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John Woo's Stranglehold hands-on
Take the gun out of your mouth folks. John Woo's Stranglehold looks like more than just a shot-to-sh-t cash-in on the Hong Kong action auteur's single-syllable last name. Senior Game Designer Patrick Curry (a loyal Joystiq reader) pulled me out of the crowd for a little quality time with Midway's homage to Woo's bullet ballets and I came away impressed. This 360 game is from the same team that did Psi-Ops: Mindgate Conspiracy, an awesome Xbox title that was on everybody's "best game that no one played" list. After commiserating with the staff over the inexplicable disappointing sales of that game, I picked up the controller to try out its "spiritual" next-gen sequel. Stranglehold plays like Max Payne with, better graphics, more style and more ridiculously cool slow-mo moves. Midway's pitch focused on the destructable environment, which allowed me to blow up everything from wall tiles to frozen pigs. Combined with an array of Woo-ish bullet-time maneuvers, the level I saw did a good job of recreating the vibe from the tea house shoot-out scene in Hard-boiled. I asked executive producer Brian Eddy for the honest truth about Woo's involvement and was told he really did write the script. He also personally nixed blown off limbs, which sadly aren't his stylistic bag. Fortunately, he does prefer that perforated enemies stack up a la The Killer rather than disappear, so the team is working on that feature. They're also adding melee moves beyond the standard pistol whip present in the current build. Employing a common E3 tactic, Midway is keeping multiplayer details close to the shoulder holster, but I was assured that bullet-time will be implemented in an innovative way. Oh, and no warehouse levels.
News wrap-up from E3!
The industry's biggest event is now over, and while posting on the Joystiq mothership maybe have taken up all of our time, we can't forget about our Fanboys. We've got some post-E3 reflections on the way, so get ready. Here's an aggregate of the show coverage: Engadget & Joystiq's live coverage of Sony's PlayStation 3 E3 event PS3 impressions: Resistance Fall of Man PS3 impressions: Sonic the Hedgehog PS3 Impressions: Heavenly Sword PS3 impressions: Virtua Tennis Joystiq hands-on: new PS3 controller Joystiq Video: Resistance Fall of Man E3 Vox Populi: What are your thoughts on the PS3 prices? E3 Vox Populi: Will lack of rumble hurt the PS3? E3 Vox Populi: Who had the best press conference? E3 booth tours: Sony A look at EA's new realism tools The PS3 controller that might have been Sony's PS3 is still $600 Microsoft befriends Nintendo in fight vs Sony First look: The Club (Xbox 360 & PS3) The jacket that says "I can afford a PS3" Sony's Play Beyond campaign played up at E3 Extended 15-minute MGS4 trailer on the hour PS3 worth its weight in Uranium Dual Shake functionality tacked on at last minute Anatomy of shame: Dual Shake vs. Wiimote Sony steals motion idea, but not from Nintendo New PS3 controller loses DualShock vibration PS3 investing in tangible user interfaces PS3: A tale of 2 SKUs Clash of the Consoles: a sneak peek! PlayStation 3 in its final form The real PlayStation 3 controller revealed Final Fantasy XIII announced for PS3
E3 booth boi at N-Gage
I am so offended. Do these companies really think that having some H-O-double-T, hot Booth Boi with a St. Tropez spray-on tan, a Colgate smile and wearing nothing but a skin-tight t-shirt parading around their E3 booth will get me to buy and play their games?!?! Show me a Booth Boi who looks good and knows how to handle his Wii and then I'll be impressed, okay? Besides, don't these Booth Bois have any respect for themselves at all?!?!? All it does is continue to objectify men...
Busted: Meet the Joystiq E3 crew
GamerScoreBlog posted some pics chronicling the embarassing amount of time (from a media ethics perspective) the Joystiq crew spent on or near the Xbox 360 Blogger Bus. Did I say crew? Maybe it was just me eating those Peanut M&Ms. For the people who don't know who the hell we are, try to match names with faces. Here's a hint: I'm the good-looking one.
Next-gen Sega Rally: Damn good donuts
Two things I remember from my closed door look at the rebirth of Sega's famed arcade racer for PS3 and 360:1. Sega Driving Studio Director Guy Wilday's first and last name. It just rolls off the tongue. Guy Wilday. Guy Wilday.2. The dynamically deformable terrain will have you making more donuts than Krispy Kreme.
DS impressions: Touch Detective
"This game seems a little confusing.""Yes, it's almost as if it's in a completely different language."As the E3 demo had not yet been translated from Japanese, it was initially difficult to come to grips with Atlus' Touch Detective. Luckily, a background in old-school adventure gaming served as a boost over the language barrier. The game is, at its heart, a completely traditional adventure (point-and-clicker, if you prefer) augmented by a very bizarre art style. Using the touch screen and stylus to move your wide-eyed character, collect objects, traverse dialogue trees and examine the environment, the gameplay is just about a perfect portable representation of a genre considered to be dead by many. Many people are wrong.Though I couldn't make heads or tails (or any sort of appendage) of the story, the game is littered with strange characters, including a talking corpse and a sentient mushroom...phallus...thing. We'll have a better idea of where the game is headed once it enters localization, but for now, it appears to be a visually arresting throwback to the adventure games of yore.
Female at E3: a look back
Being a female attendee at E3 puts one into an interesting niche. The number of women present at the show this year was surprisingly high -- a quick non-scientific headcount showed about 3 in 20 to be female. However, booth babes flashed their wares from a number of stands, gleaming cars and trucks advertised games with no cars in them, and Paris Hilton trundled out to wow the crowds.With all this advertising clearly targeted at guys -- and, by the look of the crowds, working well -- it's easy to believe the "neglected demographic" hype.
Would the real Quang show his thang?
E3 may be over, but the Joystiq team is still blowing through posts and tying up loose ends from a wild, sleepless week of non-stop blogging. When I posted about Blake Snow getting trampled in Friday's early morning Wii stampiid, I thought the man whose badge Blake "traded" for in the ensuing chaos might step forward. Instead the post provoked a flurry of "I am Spartacus" commenters claiming to be one Quang Nguyen. Fortunately, Joystiq reader Sepll Cehck has tracked down a guy on the web who looks like he really could be the Quangster (pictured at right). The Quang man is welcome to have his exhibitor badge back assuming he's the right Nguyen, although it won't do him much good now. I'm waiting for an email. In the mean time, if a small Asian man approaches you claiming to be Blake Snow of Joystiq, don't believe him.
DS impressions: Contact
The game that has been jokingly called "Almost Earthbound" is quite possibly one of the most unique RPGs to hit Nintendo's touchy-feely handheld. The impetus of Contact is that you're not in direct control of the main character. Instead, you act as a mysterious external force that helps out a young boy as he searches for the parts of a weird professor's downed spaceship. The bottom screen of the DS allows you to guide your character through some wonderful looking environments, while the top screen always shows the professor scurrying about and doing work in his lab. He constantly communicates with you, making odd remarks, providing useful information and generally hurling a wrecking ball through that pesky fourth wall.Getting back to your character in the bottom screen, it's possible to engage enemies by tapping on them with the stylus and selecting the attack icon. Now, the battles are competely automatic with the exception of using the d-pad to dodge some attacks. Some will definitely be turned off by ths approach, but it fits in well with the game's exploration and its acknowledgement of the player as an entity in the story. The game makes pretty good use of the touch screen, with the special attacks particularly standing out. Essentially, you peel off the attack command as if it were a sticker on your screen and then stick in back into an appropriate slot. Much like the rest of the game, it's a pretty fun and quirky experience.
Paging Dr. Booth Babe
With booth babes prancing about the E3 show floor dressed as warrior princesses, dragon slayers, futuristic mercenaries and (rarely) realistic independent females, it's fair to say that their role-played lives are vastly different from their real ones. There are exceptions, however, and just such an exception could be found at Atlus' colorful booth. Celebrating the announcement of Trauma Center: Second Opinion for Wii, Atlus' booth babes were all dressed as alluring nurses (the best kind). In Wendy's case, this wasn't much of a stretch at all.Self-proclaimed Halo addict, Wendy told me that she is currently in her fourth year as a medical student at Western University. In what is an unusual transition from model to medicine, Wendy hopes to become an excellent doctor with equally excellent bedside manners. It's an amusing coincidence that may just shatter that old booth babe stereotype collecting dust within the recesses of your mind.
E3 booth tours: Nintendo
So the conference has come and gone, but Nintendo was arguably the hardest booth to penetrate at E3 this year. They had the longest line of the entire show on Friday, and some rumors on the floor say it could have been E3's longest line in history. Either way, we've gone to the trouble to bring you a little bit of the inside and outside action of the Nintendo booth. Enjoy!
Scarface will give you balls
The Vivendi booth in South Hall didn't have anything hands-on for Scarface (or at least, not that I saw) -- just two flat panels playing clips from the movie, and a big, sweeping staircase that led to an upstairs "screening" room, where we got to watch a demo of the ugly game. Oops, did I say "ugly?" I meant fugly. The graphics thing aside though, I can see how someone who liked the movie would like to "say hello to my little friend" in a game. The game picks up where the movie left off, with you, Tony Montana, up at the top of the staircase. Instead of getting shot and killed like in the movie, the first thing you have to do is turn around and kill the guy behind you before he kills you (otherwise, I guess you have to start over). After that, the game is all about building up your cocaine-trafficking empire, basically by using your cajones. You earn Balls points by intimidating others with the use of voice, or by doing balls-y things. Higher speed driving, more destructive shooting, and of course, being more of an a**hole as you cut deals with local shopkeepers to join your cocaine empire.
Overheard after E3: Childbirth
With E3 over, Jen from Wonderland and NCsoft had this to say about her experiences:"E3 is like childbirth. You can't possibly imagine what it's like until you've done it."Hours to days of unending pain? Pass the sedatives.
Overheard on the Blogger Bus: "Maybe it over-heated"
Microsoft's friendly PR staff was briefly chagrined when the Xbox 360 on their E3 Blogger Bus locked up while playing Tony Hawk. Perhaps forgetting he was surrounded by blogger nerds, Online Community Group Manager John Porcaro (who runs GamerScoreBlog) wondered aloud if the unit had over-heated since it was enclosed in a tight space -- the opposite of what tech support recommends. Fortunately for the MS Candy Crew, it appeared to be a false alarm. A reset quickly returned the 360 to playable condition. Moral of the story: Always ensure proper console ventilation before offering free junkfood to the alternative media.
E3 Fashion: I scored with the princess
I'm sure it's not something we haven't seen before, and it's certainly not as hot as our Joystiq t-shirts, but I thought it was cute . Or maybe it was just cute that he was holding hands with his girlfriend, who was dressed like...a princess.
Sony's PS3 interface revealed
We saw those shots of the "Warhawk Store" and "My Singstar Online" during Sony's PS3 press event, but what we didn't see is a top level interface for the console. According to this video, it sure borrows a lot from the PSP, and therefore seems a bit limited for all the crazy uses Sony has planned for the console. Though we're sure Sony has put a lot more thought into this than we have. Also, the PSP interface has been generally well received, so why try to fix what isn't broken? The biggest additions are the new "Users" and "Friends" options, the former allowing you switch between different user profiles, while the latter didn't look quite fleshed out, but we guess it'll do what it sounds like. We also noticed under the settings option a mention of keyboard and mouse settings, rumored accessories which would seem quite appropriate for all of the PS3's PC leanings, so we'll keep an eye out for more news on that front.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Weekly Webcomic Wrapup: E3 edition
After the marathon week of posting, it feels like a millenium or two since we've checked on web comics. Most of the selection this week is about E3 -- and why not? It's the biggest convention for gamers this side of the Pacific. Take a breather while we take a break from 15-minutes post intervals, check out our picks for best game-related webcomic this week and be sure to vote for your favorite: Well, if He says so ... Yay for Kentia Hall references! Matlock ... Maaaaatlock! Overheard in H2 ... err, maybe He has erred.
The aesthetics of Wii
It's strange how almost every single picture of the Wii fails spectacularly to depict the console's actual size. In reality, the system is ridiculously small with an aesthetic that deftly illustrates how far Nintendo has come in terms of design after they churned out the monstrous looking N64. We're not shallow enough to attach much significance to a console's appearance, but there's something unnervingly attractive about that small white box and its various attachments.
A look at EA's new realism tools
At the EA booth, we checked out a demonstration on the technology their Sports sect is working on, and we were honestly blown away by some of the strides they have made because, although the primary focus was on realism in their sports titles, the technology can (and likely will) affect all game development. Here are some of the next-generation features the developers showed us: Momentum Shift: The developers demonstrated how a character's body is altered by the speed. They compared current-generation jogging, with players back upright, to the new technology where the athlete lean forward. Procedural Awareness: For this demo, the developer created a ball for the character to observe. as he moved the ball in space, the character constantly kept his eyes on the object, even at moments requiring that his head tilt to reach the field of vision -- when multiple important objects are on screen, the character wil "cycle" through observation, constantly checking up on the objects. Later, we saw changes in facial contortions to demonstrate the character's change in mood ("his reaction to the object") and how different emotions can be attached to multiple objects, the character's mood reflecting whichever object currently catches his attention. Foot Planting: This is an issue we have still seen in many high-profile titles (e.g. Oblivion): a character will run, but his legs move slower and faster than the actual pace of the character, given the impression that these characters are somehow gliding across the map; this technology aims to fix that. Responsiveness: The idea behind this feature is that every animation can be stopped at any moment and shift fluidly to another motion (current generation technology, according to EA, requires that a character must finish each animation before shifting to another). For example, say a football is running to the left and then wants to juke right, changes his mind, and does a full on sprint straight down the field. In what the developer found (and demonstrated), characters using this model actually responded and accomplished their task up to 25% faster. Accurate Positioning: Current-generation points characters in only 8 directions; the demonstration shows that your character can turn in any degree of rotation. The technology is subtle, but the effect is dramatic. The developers are hoping it will be utilized in all next-generation (clarified as PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and "probably PC") titles. We inquired about Nintendo Wii's capacity to use these tricks; the EA representative explained that, due to the constraints of the Wii's hardware, select features will be used "when appropriate."
E3 Vox Populi: Will lack of rumble hurt the PS3? [update 1]
Yesterday, we asked a few people on the show to give their reaction to the following question: "Will the lack of rumble in the Dual Shake hurt the PlayStation 3?" Here are some reactions we got:David Edery: Game TycoonIt's certainly a shame to lose something where rumble matters in the design context. Rumble has always felt like icing to me; it's not crucial. Not having the motion sensing at all, that's a huge problem. I'd be much more worried about Microsoft, frankly. Rumble has never mattered to me that much. I think it'll hurt them, but I don't know how much. I don't think it's a huge deal. People want to move, though. Not having [motion sensing] when others do have it, will be a huge disadvantage.Jessie: GamerSurvival"It'll hurt; I've heard a lot of people upset [over the decision]."David Reid: VP Marketing for GameTapI've never thought of it as a big deal. That's me personally. There was a time when i was deep in the weeds at Xbox when we were like, "do we pay for one motor or two motors?" I think the bigger story is a $499 box that doesn't have HDMI, doesn't have Wi-Fi, doesn't have a memory unit. I think lack of rumble is the least of their problems. Those are really smart guys, they've got a really great business, I'm sure they know what they're doing but it really struck me as odd.Delila: OnTheXbox.com"[The rumble] adds to the experience, feeling the explosions for example. It's gonna hurt them."Roman: Industry Analyst [Lack of rumble] is not the main thing that's going to hurt them. To me they're the loser of the show. I'm very concerned actually. Rumble is marginal compared to other issues.Cesar: Gamerscore"Not as much as the price."See also:E3 Vox Populi: What are your thoughts on the PS3 prices?E3 Vox Populi: Who had the best press conference?[Update 1: fixed horrible, horrible typos. Please forgive us!]
