Wow! E3! Why don't I care!?

Last year's E3 was a big deal. The Wii was announced. Sony looked like tools. MS was showing they were ready to take advantage of Sony's toolfoolery.

This year's E3 was an even bigger deal because there were actual games.

So why don't I care?

Part of it's simply a lack of new announcements. Microsoft even went out of their way to only promo games coming this fall.

Part of it's just me being jaded. I have played first person shooters regularly since DooM. I don't care how good it looks. I don't care if I can knife a dinosaur or punch through the roof of a shanty or slide down a bannister. Been there. Done that. Done better (in Hulk: Ultimate Destruction). Plus that's all fine and good for a demo, but I'm jaded enough I don't buy almost anything until the reviews are in and there's a good post release buzz going.

Part of it's me falling out of gaming. I'm not a gamer anymore. I play WoW. That's not gaming. That's a chat room with collectibles. I dinged 60 and got my epic mount on Saturday, July 7th. Nobody cares.

I'm playing Manhunt, when I'm not too bored. It's gory, but it's all canned animations, so it can't really surprise. And it's stealth, so it's dull.

I'm trying (desperately) to finish PoP 2, which I started six months ago and got completely bored with. Combat has a fair amount of options, but counterattacking makes 80% of them not worth exploring. Sometimes the hardest part of the game is seeing where you're supposed to go next. Plus the memory of the horrble chase section and bug that make me put the game down in the first place is still leaving a bitter taste in my brain.

Heh. I'm not just jaded. I'm bitter.

I dropped Company of Heroes. I'm telling myself it's because my PC can't handle it, but the truth is the first mechanized map requires way too much micromanagement. Plus the game punishes excellence. I kicked ass on one of the early maps, using very few troops. Then the next map I have to defend against a massive assault on a map I haven't even taken all of with way too few guys. It was bullshit and not fun.

Just Cause is another upgrade postponement. It ran like crap, but from what I could play, the experience was pretty uneven.

But enough of the old stuff. Let's talk about the new stuff.

Mass Effect. Considering I got bored of fetch quests and quit KOTOR after a couple hours, I'm not sold.

Bioshock. Yeah. That'll be good. I'm a sucker for that type of game. I even liked dicking with the guards in Invisible War.

Crysis. At least a new PC away, and Far Cry sucked. I had to manually edit the game's script files (NPCs do full damage to each other and mutants do much less damage) to make that game worth playing, and it still wasn't what I'd call good.

Blacksite. The original Area 51 was good, if a little generic. It's really hard to tell if this will be better or worse as they're trying to do some perhaps overly ambitious work with squad AI.

Stranglehold. Everyone compares this to Max Payne, which sucked. Half the time you'd dive through a door and be instantly dead from a guy hiding behind the door with a shotgun. Hopefully Stranglehold is less random.

Wii Fit and the balance board. You know, this time last year I was crazy excited about the Wii. Everything from MS and Sony looked like the same shit, only shinier. The Wii could actually let games feel more interactive, almost like you could touch them. To quote William Shatner, "it hasn't happened yet". I'll write a whole article about this later. Maybe after I finally break down and buy a stupid Wii.

Little Big Planet. There's a huge amount of excitement around this game. I see a lot of fail. My impressions of physics based platforming (from N and Gish) is that it takes the really tight mechanics of the games I loved, and trades them for "realism" I didn't want. And letting the community make the levels and gadgets is just another way of saying there's no game there.

So maybe this is just a cry for help, but I'm bored senseless with E3.