The list of games for the summer of arcade this year include the Giant Bomb shilled Bastion, an iPhone to Kinect port Fruit Ninja Kinect, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, From Dust, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
Perhaps the least exciting lineup ever? Yes.
Day one of E3 brings us gifts from third parties, first off Ninja Gaiden 3, the first mainline Ninja Gaiden without Itagaki, and it’s bloodier than ever. Graphically it looks like it might be a bit improved over the Sigma games, but not by much, especially given the canned nature of this trailer.
Microsoft has never been able to keep the lid on their news, and this year is no exception, via images on their site they released everything they’re announcing at their E3 conference, and it’s pretty much all Kinect stuff, except for the Halo milking.
Halo 4 is coming, surprise.
As heavily rumored, they’ll also announce a Halo: Combat Evolved remake for the Xbox 360.
Kinect Sports Season 2 is the sequel you’ve all been waiting for.
Dance Central 2 coming to the Kinect
Last.FM becomes Kinect enabled.
Kinect Fun Labs is for “crazy, cool new gadgets” presumably this is where they try to capitalize on Kinect stuff people have been making on the PC. So far this includes: Kinect Sparkler, Kinect BobbleHead, and Kinect Me
Ryse is the Codename: Kingdoms game, and it will be a Kinect thing, a “cinematic, action-packed” Kinect thing.
So this Microsoft event is going to be just as disappointing as had been expected, at least they released this early so there’s no need to sit through it.
Do you like Kinect? Well you better start loving it, because that’s all you’re getting from Microsoft for the rest of the life of the Xbox 360. Kotaku is reporting this list of games for the show floor, and aside from the third party multiplatform games there’s absolutely nothing to get excited about.
Tomb Raider
Forza 4
Star Wars Kinect
Gears of War 3
A Halo related title
Codename Kingdoms
Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster
The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor
Alan Wake: Night Springs (Kinect compatible)
XCOM
Hitman: Absolution
Modern Warfare 3
Spelunky HD
Ghost Recon rail shooter for Kinect
Dance Central 2
Kinect FunLabs XCommerce
Kinect Sports: Season 2
Toy Soldiers: Cold War
Fable: The Journey
Raving Rabbids for Kinect
An Unspecified Double Fine game
Hybrid (XBLA shooter)
Roller Coaster Kinect
Rise of Nightmares for Kinect.
In addition to this list Geoff Keighly has been tweeting about the Batman guys, and the Mass Effect 3 guys being at Microsoft’s event, but again nothing we don’t know about already, isn’t on every capable platform, and that’s worth seeing.
It looks like the 360 is done as a source of new and interesting exclusives, it’s time to move on to the next console generation if they want to retain any of the core audience that their platform was built on.
Just a reminder the Microsoft E3 press conference starts at 9:30am Pacific Time this morning.
These newly released Hitman Absolution screens, show off some very nice visuals, especially for the Hitman series, though 47 being on a small ledge in the sky is slightly troubling given that he’s not supposed to be an acrobat like that Creed guy, but we can assume there’s a hatch above that ledge or something that he dropped down from.
What’s truly troubling is that, while Hitman will be appearing at E3, it will only be behind closed doors to the press.
Now of course this could simply be what they think is the best way to build the hype, it could also mean they don’t have full confidence in their game, and need to limit any public scrutiny, and god forbid take notes from the biggest dumbest members of the press, IGN employees for example.
If they screw up this series I say we dig up Aeris and kill her again.
Microsoft’s Kudo showed off Disneyland for Kinect to some french press who quickly put it online for all to see, and surprisingly it’s a collection of mini games, look forward to a Microsoft for soccer moms at E3.
He also showed off this Star Wars Kinect demo for E3, and it’s proving not too popular with gamers, but gamers aren’t too popular with Microsoft at the moment either.
It’s been a while since there’s been a really good attempt at a decent Star Trek game, aside from the waste of effort MMO Star Trek Online, but with the new versions of the characters in the movies maybe somebody can make it work again. Paramount hopes so, according to VentureBeat, they’ve enlisted Digital Extremes to create a new Star Trek game for home consoles.
Even the worst Star Trek games had some good in them, and while there’s no way this can live up to the greats like 25th Anniversary, or Birth of the Federation, they should at least be able to match the likes of the Voyager FPS, for those of us who dare to dream, the Deanna Troi text adventure.
Warner Bros. put out their E3 trailer for Lord of the Rings: War in the North a little early to get out of the way of the oncoming hypewave for bigger titles and announcements, and it looks pretty nice for a licensed title, it’s not quite Dragon’s Dogma, but the big creatures are looking pretty cool.
Somebody somewhere was kind enough to provide this early look at Capcom’s upcoming answer to Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. This trailer focuses on the team for the Umbrella corporation, I assume Capcom will release a couple more trailers before the end of E3 focusing on the other sides of the fight.
EA put out a new video from their upcoming SSX reboot, and while it still seems to be missing a lot of charm, and proper level design, at least some of the mechanics on display seem to be working right here, though this new terrain reshaping gimmick they have, hopefully on in Trick It mode, seems to be a significant misstep. It certainly looks cool, and technologically impressive, but in the flow of gameplay it seems to be the equivalent of poor load streaming.
Hopefully they’ll continue to show more of the game throughout E3, perhaps a map with some actual designed elements, rather than big open nothingness with the same jump littered all over the place.
