E3 Roundup 09

As many of you know, we like to spend alot of time gaming around here, so when E3 comes around we tend to get excited. With E3 coming to close, it's left us looking forward to a promising future of games. Here's a quick rundown of each press conference and what we games caught our eye:

Microsoft Press Conference

As far as MS goes, they usually do a pretty good job in showing what needs to be shown and getting info out there in a straight forward manner. It also helps to have some really good franchises and popular titles under your belt. They had a few hiccups with the audio levels and even a glitched out quick look on one of their games, but it went pretty well.

They showed off some gameplay footy of Modern Warfare 2, which is unsuprisingly looking good. For some reason, it still bothers me that games that receive minimal improvements and change in setting get a full blown number upgrade rather than just being an expansion pack or something but I guess times have changed. It's also weird how IW just dropped off Call of Duty from this game completely, but hey whatever floats their boat is fine with me.

Kojima-san made an appearance revealing his big "secret" that the next MGS game will be coming to the 360 (JP people love money too) and that it will be featuring Raiden as the main character. Since Hideo is writing the story for this one and supposedly putting forth the same amount of effort into this one as MGS4, I'll have to pick this one up (even though I'm not feeling the whole Raiden hi-heel ninja boy thing).

Assassin's Creed 2 actually stands for Awesome Contrapulation x2. Must buy it already.

Another thing that kinda caught my attention was Peter Molyneux's Project Natal which is essential a virtual AI person that you interact with using a camera. Now, we all know how Peter likes to gloat about his games being the next big thang, but I'm not sure what to make of this. It's actually pretty scary to be honest, but regardless me and Jason will be getting this so we can bitch around the little boy and try to convince it to kill itself.

Nintendo Press Conference

I've always like Nintendo's Press Conference's, even though they sometimes come off a little cheesy, but this year it was just so boring to watch. And why does Reggie look like he wants to choke a bitch all the time. He gives off a Terminator vibe that kinda doesn't fit in with the whole Nintendo thing. Jason said he belongs in the Sony camp and you know what, I totally agree cause he would actually scare people into buying PS3's. At least the chick is somewhat friendlier but she can get annoying too. Anyway after they threw out some numbers of "how well we're doing" they got around to some games and stuff.

They opened up with the Wii Motion plus and Wii Resort. A more refined Wii-mote and a spin-off of Wii Sports to help show off the tech. I guess it looks more responsive? I dunno I haven't really touched my Wii in such a long time. Whatever.

"NEW" Super Mario Bros. looks pretty sweet, looks like it has classic Mario Bros 3 platforming but a little more "nex-gen" with crazy crap happening while trying to platform. Not to mention 4 player coop, this is one game I'm looking forward to.

Sony Press Conference

Sony is fun to watch because of Jack Tretton. I mean, he's got the whole friendly dad and I wanna buy you some presents thing going on, who wouldn't like this guy? I also respect the fact that top peeps from Sony come down and actually talk, not just hire some english PR's to sell their product. What I dont like is when a dame dev team (cough..tiburon..) wants to show off a game (Gran Turismo for the PSP) and then holds up the PSP in his hand and says, here look. They really couldn't hook up to the huge ass screen in back of them? Come on guys... Anyway minor point, I'm still waiting for GT5 to come out after all this time...

Mag looks interesting only because it's a huge team based shooter on large maps (Battlefield-style) with up to 256 players on one server. Guns look pretty fooked up tho, but I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens.

New Ico game looks amazing. I want to play that game.

Weird ass motion control they had with remotes that looked like glowing ping pong balls. Was pretty accurate but I just never really got into the whole motion-sensed gameplay thing.

And last but not least, Final Fooking Fantasy XIV Online. Needless to say, Jason and I have been pouring copious amounts of time into FFXI recently, but nevertheless were pretty stoked about a new FF MMO. We're definitely gonna try it out, but in the meantime we're gonna grind that much harder to reach endgame before FFXIV comes out next year.

Oh yeah, FFXIII. Need I say more?