I dumped a preview cause I was kinda bored, and any reason to listen to “catfish blues” is a good one by my books, I’ll probably finish this off this weekend assuming EA’s servers cooperate.

Enjoy!

First of all, I’m not at E3, I’ve been streaming the press conferences like many of you, I was going to post notes about all the individual press conferences, but as I watched them yesterday I was simply not impressed with 90% of the things that were shown. Microsoft spent far too much time pedaling Natal er.. Kinect… and frankly it seems like they’re doing all the right things with it to get the interest of people like my girl friend… the Kinect star wars had potential I guess, but it just looked like someone flailing aimlessly in an “on rails” type game.

I really liked the new 360 hardware though, if it were “whisper quiet” like they say it is, I’d strongly consider it. And the combat in Metal Gear Solid Rising looked amazing, Raiden’s sword was cutting through pillars causing balconies to drop on baddies heads… you could chose the orientation of his swing using a circular reticle on the screen which was used to create some incredibly impressive dismemberment, and some watermelon slices… I’m all of a sudden looking forward to that game.

EA was spewing more 3D at us than I would have liked, but Crysis 2 gameplay looked cool. I had my doubts about Bulletstorm, but it seemed to be as advertised “fast paced action with a wink and a smile”. I can really get behind an over the top action game that doesn’t take itself so seriously (ala duke nukem/serious sam)… Need for Speed Hot Pursuit courtesy of Criterion (of Burnout fame), sounds like a great pairing to me, I’ll be looking forward to more info on that one. They showed people playing Medal of Honor, but there was so much footage of peoples thumbs that I didn’t really get to see what was going on in the game. I mean, does anyone ever actually glean any insight from looking at someones thumbs while they’re playing video games? it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen especially because they kept going back to thumb shots as if 1 wasn’t enough “yes! these people really ARE playing video games!”… com’on guys…

Ubisoft was disappointing, they introduced laser tag… and some heart sensor thing (Nintendo is going to be maaaaaaad). They showed some Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood but I’ve been burned by that franchise before so I’m quite skeptical at this point. They re-demonstrated the Kinect fitness game that looked like it might be ok if you’re into that thing. The also demo’d a new Driver but they were talking about shifting in and out of the car you’re in, to other cars, and mildly hinted on some sci-fi type in a comma story line shit… I dunno, it’d be interesting to check out a demo at least.

Nintendo and Sony keynotes today, I’m hoping for better or this e3 could be pretty disappointing.

I was really looking forward to Skate 3 as I’ve made abundantly clear I think, and I’ve been playing quite a bit (though not as much as I would have liked). I knew coming in that this was simply going to be skate 2 in a new location, with some new team focused changes to community, and multi-player. Some of the press, specifically the dev diaries discussing each of the districts in the game shared a similar message, that they are building Port Carverton to be skateable. Which I thought was great, I wanted some great lines for some great videos etc, and for the most part thats good, I guess this is a case of be careful what you wish for because by making everything more ‘skateable’ it feels like they’ve taken away some of the authenticity from the environment as a whole. I kinda liked in skate 2 how you had areas that were very skateable much like the bulk of Skate 3, but they were sectioned off so that it felt like this was just a magical spot that you happened to stumble on, I’m not getting that impression with Skate 3 at all because it all feels that way, and as such there may not be the same neat lines because everyone will be finding the same stuff.

With a 30 second replay timer, it kinda sucks when your line goes a little too far outside of that time limit since the environment is prime for infinite lines and you end up clipping the start of your line which might be your favorite part.

Now the way I play this game, is to find sweet little spots, and make neat little videos… I prefer the realistic ones but I’m not opposed to over the top megaramp type stuff too as you’d see if you were to check out my profile at the moment, in anycase, I was excited to see they included HD video output from the replays. So I wasted no time investing in the “Filmer Pack” which increases your online video storage to 5 minutes, apparently this translates in about 5 HD videos, which is too bad, but it does let me get high res sources for my compilation videos which is alright, but it sucks that you can’t really leave them up there if you do a lot of filming like I do.

Aaaanyway, “Part” in progress, enjoy… for now..

This would come together a lot faster but my connection keeps dropping when I try to upload vids, it’s really annoying considering how long they take to render in HD… but I digress