Conference
The entire theatre started awash with Microsoft's familiar green light, and then there it was - a FMV Halo 4 trailer! Now I've never been the biggest fan of Halo, and my hopes of something new were dashed when I saw that the first enemies to be seen were Grunts, Jackals and Elites. But wait, that Elite just disintegrated... wait, what are those glowing crawling animal robot things? Awesome, something new from the Halo franchise, perhaps I'll be excited about it after all.

Next up was Splinter Cell Blacklist. I remember when these were highly unforgiving stealth games, but not any more. This origin story sees Sam Fisher running and gunning his way through hordes of enemies, and scaling walls like a monkey. I haven't confirmed this, but I don't think Michael Ironside was voicing young Fisher, which made me a bit sad, but we'll see.

I know lots of "proper" gamers don't like sports games, but that's only because they're wrong. Fifa 13 will be the new slightly improved football game for this year, and will feature Kinect support for the first time. You can make substitutions without going into menus, can call for passes and so on. My favourite part was when they showed a player being caught by the offside trap and swearing at the Kinect (it was beeped out, kid friendly show). The Kinect picked up on this however and the commentator began saying how the player was unhappy about being caught out, very amusing.

Madden 13 too will feature Kinect support, and the presentation even featured legendary quarterback Joe Montana! I found it funny that no one seemed to be acknowledging that Sega made the largely unsuccessful Joe Montana football games back in the nineties, but anyway. Montana began to call plays using his voice rather than a controller and then proceeded to score a touchdown! Against the Seahawks, with the Niners, what a dick.

Fable The Journey is a Kinect Fable game. Yay.

Gears of War Judgment got a trailer too, sparking many debates about what the correct spelling of that word is. The trailer didn't show much other than confirming that it is indeed a new Gears of War game, so there's that.

Then there was dubstep, which can only mean one thing: a racing game! Forza Horizon was on show, and this time they're leaving the track and heading out into the open world, and it looks very, very pretty. I've never been drawn to the Forza franchise despite being a big racing fan, hopefully this will do something to persuade me.

Last year we saw the new Tomb Raider game, and this year we got to see a bit more! The gameplay looks incredibly fast paced, seeing Lara running, jumping, shooting and stabbing her way through the level at breakneck speed. I'm hoping that there will be more of an exploration element to the finished game, but I guess they have to show off the exciting sections here.

Then three new titles. Ascend New Gods seems like a fantasy beat em up, in the same vein as God of War, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it from what they showed. Then they showed a trailer for a game called Lococycle, and in the notes I made for the press conference it says "Wat???????", so there you go. Go and watch the trailer. Then finally 343 Guilty Spark was floating around a test chamber from Portal and apparently that's going to be called Matter. 


But that doesn't Matter because Resident Evil 6 was next, and much like Tomb Raider the action was fast and action packed, with explosions and fire and helicopters and quick time events out the arse. I wasn't particularly interested, but then I haven't been interested in a RE game for a long time now.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park then made an appearance to grant some much needed levity to the press conference. They were showing off South Park: The Stick of Truth, well not so much showing it off as showing a trailer which gave no indication of what the game will be. You will be playing as the new kid in town who is trying to become cool and be the fifth member of the group. It remains to be seen just how this will be done and whether it will be any good or not.

Then for some reason Usher came out and sang a song and danced. A lot. And then he left and apparently that was them showing off Dance Central 3, huh.

Finally, Microsoft closed out their star studded show with the big guns, quite literally. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 or CODBLOPS2 if you're feeling that way inclined showed the public what they've been showing press since the game got announced a while back. There's a female president and holographic devices, so you know it's the future. Also there's a gun which you can "charge up" which apparently means it can shoot through solid concrete to kill guys on the other side. The gameplay demonstration takes place in Los Angeles and shows the branching storylines and differing tactics you can use to approach your mission. At one point you can choose to either snipe from the top of the broken freeway or rappel down and shoot guys that way. Okay fine, it's not really revolutionary, but at least it's a step in the right direction for the ageing franchise. The most interesting part for me was the use of drones which could be controlled using a PDA thing on your wrist, and that there was a pilot-able jet. I'm unsure whether the jet is on semi- rails, as there didn't seem to be a way to alter your altitude when you wanted to, but I could be wrong about that. Also, the future is black, apparently.

So that was Microsoft's press conference. I'll be writing up EA and Ubisoft's respective press conferences early on tomorrow, and then I'll hopefully be able to do Sony and Nintendo's later in the day.

Excited about games yet? I sure am, and we're only a couple of hours in to this epic event. Thanks for reading, see you later.

The Games of 2012

January is traditionally pretty slow for games, making new posts on a blog about video games fairly hard to come by. If I find the time, I'll be reviewing some lesser known games from last year that I enjoyed (here's hoping that my timetable for the next few months isn't as overwhelming as I feel like it's going to be).

Really, the next game that I'm kind of at all excited about coming out is Mass Effect 3, and that's not until March. I didn't much care for the first game, and barely played any of it, but the second one really grabbed my attention and I started to care about what was going on. This was mostly due to the improved gameplay...I'm told the story in the first game may have been better, but the story in 2 kept me going just fine.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning seems like it could be quite interesting, but I'm going to need more convincing before I buy it for myself. I'm really not a fan of that 'Reckoning' after the colon, it's the first game bearing the Kingdoms of Amalur name, so why does it need a subtitle? Also 'Reckoning' is just the least exciting subtitle to add randomly onto a game isn't it? I guess they just went through the list of possible subtitles beginning with 're'...Revenge, Redemption, Restructured, Rearmed, Remastered, Really...?

It seems that, like last year, most of the blockbuster games will be coming out in the second half of the year. It's possible we might see GTA5 around May/June given Rockstar's recent release schedule, but that's just guessing on my part.

Speaking of Rockstar, Rockstar Vancouver have been making Max Payne 3 fairly quietly in terms of press coverage. What's exciting about that is that the studio's previous game was Bully, which turned out to be rather a surprisingly good game given the setting and subject matter. I'm not sure how much of that experience they'll be able to bring from that game into Max Payne's gritty, film noir world, but if you make good games, you can make good games, right? The release date for that is March, allegedly, so that could be interesting.

I suppose the main games coming out (supposedly) this year are Bioshock: Infinite, Halo 4, Borderlands 2, Diablo 3, Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Guild Wars 2, and Nickelodeon Dance. If all those games do come out this year (barring maybe one of them), then what a colossal year it will be for video games. That's also leaving out the inevitable Call of Duty game, and maybe even an Assassin's Creed game (although I hope not, I'd rather they take another year with that). Perhaps there's a possibility of a Skyrim expansion before the end of the year too? That would be cool, as I think I'm close to finishing all I really want to do in that game now.

 I've probably even missed some off the list...there are quite a few big games to remember... Until I get to play all of them though, I'll go back to NBA, Madden and FIFA (I've been spending an unusual amount of time playing sports games recently), and continue playing LA Noire on the PC (yeah I bought it).

Thanks for reading, enjoy your week.