Day one E3 thoughts – Kinect looks okay, EA has some decent stuff coming, what is in the water at Ubisoft???

Woohoo! More gaming shit! Especially for those of you who have sat through the approximately 7,300 thoughts I’ve had on Twitter today regarding the show. And as an added treat, I’m re-using some of those tweets here. Warmed over stuff…YEAH! It’s only a few more days…SUCK IT UP.

Microsoft – Main announcement, aside from more sequels (Liked it before? You’ll like it again! Sequel City! Gears of War 3! Call of Duty 79!) it was all about Project Kinect. This is their motion sensing system that they used to call Natal until deciding that product name wasn’t quite shitty enough. It’s a full body motion system, so the movements of every part of you are tracked. During this part of the show was uttered one of the most disturbing sentences that I think I’ve ever heard…

‘Kinect watches your skeleton as you move’

That phrase terrifies me. Anyway, they then showed some ESPN integration that has some cool features. Because Kinect also has voice integration, you can actually ask for a replay…and you get one. Not sure if this is for both live AND taped events, but that’s pretty cool. Now if they’ll just integrate a telestrator using the 360 control pad…

Kinect Sports…geee, this seems like a TOTALLY ORIGINAL TITLE CONCEPT. I have to actually RUN?! I hate running in real life!

Honestly, the level of physical activity required by a lot of these games seems unlikely to be popular. A hurdles event where you have to sprint in place and jump repeatedly? Is this fun?

Next up was basically a dance game version of Guitar Hero.

Nothing sells a dance game like geeky, pasty white dudes gittin’ down to the phat beats.

Seriously. Picture the most awkward dancer you’ve ever seen (if it isn’t me, I pity the one who it is)…now make that person worse, sweaty and bustin’ moves in front of thousands of people.

Next up was a Star Wars game with light saber battles and force powers and everything using the Kinect. Most impressive of all was how they took such a cool concept and rendered it down in to something so dull and uninteresting to watch. I suspect the direct involvement of George Lucas.

Also a bit weird about Kinect is that it randomly takes pictures of you while you’re playing. So now it’s watching my skeleton and taking my picture…?

Then they showed off the new 360. Smaller, lighter, quieter (which is good. The one I have sounds like a goddamn fighter jet revving up it’s engines for takeoff when I start it) with double the hard drive space and high end wi-fi. Pretty sweet.

EA – They started with the 377th incarnation of a Need for Speed game, essentially revisiting the whole cops vs. criminals chase mechanic they had in that one about 44 editions back. Well, they did after they rebooted it when it crashed the system at first.

The new Medal of Honour, set in modern Afghanistan, sounds good. The entire UI is wholly ripped off from the CoD : Modern Warfare series, though.

Then a 20 second clip for an expansion for Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam that consisted of helicopters, some Vietnamese people, an airstrike and CCR music. Yeah, really giving a lot away with that. What the fuck was the point?

Next up, EA Sports MMA. Apparently you’ll be able to create fighters and fight online. More than that, you can cut promos with a webcam and upload those. Catch the eye of the EA MMA crew and your fights will be broadcast across the game network, and you can win real life stuff. They also mentioned some sort of real commentary for these fights but I can’t see how that can possibly happen.

Madden. Apparently it’s simpler and yet deeper, and the best way to explain the new play calling system is to bring out Joe Montana and have him awkwardly talk about his days in the NFL and what Bill Walsh was like. Color me confused.

Am I the only one sick of the ‘EA Sports…it’s in the game!’ tough voice guy?

Next up was some uncomfortable dude talking about Greek philosophy while a Sims 3 logo bounced around on the big screen behind him. He went on for 4 minutes. He showed stuff that has existed since the game released last year. Then he briefly mentioned the console version coming soon and left. What the Hell was that?

Congratulations, EA. This blathering guy has just put the entire audience to sleep. An interesting presentation goal, I’ll give you that.

Finally, out come the Epic Games crew. They tried to show how XTREME!!!! they truly are by cursing a lot. Some girl going on about “You do a bunch of cool shit in the game to unlock more cool shit that you can do later on.” would normally be kind of entertaining, but I just found it tiresome here. Then they showed Bulletstorm, which was apparently written by a 13 year old boy. Lots of bullets, heroes who can survive hundred foot falls on to metal platforms, and more bullets. Also…weird, weird lines.

‘You scared the dick off me?’ That’s the dialogue you’re bringing to the table? Really, Bulletstorm?

That was the first of 3 or 4 dick related lines within about half a minute. Odd.

Ubisoft – You know how some movies apparently work better if you smoke up before watching? This presentation might fall in to the same category.

It starts well enough, with a music game using Kinect called Child of Eden that looked like a blend between Beat Hazard, Geometry Wars and some sort of puzzle game.

LOL. The “What’s that noise?” “Nothing baby…don’t worry.” horror movie bit brought in to Assassin’s Creed. Nice.

Seriously. The main character and some honey are in bed, she hears something and he insists it’s a training exercise. Actually, it’s a full battery cannon attack on his villa. The melee fighting mechanics look badass, though.

Now things took a turn towards the what the fuck. Out comes Shaun White to talk about his new skateboarding game. A minute in to talking to host Joel McHale, some guys come out and set up a bunch of white boxes…I don’t know why. It seemed like neither Shaun nor Joel had a fucking clue, either. The boxes just sat there for the next 45 minutes.

So they finally get in to the game. You skateboard around a city, but you remake the map as you go, skating on the corporate propaganda to bring the city back to life. Seriously.

What the fuck? So…you skateboard out ‘propaganda’ and it makes trees grow? Taking on ‘the man’…man

How high were the developers during the concept meeting for Shaun White Skateboarding? This is pretty much crap.

Well, things have to go up from here, right? HA!

All of a sudden, the confused audience has very bad laser tag players in their midst, shooting and half assedly running around. The ‘creator’ finally gets to the stage after a good minute of this shit.

Battle Tag. Essentially a rebirth of Laser Tag that needs a console. This guy didn’t create anything, he resurrected a long dead concept.

Yeah. It’s laser tag guns with integration in to a console. This was followed by a 5 minute demonstration of some dumb as fuck target shooting exercise, and the announcement that you can share the content…

I can share the content…I’m already doing that by running around the neighbourhood shooting people with laser pistols! What the FUCK?

Finally, this horrible mess came to an end. It was during this bit that McHale just started mocking the whole thing, because he sensed that the audience had turned ugly. I don’t think a single person had a clue what in the Hell was going on. It got worse.

“Not only about having fun, but also about feeling well.” Call me crazy, but with that intro I am expecting complete crap.

SHOCKINGLY, my premonition was correct. Guy with weird hair sets up Joel in a relaxed position with some body monitors that will show us what is happening ‘inside the gamer’. The screen fills with a track showing the breathing Joel needs to do to follow the exercise while rainbows float in the background. It was like some hideous video love child of a hippie and a Care Bear.

I am honestly watching footage of a man doing breathing exercises to a picture of rainbows. I have no words…no words…

By this point, the audience is doing nothing more than supplying those polite claps. A kid could have walked out on stage and taken a shit for everyone to see, and he would have gotten bigger applause.

Next up…some weird vignette of various Ubi employees talking about how the body is a resource for game developers, and how they’re going back to the beginning and…ugh. Then there was yet another Wii Sports rip-off. Out of the minute spent to pimp this game, maybe 3 seconds showed game play. The other 57 showed the bad actors ‘playing’ the game. I don’t know why that was what Ubisoft apparently felt we wanted to see.

Then they showed a fitness game that had already been shown during the Microsoft event. I don’t know who ‘celebrity trainer Michael George’ is, but he was apparently one of the fitness gurus behind this and Ubi sure played on his name. Note to Ubi…game geeks don’t tend to spend a ton of time at the gym with trainers…NOBODY HERE KNOWS WHO THIS PERSON IS. I do know that he is HORRIBLE at trying to make those bad canned speech bits used on stage shows seem life like. He might be a droid.

New Ghost Recon looks interesting. Joel McHale couldn’t be happier to be talking about an actual game.

Seriously. It does look potentially pretty cool. And seriously, I really thought dude was going to burst in to tears at one point. I expected a shouted “HALLELUJAH!” as he dropped to his knees in reverence.

Next up, a new Driver game. All I have to say here is…

Note to Ubisoft guy…the main character from Driver and the villain from Driver 2 probably can’t be described as ‘historic characters’.

Seriously. I just watched 4 minutes talking about them, and I can’t name them. One weird part of the game is that if the bad guy loses you in a car chase, you can apparently just magically and immediately ‘shift’ in to any other car on the road. Ummm…what? Are you the Matrix?

Then out comes the Ubi CEO. First he shows a video for a game called Dust that he’s very excited by. Nothing is explained. I don’t know who’s in it, what they’re doing or even what kind of game it is. Utterly pointless waste of time. Next up, a rebirth of the Rayman franchise? Did anyone miss Rayman? Really? And there’s no Raving Rabbids here, because they have their own Wii-exclusive game coming where they travel through time.

“ManiaPlanet…where you create your own PC game experiences, because Ubisoft can’t be bothered to.”

I’m very proud of that line…I think it’s pretty funny. Anyway, it’s a multi-genre take on Trackmania, where the content is built by the users. Didn’t really get explained in any way at all, though.

Finally…

Michael Jackson…the game. They’re explaining nothing about it. Just a bunch of people on stage dancing to Beat It. Again…WTF?

And that’s all that happened. With the name Michael Jackson on the big screen, 6 supposedly professional dancers (they were execrable) danced to Beat It, then the show was over.

The whole Ubi event can really be summed up by one tweet from Drew Dalby.

@Dalby Microsoft’s E3 presser was good, informative. EA had some good reveals. Ubisoft punched themselves in the dick for 90 minutes.

Anyway, if you feel like joining in and watching, the channel I watched is here. The live schedule for tomorrow is (this is in Pacific time) :

- 9:00 AM Nintendo Media Briefing
- 12:00 PM Sony Media Briefing
- 1:00 PM TBA (To Be Announced)
- 1:20 PM TBA
- 1:40 PM TBA
- 2:00 PM Microsoft Xbox 360 Demo (TBA)
- 2:20 PM Microsoft Xbox 360 Demo (TBA)
- 2:40 PM Ubisoft Demo (TBA)
- 3:00 PM Crysis 2
- 3:20 PM Ubisoft Demo (TBA)
- 3:40 PM Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2
- 4:00 PM Madden NFL 11
- 4:20 PM Sony Move – Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11
- 4:40 PM NCAA Football 11
- 5:00 PM EA Sports MMA
- 5:20 PM Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
- 5:40 PM Halo: Reach