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15 jul. 2008

E3 2008: Day 1

Since I’m not in one of those periods when I think I can make Beware The Frog into your one-stop shop for all news and commentary about video games, I’ll just focus on the few bits I have an opinion about.

Let’s start with the general aspect of the Xbox’s software redesign: in an unexpected move, Microsoft finally ships a product that really looks like a consumer electronics device rather than a computer (wait, I forgot the Zune 2 — but who doesn’t?). It looks like there might be more “clicks” to access some options, but everything’s prettier, friendlier, more accessible. A very definite win.

On the other hand, there are those avatars who completely look like upscaled miis (even the eye choices are the same; I suppose going all-out anime would have unsettled the more hardcore audience) and have mostly fugly faces; I hope I can buy a 200-point Cylon mask at some point (or a Spartan helmet for lack of a better option).

It’s nice that Microsoft was able to take all of Home’s much-touted functionality and ship it in a nice, straightforward menu system, but it’s still puzzling that there wouldn’t be a real virtual universe for your avatars: what’s the point then? As much as I dislike Home (more for the undiscriminating hype it initially received than its real capabilities), it doesn’t make that much sense to give you avatars if you’re not going to have any place for them to… I don’t know, walk? It’s okay for the Wii because, well, it’s a cheap piece of crap really, so you don’t expect much, but Microsoft’s avatars should definitely find better stuff to do than sit around in Scene-It. If our customization options for the new Xbox are more constrained than gamerpics and blade themes used to be, we should at least get to actually play with our new toys.

Among the less important additions to the new firmware (support for 1680x1050 is nice, although I’m surprised it wasn’t there already), I’m really interested in the ability to copy games to the hard drive and play them from there: if the PS3 game installs are not any indication, that should give much better performance to some games. (Because, unlike the PS3, all games will still be designed to work from the DVD, so the hard drive’s speed could only be beneficial.) A great motivation to buy an overpriced 60GB hard drive, hoping the new functionality works with existing titles — which it should, if they were clever when they designed the console

 

As for games… well, nothing spectacular, really:

  • The Gears of War 2 CG trailer is a missed opportunity: it could have been in-engine and look almost as good

  • The Halo Wars CG trailer, even though it has absolutely no relation to the gameplay, seems to prove that you can actually make something gritty, realistic and modern in the Halo universe, and Halo 3 didn’t need to look like it was powered by Playskool

  • I like how the new Mirror’s Edge gameplay trailer picks up exactly where the previous one left off, but other than that it doesn’t show much of interest (and the final song makes me wonder if EA might actually screw it up after all)

  • Fallout 3 looks kinda pretty, but it still has some of that Oblivion-ness that I can’t quite describe but deters me from playing it (more apparent in the live demo, but the video quality is not representative of the game’s graphics)

  • The Fable 2 “pub games” (Keystone, Spinner, Tower of Fortune), which you can play in-game or on XBLA to earn gold, seem to all rely on chance, which is stupid (and the live demo didn’t show anything new, apart from a wife speaking at the door for ten minutes while the players were elsewhere)

  • I don’t know what Hydrophobia is, but it’s a pity Bioshock didn’t have that technology

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