With the video game industry’s largest trade show over, it’s time to wrap up some of the highlights. We’ll start with the biggest surprises that VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi and I saw at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
But Tomb Raider is not the only franchise to receive a second look. Square Enix also showed off Deus Ex: Human Revolution at E3 this year — though it doesn’t look anywhere near as impressive as Tomb Raider, which is also a Square Enix title. Still, it looks like a very solid game and should please fans of the original Deus Ex series, which was critically acclaimed and came out more than a decade ago.
There were a number of other franchise reboots, such as the Spyro series, that also look quite good. Even though game developers aren’t coming up with radically new franchises, it looks like they are working a lot of magic on existing concepts that should delight gamers of any type.
The best example was when Microsoft demonstrated Mass Effect 3 on stage at its press conference last Monday. Instead of shouting at a teammate, like the psychic-like biotic Liara, for doing something stupid, I can tell her to quickly run behind cover while I continue laying the smack-down on an oncoming enemy that’s marching through my line of fire. It gives gamers a whole new way to interact with hardcore games like first-person shooters (FPS) that still rely on typical controllers. And it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the rest of the game.
Dust 514 is much like other FPS games at first, dropping players into closed matches that consist of team-based matches with certain objectives like capturing a position or eliminating the opposing team. Each match that a Dust 514 player participates in is actually a contract created by an EVE Online player, a completely separate game that features tactical space combat and lots of player-driven politics. The squads on the planet’s surface can also fire artillery into space to damage ships in EVE Online, and ships in the EVE Online universe can initiate orbital strikes on the planet’s surface to help Dust 514 players.
They are two completely different games. EVE Online is geared towards hardcore MMO players and the average play session lasts around 3 hours. Dust 514 is a game for FPS gamers that only have 10 or 20 minutes to play. But they exist in the same universe and regularly interact with each other, creating an experience another MMO game has yet to match.
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I got a chance to try out a demo of the game at E3 this year and it looks like the game will feature something for both fans of the original Sonic games and the over-the-shoulder style gameplay featured in Sonic Adventure. The levels are well-designed and there are enough breaks in the action for clever platforming that each mission feels like a blast to play. And better yet, the level design harks back to the old days of Sonic the Hedgehog, with multiple pathways to the finish line and secrets hidden throughout each level that give players an incentive to be both quick and clever.
The PlayStation Vita will have games like Uncharted and LittleBigPlanet, two games from critically-acclaimed franchises that haven’t come to handheld devices yet because the devices simply weren’t powerful enough. The games look just as good as their PlayStation 3 counterparts and feature some additional controls courtesy of the device’s design. The PlayStation Vita has a touchscreen, a motion sensor and a camera, and the back of the device also has a touch pad that players can use to interact with some games. For example, when playing LittleBigPlanet, players can touch the back of the device to push objects in the background into the foreground of the game.
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The Contra series is significant because it was a landmark series for Nintendo that sold several thousand copies of the game and helped push the original Nintendo into popularity. It’s also the first game that featured the “Konami Code,” a continuing trope in pop culture that basically every gamer has memorized to this day.
Sony, however, is taking a different approach with NBA 2K12, the latest iteration of 2K Games’ basketball franchise. Players take control of a single player with the main controller and point the PlayStation Move, Sony’s version of a motion controller, at the screen to direct a cursor across the court. If players want to pass the ball, they point to the player they want to pass to and hit a button. If players want to go for a steal, they point at the person carrying the ball and press a button. The controls are surprisingly intuitive — enough so that NBA star Kobe Bryant was able to play the game and go toe-to-toe with the Miami Heat, this years’ runner up in the NBA Finals.
Brothers in Arms: Furious Four is the coolest World War 2 game this year — It seems like there’s a new FPS game based on World War 2 just about every year, and this year was no exception. Except this time, Gearbox studios — the team behind Brothers in Arms: Furious Four — decided to take a few creative liberties with the story of World War 2, much like Quentin Tarantino did last year with the critically acclaimed film Inglorious Bastards.
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Brothers in Arms: Furious Four puts players in control of a member of the Furious Four, a rag-tag team of misfits that are on a mission to kill Adolf Hitler and end World War 2. The art style is a lot like Team Fortress 2 in that it consists of very bright colors and vivid environments, along with a bunch of comic weapons and elements. For example, one character in Furious Four can throw down a bear trap that has a grenade attached to it and mows down Nazis with a minigun. The game supports four-person co-operative play.
Be sure to check out VentureBeat for a full wrap up of the show and some of the crazier things we saw last week.
