Preview: Crave's E3 lineup, featuring Deadliest Catch, Man vs. Wild and Brunswick Pro Bowling
For every Batman: Arkham Asylum or Epic Mickey, there's got to be someone out there bringing shoddy licensed games to the floor of E3. Bless Crave Entertainment then, because the publisher was back at it this year, showing off titles based on Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch and Man vs. Wild TV shows, and a Brunswick-licensed PlayStation Move bowling game. The trio was quite generally terrible -- unpolished, unfinished, pretty blatant attempts to take a familiar name, slap it on some semblance of gameplay and make a few bucks from people buying something for the name on it.
So don't read the rest of this post because you're thinking of buying any of these games -- even if you happen to be a Deadliest Catch or Man vs. Wild fan, there are better and more enjoyable ways to spend your time with the properties (like, you know, watching the shows, which are both pretty well done). Instead, read on about the three most awkward moments of my time spent in Crave's E3 booth.
Brunswick Pro Bowling
Crave's bowling title happened to be the first PlayStation Move title I got to play on the show floor, so I was actually kind of excited about checking out the controllers. But my excitement quickly drained away once I saw it in action -- the game's biggest new feature is the ten different "licensed oil patterns," representing different amounts of oil in certain parts of the bowling lanes that are supposed to affect your ball in various ways.
Needless to say, it didn't work -- the girl showing off the game to me let me have a go, and on my first try on a weird oil pattern, I rolled a strike. On my second try, I rolled another strike. And on my third ever try, just randomly waving the Move wand at the screen ... strike.
"Wow," the girl said. "You're really good at this."
Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos
After the last Deadliest Catch game was deemed by audiences to be "a little slow," this one will do away with the realistic issues of navigating a crabbing boat around the Bering Sea, and instead make use of simple minigames that tell the story of the reality show's stars. Instead of trying to hook a single buoy out of the water, you're throwing a hook at multiple buoys floating past at different rates, aiming to hit as many as possible before the time limit. Instead of just dumping crab into a cargo hold back at port, you are tasked with shooting them rapid-fire through a moving hoop, in what the developer calls a kind of "crab basketball."
And the most awkward moment? While playing the crab sorting game, in which you need to grab and "throw" different sized-crabs to either side of the screen with a flick of the joystick, the developer told me that none other than Captain Sig Hansen had been in the E3 booth the day before for a promotional visit. "What did he think of the game?" I asked.
After trying out the video game version of crab sorting, Captain Hansen said he "would rather sort crabs in real life."
Man vs. Wild
"You can drink your own urine."
