Middleditch Littlebitch

I finally went to E3!

And it wasn’t that awesome.

Yeah, I said it.  Don’t get me wrong, you walk into those conference halls and they are filled to the brim with every bleep, bleep, explosion, gunfire, guitar sting imaginable.  You see gadgets and gizmos and big screens and games and all that.  You are literally overwhelmed at first, which is…a little overwhelming.  But after that, things start to sink in.

The very first thing I noticed is how 90% of all the games displayed at this year’s E3 were clones and copies of existing games.  There are countless Modern Warfares out there, Lost Planets, Gears of Wars, “family games”, wrestling games…it’s just plain old sad.  Not to mention that the big deal for Sony and Microsoft this year were the most ridiculous and played out additions for their existing consoles ever conceived.  You’ve got Sony coming out with the Playstation Move, an exact copy of the Wii.  Microsoft has it’s formerly known as Natal, now Kinect, which is a glorified Playstation Eye.  What do these peripherals do?  Play nice-looking Wii games, and not the good ones, the ones that people play for 20 minutes and then throw away.  There is an onslaught of shit coming our way in the next year.  A total onslaught…of shit.

At first I thought Kinect could be neat, but then I realized it’s just like every other gadget out there.  And I like peripherals.  I like steering wheels and flight sticks and gamepads, I like the TrackIR system which allows you to “look” around in your video games.  But Kinect, as with the Move, just feels like the Power Glove.  I remember everybody, including myself, kept saying “but Nintendo’s got it right this time!” when they were releasing the Wii.  Granted, Nintendo made a shit ton of money off it and expanded it’s gaming clientelle substantially, but to any proper gamer out there I dare you to say that you prefer to play with that awkward piece of shit over a simple controller, joystick, wheel, mouse/keyboard setup, whatever.  If you say you do you’re a fucking liar and I hate you.  The Move is just weak.  Such a blatant rip-off Sony should be ashamed of itself.  Kinect could have a use as a built-in TrackIR system, but other than that it’s a “family game” add on.  Fucking family games.  Fuck you, families!

Ok.  Breathe.

I don’t mind the craziness that is the showroom floor.  It was cool to meander around and see people playing the new Nintendo 3DS (bee-tee-dubs, it was extremely comical that as soon as you get to Nintendo’s section the amount of Asian people increase by a factor of a million).  Every time you yourself pick up a controller and play something, a friendly person comes up to you and informs you on what’s going on.  Some people line-up for the private showings of major titles yet to be released.  This is all fine and dandy, it’s what I expected.  It’s just the sheer amount of unoriginal content that was depressing.  That, and the booth babes.

Seriously?  We still need booth babes?  Does the film industry have booth babes?  The only thing I can think of that needs “babes” are fighting events, and at least in MMA, the dudes who are into fight culture wear the clothing that’s worse than Ed Hardy, slam energy drinks, and fuck tired ass porn stars (I’m looking at you, Tito).  My friend Jordan Vogt-Roberts, with whom I went, remarked how sad it is that even now, with him and myself approaching 30, we are still viewed in the industry’s eyes as 15 year olds who have never kissed a girl and lather on Axe Body Spray every morning.  And just as we lamented about this, a 30 year old nerd came up to a booth babe and said, “Can I take a picture of you?”  Keyword: of.  Gross.  And these dames, I’m sorry to say, are kind of haggard up close.  Game developers are a motley bunch, man, I tell you what.  You could go to E3 with the sole purpose of photographing the weirdest looking people out in the wild.  Like a fucking Nat Geo project.

Then there is this horrible, and I mean horrible trend of stereoscopic gaming.  I can’t be the only one who gets a headache looking at that shit. I can’t be the only one who thinks the idea of wearing stupid looking glasses in order to play your games while anyone else who’s looking at the screen wants to blow their fucking brains out from watching a blurry x2 image is the worst thing ever concieved.  Even the built-in 3D screens make it impossible to watch if you’re anything but straight-on from your screen.  I hope this fad is just that, a fad, and I hope it’s destroyed with more vigor and fury than 30 giant hornets attacking 30,000 bees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDSf3Kshq1M

I digress.  There were some redeeming things.  As always, what’s going on in PC world is interesting to me.  The lost art of PC gaming is still holding onto the potential of a jackpot gold mine in MMO development; APB looks like an immensely fun game as well as a future corporation-based thing Global Agenda.  Mafia 2 is, and always was looking great.  Maybe I didn’t have access, but on the main floor there was nothing of what I was hoping for.  Nothing on LA Noire, Deus Ex, a new Elder Scrolls game, any of that.  But I will say this…

I’ve been toting the potential merits of the OnLive service ever since I first heard about it.  Secretly, for the past week I’ve been in the beta.  I can’t say much about my experiences there, but now that I’ve played it in E3, consider my impressions based on those experiences rather than the ones I’ve been having at home, going through Dragon Age.  It.  Is.  Awesome.  Granted, you will need a nice internet connection.  Yes, if other people in your house are all downloading shit at the same time you’re playing your game, unless you’ve got some speed in your modem, you’re going to get frustrated.  But, if you’re connection can maintain a decent speed, it is flawless.  I am so amazed at how well it works.  You are literally playing top tier games on a MacBook Air.  It’s incredible.  Not only that, you can play them instantly.  You can switch games instantly.  You can spectate people instantly.  It’s all there, right now.  I will say that you can notice the slightest bit of input lag with keyboard and mouse movements, but if you’re not paying attention to it you won’t even notice it.  If you’re online, everyone will be having to deal with it so it cancels it all out.

I may sound like I’m selling it, but I honestly hope that everyone picks it up because not only do I perceive, conceptually, it to be the future of gaming (ie: immediate results on hardware that you haven’t paid for), it could mean the return of PC gaming, which as you’ll see in previous posts, it’s something that I think is a far more rich and engaging experience.  Also, if you sign up now, you get a year free with the second year being $4.95 a month.  It is the best.  It’s all I want to talk about and all I want to play any and all games on.  I just hope they backlog their games catalog so I can finally play Empire: Total War and ArmA 2.

So yeah.  E3.  Pros and cons, but mainly cons.  Most of those cons could be due to where we’re at in the industry as a whole, but some of them are just the madness that is E3.  I saw one indie game.  The fact that there isn’t an indie games section somewhere on one of the floors is just stupid.  It should be official and have it’s own little niche somewhere in that expo.  Although I saw some cool stuff, although I’m glad I went, in my opinion E3 is an experience best felt filtered through the internet. 

Then again, there was Lego Harry Potter…