E3 was a thing. It happened.
I don't really follow gaming news sites now. With my long-view philosophy on gaming I just trust information on any game that might interest me will eventually filter down through message boards or people's blogs, but for E3 I go to a big news site after the event and browse the headlines. I only got around to that today because I decided last week playing Bowser's Inside Story for 6 hours a day took priority.
(Bowser's inside Story mini-review: boss as fuck)
I want to say this year felt kind of underwhelming but I don't know if I can judge that being so disconnected from what's 'popular' now. All the biggest names at the show were sequels to games I never played or don't care about. Who else is going to have Luigi's Mansion 2 as one of their favourites of the year?
Wii U? Don't care. I'm sure it will be used for something great but until the machine is on sale along with the game that will get me to buy it it won't register to me. I don't like this sudden focus on all-new hardware (new DS, new PSP, new Wii and we'll definitely see the next Xbox and Playstation revealed within a year). There's no excitement in new systems now. It's just a chore, another box I have to buy in order to stay up-to-date. It feels like I only just got used to the current generation recently. What happened to these machines lasting ten years?
Skyward Sword's new trailer only managed to look a lot worse than it's debut last year (believe me, I checked) with less action and more trying to make characters with creepy disproportionate faces emote.
And suddenly there were two new Kirby games. Or one new Kirby game and one resurrected from five years of development limbo. There's a Wii game where four players can team up and adventure as Kirby, Meta-Knight, King Dedede and... a Waddle Dee with a stick. I'm sure he'll try his best. Meanwhile on the DS Kirby follows his nature as an amorphous blob and starts to asexually reproduce.
Bloodrayne was a game I considered trying years and years ago, if just to see if it's premise of a Nazi-killing vampire dominatrix was as camp and unironic as it seemed to be, but I never got around to it. Now the series has my (and other peoples') interests again by pretending really hard to be Castlevania. A really gory Castlevania designed by the same company that made the adorable A Boy and His Blob remake. You can say this means they've got range.
This post turned out very Nintendo-centric but they seemed to be the ones supplying most of the material that didn't involve shiny brown realism or Hollywood envy. There's so much of that going around now it's refreshing to find a trailer with an attitude of "yeah, I'm a video game. Got a problem with that?"
If one thing made this year a little better it's that I discovered this while looking through E3 news. It's a composite trailer of big games from the show and it got me all nostalgic. This is what I remember game trailers looking like in the PS1 and N64 years, where footage from games by all developers would all get mashed together in one big trailer for the system. The music and the editing make me think of old PS1 trailers in particular. This would never happen nowadays because of modern marketing-focused publishers keeping tight control over how their big games get presented.
(Bowser's inside Story mini-review: boss as fuck)
I want to say this year felt kind of underwhelming but I don't know if I can judge that being so disconnected from what's 'popular' now. All the biggest names at the show were sequels to games I never played or don't care about. Who else is going to have Luigi's Mansion 2 as one of their favourites of the year?
Wii U? Don't care. I'm sure it will be used for something great but until the machine is on sale along with the game that will get me to buy it it won't register to me. I don't like this sudden focus on all-new hardware (new DS, new PSP, new Wii and we'll definitely see the next Xbox and Playstation revealed within a year). There's no excitement in new systems now. It's just a chore, another box I have to buy in order to stay up-to-date. It feels like I only just got used to the current generation recently. What happened to these machines lasting ten years?
Skyward Sword's new trailer only managed to look a lot worse than it's debut last year (believe me, I checked) with less action and more trying to make characters with creepy disproportionate faces emote.
And suddenly there were two new Kirby games. Or one new Kirby game and one resurrected from five years of development limbo. There's a Wii game where four players can team up and adventure as Kirby, Meta-Knight, King Dedede and... a Waddle Dee with a stick. I'm sure he'll try his best. Meanwhile on the DS Kirby follows his nature as an amorphous blob and starts to asexually reproduce.
Bloodrayne was a game I considered trying years and years ago, if just to see if it's premise of a Nazi-killing vampire dominatrix was as camp and unironic as it seemed to be, but I never got around to it. Now the series has my (and other peoples') interests again by pretending really hard to be Castlevania. A really gory Castlevania designed by the same company that made the adorable A Boy and His Blob remake. You can say this means they've got range.
This post turned out very Nintendo-centric but they seemed to be the ones supplying most of the material that didn't involve shiny brown realism or Hollywood envy. There's so much of that going around now it's refreshing to find a trailer with an attitude of "yeah, I'm a video game. Got a problem with that?"
If one thing made this year a little better it's that I discovered this while looking through E3 news. It's a composite trailer of big games from the show and it got me all nostalgic. This is what I remember game trailers looking like in the PS1 and N64 years, where footage from games by all developers would all get mashed together in one big trailer for the system. The music and the editing make me think of old PS1 trailers in particular. This would never happen nowadays because of modern marketing-focused publishers keeping tight control over how their big games get presented.