10th June 2014, 3:34 PM
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 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.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)