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).

Controller Breaking Nerd Rage

Abric, the guest from Episode 52 of 5wowthings, sent me a link to a blog about throwing controllers. Some of you may know, as I finished Mass Effect 3 a week after it came out, I threw my controller across the room and it broke. This is the controller:

Doesn’t look very broken, now does it? I figure one of the little bits and bobs on the inside that they make in Japan and I don’t understand at all broke off and can be fixed by being soldered back on. I don’t have any idea how to do that, so I just use the other controller I own and this sits around as a paper weight.

No big deal. Well, there is this spot:

That’s where the paint tore when this got ripped off the wall by the flying controller:

It’s just a hook I use to hang stuff on. I have several and there’s about a foot of space between each so it’s damn good aim on my part. But to be honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve thrown a controller, or anything that is immensely pissing me off. I broke a flute once and my steering wheel receives a lot of abuse.

First Impressions: Record of Agarest War X Rated?

The Record of Agarest War is a tactical RPG made by Aksys Games for the Xbox 360. I have spent three hours in this game so far and I think I will really enjoy the rest of it. That is, if I ever pick it up again as it doesn’t have a draw to keep me engaged.

The graphics are very simple with all animations done as sprites, no cut scenes, and the best art being anime style, 2D portraits that players collect as the story progresses. This is in no way detracting from the game, but compared to other games it is certainly lacking something. The game play is phenomenal and the difficulty level is steadily increasing. So far, the terrain is a simple, even, square grid. Combination attacks can be created by using certain moves as well as with multiple characters which allows for plenty of strategy with moving characters, getting them to attack sooner, and combine damage to kill enemies.

Unfortunately, the map and travel system is rather outdated with the main character’s sprite moving from point to point along a set line and the word “event” over the dots if something related to the main story occurs there. It is really a shame because the expansive world is reduced to a boring looking map and occasional bland backgrounds during “cut scenes.” It is a stretch to call the scenes where the characters interact cut scenes because

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.

Mass Effect 3 – All the same colors

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read this blog if you care about being told the ending.

I loved this game, as you’ll know if you read my blog,  First Impressions – ME3. Every second was filled with a new choice, a new option, a new way to shape MY Mass Effect game. Yes, MY game. When you talk about ME 1, 2, or 3, you’ll see gamers tag “my” to the character names: “my Shepard, my Tali, my Kaiden, my Wrex.” We do this because up until the last ten minutes of this game, everything that’s taken place varies from one player to the next. My Tali and Garus hooked up, much to the shock and surprise of another ME3 player and that’s just one example of a very, very small difference.

If you follow me on twitter, you know how angry I was about the ending to this game. I’m still angry – seething, really – that I didn’t get a conclusion to my game; that the options I was given were nothing my Shepard would have ever picked, let alone ran towards in the end. Then I got in an argument with a guy who said the ending was amazing and we should stop bitching (by we I mean the 50,000 people who took a poll on EA’s Origin forums to say we hated the ending and want a better one). This blog is for you guys, for the ones who don’t get why we’re upset, why Child’s Play has raised a donation of over $45,000 in an effort to get Bioware to change the ending, and who think we need to grow up and get over it.

First I’d like to show you a little video

First Impressions – Mass Effect 3

As Mass Effect 3 loaded on my Xbox, I sat back, calmly waiting for the game to start. Of course, this was interrupted by three separate updates to the game and I got to sit for a long time before being able to click that New Game button. The first chime took me back to the very first time I played Mass Effect 1 and the excitement started. Who can forget that noise? Leaning forward eagerly, I waited for my port to go through but then my save from ME 2 didn’t port correctly and I got to spend ten minutes recreating my Jane Shepard from scratch (her nose still doesn’t look right).

So, finally, after nearly a half hour of waiting, the opening cut scene started – and I was hooked. As Commander Shepard once again, it was my job to smack the stupid Alliance Council into doing something about the nefarious Reaper threat. Did they listen to me? Well, they probably thought they should have all along when a Reaper blew the fuck out of the chambers we were in and killed them all.

Yes, that’s right, the game starts out with you nearly dying as Earth is attacked – no decimated – by the Reapers invading force. The little girl you were watching playing from your room? Oh, she’s dead. The friends and family of most of your crew? Them too. And in this game it’s not just being told, “Hey, we don’t stand a CHANCE against this enemy,” you see it firsthand. As I ran down the outside of the tower where I had been , I looked out to watch a Reaper ship zapping and blasting its way through a thriving metropolis, ship after ship dogfighting above me while molten meteors hurtled their way through the sky. Let me remind you, I’ve been playing for less than ten minutes thus far and ever since, the action hasn’t relented once.