All said and done, I think Kinect is a snazzy piece of technology and represents the future of user interface.  To assume that these first steps will be stumble-free is rather wishful thinking, however.  First black people, now couch potatoes.  Hopefully Microsoft will resolve these problems soon.

Underwhelmed – Kinect -  With games like Kinectimals and Dance Central, Microsoft Kinect was very clearly targeted toward the casual market despite having games like Forza and a Star Wars title (which honestly looked a bit janky).  What Microsoft really needed in their press conference was Tetsuya Mizuguchi demoing Child of Eden – that is the Kinect killer app, a perfect example of what is possible with the hardware.

Hyped – Nintendo 3DS -  At about 1:30 pm, we were introduced to the sizeable third party support for the new handheld.  At about 1:45pm, the gaming press on Twitter was all abuzz echoing a single thought.  Oh my God, it really works.  And then came the software lineup.  Metal Gear Solid 3DS?  Ocarina of Time?  Resident Evil?  Street Fighter IV?  Pilotwings?  KID ICARUS as a launch title?  At about 2:00pm, I was a believer.

Whoa – Kid Icarus on the 3DS – After years of Nintendo fanboys clamoring for a new Kid Icarus game and years of not getting one, we finally do get one.  Is this proof of Nintendo listening to its fanbase?  Hey Nintendo:  we want Earthbound!

Oh Sh*t – Gabe Newell and Valve supporting the PS3 – For the longest time, Gabe Newell hated the PS3.  In fact, he called it a disaster and a waste of time.  That time has come to an end with the announcement of a Steamworks enabled Portal 2.  Aside from steam community support, this also means that any updates to the pc software will get pushed out to the console version as well.  This is an absolute coup for Sony since substantial updates to software on the 360 are mandated by Microsoft to cost money – a philosophy that Valve traditionally does not support.  This is possibly the most important announcement amongst all of the press conferences.

Jumped the Shark – The Microsoft Oprah Moment – Really?  Don’t get me wrong, I wish I was there to pick one of the new shiny 360 slims up.  But yeah, I think this was a little bit too much in an attempt to get that mindshare.

Resurgence – Nintendo - The 2010 Nintendo E3 Press Conference was more than just a reversal of fortunes of the past two years of disappointing software reveals.  It was a sign of life for all of the world’s Nintendo fans, and a return to what Nintendo was known for in the NES and SNES era.  The sheer amount of software easily had more impact than the past two press conferences, starting first with a demo of the new Zelda game followed by the unveiling of an interesting looking Mario sports game.  But it didn’t stop there: alongside was a modernized remake of the N64 classic Goldeneye, Metroid Other M, a return to the world of Donkey Kong Country, an exciting walkthrough of the Disney world of Epic Mickey, and a mind-blowing new Kirby game.  The cherry on top was the unveiling of the Nintendo 3DS to be launched with a new Kid Icarus game.  Sony did a good job, but there was no way anyone could have beaten this lineup.

Game of the Show (Thus Far) – Child of Eden – I have never played Rez.  Watching the delightfully synaesthesic trailer and Mizuguchi-san demoing this game at the Ubisoft presser showed me that I really missed out on a hallmark experience and that I would can’t miss out on the spiritual successor to Rez.  Not requiring Kinect or Move is a plus for me, though I can easily see this being the killer app for the Microsoft motion control system.

Too soon?

An important point that stuck out to me was the range of fighting games that were included in EVO2k9.  Street Fighter IV was a no brainer – it was the main draw and everyone was playing it.  HD Remix A.K.A. Super Street Fighter II Turbo had always been a mainstay at the tournament, as was the same for Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and SF3: Third Strike. Rounding out the list were Soul Calibur IV (a game I totally didn’t even expect would be at the tourney) as well as BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (another surprising choice since it had been out for maybe a month).  In any case, a great set of games for the greatest North American fighting game tournament.  From the perspective of a gamer that had long fallen out of playing fighting games, the killer combination of SFIV and EVO2k9 brought me back to the fold.

At this year’s EVO, the breadth of games is still excellent, but there are some definite, notable changes.  From the EVO Press Release linked on Seth Killian’s Unity Blog, Super Street Fighter IV would be taking SFIV’s spot (no surprise).  HD Remix will also return (also no surprise) along with BlazBlue.  Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, the latest from the Vs. series of games, would make its debut perhaps bumping Marvel vs. Capcom 2 out of the picture temporarily.  Tekken 6 will make its debut this year as well (in my eyes, bumping Soul Calibur IV out).  SF3: Third Strike?  Nowhere to be seen.  The final game will be decided by player vote from a pool of games which includes Third Strike, Soul Calibur IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, King of Fighters XII, and Melty Blood(?).  The final game would undoubtedly fall between Third Strike or MvC2, but I will find it extremely odd not seeing either the game that put the Daigo Full Parry in the fighting game vernacular or the pinnacle of the Vs. series of games featured in this year’s competition.  My vote goes to Third Strike.

Personally, I hope the fine folks at EVO sort out the video archive problem with their IGN partners this time around.  While putting the videos online makes sense, I still feel it was an absolute travesty to lose some of the videos that they did (in particular, the 5 vs. 5 tournaments, some of the more interesting pool plays, etc.).  If this stuff is going to vanish from the ether, EVO might as well put the video on DVD.  Hell, I’d buy it!

In any case, the competition will be excellent and I look forward to watching the stream online.  The 9th of July can’t come fast enough!

My obsession with the Final Fantasy series began with the fourth game – the second one localized for western audiences on Nintendo platforms and the first on the Super NES.  My previous role-playing game experience was the original Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in the U.S.) on the NES, a highly touted and revered game to most of the world – except me, of course.  That’s not to say that Dragon Quest wasn’t a good game: several millions of fans spanning generations of gamers would angrily disagree otherwise.  Still, there was something about the game that I just couldn’t relate to.  Other contemporary games made it relatively easy to follow along with the story – both the Mario Bros. and the Mega Man series were both relatively successful in progressing their own plots along for the player.  While there wasn’t much in the way of actual text in both of these games, the experiences were both linear and directed – making it easy (for me at least) to build up a plot in my head to follow along with.  However with Dragon Quest the player had to work just a little bit harder to get that next tidbit of the story, a consequence of the game being a less directed, more open, and more abstract experience than other games at the time.  Sometimes that extra little bit of work became a lot of extra work – the player could only slay so many happy slimes before it became a chore and the player lost interest.  Which I did.

With my first experience with RPGs spoiled by an impenetrable plot and level grinding ad nauseum, it was a great surprise that I even gave Final Fantasy II a fair chance.  Maybe it was because I was because I was a little older at that point.  More likely, it was because of the fact that 16-bit cartridges actually allowed for a more comprehensible story with actual character development.  While the natural grindiness inherent to RPGs were still there in Final Fantasy IV, it was as if the more developed and mature storyline lessened the impact of that grind: because the characters all had names, personalities, history, and relationships, I actually cared about what was happening to them and where they were going.  As a result, Final Fantasy IV was the first game I could really sink my teeth into and get completely absorbed into the world.  It wasn’t just Cecil Harvey’s quest for redemption that kept me interested.  It was also Palom and Porom’s self-petrification to save the heroes from moving wall trap.  It was Sage Tellah’s revenge-fueled to cast the forbidden spell of Meteor in an attempt to stop the man responsible for the death of his daughter.  It was Monk Yang’s selfless decision to remain behind to try to stop a super cannon.  And then there was the final trip to the moon on a whale-shaped space ship to stop the embodiment of hatred itself.

Nowadays this would all sound very contrived – just another story about a handful of plucky adventurers try to save kingdom-land from becoming a bad world filled with evil.  But to my twelve year old self, Final Fantasy II was absolutely mind-blowing and made me realize that games were capable of evoking emotion – hell, Palom and Porom’s sacrifice actually drove me to tears.  Video games didn’t have to be limited to running and jumping and shooting; they could also be works of art.  And it is because of this that Final Fantasy II/IV will always hold a special place in my heart as the game that opened up the Final Fantasy floodgates – no matter how many times it gets re-released, I will always be along for the journey to the moon.

Next time: Final Fantasy First – the reason why I should have played the Final Fantasy games in order.

But yeah!  Stuff to look forward to, kind readers!

I’m excited for this year’s E3; the return to the spectacle of the traditional E3 means that publishers have a lot more impetus to show off their goods and drop megatons upon megatons.  So let’s get started, eh?

Nintendo

• Pikmin 3 will be displayed and demoed for the first time.
• Earthbound finally to the Virtual Console, marking a refocus on the Virtual Console because Nintendo likes money!  Right!  Right?
• New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the DS…it’s about time!
• Nintendo will finally show off different colored Wii consoles, in light of the slipping Wii sales.  And it will be monstrous because consumers are stupid!
• Nintendo will announce either a new Mario or Zelda game on the Wii.  Not both.  If it’s a Zelda game, it will have Motion Plus and/or DS integration.  If it’s Mario, it won’t make it out this console cycle – Nintendo hasn’t put out multiple games to a franchise the last couple of hardware cycles.  Doh!

Microsoft

• The Motion/Camera thing that’s been rumored for XB360 will be announced, and unfortunately will flop.
• Alan Wake and Huxley will emerge from the mire of development, since we have heard next to nothing about upcoming 360 software aside from Halo 3 ODST, which will be demoed and dated for this Fall.
• Valve will make an announcement of Half Life 2: Episode 3 at the Microsoft Press Conference.  The game will be available for PC/XB360 only and will be primarily be digitally distributed, marking the beginning of more substantive games for XBox Live.
• A new iteration of the 360, akin to a slim model or perhaps even in different colors. Because consumers are stupid!

Sony

• The Motion/Camera thing that’s been rumored for PS3 will be announced, and unfortunately will flop.
• The PSP Go!, despite being leaked on Qore yesterday, will be announced and kick off the “Year of the PSP” – a reinvogorated focus on the PSP.
• Gran Turismo 5, God of War 3, MAG, Heavy Rain, and Uncharted 2 all demoed and dated for later this year, marking a star-studded Holiday ’09.  Project TRICO?  Next year.
• Sony will either announce a moderate pricecut of at most $50 (from $399 to $349), or a new value bundle at 399 bundled with both Uncharted:Drake’s Fortune and LittleBigPlanet.  Leaning toward the latter for now.
• PS3 Slim will not be announced, despite all the leaked, atrocious, and probably doctored screenshots.  Why?  They still have way too many PS3 units still in stock.
• The oft-mentioned Sony “Megaton”?  I’m not really feeling a Final Fantasy VII remake anymore, so I’m going to say it’s a non-game related service.  What’s something that’s used by everyone and not on the PS3?  How about Facebook?

Other

• Kojima Productions will announce 2 games, a PSP and a simultaneous PS3/XB360 title.  Everyone by now has seen the ad with Big Boss, Raiden, and the mysterious porcelain mask – it makes sense for the next Metal Gear game to be a Raiden game, perhaps his side of the story during the events of MGS4.  As for Big Boss?  I vote the PSP sequel to MGS: Portable Ops.

How spot-on will I be?  I guess we’ll see tomorrow with the Microsoft press conference.  Let the games begin!

Street Fighter IV: Championship Mode

While there wasn’t too much in terms of character balance changes (that feature will almost undoubtedly be reserved for the next incarnation of the game), the new Championship Mode introduced in the latest Street Fighter IV patch is phenomenal.  The mode is divided up into multiple grades and it mimics the conditions of actual SFIV tournaments – blind character select, multiple rounds, and a payout at the end for winning the tournament.  The entry-level tournament tier you’re placed into is Grade 3 (G3) with the opponent challenge is more or less analogous to normal ranked matches – meaning Sagats and Flowchart Kens aplenty.  With each successful win, you’re awarded Championship Points (CP) which contribute to your overall Grade Points (GP).   When you accumulate enough GP, you eventually progress through the classes of each Grade till a certain threshold when you are then promoted to the next Grade – and that’s where the fun really begins.  When eventually reach G2 (and reaching G2 is an inevitability – there is no point degradation in G3), the first thing you notice is the sad fact truth you are no longer winning anymore; in fact, you’d be lucky to be winning half as much as you were in the previous Grade.  Competition is tremendously disparate and the players are noticeably better: I considered myself competant and played maybe ten games before I was able to squeak out a victory.  Currently I’m at about 2750 GP, most of which was fueled by second and third round butt kickings, but I’m still having a ton of fun running with the tournament folks and their 8000+ GPs.  And even though I still lose a lot, I do feel that I’m adapting to the heightened level of competition.

WoW Patch 3.1 and Ulduar Raiding

The other majority of my gaming time has been spent playing World of Warcraft (of course) and raiding Ulduar with my guild on Gorefiend.  So far, we’re doing pretty well and we’re currently working on the final boss in the instance before we start working on the hard modes and Algalon the Observer (coined by Blizzard as the Destroyer of Raids).  Most importantly however is the fact that I’ve been working hard on the video footage for our first successful kills for the guild, going so far as to even make a YouTube Channel comprising of most of the video work I’ve done.  I intend on editing the hard-mode footage when we get there so there’s certainly still a lot work that needs to be done and there’s plenty of room for improvement.  Stuff to look forward to!

Blizzcon 2009

This year I was again fortunate enough to be able to attain tickets to this year’s Blizzcon convention in Anaheim, California.  As with last year, we booked the hotel and flight months in advance, even before we even knew of when tickets were going on sale.  Thankfully with some dilligence and a new and improved ticket purchasing system, we were able to get tickets to the show floor.  It’s still astounding that even though the convention tickets are 25% more expensive this year (due to the extra convention hall for exhibits), the first batch of tickets still managed to sell out in a mere thirty-three minutes.  Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising with tickets on eBay already going at 300% markup.  Still, I look forward to spending time with my fellow Blizzard fans, regardless of how rabid (and possibly unkempt) they are.

And that’s it for now.  E3 Predictions forthcoming!