Here is a review of 3 tapes. This video starts with the third, a weird Japanese tape that starts out just... Japan odd, then goes into a diatribe about the evils of evolution, abortion, and bar code scanners. (Yes, bar code scanners. Back in the 70's and some of the 80's, Christian groups were terrified that "bar codes" were related to the "mark of the beast".)
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.
I was never too impressed with the surprisingly lax standards of a turing test to begin with. I always thought some more rigor in the form of providing some intelligent questions for test takers to ask should be required.
Namely, if this chat bot is intended to be self aware AI, then it fails completely. If all it was meant to do was fool some test takers about 30% of the time, I have to ask what the point of chat bots aiming for such low hanging fruit is supposed to be.
Here's the crux of the matter. I have been able to fool every single chat bot I've ever come across with a ridiculously simple question: "What were we just talking about?". Eugene is, essentially, designed in the same way as every other chat bot out there. As I read on it, the only unique tricks were lowering the expectations of test takers by purposefully emulating a foreign 13 year old (one from the Ukraine that apparently can't answer basic questions about what happened last month IN the Ukraine). The problem is that every single chat bot programmer is stuck in the "Chinese box" notion of how to design a chat bot. Namely, they try to build the biggest database of responses they can (either themselves or trying to build one from user input ala the Alice chatbot) and then, if ONLY that database is big enough, it'll be able to pass for human. If only! Except, it's trying to build "perfect" responses to one-off inputs, ignoring the critical notion of CONTEXT. It doesn't matter if the "learning" AI is only "learning" which response to use for one specific input, because a "good" response to MOST input in a real world conversation changes moment by moment based on the situation. In a word: Context! If I ask "how are you doing today?" no SINGLE response will do, your response is determined by a multitude of events during that day and your current state. The same could be said for something as simple as "How's the weather?" or "Have you eaten?". However, no matter what tricks you set up for those SPECIFIC questions (often they'll set up a special exception for weather questions to check sites like weather.gov to determine a response, which by making such an exception is a tacit acknowledgement that their whole general strategy is flawed), the one question they can never find a "trick" to work around is a basic question about what you and the AI were JUST talking about. No specific response, short of actually making a competent chat program that can understand context, is going to fool such a question. The best they could hope for is to treat such questions with a special exception that just regurgitates whatever the AI stated last, but even that will be broken in certain series of strings.
In short, I've lost a lot of interest in the field of chat bots because programmers can't seem to get past the whole "build a bigger database" paradigm they're all stuck in.
This is a PC game. If there are going to be console or tablet or something versions sometime, they haven't been announced yet. The PC game will be out later this year, though.
Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy are two of my favorite games ever. They're probably my favorite action-RPGs ever, in fact... or at minimum they are very high on the list. Amazing, amazing games... but Midway's last Gauntlet game, Seven Sorrows, was a horrendous debacle of a game. It's not a Gauntlet game in any imaginable way. It was originally supposed to be something, but it totally fell apart during development; I'm glad that the PC version was cancelled, or else I'd have surely actually spent more than a few bucks on that terrible thing. After that came a DS Gauntlet game which was far in development but didn't release because Midway went under and it died with the company, sadly.
Now, after several years, WB (who bought Midway) has decided to resurrect the franchise with this reboot that is a modern topdown action-RPG somewhat inspired by the original Gauntlet game. The game is looking fun, but it's nothing like either Legends or Seven Sorrows, for sure; it's a generic-looking topdown action-RPG, of a style that there are a fair number of these days. It looks like fun for sure, and I"ll definitely get it eventually, but it's clearly no Gauntlet Legends. Ah well... Gauntlet here looks more like something like Hammerwatch (PC) but in 3d, or something like that. It's kind of like Diablo or other such games, but simpler and more arcadey, appropriately for the license. But it doesn't look like it had a lot of budget, sadly. Hopefully it'll be fun despite its simplicity.
This new Gauntlet game is from Arrowhead, the developers of Magicka, and you can kind of see that here, though as I've said this one looks like a pretty quick project. The game has okay but not great 3d graphics, and a strict overhead-only viewpoint. Does it seriously not even have an announcer guy? And ugh, warrior and valkyrie are melee-only... come on, in Gauntlet all characters have ranged attacks! I know Seven Sorrows ignored that in favor of generic beat 'em up gameplay, but that's one of the many reasons why it's so, so awful. Also, if you just run around for a few seconds the other characters all respawn? Unlimited? Modern gaming... Sure, they do charge you gold for each death so there is a punishment, but still.
Even so, the game looks fun and I'm sure I'll like it. But as a Gauntlet game, it could be better. This game looks a lot better than Seven Sorrows for sure, at least! It looks like a decently fun topdown hack and slash dungeon crawling action game, and I like such games. (Oh, and yes, the game is PC only and is releasing this September.)
Who's excited? I am! Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft's press conferences are today (Monday), and Nintendo's webstream is Tuesday, when the show opens. I hope it'll be good... :)
Hmm... well, I hope that it works with GC-controller-compatible Wii games! Otherwise they're releasing this thing for Smash and just about nothing else, since who knows how many other Wii U games would really support this when the Wii U Pro controller's got more buttons and is more standard for the system. But there are a bunch of Wii games that can play on the Wii U and work with Gamecube controllers, so I hope this will work with those as well as with Smash.
Also, of course, it's very interesting that Nintendo is both releasing a GC controller adapter for the Wii U mostly just for SSB, and that they're holding a SSB Wii U tournament during E3. They're obviously interested in getting the hardcore SSBM competitive community interested in this game. Well, I hope the game's great!
