Stuff That Happened At E3 ’09: Tuesday 2nd June

Well well, Tuesday was a blast wasn’t it? All of the announcements, trailers, and tech demos left me in convulsions and frothing at the mouth for the better part of 5 hours. The two main events of that day were undoubtedly the Nintendo and Sony conferences (live blogged here and here respectively.) Individual recap for Sony here and Nintendo here.

Before we delve into those let’s cover the off-stage bits and pieces;

• Zephyr exists. A game about smashing things with the weather.
• Shiren The Wanderer is an RPG on the Wii that doesn’t look like it has many minigames in it. Meaning it is rubbish because everyone loves those.
• Old classic Perfect Dark will be coming to the XBL marketplace. Gandy soils himself with glee.
• Predators are predatory and Aliens are alien in Alien vs Predator.
• Face shooting and free running are finally brought together in Brink.
• APB is customise-tastic!
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories still weaponless; still on the Wii
• Bioshock 2′s multiplayer modes multiplayed and look multigood.
• Zelda: Spirit tracks will henceforth be known as ‘that Zelda game with the train in it’.
• Heavy Rain uses totally sweet menus (because menus can be totally sweet too.)
• PSN game Gravity Crash available this year will make use of gravity AND crashes.

Quite a lot this time round. Below are some bite-sized recaps of the Nintendo and Sony conferences for you to enjoy.

Nintendo Press Conference

I’ll level with you now. Having caught the conference in it’s entirety, I have never felt more embarrassed for Nintendo. It was a bit shameful to be honest.

The most memorable annoucement was easily the following. An announcement that is as terrible as it is possible to be without being hazardous to one’s health. The Wii vitality sensor. I cannot even begin to comprehend to stupidity that went into the decision that was made for a pulse reader to be used as a game controller. I’m still half expecting the Regginator to hold an interview and be all; “Hahaha, got you. You actually thought it had come to that? You should have seen your non-meat based faces!”

The delectably meaty faced Reggie explained the Motion Plus controller attachment. In effect this is just a more accurate Wiimote. They played some generic, nondescript Wii sport games to show it off. It works, but it’s completely unexciting (it was also completely shat upon by a Sony announcement, but more on that later.)

A new Metroid game in the works. Depending on how that pans out my own Wii might actually be turned on at least once in the next three years. The entire Metroid series has more or less passed me by, but this has me interested. Or, it may just be that i’m in dire need of a non-mario game to play.

• Another 2D Mario (gasp!) game on the Wii. New Super Mario Brothers, 4 Player tooling about. Pretty straightforward.
• The predictable Wii Fit expansion: Wii Fit Plus was announced. It’s Wii Fit 2. That’s all you need to know.
• Mario Galaxy 2 was announced. Also predictable. It’s got Yoshi in it. That’s about it really.

Nintendo’s conference was disappointing to say the least. I’m not the only one who noticed the lack of audience applause through almost the entire event. Only piping up for the Mario and Metroid announcements really. Also notable is the fact that they managed to use the word “Innovation” the most out of the big three conferences, yet had the least amount of innovation.

SONY Press Conference

It’s a good thing that Nintendo’s conference was before Sony’s. It would be like a highschool band following The Beatles were it the other way round. It would have served only to highlight their inadequacies to all the industry. A healthy sized conference full of game trailers and announcements, tech demos, and industry-friendly sales statistics made 2009 a good E3 for sony. The conference opened with, and indeed used many times during the conference, Queen’s One Vision in among a montage of games and products. That was a good start to be sure. Jack Tretton also opened with some humour about the inability to keep secrets so that was nice.

The PSP GO was announced. Completely taking the room by surprise, no doubt! And for the low low price (see: exorbitant) of $357.45 (after conversion) for Europeans, and the more reasonable $249.99 for the US. They were really pushing the PSN Store integration with the PSP. Hard copies of games are so last century. Also notable is the massive 80% reduction of price of the PSP dev kits.

The first game to be demoed proper was Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It’s looking spiffing. And chock full of James Bond-esque action and humour. There’s a multiplayer demo available on the show floor, various sites have hands-on tests.

Sony then decided to piss all over Nintendo’s cornflakes by talking about their new strange looking waggle and PS Eye camera controller. The tech demo was very impressive indeed looking super responsive. Though controls such as these rely on very good game ideas to be interesting.

MAG was demoed live on stage. It looks fun and hectic in a good way. Though it’ll be interesting to see how a game like that works in the real world on real people’s internet connections. It seems to require some assemblance of teamwork and for a game with so many active players at once, that will be a hard goal to reach.

Hideo Kojima showed up to tout a new PSP Metal Gear: Peace Walker game. He assured the audience that he’s very involved with the production of this game. And, that he has a trained chimp and a drunk seven year old working on his Xbox360 title. That’s not true. I just made that last part up.

We were treated to some Assassin’s Creed 2 gameplay! Something that Sony are probably smug about considering all the Microsoft conference had was a trailer. The game is looking great. Some of the new mechanics and tools at Eizo’s disposal were demonstrated. Pretty much the same as AC1 but with a lot more to play with. The developers explained that they wanted to give the players more options on how to deal with an assassination, before going on to say that the bloke they were about to stab in the face could only be reached by air.

Some Final Fantasy XIII trailer was shown before, shockingly, Final Fantasy XIV was announced. It look pretty exciting until everyone noticed the ‘online’ suffix on the title. You could almost hear the collective sigh of disappointment as everyone realised that it’s another Final Fantasy MMO.

• A lilac Hanna Montanna themed PSP to appeal to the “tween” market exists. As much as I hate that word, it’s good that there’s a PSP that girls can use now. Because previously they weren’t allowed one.
• Gran Turismo for the PSP was announced. Looks like a fine racing sim. Especially for a handheld console. It has some new features to make it interesting such as car-swapping.
• Some footage from the leaked Team Ico game was shown along with it’s actual title: The Last Guardian.
• Gran Turismo 5 Trailer. It’s looking gorgeous as ever. No word yet on if you can still drive into a concrete divider at 250 Miles per hour and not take a scratch.

The conference finished off with some God of War 3 gameplay available on the show floor. Brutal QTE based eviscerations and all. It’s looking good and probably a definite buy for the majority of PS3 owners out there.