Konami Pre-E3 San Francisco Event

One of the highlights to attending E3 as a member of the press is getting invited to a multitude of industry events, parties, booth tours, pleasure cruises and one night stands. Okay, some of those may be stretching the truth a bit too far, but tonight kicked off Nukezilla’s E3 coverage, courtesy of Konami of America.

This evening’s event was hosted at the Temple Nightclub, a swanky bar on Harrison in San Francisco. I worked today, so the “easiest” way to get to the event was take off early and hop onto our public transit (BART). Due to my over-busy work schedule and poor planning, I arrived an hour late, but according to the PR folks, didn’t miss much as they were still 30 minutes away from presenting the press (public) event footage. I quickly scanned the room and found four games playable on the floor: two XBLA/PSN titles, Burger Time and Puddle as well as two retail games, Skullgirls and Jimmie Johnson’s Anything With An Engine.

At first take, I thought I was missing something. Not to be dismissive of these games outright, but I expected to see Metal Gear Solid: 3DS, a playable build of NeverDead, new Castlevania DLC and on the outside chance that they had something amazing up their sleeves, Metal Gear Rising or a massive new game announcement. The games on display weren’t awful, but I certainly had to adjust my expectations quickly in order to salvage something positive from the event.

I played a few rounds of the Jimmie Johnson racer, which is basically a wacky cart racer with oddball characters. There’s one who races a chrome bathtub and wears a diving bell costume. There’s a creepy bear costume (furry?), a Mario/Luigi rip-off that hurls pizza and other strange choices. I wan’t too impressed with the feel of the racing, but this could be attributed to the fact I played two whole rounds one handed as I held a beer in the other. I figured this was how most players would experience the game, so I was just trying to go for authenticity in my coverage.

Skullgirls looks amazing with gorgeous hand drawn 2D animation for each fighter, though only three characters were playable. It plays much like BlazBlue, but didn’t have the same depth to the fighting system. Though I played several rounds with each character, I didn’t start to develop any comfort with any of them, which is something that usually happens for me with most of the fighting games I stick with. I plan to keep my eye on this one as it gets a fleshed out ensemble.

One of the people I played with asked if the whole cast would be female fighters, given the title that’s a pretty safe bet. The representative told me about the a character who was new to this build; a twisted early Disney/Warner Brothers type character whose move set offered lots of subtle nods to other games. The one detail I noticed was her revolver projectile attack, where the bullets would hit her opponent and then bounce off, deformed.

Each of the fighters had great looking moves and animation, but there’s just not enough there yet to get a good feel either way. I wasn’t able to get a final count of the expected roster, but the rep seemed positive that the game would be released in 2011.

Puddle is a deceptively simple game where you control the tilt of the world to move around a puddle of liquid. There were a wide selection of levels available to play, each one with a different liquid material. I played one level with wastewater and one with molten metal. The water evaporates when approaching heat, but of course, the metal requires frequent heat to remain fluid. The threshold for failure was pretty low and losing too much liquid instantly fails each level.

For me, the liquids/gameworld needed to be more responsive to the the tilt movement. Most times when I approached a difficult section I would hold down the tilt in one extreme direction only to wait several seconds for the action to have an effect on the puddle. All in all, a cool concept, but not a very fun experience.

Burger Time is the 3D on a 2D plane re-imagining of the Data East arcade classic of the same name. You’re still the manic cook trying to layer together hamburgers across multiple layers of platforms while being chased by killer foods like an egg with a face and a sausage with a cowboy hat. This game is peppered with nods to its many predecessors, like a staggered animation as the cook walks over each level of the burger, before it drops (which struck me as a strange choice until I came home tonight and played a few rounds of the original here).

I had fun playing BT, but the jumping was floaty, which led to several unexpected deaths. Despite the clever visual overhaul and tons of new elements (such as power ups and boss battles), if you don’t have a soft spot of nostalgia for Burger Time, this one may pass under your radar.

None of these games were a standout hit for me, so I had high hopes that the presentation would make the whole event worthwhile. Instead, once the pre-recorded video rolled, we were treated to featurettes/trailers for MGS:3DS, NeverDead, Pro Evolution Soccer ’12, Silent Hill: Downpour and a pair of comedy sketches (one by Mega64 and the other by Kojima Productions featuring Hideo and Mark McDonald). The sketches were both decent, but they existed to reveal HD remake releases for the PS2 editions of Metal Gear and Zone of the Enders.

NeverDead looks strange and intriguing, but I can already tell the horrible dialog and voice casting for the female characters will put me off taking the game seriously (come on y’all they sound like pre-pubescent girls – WHY!). They paid Megadeath for an exclusive new song for the game’s trailer, but who still listens to Megadeath? Silent Hill: Downpour doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly interesting or new, but then again I’ve never played more than an hour of a Silent Hill game, so I’m probably not the best judge of its quality.

A new feature, which will be added to MGS: Peace Walker on the PS3 MGS pack, bizzarely dubbed ‘Transfarring’ will allow players to transfer their console game progress to and from their portable game system. Kojima announced “Step 1″ will allow for PS3 to PSP transfers, “Step 2″ will allow for PS2 software (running on PS3) to transfer to the NGP and finally, “Step 3″ would allow for new PS3 software to interface with equivalent software on the NGP. The Zone of the Enders HD Collection on PS3 also carried a Transfarring logo, so we can expect an NGP or PSP release to be announced in the future.

Kojima also showed off some (pre-alpha?) footage of their new “FOX Engine”, which is modern generation compatible, which means 360, PS3 and whatever Nintendo decides to call Project Cafe. He controlled what looked like a young boy running through a jungle environment with some beautiful detail, density and lighting effects. They’ve supposedly been working on this tech since the end of MGS4 and are very proud of it being a completely self-built engine. Hideo admitted that 2011 was “a year of preparations” for his studio and that he was sorry they didn’t have more to show fans expecting massive surprise announcements.

At the very end of the video, they showed a brief teaser announcing that a new Contra game is under development with the tag line, “THEY’RE COMING” displayed under the iconic burning “C”. We were informed that all of these videos were going to be made available on the Konami E3 site this evening, which is mostly true. They seem to be missing the MGS skits and a few other highlights, but those can be found on Game Trailers.

All in all, I came away pretty disappointed with their Pre-E3 offerings. Jenny has scheduled an E3 booth tour, so if we get to see or play something new on the show floor we’ll report on it next week.