so the day started over at
pikmin 3. i spent a while doing the find mii stuff on my 3ds so i wouldn't be spoiled by the guy taking forever on the demo. i spent about 12 minutes at the demo. 7 for the main game stuff and 5 for a boss battle. i haven't played pikmin npc, but i picked up the controls and it was like second nature. point the controller at the screen, push a to call pikmin. push b to throw them. use the z button to switch between types (this one was explained to me).
i haven't played pikmin 2 in eight years, but i think there's a somewhat new thing that each day or area is ranked on how much pokos you can make back at your ship. by the end of the demo, the guy said i had gotten pretty far, so at 955 pokos, i probably did reasonably well. you can get a silver and a gold medal for the day/area (i forgot to ask). the boss fight was using the rock pikmin to break open the shell and the red pikmin to murder the thing. all-in-all, it's pikmin all right. it looks very nice in person, but it was also very obviously a wii game at some point. it's not a graphical showcase, but it retains its charm pretty well.
i checked out
zombi u, more specifically, the part that was once killer freaks. i took control of the gamepad and placed zombies around the map. the guy playing the fps game on the cc pro went around trying to capture the flag while i was also using a zombie to capture the flag
and using zombies to kill him. you can spend 3 or 4 points to create generic zombies that will hunt out the duder, and 10 points to create a zombie made to capture the flag/zone. you can also spend 12 points to create a superfast zombie. your points as the gamepad guy increase steadily over time. in the end, i won this segment, and then i watched someone play the single-player game.
aside from some weird stuff with the zombies vanishing in a puff of smoke sometimes, the single player was pretty tense, especially with the stakes being that one bite kills you. there are ways around it- you can stab a zombie with a syringe to kill it, or push it back and then aim carefully at the head. i think the longest runtime i saw someone do was about 13 minutes. it looks more like a survival horror game than a traditional first-person shooter. sure is ugly though.
also, the triggers on the back are definitely not analog. or if they are, they're barely analog. this is true of the gamepad and the cc pro. i made sure to double check before i left.
after zombi u i checked out
project p-100 it's kinda got the feel of viewtiful joe but in 3d. you use the gamepad to draw a circle around civilians and add them to your gang. i didn't like this because there's no reference point, really. you also use the gamepad to draw up and up-and-right to draw a sword and gun respectively. if you use either one of those you can use it against enemies, but it depletes battery power. battery power can be rebuilt by mashing the x button which makes all the civilians rush the baddies and attack like pikmin. you can also defend and evade attacks as a group.
there was a part where you could go inside a building to solve a puzzle. the game then moved to the gamepad screen. i think everything involving the gamepad screen was pretty dumb and didn't need to happen. for instance, switching between types of civilian-weapons could have been done by pushing a shoulder button or even clicking an analog stick.
i was pretty much done with the nintendo booth after that, so i went over to the sony booth and played
littlebigplanet karting. not a whole lot of news here but you drift to get speed, use items to attack, and collect littlebigplanet orb-things. apparently these levels were built just for e3. i got there when there wasn't a line so i got to go right on in. it was neat, but i'm not a huge racing fan.
ni no kuni was next and i played a story segment. i found the localization extremely charming and very reminiscent of dragon quest viii in its style (and how british it was). the battle system was neat. you throw out little guys to attack for you, and you can also cast spells on your own. it's kinda like a tiered-persona system, but you can also move around the battle map. it was almost too much to just jump into, but i think it would make for a fun 30-40 hour time sink when it comes out.
then i played a lot of vita games. i played gravity rush first, and i think the concept is cool, but i didn't actually do much except fly around and get a free shirt afterwards. i played munch's odyssey hd, twisted metal 2 on psone classics (apparently if the psone game didn't have analog support, then neither will these). i also played new little king's story, and it looks and acts just like the wii game. so if you're a vita owner and don't know about this one, i suggest you look it up.
i also played
sly cooper: thieves in time. the segment i played was in a circus where sly was robin hood-themed. i could fire an arrow, and using the vita's motion control, guide it to the bullseye if i had initially shot it somewhat off-target. i assume the same works using the motion controls in the dual shock 3 on the ps3 version. the rest of it was platforming up this giant circus, firing arrows with ropes on them to tightrope through the place, and eventually reach a cutscene. i had fun with it, and hope the rest of the game turns out good. it was the only 3d platformer i played at the show, and i'll be keeping an eye on it when it comes out this year.
and then there's sound shapes. this is my game of the show. rayman legends had this great segment where you platform along to music, every jump coming at a beat, and the ropes correlating to guitar parts. sound shapes is like if they took that concept and just made a full game out of it. the game is more about the platforming than the music, and the game doesn't make the music based on the syncing of your platforming. however the more stuff you collect, the fuller the song becomes. the levels i played were very well designed, and the extremely simple look of the game works well in its favor. afterwards, i was shown how to use the editor, and the game actually has a small interactive tutorial anyway. a lot of it used the rear touch pads on the vita, and i thought it worked great, and probably a lot better than a ps3 controller would. this information is probably known, but you'll be able to get the ps3 and vita version together when the game launches, and it's going to go on sale for $14.99. i don't want to sound like i'm shilling for the game, but it's a pretty good price if there are a lot of challenging levels and the game lasts a while. it was one of the few games at the show i came back to later to try again.
i left sony's booth after playing a match of dead or alive 5. i also went on to play
persona 4: arena and knowing nothing about fighting games or this one in particular, i thought it was fun. maybe a tad unbalanced, maybe not that deep, but it did its job as a fighter at least. and what i can only assume is sprite-based artwork is fucking gorgeous.
at the south hall, konami's booth had
castlevania: lord of shadows - mirror of fate(?). the game sorta reminded me of the recent prince of persia remake more than anything. i didn't hate it or anything, but i was annoyed by the loading times. and the fact that there was an actual screen for the loading times.
sega has a game they're publishing called
hell yeah and it's sort of a metroidvania in its level design. you can also buy stuff in the game to improve your little guy as you kill enemies and travel around the fiery place you're in. lots of enemies, some different types of qtes (i think i answered a weird trivia question about dead rabbits for one of them). it's a psn/xbla/pc game, and looks pretty interesting.
i played some more rayman legends, and used the gamepad this time. there's not a lot of interesting stuff to do with it, but i wasn't bored. it is also useful in solving some of the environment puzzles for the guy actually platforming through the level.
assassin's creed iii was also in the ubisoft booth, but it was only the mulitplayer. this was another capture the flag type thing. if you were in an area capturing and the other team showed up, you could only stun them. if another team showed up in your area, you could murder them. i had a couple of kills myself, although i took down many civilians on accident (assuming they were actually the other team). one guy did pretty well in stunning two of us, laying down a smoke bomb, and nearly vanishing before another guy from our team killed him. i liked the multiplayer.
as for the single player, i didn't see anything at the ubisoft booth, the microsoft booth, or the sony booth. the only single player game being played was one kiosk at the nintendo booth. and this was being manned by a ubisoft employee only so no one else could play. according to the guy at the booth, the wii u version is 720p, 30fps, and that is the same across all consoles. the game is the same across all consoles (aside from the gamepad stuff on the wii u), and it looks the same across all consoles. the single-player itself looks pretty nice. i jumped in with the second assassin's creed and was really unsure about the change in scenery, but after today, i'm more interested in seeing how it turns out. i thought it was cool how main character man escaped up a ship's sails, bouncing up the ropes to get there. i was worried that setting this new game in relatively new places like 100 year-old boston and new york would make for few rooftops and platforming to be done, but that appears not to be the case (mostly). i'll keep an eye on this as well.
unfortunately epic mickey 2 for the 3ds wasn't at the show, from what i saw. i played theatrhythm, but wasn't really feeling it. i didn't like the disconnect from looking at the top screen while using the touch screen to trace the stuff up top.
i also saw multiplayer aliens: colonial marines. it was gearbox as xenomorphs against e3 attendees as marines. the game looked like left 4 dead zombie vs. survivor matches, and the gearbox guys were ready to go and glad to kill.
that was pretty much my day. i'll be going back to work tomorrow, but if i forgot anything, i'll mention it here.
oh, and i can't forget the swag.