E3? More like... Nintendo3
As soon as we got there at around 10:30, we wandered around until we found the hall containing the heavy hitters, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft... although to be honest we didn't look at xbox anything, and had little to no time to look at the PS3 because most of the day was taken up... with the Wii.
The line to get access to the Wii area was... 3 hours long. Literally. Luckily, David randomly ran into a friend while we were in line, so he held our places so we could at least leave the line for about an hour to play some of the DS games nearby.
Then we finally got access to the Wii. Tons of games to try, but the catch was that each game station had its own mini line. >_< Lines, lines, and more lines! One thing I noticed about the Wii was that the motion detection varied quite a bit. I can tell that the remote is advanced enough to know whenever it's moving-- the tricky part however, is when you make a specific movement. There were a couple bits of noticeable delay when doing a specific slash or spin of the nunchuk or remote, and I'm guessing this is because the game's trying to make sure you're actually intending to do that specific motion and not a regular move. ... this could cause problems in hectic situations or places where you have to get things precise the first time, but I'm giving Nintendo the benefit of the doubt and hoping control will be smoothed out for their games once the Wii actually comes out.
No! Not the lava, Link!
Here's my reactions on the following games:
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess --- Wow, aiming with that bow and arrow was tricky!! And I was definitely not the only person having to slow down and really aim carefully. Some moves like Link's spinning slash were a bit delayed, although the bow and arrow action was pretty quick.
Red Steel --- The whole sword action element of this game was a little weird, but overall kind of cool. Parrying someone was surprisingly responsive, but the actual sword slashing itself had a slight delay. The gun portions were pretty standard FPS fare, although I felt like I had a teeny bit more control aiming at people in this game compared to Zelda, but that's probably because Link's bow and arrow requires you to let go of the button to fire the arrow, which would always make me move the controller a tad and fuck up the aim, whereas Steel's machinegun was purely press-and-hold.
WarioWare --- Super fun, super responsive, and super intuitive. Warioware offered like 15 different ways to hold your Wii remote and it gives you a quick pic of the intended way to hold the remote right before a minigame starts. Very fun, and bizarre, just as it should be.
In terms of DS games, I managed to try out the upcoming Kirby game, the upcoming Castlevania game, and also Starfox DS, although that was mostly because David reeeeally wanted to try it and I was curious what the fuss was about, hehe. The Kirby game is very much a return to its roots, and was pretty fun, as was Castlevania, which had a very interesting swap-character option, where your 2nd person follows you and assists constantly.
Nintendo certainly kicked E3 ass this year, and their stuff all had constant lines. Well worth it though!
Is that Link a guy or a girl...?
I have to say, going to E3 with David was really great. E3 would've been interesting alone, but with him it made things like exponentially more fantastic. ^_^
Overall, the E3 experience was fucking awesome, and hopefully next year I can attend it as a legitimate industry participant.
Check out more photos at David's photo site:
http://photos.davidbadgerow.com/E3%202006/
