Community Ubisoft press conference

By jalexbrown — June 14, 2010
Tags: e3-2010 press-conference ubisoft

My impressions of the Ubisoft keynote speech.

When Ubisoft started out their keynote, I wasn't quite sure what I was watching. I thought maybe I'd changed the channel and turned on the Stoner's Channel - but I hadn't; Ubisoft was just showing off Children of Eden, a super-trippy game that is supposed to be (I think) the spiritual successor to Rez. I might have been impressed, but I can't tell, because I had no idea what I was seeing. It was trippy - I'll give it that - but all I saw was some guy wailing his arms around and colorful blocks doing crazy things. I don't know about this Ubisoft; I mean, it was cool on the PS2, but really?

Next they showed Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood with a demo that looked amazing. Mind you I've never played either of the first two Assassin's Creed games, but this demo automatically made me want this game to come out already. There was just something about it that was so cool looking. In my opinion it seemed to have a bit of a Prince of Persia feel to it with the acrobatics and combat, but that's certainly nothing bad at all.

Then they showed Shaun White Skateboarding, which - okay, I really like the concept of this game; I think it sounds really cool to skate around and change the world. I think this has the potential to be the next-gen version of what a really cool Tony Hawk game could have been. To be completely honest I'm quite excited about this game, and that's saying a lot since I don't care much about skateboarding games.

Battle tag - what? That's not a video game at all. I'm not even really sure what to say about this - but I can only assume that you wouldn't care about it if I knew how to explain it. Where is the 'video' part of video game here?

Innergy? Wait a minute - where have I seen this before? Oh, I know...this was the Vitality Sensor that Nintendo showed off last year. Yes, that's right; you put it on your finger and it reads your vital information. Mind you it doesn't look there's any real game here. Where the battle tag crap lacked the 'video' part of video game, this lacks the 'game' part of video game. Okay, so moving on...

Next Ubisoft showed a couple Kinect games. One was Motion Sports, which dare I say is Wii Sports for the 360. I literally saw nothing here that impressed me, and nothing really that looked new at all. I'm not sure why Ubisoft expects anyone to care about this, especially since Microsoft had a nearly identical game they showed during their keynote speech. I'll pass.

Ugh, another fitness game?! They already showed off Your Shape: Fitness Evolved during the Microsoft keynote, but apparently they thought it was good enough to show again. Well guess what - they were wrong. In fact it wasn't worth showing off the first time. Next.

There was a little video for Raving Rabbids Travel in Time. None of this video was gameplay, so I'm having a hard time figuring out what kind of game this is. It's exclusively for the Wii, so my expectations are next to nil. But to be fair, I can't really say anything for certain, because all they showed was a gameplay-free trailer.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - this is what everyone wanted to see. And I'm glad to say that it didn't disappoint. There was a demo that looks freaking amazing. I really can't wait for this game to come out! I wasn't the least bit interested in this game before, but after seeing it in demo form...wow. There's a nice mixture of stealth and action. The graphics looked amazing, and this isn't even the final build. Just wow. The demo left me speechless.

They showed a demo of Driver: San Francisco next. I'm just...well, I remember the old Driver games; they weren't that great. Driver was a series that I was fine with being gone. I felt no need to see it brought back. But since it is being brought back, it looks...meh. You drive around doing cool chase scenes. It's pretty much what you'd expect, and it doesn't look like it offers much more than what you'd expect. This might be the perfect type of game for someone, but not me.

They showed a trailer of a game that is being called Project: Dust right now. The trailer doesn't really tell you much about the game, so I'm not sure of much about it. The premise was certainly interesting; it appears to be about some ancient civilization trying to survive or something of that nature. I'm not sure what genre of game this will be, but I think that if the gameplay can match the premise, it might just end up being pretty good.

Rayman has been gone for a while, so I'm surprised that we got to see Rayman: Origins. There's something you must know about this game if you didn't see the gameplay: it's freaking cute as hell, but that's not at all a bad thing. It really does look like it's a very charming game, and I think it looks like it could be one of those games that is just pure fun, which is something I've been wanting for a while.

ManiaPlanet isn't a game at all; it's a platform to allow people to make their own games. TrackMania is something that has been out for a while, and it's been quite popular. Now it's being branched out into a whole platform that will have TrackMania, ShooterMania, and QuestMania (racing, FPS, and RPG accordingly). This has that whole LittleBigPlanet feel to it where it's focusing on the gamers as creators. The problem I have with this is that most of us aren't game designers, and I don't want to have to sift through loads of crap from artistic wannabes to find one gem.

Apparently there's a Michael Jackson game of some sort. I don't know; some people came out and danced to Beat It. Whatever. Just Dance: Michael Jackson? Meh. I'd rather not Just Dance if it's all the same to Ubisoft.

Yeah, Ubisoft's keynote was just horrible. There were a few interesting games, and a few great looking games, but...there was just too much that disappointed me. I'm feeling that Ubisoft is becoming one of the major advocates of casual gaming. With things like Innergy in the pipeline, I'm just...I can't get behind Ubisoft on this. Terrible. Tsk, tsk.

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Community Ubisoft press conference

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