And Ubisoft Takes the Prize – E3 News

E3 over the last two days has been a flurry of news and information. While it’s not over yet, all of the big press conferences are over. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, and Ubisoft held major press conferences and wowed, or bored, crowds with their presentations. Here’s what I thought stood out during each.

Microsoft came out with a presentation for the next Halo. My opinion is the game will be mediocre now that the old team is no longer developing it, but time will tell how good it really is. They also announced the release date, November 6, so we won’t even have to wait that long.

Next was the announcement of the new Splinter Cell which attempted to demo voice commands via Kinect. It didn’t come off so well. The developer playing the game knew the commands, but it’s going to take some heavy tutorials to get players using them as smoothly as a button press. The guys from Madden came in afterwards, though, and they showed how Kinect voice can really be utilized.

First Impressions: Game of Thrones RPG

Game of Thrones is an action RPG for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 published by Atlus and co-written by George R.R. Martin, the brains behind the books that have spawned all this craziness. My first criticism of this game is: Not as many boobs as advertised. Moving on from my tits fetish (Don’t judge me, you have one too), this game is phenomenal story wise, okay game play wise, but crashes and burns with animation.

See this?

Apparently people hate staring at that guy. The biggest criticism of this game is the animations during the multitude of cut scenes. This head (and the others belonging to people you talk to) doesn’t move much, has one expression (or has an intense expression that doesn’t match the dialogue), and his lips don’t match his words. In other words, it’s Elder Scrolls: Oblivion all over again. But people loved that game! So why do they hate this game?

My opinion is the criticism from this game come from people expecting more action from their action RPG. I can’t blame them for that, nor can I say that the animation isn’t shitty, because the animation is shitty. What I can do is call them immensely silly for expecting anything that has even the loosest ties to the Game of Thrones franchise to not have expansive dialogue, story, and cut scenes. Atlus would have been better off comparing this game to L.A. Noire or Heavy Rain as it’s closer to that style of game play than the Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age.

So far, this game is mostly what I expected: lots of people talking, less so me killing things. I actually cleaned my living room, set up my file cabinet and organized my files all while listening to the fully voice acted dialogue during cut scenes for the first three chapters. All this chatter is broken up by your own conversation selections and combat, but there’s still so much that it’s like listening to T.V. (I don’t watch T.V., I listen to it – stop judging me).

ME3 Jan’s Way

I posted this in response to Lodur’s blog, ME3 and why the ending is fine as is. He challenged the critics of ME3s ending to write something better. Challenge accepted. I encourage you, if you’re as annoyed by this as I am, to also comment on his blog with your ending. He wrote a good post; I just disagree with him.

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Fine. Even though I am not a fiction writer, a game writer, or a writer of anything but my opinion, I’ll take a shot at this because I think they could have given us something that reflected our paths throughout the game like they promised. I’m not making a special cut scene for people who got 5k+ military strength. This is because I am lazy and I’m not getting paid for this shit.

So let’s get into this: Anderson is dead and Shepard is dying. Everyone Shepard loves, has ever known, everything that has ever mattered to him is about to be destroyed because Hackett needs him to do something. The Crucible isn’t working. No one knew what it was supposed to do in the first place, so what the hell is he supposed to do?

Crawling forward, he tries anyways. With the last of his strength

In Before It’s Out: Game of Thrones (RPG)

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m an Atlus fan girl. I have loved everything of theirs that I’ve ever gotten my hands on for its rich stories and realistic characters – even the ones who never speak. Yet, when it comes to the Game of Thrones phenomenon, I’ve been disinterested – after reading the first two books, the third stalled out and I never finished it, so the T.V. show never seemed like something I would enjoy.

Then I heard there was going to be a Game of Thrones RPG for the Xbox and the PS3. My first thought was someone was trying to cash in on the name for the sake of making some money. And then I heard that someone is Atlus. This caught my attention with an immediate reaction of, “Oh God, I have to have it!” I settled down after a few days and decided to do some research into just what I was going to be paying for; I was not impressed. The videos showed half-assed graphics and declared one of those “Play as four different characters” games which always suggests to me that they couldn’t come up with a good enough story to run with only one set of characters. At the time, they had only released two of the story zones and I was sorely disappointed.

Today, Atlus sent me an email telling me to take a first look at the combat for their Game of Thrones RPG. What the hell, I thought and pulled up the video. As the video wound down I was both surprised this was the same game and again excited to get my hands on it.