Highlight

Well, I have thoroughly played and beaten Chapter 1 of Tales of Monkey Island called Launching of the Screaming Narwahl. I have to say it is great to play a Monkey Island game again and with some help with some of the cast of the past games it feels almost like returning home to the family. The game is like the past a point & click adventure which I still find fascinating.

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Now we jump in the pool of Sony. I have to say this was not a very good conference for Sony despite showing some cool things. First off we know of PSP Go a touch screen PSP with no UMD system at all pure digital download structure. This was actually leaked a few days before and no there were no signs of the slim PS3. I think the only real good parts of Sony’s Conference was God of War III and the Motion Controller Tech Demo.

The Conference Video

The Important parts in my opinion broken out of the conference video above.

Motion Controller Demo I

Motion Controller Demo II

Pros:
PSP Go
More Focus on PSP Games
Cheaper PSP Development
GOW III
Motion Controller

Cons:
Assassins Creed II – Looked Worse than the First
Mostly Video Shown not much actual Gameplay done
Nothing else Really shown

Yeah, were going to do things slightly different with this and the next post. We are going to tread into dangerous waters of the Microsoft Camp and let you know what we thought of the Microsoft Conference and you might be surprised by my response and possibly Carl and dajaco will speak on this in the comments.

Alright, now bare with me Nintendo-Centrum and Nintendo Fans. It is always good to study your opponents movements, products and ways of their business and it is interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with to top the industry. We’ll get to the conference video in a little bit let me just post my thoughts on some of the things shown at Microsoft’s Conference. First off the opening of the conference was pretty sweet with the Beatles Rock Band Opening Cinematic. However Ringo and Sir James Paul McCartney seemed to be so out of place it was crazy but still cool they were on stage.

Modern Warfare 2 looked freaking sweet and I have not seen a game yet that could do snowmobiling justice like this game did. Also Bungie showed off their new Halo game which looks okay from my aspect but doesn’t look much different from previous Halo or even other FPS in the industry. Bungie also had a teaser for another Halo game. Halo Fanatics of course are foaming at the mouth but come on guys its just a pretty good FPS game.

Tony Hawk Ride Controller is pretty awesome. Really the only thing I could say about it.

And last but not least Project Natal blew my mind away to be very honest. This product does look to be the next step in gaming but we will have to see why type of software is created for this device. The Block Breaker Game was pretty cool. The painting software was neat but what Lionhead showed was some crazy futuristic stuff. And and a pretty funny Wii diss by Kudo. Waggle Controls. And a special appearance by Steven Spielberg talking about Project Natal.

Now here is the MS E3 2009 Conference Video via Gamespot.com

And some of the important parts I think of the Conference broken out below.

Project Natal

Natal Ricochet Stage Demo

Natal Splat Stage Demo

Milo Project

Tony Hawk Ride

Pros:
Project Natal
Milo Project by Lionhead Studios
A Metal Gear Game
Halo Games – If your into it.

Cons:
Halo Games
Worry of Software for Project Natal

A pretty good show with more Energy than at the Nintendo Conference from the crowd. I think project Natal and the Milo Project shocked the crowd and of course another Halo that brought Halo fanatics to their knees. I really do not have to much opinion on this show though some things shocked even me coming from Microsoft. The Spielberg thing seemed a bit out of place but deep down Spielberg knows this is a very good project which has money behind it. Interactive movies I sense will be a big deal with Project Natal.

We may have been posting press releases and fact sheets for E3 already but here comes the meat and potatoes of E3.

We here at Nintendo-Centrum are die hard Nintendo fans even so much to say core fans but Nintendo at E3 once again seemed to conservatively walked through E3 trying to be safe even though there were a couple of nice things shown but it just seems that Nintendo is losing its step and touch with hardcore gamers or hardcore Nintendo fans. Nintendo is moving to a wider audience, which is smart, but Nintendo is loosing sight of what made Nintendo. Sure Nintendo will show off one or maybe two games that the hardcore Nintendo fans like but that really is not enough. Also another sad thing at the conference you can hear polite clapping instead of happy intense clapping. Only once or twice you hear like three people cheering instead of the other Conferences at E3.

At the beginning of the Conference Cammie talks about Mario and about a new game. Honestly I started to become emotional as I felt this was going to be a special brand new game of Mario and it turned out to be………OMFG……………LAME!

Instead of just speaking about what happened why don’t you just watch what happened. After the video I will break it down into pros and cons concerning my view of what happened. Carl and dajaco may chime in the comments on how they felt about E3 2009 Nintendo.

You can see and hear the press conference below via Gamespots Video of Nintendo’s Conference below.

If you watched the video now take a look at the pros and cons.

Pros:
Wii Sports Resort
Mario Galaxy 2
Metroid Other M
Motion+
Retro Studios is Working on Something!!

Cons:
Mario Galaxy 2
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Wii Vitality Sensor
Womens Murder Club??
Again Lack of Motion+
Too much Philosophy and Less Game Action
Almost the Entire Conference

To me I think Nintendo Dropped the ball but not having more Motion+ action, too much talk, and the Vitality Sensor – WTF. Now why are Super Mario Bros Wii and Galaxy 2 in the cons section you might ask? As for the New Super Mario Bros Wii it is cool that you can play with four players as well as single player and the world maybe, maybe, will be different I just can’t see my self plopping down 49.99 for this game. I respect Miyamoto’s wish to have four-player action in the original Super Mario Bros but I just do not agree with this title. If the game is a Wii Ware title I can understand this direction with the game but if it is not and it does cost a full price for game Nintendo is loosing it.

Now for Mario Galaxy 2 No doubt it will be a great game like the first one with Mario’s New moves and the including of Yoshi (Awesome) but the problem I have with this is one the game comes out next year the game is basically done with the engine. I can understand adding new moves to the game would add more time but heh. The other issues is come on make a brand new game do not rehash and sequel-ise your games don’t follow the path of Square Enix and several other game companies. That is really the only two cons I have with the game and as you see it is both a pro and con so it’s a mixture.

The other cool interesting tidbit that happened was by the Man Reggie himself. I watched the G4TV E3 Special Presentations and after the Nintendo Conference Reggie spoke with the hosts of the show and Billy Berghammer of PGC Planet GameCube, Game Informer Website, now G4TV website fame. Billy spoke up asking why Nintendo went with Team Ninja for the Metroid Game instead of Retro Studios. Reggie let it out that Retro Studios is working on something right now but could not say anything about it. Now what could this project be? Is it something completely new, or a new game for a Nintendo Character, could it be Project Hammer? Who knows but we have to keep watching and waiting for this.

This was the idea I refered to in the article I posted just prior to when e3 started. I wrote that it would be possible that someone would show this new controls scheme utilizing the wiimote (or something similar) and that I would tell about it if no one showed it (or had thought about it).

But Sony camp sadly demonstrates motionlook with halfbaked eyetoy game, which makes motionlook seem inferior to mouselook, and sports a stupid yellow gun at the bottom of the screen like as if the same rules that applied in Quake in terms of interface applies in FPS games using motionlook…. they don’t.

Immersive aspects are key with motionlook. If you have a gun at the bottom, the whole presentation will just look like a tacky action sequence done by college kids who wants the action to be viewed from a shooters view by replicating doom with handheld camera and plastic gun………

And using motionlook to control a vechile, or the cannon on a tank? No, no, no, it’s not ideal, motionlook is for first person view for a character in the game.

My head explodes from too much frustration now. But it’s childish to write sentences ending with exclamation mark, so I’ll just do a single line of them without any sentence.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I mean come on, I wanted to show this cool 3D Metroid game I’ve thought out taking advantage of this idea, well, when I thought out the Metroid 3D game idea I had actually forgotten all about motionlook, because I quickly forgot about the idea when I realized that the wiimote wasn’t that accurate. A couple of weeks ago I remembered I had actually had that idea, and I started to think about it. My creativity has been pretty abysmal the last couple of years though so when I started to rethink the whole concept of motionlook I added strange things like that there has to be some basic physics for a human skeleton that govern the camera system. That’s not that important anymore, it is applied in one instance though (you can’t spin the “virtual camera” around quickly, since your head can’t normally do that, it could of course maybe be applied when you’re in a narrow tunnel, since it would be possible for the avatar to spin around in such a place).

Anyways, this is in a way like the camerasystem for Beyond Good and Evil 2, but you control it yourself with 1:1 accuracy. This doesn’t mean that BGE2’s camerasystem is rendered obsolete, because they use it for a game that’s played from a 3D person view.
It’s pretty funny that you now have shaky cam camera style implemented at about the same time in games for both FPS games and 3D person adventure games. Technology and creativity converge.

This new control system is very VR. It’s everything that’s good about VR headsets, minus the bad, and the detrimental factors are pretty severe:

*having to wear a silly looking VR headset :P haha… 8-(
*cost of VR headset.
*having to look at a pair of screen displays that are very close to your eyes, making the viewer nearsighted within a week of “exposure” to the headset.

One thing people have to understand about motionlook. Every movement becomes inverted the second you “step into the semi circle facing the player”. Imagine that you strafe left and aim left to turn left in the game. Imagine that you contine turning the wiimote so that the aim “entered into the semi circle facing yourself”, and while you did this you continued to strafe left. The reason why everything “suddenly” inverts, is because the TV is stationary, that’s why. And that’s why motionlook isn’t as perfect as a VR headset, but then again, who cares? It’s a small price to pay for a control scheme that’s really just amazingly fun and immersive, and strafing and turning isn’t exactly cumbersome, and also, it’s still possible to do the quick turn into the “inverted semi circle” if a player felt for it (if you had to deal with a swarm of enemies for example).