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E3 2012 Press conferences disappointing, sleep inducing

By BatRastered — June 13, 2012
Tags: blog e3-2012 wildrant

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A review/rant about the big three press conferences leading up to this year's E3 event. Was there ever a more lackluster display from MS, Sony, and Nintendo?

Microsoft

The MS press conference started off with a bang, Halo 4! I didn't have super high hopes for Halo 4 since it is no longer a Bungie game and switching dev teams is rarely a good sign, plus the fact that there have already been 5 games in this series, plus the recent re-release of the original as an HD remake... The series was feeling tired. 343 came through in a big way with this demo though, it looked new and exciting again and the HUD design reminded me of the Metroid Prime series. Then we got to see Kinect integration in the new Splinter Cell game (saying "Hey, over here!" to get the guard's attention was cool).

They should have ended the show there. We were then bombarded with pre-scripted celebrity gameplay (Joe Montana scoring a touchdown right when the teleprompter said he would on Madden), a bunch of dashboard and app news (control your screen with your phone, yet another music store, etc),  and an Usher concert for one of the dancing games. The final highlight of the show was Trey Parker and Matt Stone coming out and making fun of the previous presentations while introducing their South Park game. Of course, that's a third party multi-platform game so I hardly count that towards MS news. They ended with a Call of Duty trailer... What?

3/5 Z's + 1 scripted touchdown

Sony

When they showed the two new characters for Playstation All-Stars Battle Royal (Drake and the Big Daddy) they only teased at them. Normal, I guess they'll be shown at a later date... Nope, they're playable on the show floor. What? Why didn't they show that during the conference? Only Sony...

We saw Beyond: Two Souls by the makers of Heavy Rain... this one stars Ellen Paige. This is a QTE driven movie... some people like this, I'd prefer you just make a movie if that's what you want to do. Bored.

Sony spend a bunch of time showing off Assassin's Creed 3 for both the PS3 and Vita. GoukiJones fell asleep twice during the boat scene, exclaiming on waking up the second time "They're still on the boats!?!?". Third party games at the big three press conferences are always a bit of a WTF moment unless they are showing off some "better with Kinect" type of stuff. It's double weird for an Ubisoft game as they have their own conference.

Sony also had a new God of War game, which looks a lot like previous GoW games... not that that's a bad thing, but still, show me something new.

Then came the WonderBook, a collaboration between Sony and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. It uses the Move to create an augmented reality version of the physical book in your lap to... well, I'm not really sure what the point is, it certainly didn't look fun if that's what they were going for. This demo went on for what seemed like 20+ minutes. I tweeted "OMG END THIS DEMO ALREADY" during it. GoukiJones slept through this entire portion... he never saw it. Lucky him.

Finally, the lone highlight at least for me, we get to see more of Naughty Dog's new game "The Last of Us", this one does NOT star Ellen Paige, though the character looks like her and is named Ellie, causing all sorts of confusion. This game looks a bit like a cross between Uncharted and Resident Evil but had some cool twists.

4/5 Z's + 1 OMG END THIS!

Nintendo

Allow me to quote myself from our E3 awards story:

Nintendo Media Briefing: First of all, which one? Nintendo had 3 confusing conferences. It started on Sunday with an online show of Iwata talking about the Wii-U hardware. He showed off what had changed on the gamepad from what was shown last year, and announced the “Pro” controller (which looks a lot like an Xbox controller). On Tuesday, we got the full on conference which started off with Miyamoto showing us Pikmin 3, followed by Reggie telling us they were just going to talk games today and not announce Wii-U specs, release date, or price. There was a demo of Arkham City’s “Armored Edition” for the Wii-U where you could have heard a pin drop people were so bored. Then they came out to talk about the 3DS, saying we’ve only got time to show you a few things, but there will be ANOTHER online press conference for just the 3DS (ugh!) people seemed bored by the short 3DS demos shown. Then there was the WTF moment of Nintendoland which ended the show twice (I don’t know how to explain it other than once you thought it was over, Reggie comes out says it’s over, goodbye, etc.. but here’s more Nintendoland then it shows some rendered fireworks as the lights come up, WTF?)

Yeah, that about sums it up.

4/5 Z's + 1 WTF

I can't really declare a winner here... they were all terrible. Outside of the big 3, Ubisoft had a good conference if only because of Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell.

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[UPDATED] Jun 13, 2012 12:08:30 PM

Jun 13, 2012 by BatRastered

Don't forget to check out our E3 2012 Wrap-Up podcast for more takes on all this and more.

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