11th June 2014, 11:16 PM
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?
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?
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