E3 Wrap Up

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 9 June, 2012

Wii U

Reaction to the Wii U and the software shown for it was tepid. The enthusiast press were underwhelmed, but then many of them were also underwhelmed by the DS and the Wii, which sold great.

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Games

There were a fair amount of games people were excited about (Halo 4, The Last of Us, Dishonored, Star Wars 1313; Watch Dogs). A few of them will release this year. A few others were not given release dates and looked too good to work on current consoles, lending credence to rumors that MS and Sony will release new hardware next year. And trapped in between are the many, many games aiming to release in early 2013. It'll be a rough first quarter, methinks.

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Tech

John Carmack likes to take a break between games to do research, often revisiting old ideas that weren't ready for prime time. Roughly 15 years ago he looked into VR headset technology and decided it wasn't practical. After Rage he decided to give it another look and believes he can make something awesome. It's still in the early stages, but within a year or two we may all look this cool.



Also, Unreal Engine 4 has a lot of snazzy features. Epic games has said that they're pushing the console manufacturers to make sure they provide hardware powerful enough to support all this new chrome.

Nintendo Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 5 June, 2012

Nintendo's press conference is hard for me to judge, as I'm not their target demographic. Sure, they showed some stuff for core gamers. And I guess you could say they did as well as Sony in that regard. They didn't have as many interesting games, but factor in the novelty of Wii U controls, and it's about equal.

They showed a zombie game from Ubisoft which could turn out gimmicky or delightful, depending on how much polish they can give it. (concept video)

I'll be curious to read the reviews of Batman: Arkham City for the Wii U. (concept video) Most of the "additions" look pretty dubious, but I'll reserve judgement.

Depending how these games turn out, I might eventually be interested in owning a Wii U.

But, again, I'm not the target. The question is if this new system will have the same mass market appeal as the Wii. I checked the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, USA Today, and the LA Times (which didn't even have an article).

Nobody knows. The New York Times columnist (Seth Schiesel) gave a tentative thumbs up, but everyone else either had no guess or asked the opinions of enthusiast press people who are the wrong demographic.

Addendum (3:30pm): There's a well loved horror franchise called Fatal Frame where you have to survive in a haunted environment with only a camera to defend yourself. If there's no Wii U sequel / homage to Fatal Frame, the gaming industry as a whole has failed.

Sony Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 5 June, 2012

I'll be brief. Sony showed some games. Some of them looked good. They gave even less lip service to the Vita than I thought they would.

For me personally, it was slightly better than Microsoft's press conference because they weren't pushing MS Smart Glass.

Microsoft Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 4 June, 2012

Better With Kinect

To demonstrate Kinect voice commands, a player speaks to make a character in an action game call in an air strike. Audibles are called in sports games. These are not bad things, but it only takes some simple math to prove they aren't worthwhile.

Publishers believe that the money Microsoft pays them to make voice commands for Kinect only is more than the extra copies they would sell (across all platforms) if they gave everyone with a headset access to this "amazing new feature".

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Live Anywhere 2

Announcing MS Smart Glass! Yep, Microsoft's cross device initiative that died on the vine in 2006 is back and so withered it's hardly recognizable.

In 2006 Microsoft was talking about the future of games. Buy once, play on any device. Edit your race cars on your PC and phone, then race them on the Xbox. Play multiplayer games across all supported platforms. It was ambitious and cool.

If the 2012 edition succeeds in every way, it will be a dismal failure by 2006's standards. Microsoft's lead feature was being able to pick up watching a movie on your TV from where you left off watching it on your mobile device. They'll save you the two seconds it took to read and remember the time index and the three seconds it takes you to skip ahead on your TV.

The rest of the features (supplementary info during video viewing and gaming, using the tablet as a controller, web browsing) were also uninteresting.

Maybe they think a little tablet integration will make people ignore the Wii U, but that's wasted effort. The Wii U will sink or swim based on software designed for it's unique abilities.

As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft had nothing to show this year.

It's E3 Time Again

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 2 June, 2012

The industry trade and press show known as E3 will be starting soon.

Nintendo

Their new console, the Wii U, was announced at E3 last year. It's roughly as powerful as a 360 or PS3, but in addition to supporting Wii motion controls, it has a dual stick controller with a large touch screen on it.



The performance bump is nice for developers because it becomes easier to create a game that will run on all three consoles. But the Wii U isn't going to succeed because it can play the same games as everyone else. Nintendo needs to show consumers and retailers the software that will distinguish the Wii U.

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Sony

The number of of Sony's game announcements that were leaked ahead of their E3 2011 press conference became comical. Outside of Naughty Dog's latest (and the slim possibility of an appearance by The Last Guardian), there doesn't seem to be any game the press are universally hyped about. Hopefully this just means Sony improved their security.

Sony's trying to get traction with Vita, their new portable system. According to gamesindustry.biz Sony will be bringing PS1 and PS2 games to the PS3 and possibly Vita using the Gaikai cloud gaming platform. That could put a lot of good, cheap games on the Vita for people with reliable mobile internet connections who don't mind a bit of lag.

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Microsoft

Microsoft claims to have a number of world exclusive game announcements at their press conference. I'm betting more than half of them are Kinect titles.

Microsoft will lie about how much they care about Windows gaming, as they always do when they roll out a new OS. Just remember that over the last two years (2010 and 2011) Microsoft published four games for the PC and sixteen games for the Xbox. (source)

And they will apparently be making another push for Live Anywhere, the cross device connectivity initiative that, to my knowledge, hasn't moved the needle since it was announced at E3 2006.

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Also everyone will probably announce new / enhanced music, video, and social media features / partnerships. I said it before, and I'll say it again: this overpriced generation was about conquering the living room (except for Nintendo). The question at this point is whether Smart TVs (with OnLive and Netflix integration, for example) can eventually cut the consoles out of the equation.

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You may recall that I predicted MS and Sony console announcements at E3 this year. Barring a miracle, I was wrong. Sony almost certainly isn't announcing anything, and according to Arthur Gies of Rebel FM, Microsoft was planning an early announcement to steal a bit of Nintendo's thunder but had to call it off for some reason. Hey, if it means Microsoft's new hardware won't require over a billion dollars of repair work, I say delay it two years. :P