Tendo City

Nintendo's recent strategy of "turning our things into other things" still hasn't grown old, so we've got new Kirby Rainbow Curse with the power of claymation (and also some Canvas Curse mechanics). Yoshi went all wooly, and it looks pretty fun there.

I read some articles and watched direct trailers, because when I watched their "direct", I got a face full of Reggie and Robot Chicken combined. It's like they specifically engineered that to annoy me personally, so no thanks to that. (I still don't get why people actually like Robot Chicken.)

However, some news. Another god descends to earth as Palutena has joined Smash Bros. Also, Mii. This is good, great even, though I still would like one minor cosmetic option in the form of female Villager. Still no sign of Snake... He's kept us waiting, huh?

Bayonetta 2 seems to include some Zelda cameos, as well as, well, the entire first game. Never played the first one, so I just might pick this one up.

Nintendo is going back to their roots and are making toys again, namely ripoffs of Skylanders (just like Disney Infinity) in the form of figurines you buy in the real world to net in-game rewards. Frankly, considering that in ALL those cases, the "toys" are motionless figurines that don't actually DO anything, it really just feels like a (surprisingly successful) rip off. Why can't those things just... be IN the game? I did BUY it after all, stop making me buy stuff just to "unlock" content that's already there! Sorry, I've got a fundamental issue with the way these toy/game hybrid products function. It'd be better if it worked the other way around. The toys were mechanical, say, and the games could "control" the toys via instruction sets. That seems more fair and frankly more fun.

Another Xenoblade game, and it looks interesting. But it has a "Xeno" in the title so Weltall hates it :D. I dunno, maybe it'll be good, but Weltall's got one thing right. It's a cryin' shame that so many developers end up having to abandon entire universes they made when they leave a company, only to rip themselves off by making a slightly different version of the same universe and essentially "rebooting" those series. Sure, I'll get Mighty Number 9, but it'll take a good long while before that series "catches up" to the vast universe that exists around Megaman at this point, and all the while it'll still feel like retreading old ground, never really feel like "the real thing" all while the original still sits, gathering dust, begging to actually get the story finished.

So other than that, there's a new Mario game that lets you design your own Mario levels. Hackers have made similar tools for years, but this'll be designed from the ground up so everyone can more easily do it no matter their skill level. While the level creator lets one use the visual style of either Super Mario Bros or New Super Mario Bros, it appears as though it is still limited entirely to original Super Mario Bros.' items, enemies, and physics. It looks potentially fun, but something using a later game's far more vast reserves of different "stuff" would have been preferred.

As for new properties, I'm looking forward to this new paintball squid battle game. You shoot the enemy, you paint the enemy, you paint everything else, you turn into a squid and "swim" through your paint. I'm sold.

There's rumors about a new Star Fox floating around, but nothing concrete. More notable, the next Zelda is going even more towards the "open ended" approach than Link Between Worlds did. They've made it clear that areas will still be locked off here and there, but in all cases it'll only be due to missing the right items or abilities, never because a lion shaped boat told you you can't go there yet. Good, that's the sort of open ended thing that brings Zelda back to its roots.

All in all, very enticing bunch of upcoming Nintendo games, and I'm looking forward to most of it.

Actually, the game announcements from the other 2 (Nintendo's Big Red, so Microsoft gets green and Sony gets blue, we got our primary colors accounted for) weren't bad either. A lot of the others were cross-console (many of them also on PC) but there's a few interesting ones. I'm actually really looking forward to Phantom Pain. Yes, we all know the big issues Metal Gear games have, and Ground Zeroes was WAY too short even for the reduced price, but if they keep the cinematic down to a reasonable length as in Ground Zeroes and earlier Metal Gear games, an open world Metal Gear could really be amazing.

More specifically, I have to give major credit to MS. They did what they needed to do between last year and this year and undid all those terrible choices they made with the XBox One, bit by bit. The current XBox One is actually something worth getting, and while we certainly need to keep our eyes on MS so they don't try to pull those same stunts in the future, I gotta give them credit for the change, even if that change was out of self preserving panic. About the only thing wrong with the XBox One at this point is the lack of a built in way to replace the hard drive. One can "extend" it, and that's good (though even USB 3.0 won't be as fast as a straight internal SATA connection), but without a means to replace it, it's as vulnerable to failure in the future as the drive in my original XBox. Yes, that goes for Nintendo's internal memory as well, but flash is still more reliable in terms of no moving parts to fail (it will of course inevitably die, but that's many many rewrite cycles from now).

All in all, the big thing about this E3 was that they actually focused on games that I actually want to play. Oh, I think there may have been a FPS game or two there as well. I've grown a bit weary of that genre as of late. I miss Perfect Dark.

Nintendo has also announced that Pac-Man is in Smash too. It's a classic Pac-Man design, which is great because the modern one is a little weird...


Yeah, Nintendo's conference was pretty good! Did you watch the SSB for Wii U tournament too? That was their big stage show, in the theater they used to hold press conferences in, and it was fun stuff. It was MUCH more popular than Nintendo was expecting, too -- apparently the stream hit 200,000 views! Impressive. I still like the traditional press conferences, but it helped a lot that they had some theater event, and this was a good one.

As for Nintendo's games, I'll write more later, but first... the character in the Zelda game, who Aonuma (maybe trolling, maybe not, we don't know) said was not confirmed to be Link... boy or girl? The debate rages!







I think it's probably an even more effeminate than usual Link (or something), but it's impossible to say for sure I think... could go either way. It would be fantastic to see Nintendo finally make a Zelda game with a fully playable female character, but I'm not really convinced that that is it. I'm sure it'll be a long time until this controversy is cleared up, annoyingly. :p


Oh yeah, and yes, the Zelda game looks incredible. Zelda is my favorite console game series of course, and this one looks fantastic! Amazing graphics too, as the images above show.

Indeed, the look is similar to the art style of Skyward Sword, but a little more on the cell shaded side this time around.

Looks like Link to me, but if it's a new character, that's fine too. I always thought the Zelda series had potential to grow beyond reusing a Link as the main character in every game.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archi...wii-u.aspx
Aonuma you troll!

Quote: Q: What are your reactions to everyone's reactions to the Zelda Wii U reveal?

Eiji Aonuma: Because I have been at E3, I haven't had much time to spend in doing this research, but I certainly have been checking fan reaction and I am really excited many comments have said how beautiful the game looks. The designers have been working really hard to make sure the visuals look like something players don't expect, or maybe something they haven't seen before, and this applies to not just to the scenery, but to the enemies and things like that.

Another interesting comment I've heard, quite frequently actually, is that, "Oh Link's a woman. Link is female now."

Q: I thought that, too. I thought maybe it was Zelda when I first saw Link on Epona in the distance.

Eiji Aonuma: That might be something that consciously we kind of did, but not to say anything specific – I am not saying anything specific – but, I am hoping people continue to comment, and I will continue to follow the fan comments and reactions to the trailer. I am certainly curious, and I am sure there are things we as developers can glean.

I like the Pacman reveal.

I'd rather not play whatever game the commentoforce is playing right now. We'll know more when they say more. That is all. Beyond that, what's to be expected? Link has always been "ambiguous".

In other "news", apparently Mortal Kombat is still a thing. I watched the trailer and... I'm a bit shocked that they're still so... 90's teen. So apparently they now show weird x-ray scenes of bones and organs breaking apart throughout the fights? Not sure when they started doing that, but it's clear to me that Mortal Kombat STILL is only interested in being gory for the sake of being gory. That's all the series EVER had going for it. The story is dull and stupid, the characters are dull and cliche, and the combat is dull and repetitive. Seriously, who is still buying this garbage? I wish the series would die already so the rest of the industry didn't have to listen to it being used as congress's sole example of "the excesses of video game violence".

I haven't played a Mortal Kombat game in a long time, but supposedly the modern ones are okay games. Of course, okay is all I've ever really thought MK was... back when MK1 released I thought the fatality thing sounded interesting in theory, but I never actually liked playing the game all that much. It is impressive that the series survives, though -- MK is the only long-running Western-made fighting game series, after all! All the other teams that got into fighting games in the West after SF2 and MK hit got out again later on after the genre faded, but MK has survived.


As for Nintendo's show... yeah, it was pretty good. I've always found Robot Chicken kind of amusing, so I liked most of those bits. They weren't all good, but I did like it; it's been some time since I watched Robot Chicken... They've also announced some other stuff outside of the show, of course.

Zelda is my favorite of course. It looks amazing! Open-world Zelda... we'll see. I hope it works well.

Splatoon looks pretty good, and seems to have gotten a positive reception. That's good, and it's great that it's a new IP and not another game with a license. The game definitely looks fun as well; I'm rarely interested in multiplayer shooters, for sure, but the game looks definitely worth a try at least, and it could be good. The squid idea certainly is unique, too! In some ways this was one of the best parts of E3 because it was a completely unexpected new IP title which looked really good. The only negative is that it's kind of sad that it took a shooter to get Nintendo attention, but if it's good and catches on, it'll help Nintendo for sure... we'll see, though. Like almost everything newly announced it's a 2015 game. But it's definitely very promising now.

Captain Toad is the one exception to that rule above -- the new surprise title that's actually releasing this year! This is a spinoff of the Toad puzzle levels in Mario 3D World, of course, and it looks really good in both graphics and gameplay. The proto boxart for this looks fantastic as well! EAD Tokyo is pretty amazing, and I like puzzle games, so this'll surely be good. (Yes, this is retail.)

Mario vs. Donkey Kong for Wii U is another puzzle game, and it looks good as well. It wasn't in the show, but I really like the DS MvDK puzzle game concept, and this looks just like that but on the Wii U. A 3DS version too would be nice, but this looks good, just like the DS games. This game has a fairly simple 2d look, and clearly is going to be a download, but still, it should be good. It IS too bad that Nintendo let NST mostly die, though -- NST hasn't released a 3d game since 1080 Avalanche! Yeah, their Virtual Console and Mario vs. Donkey Kong work is good, but I'd rather Nintendo had kept their console team. They were a good team capable of very good games, and letting them die in the '00s, along with almost all of Nintendo's other Western teams and partners, was a mistake. Iwata has done good for Nintendo, but that he let Nintendo's Western success on the N64 die and replaced it with nothing but the occasional third-party-exclusive game from various Japanese studios is a big mistake. Yeah, the Japanese partnerships have led to some good things, but not anywhere near enough to excuse letting Rare, Silicon Knights, Factor 5, Left Field, NST's console team, and more all die off! Iwata wanted to be in control of everything and took away NoA's independence, and followed this up by letting Nintendo's Western partners all go (Retro aside) and letting Microsoft entirely steal away the Western hardcore gamers who had been a key part of the N64's userbase. And now that their replacement for that, casual gamers, are leaving Nintendo for browser and cellphone games, Nintendo has problems... I hope they can work through them, and they showed a lot of great stuff here, but their Iwata-led abandonment of Western studios has hurt them.

Kirby Rainbow Curse or whatever, the Canvass Curse sequel, looks pretty good. I like, but don't love, the original Canvass Curse; my favorite Kirby DS game is actually Mass Attack. Still, Canvass Curse had an original idea, and it's cool to see a sequel on the Wii U. The clay graphical style looks very cool, too. Good art design.

Today, Nintendo announced a game for the 3DS, Project Steam or something like that. It's a shooter/strategy game from Intelligent Systems, with a Western cartoon art style and a steampunk setting -- you control a group of steampunk soldiers defending earth from aliens in the 1800s. Abe Lincoln actually founded the group, explaining that Lincoln Mii in the SSB video... interesting. Instead of having an overhead map, you play third person only with a team of four. It sounds decent to good, but simplified from Fire Emblem or Advance Wars -- there's no permadeath, no overhead strategy view, the third-person-shooter element, you only control four characters at a time, etc. I suspect that I'd like this less than a pure strategy game, and I'd rather see one of those than this. Still, it IS IntSys, so we'll see.

SSB for Wii U / 3DS looks like SSB. I've always liked but not loved SSB, and these two look about the same. I'll get them sometime, but they're not system sellers for me. Looks like fun to play for a little while, but I've always struggled to hold interest in SSB after a few matches... and also, the name is kind of weird -- 'for 3DS' and 'for Wii U'? That's not final title material! Palutena and Miis being in is nice, and Pac-Man's a good inclusion as well.

Xenoblade Chronicles X looks really good. The trailer in the conference wasn't that good, but the Treehouse gameplay footage was! The game looks like a sequel to Xenoblade with better graphics and a new setting, and that clearly seems to be what it is. I like the first game's design for the most part, so I'm definitely very interested. I like that you can customize the main character (gender included) this time, too. Great feature to add, Nintendo is doing better than ever with including more female characters these days.

Bayonetta 2... eh, could be okay, but that kind of game is one I only infrequently find interesting.

Devil's Third looks like a very generic and uninteresting third-person shooter. Blah.

Mario Maker's a nice-looking tool. Nintendo had a bunch of DS games with level creation stuff, so it's nice to see more on console now, such as Mario Maker and MvDK. Definitely promising. I wonder what games' tilesets it'll include? It'll have to be more than just the first game I would hope...

The Yoshi 2.5d platformer looks like a fun game as well. It's clearly very much inspired by Kirby's Epic Yarn. That game is crazy-easy, but it's good, so that's fine with me. It'll probably be simple but fun.

As for the NFC toys, they look nice, but having the SSB ones be AI allies/enemies to fight that you can train up is kind of weird. I guess it could work, but I'm not sure how useful those things actually would be... they'll probably do fine, though, particularly as more games support them.

As for the Star Fox thing, it's clearly just a little tech-demo now, but I'm definitely looking forward to the full game! It's been too long since we last had a real Star Fox game, that's for sure. I just hope it's good!

As for Hyrule Warriors... eh, it's Dynasty Warriors. Mash one button for as long as you can stay awake. It's just so ridiculously repetitive! And this game clearly is another one of the licensed Musou (____ Warriors) games, with a Zelda theme this time. I'm sure it'll be fun for a little while, and being able to play as Zelda and Midna is great, but the actual gameplay is incredibly simplistic one-button repetition.

Treehouse streaming is also pretty nice. Great addition there, Nintendo.

So yeah, Nintendo's show has been good overall. The one real disappointment is Nintendo's continuing decision to completely abandon the racing game genre apart from Mario Kart. Wave Race, 1080, F-Zero, Kirby Air Ride, Excite, Nintendo has lots of other racing games, all of them just as good overall as Mario Kart is! I know the MK games sell huge numbers now, but that's no reason to completely abandon the genre otherwise... and yet they have. Nintendo's other N64, GC, and Wii racing games (developed or published) are among my favorites, and it's very annoying that they seem to have completely abandoned the genre apart from MK. Publish racing games again, Nintendo!


For the other conferences, I watched all four of them -- MS, EA, Ubi, and Sony -- of course. One interesting thing about these is that in terms of Japanese vs. Western games, they are the inverse of the Nintendo conference -- Nintendo showed very, very few Western games (MvDK, and anything else?), while the other four showed very, very few Japanese games -- Sony's Bloodborne, Kamiya's game with the dragons for MS, and ... uh, anything else? Iwata's Japan focus continues, for good and ill.

Microsoft's was entirely games-focused, as they promised. They had some 'surprise' titles, but all of them had leaked beforehands, which ruined any surprise. Of course, most of what they showed was sequels anyway. They showed some multiplatform stuff such as CoD, Assassin's Creed, etc. and some exclusives like Sunset Overdrive, the new Crackdown, the Kamiya game, and some others. One of my favorite parts was the indie reel, though; all of those games looked interesting. As for the rest, third-person shooting games like Sunset Overdrive and Crackdown... I know they're very different, but both DO come down to being third-person shooters, and I've just never loved that genre. I was playing Crackdown 1 recently; I can't see it holding my interest. The driving is fun enough, but then it turns into a third-person shooter and I just don't enjoy that as much. As for Assassin's Creed, I always love teh historical settings in those games, but tehn they show the actual gameplay and it's so tedious looking that it makes me not want to play the actual games, which I don't. I know I should try them anyway, if just to look at the settings, but... ugh. Going by these trailers, this game has a very interesting French Revolution setting, but it's likely difficulty-free as you can basically kill anyone with a button press. The stealth looks basic and easy, too. Style over substance here clearly, I think... like usual for the series, sadly enough. But I do love history so I should care about this franchise more than I do... but... I don't. Ah well. It doesn't help that Ubi has basically said that all of the characters you can play as in this game (there is 4 player co-op) are male because they don't want to bother to make female PCs, or something idiotic like that. Uh, you have like thousand person teams and can't bother to do that? Idiots. The worst problem is how the trailers make the game look so painfully easy and simple, though. And from what I read about the series, that's really how it is, not just at the beginning. The Kamiya action game with the dragons could be good, though, but we know next to nothing so far -- I doubt any of that was in-engine. Otherwise, I don't remember, what other big stuff did they show... oh, a Halo collection. Eh. Also the racing game Forza Horizon 2, but Forza is way too realistic to be fun for me, so I doubt I care. Oh, and a remake of Phantom Dust. Why just a remake, though, and not a sequel? Ah well... the first is a somewhat interesting and unique original Xbox game (third person action game with card-battle element).

At EA, the main attraction for me was Bioware's stuff of course. Bioware is working on Dragon Age 3 (Inquisition), they are early on a fourth Mass Effect game, and they have a new IP in a modern-ish world that is not our own and they showed only a very small hint of. I'm thrilled that DA3 will have the strategy mode back again in battles; its absence was the singular worst thing about the disappointing-all-around Dragon Age 2. The first one's a pretty good game, but not the second.... but with strategic combat back again, I actually care about this game! So yeah, I'll need to play it sometime for sure. As for Mass Effect, it seems early, we'll see. And the new IP we see even less of, can't say anything about that one really. I like the one scene teaser they show though. Otherwise, I'm interested in whatever Criterion's racing game is. I don't think they mentioned a name or franchise, though, but I presume that it's either NFS or Burnout (not that the two are very different anymore). I'm sure it'll be good, and I like fun, arcadey racing games so I'm interested. Mirror's Edge 2 looks good too of course. They showed some gameplay, and it looks like more Mirror's Edge! That's great. I also like that they don't show you doing any shooting, because guns were the one weakness to the first games' gameplay. ME1 is really good, so it's grea that it's getting a sequel. I hope it's as great as the first! The rest of EA's stuff... sequels to games I probably won't play, I think it mostly was. Battlefield, etc etc.

At Ubisoft, they brought back Aisha Tyler as their presenter again, and she was amusing again as in the past year(s) that she hosted their press conference. As for their games though, well, more Assassin's Creed, shooters (Rainbow Six, The Division, perhaps more)... blah. This was one of Ubisoft's least interesting lineups in years, for me. No platformers, no Rayman, no Beyond Good & Evil... ugh. At least they do have The Crew, though! It's a fun-looking arcadey online racing game on a scaled-down version of the US as a map. I don't know if the game would hold my interest, but I do know that I like the idea and it looks like fun, so I'm watching this one.

As for Sony, as always their conference was the longest and dragged frequently, as their conferences always do. They showed some good stuff, but also had some boring parts, more than the others as always. They had a lot of shooters, of course, as with all of these conferences. Also their racing game Drive Club; who knows if it'll be any good, though, The Crew looks more interesting to me. They also basically killed off the Vita by turning it into a PS4 accessory and mentioning no new exclusives for it; it's basically a streaming device for remote play of Playstation home console games now, I guess, apart from its very few software releases. They are going to release the Vita TV thing here, but rebranded as Playstation TV... The "Vita" is quite dead. The PS4 isn't as dead, but... no Last Guardian. It's dead, isn't it. Sad. Bloodborne looks like something the Dark Souls fanbase is going to love, but I'm not in that fanbase, so I doubt I'd care... and what else was there? Shooters and indie stuff that'll mostly also be on PC and other consoles?

Ah yes, yet ANOTHER Mario vs Donkey Kong game. That concept is growing pretty stale if you ask me. I'd love a return to the Gameboy Donkey Kong style at some point instead of Lemmings Light.

I like the DS games more than the GBA one, myself. I've still barely gotten more than a few levels into the GBA game, since it's so obviously inferior to the GB original, but the DS puzzle games are great! I loved the last DS one, beat every single puzzle in that game.


Also, there are a few games I should mention I didn't. Destiny (Sony conference, but also from gameplay videos) -- this is Bungie's game, and it's sort of a FPS/RPG thing with a large world and online integration -- it's sort of a online FPS/RPG I guess. The graphics are great, and if the game ever releases on PC (or gets motion aiming controls) I'd be quite interested! It's too bad that for now it's console (and gamepad) only, because it looks like a good game. Little Big Planet 3 (Sony) -- I don't get it, how can you make so many LBP games without ever fixing the horrible controls and physics? This game is clearly just as bad as the previous ones in that regard, and it completely ruins the game and series. Platformers are all about control, and the series has bad controls! It's too bad, because they should be good. Fable Legends - Looks decent. I like the Fable series, so I hope this one is good too. They have 4 player co-op this time, fitting with the theme of the times... Evolve (Sony was it? I think it's on PS4/X1/maybe PC though.) - Another 4 player co-op game, this time a shooter, with the hook that the four team up against a player playing as a giant monster. That could work, but the game doesn't interest me all that much, as usual for the genre.

Oh, Fable Legends also has a multiplayer mode where one player plays as the villain, in classic pen & paper RPG fashion, is great! I usually played as Zargon in Hero Quest when I played with my cousins when we were younger. (and yes, Hero Quest and Dragon Strike were fantastic! Some of the best board games ever.) So yeah, that could be fun.

This is something I saw mentioned a few times during E3, but E3 is very, very console-centric. It'd be great if either PC gaming became a thing at E3, or there was something more focused on the PC -- PC gaming needs attention too! That does NOT happen at E3. I mean, look at the MS conference for example... PC was basically non-existent, even though other times MS claims to "care about PC gaming" (hah!).

What was something you saw mentioned? I'm not sure what "this" is referring to.

Sorry, I meant on streams and articles the like -- for instance Microsoft had an excuse about that they didn't have much to say about the PC at E3 because "E3 is a console show". But of course there IS no PC show, so I think that it's just a bad excuse... a somewhat true excuse, but it doesn't have to be so console-centric if MS would pay attention to PCs too at it!

Oh I see what you meant.

Well, as I've said E3 is a very different beast from when it really was a trade show. It serves a very singular purpose now, and that's advertising to news outlets.

That's partially true, but it's also about advertising to gamers! I mean, things like the many livestreams and shows during the show aren't just for new outlets, for sure. Nintendo's great Treehouse stream was for gamers, not news outlets. Same for their surprisingly successful SSBWiiU tourney; they were not expecting a full theater (~3,000 seats I think?) AND an online audience of what, 200,000? But they got it!