Quickly before I forget, I have to apologize for my quick dismissal of the EA press conferenece yesterday. I have now watched it and it is the best one yet. They may not have announced anything new or huge, but they got to the point. With the a few exceptions, there were no “look how awesome we are” statistics thrown up on the screen. They had the best presenters (Will Wright and Peter Moore) and constant gameplay/trailer action. By far the most entertain conference of the show. Go watch it now.
When the most exciting thing at your press conference is the sword fighting minigame in Wii Sports 2, something is wrong. Most people would probably argue that Animal Crossing: City Folk is more exciting, and if that is true for them I’m very glad. Unfortunately, I’m not an Animal Crossing fan. I wish I was more excited for it, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the begining of the conference.
First up, they showed off Shaun White Snowboarding which will use the Balance Board. Looked fine enough, dispite my unnatural hate for Shaun White (most likely cause by the fact that he is my age and has more talent than I). Think they will sell it with a Balance Board or do you have to get Wii Fit to get one?
The next game shown off was Animal Crossing: City Folk. The long talked about game is finally coming out on the Wii and with more connectivity (or so it seems) than I had ever expected Nintendo to give it. It will come with the new Wii Speak microphone. This “community microphone” sits atop the sensor bar allowing a room full of people to communicate back and forth with another room full of people. This is a really cool idea and makes me wish I cared about Animal Crossing and then had multiple friends who also cared about it. The obvious hope here is that they would bring chat to other games, past (Mario Kart, Smash Bros.) and future games. Future seems possible but I highly doubt they will patch it into their back catalog.
City Folk itself looks like more Animal Crossing. The town stuff looks very similar to the game I played on Gamecube years back. The new addition, the city, looks cooler. It is filled with shops and a cool circular world perspective. They showed off some, hopefully, online player interaction, with 4 friends all fishing together. I’m sure there will be many hurdles to climb to get to the point where you and some friends can go on a fishing trip, including but not limited to a long number code and the inability to invite people effectively. I need a lot more convincing before I need to buy a game where the one of the main selling points is being able to send a letter to my friend telling them they are my friend (it’s in the trailer).
A few new DS games were also shown off. The most surprising and least talked about was GTA: Chinatown Wars. Color me intruiged. It’s coming from Rockstar and being made specifically for the DS. I can’t think of how that will work well, but I’m not a game designer so I will give them the benefit of the doubt until I see otherwise.
The next and less interesting DS titles were Cooking Guide and a new Guitar Hero. Let’s start with Cooking Guide. Originally a Japanese “help with your life” kind of game, it will now make its US debut. This nongame is simply a cookbook. No minigames here, just recipes. I am clearly not the target market for this, so my commenting will cease before it turns snarky, leaving all my snark for…a new Guitar Hero: On Tour! Oh yes, we will be getting Guitar Hero: On Tour: Decades. Yep, that would be a subsubtitle. There are very few details, the only one that stuck out is some sort of “song sharing.” I have no idea what that could mean in a DS Guitar Hero context, nor do I care. I’m sure this one will be just as uncomfortable to play as the last one.
Next, we have my favorite part. Wii Sports Resort. A new Wii Sports game that will come with their new peripheral that was announced Monday, the Wii Motion Plus. This is a little nub that plugs into the bottom of your Wiimote and gives it greater accuracy and 1:1 motion. That’s all well and good, but why wasn’t that in it to begin with? That aside, they could do something amazing with this, but instead we get more Wii Sports with it. Fine, I can accept that and pretend like they will actually do something cool with it next. This new Wii Sports is full of summery type games such as frisbee and jet skiing. But it totally won me over with sword fighting. While not a traditional summer sport, at least not that I know of, it stole the Nintendo show. This is what Wii Boxing should have been. It looks like a precise, motion following sword fighting minigame. You block with the Wiimote, your mii blocks with their sword. Can not wait. Now someone make a non minigame out of this please.
For the finale, Nintendo finally showed off Wii Music again. From what I could tell this game involves pressing any buttons in any order that in turn play a preselected song. While it does boast “over 50 instruments” that does not change the fact that it is a terrible idea. People slag on Guitar Hero and Rock Band for not being a real musical skill, and say what you want, at least it is some kind of skill. This is just pressing buttons and nothing more. There is a drum mode, which they had a professional drummer showing off. While better than the “press any button you want” horns, it was pretty impercise. He was clearly hitting a snare when he was going for a high hat a good deal of the time. At the end they brought out a few people to play together in a band. This was harder to watch than the Microsoft execs making a crappy B movie yesterday.
The feint light at the end of the tunnel is that the Mario and Zelda teams are both working on Wii titles. But that didn’t come out until after the conference.
The best of the rest
I will get to Sony and Activision tomorrow, no worries. The other two press conferences of the day were fairly uneventful. We can skip right over Capcom who, instead of showing fun things like RE5 or Bionic Commando, spent the entire time talking about the Lost Planet movie. The movie will be written by David Hayter and everyone is very excited to be working with everyone. The more enjoyable press conference was given by Ubisoft. They showed off their known titles (Raving Rabbids, Brothers in Arms, EndWar, Farcry 2). Then moved on to their girly games that involve imagining things, petz, and Ener-G. Shaun White came out to shill for his game again, 360/PS3 version this time, but no need to talk about that. Finally, we get to the good stuff. New Prince of Persia trailer and gameplay demonstration. Fucking beautiful. Boiling the combat down to you and your lady friend versus one creature who is powerful enough to kill you looks like it is going to give us some amazing battles. The prince looks as acrobatic as ever and just as fun to play, even if he doesn’t have his time sand any more. I can’t get over how good the game looks, from a graphical stand point. Their last trailer is for their brand new game, I Am Alive. After some sort of disaster, you have to fight for your survival. Much like Assassin’s Creed last year, I’m sure there is more going on in the story then they are letting on. The seemingy always smiling Jade Raymond, who also worked on Creed, is rumored to be working on it.
Now, read, click, watch, enjoy. I must sleep.
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