E for All Running Coverage – JLo Plays some GoW2
An hour down at E for All and here is what I’ve got. We’ve known for months that E for All was starting to look like a Ghost Town when game publishers announced that they were skipping the event in lieu of going to Tokyo to watch NINTENDO KICK THEIR ASSES. You saw that trailer for Punch Out Wii. It slapped you around and made you King Hippos biznizinitch.
So what are we left with if we live in L.A. and don’t speak Japanese? We’ve got E for All, which looked pretty empty at 10:30am when I walked in the front doors. I made a b-line for our friends Eli and Aaron with the Mana Energy Booth, determined not to drink 3 more of their demon vials in quick succession and put myself in the damn hospital. I ditched my jacket and headed to the most promising place I could imagine: the IndieCade area.
Indiecade.com is a place for independent game developers to get noticed by bigger publishers who might show an interest in putting out their game and moving them out of their parent’s homes. Without too many big game companies showing up, and because I played Cave Story for an hour last night when I should have been sleeping, I was excited to see some indie stuff.
There were a few different screens set up with offerings that were and weren’t working that well. With indie games, even when they ARE working, you’re not sure that they are or that you are doing what you should be. I was devastated that the game JoJo’s Fashion Show wasn’t working… but you KNOW I’m determined to play it today!!!!
Some of these games were rough, but here are some of my impressions.
Mushroom Men (getting published soon on the Wii) by Redfly Studios/Gamecock. – This game reminded me a ton of Jak and Dexter with the 3D platforming and missions setup. I wasn’t blown away by the game. Like Jak and Dexter, it looks pretty dark, the camera doesn’t always work well and other characters sometimes fill the frame when they are talking to you. Sorry to kill your buzz. I wasn’t down.
Offroad Velociraptor Safari by Flashbang Studios – I shit you not. I drove around dragging a chain with a spiked ball on it running over feather velociraptors for points. Extra points for sandwiching them into a wall with your jeep or landing on them. Once I got a chance to drag a dead one around when it got impaled on the ball. Go play the game now at www.raptorsafari.com if you want to blow some time. It’s mindless but whatever.
Rooms: The Main Building by Hand Made Games – This game looked pretty damn cool. It’s a slider puzzle style game that looks like the menu to Braid with your character navigating the rooms. But each room slides up and down like a slider game. You can only slide the room you’re in and you can only change rooms using a doorway or a wardrobe. There is live video in the game as you navigate an Asian Harry Potter looking actor around the different rooms looking for keys and unlocking more doors in order to progress through the mansion. It’s beautiful and different and reminded me of snakes and ladders.
I flipped when I saw a little sizzle reel for Telltale Games’ upcoming Bone: The Great Cow Race videogame. I almost wanted to buy a PC when I saw it… but I’ll wait for the Wii port like everybody else. Still, you guys know I love Bone like Gilmore loves bone so I was pretty excited. Check out these pictures:
I caught this one dude playing a game called Synaesthete from Digipen University. It looks like a ¾ top down SmashTV style of game set in a Tron-looking universe with hot disco lighting floating in space. You’re a little Bloom Block looking dude navigating a map and taking on various challenges, but the way you battle these bad guys in each mission is original: it’s a rhythm game like Guitar Hero. In fact, the color scheme looks like DDRs moving prompts. Your success in the rhythm game leads to success in your attacks as you move around SmachTV style killing enemies. The dude offered to let me play but it just looked like it would fry my brain. I needed JoJo there for back up if I was going to try it.
The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom by The Odd Gentlemen – This game has a black and white, 1920s German Expressionist look, film grain and all that moves like Braid. It’s a puzzle platformer that involves pulling switches and timing your jumps as you move along rooftops and complete the story. I didn’t get a chance to play but it looked pretty cool nonetheless. I’d be excited to see this get released so I could give it a try.
A student from USC introduced himself to me and told me that his professor had a game on the IndieCade floor. It’s called Meanwhile (by USC professor Peter Brinson) and at first look it wasn’t too impressive. You followed a Mr. Game and Watch style character from left to right in a platformer similar to N+. If you fall off the platforms, you die and start over, the goal being to complete the level in a certain time. The game has a gravity element with switches the move the game’s gravity up or down. Bad guys run around trying to flip the switches and send up plummeting upwards or downwards into digital hell. Pretty simple right? Not completely…
What impressed me was that this 10 level game is actually a single player MMO. You can play it with various inputs (we used a 360 controller) and while you’re completing levels, other players are as well. If they finish the levels in the allotted time, they get to change the attributes of YOUR character in REAL TIME as YOU ARE PLAYING! They can slow down your speed, weaken your jump or slow down the regeneration time it takes for you to refill these abilities. They can fuck up your game AS you play! And if you’re good, you can salt their game by crippling their character as he’s trying to leap an abyss or beat the bad guys to a switch. Pretty cool, in my opinion.
So those are my first impressions from the Indie section of the almost vacant floor. It feels like Comic Cons Preview Night 5 years ago when no one was crowding the space.
EA has a large area with ho hum games to play like Bloom Blox, Mercs 2, Facebreaker, Tiger Woods 09 and Battlefield: Bad Company. Aren’t all these games out yet?
THAT KID ON THE RIGHT IS BOOOOOORED.
Xbox Live has a similar set up with Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, Lego Batman and Grid. Of course they are also pimping Castle Crashers and Braid but these stations only worked to make me miss Giraffey that much more. Come back Giraffey… please?
Intel has a place where you can play WoW, Unreal 2 and race around to win some digital power thing… a new processor… yeah yeah. Get out of my face, fool!
THE FOOL IS IN WHITE
Target has a MONSTER of a setup that is building to a Guitar Hero 2 championship. No gracias. But check out the picture. The kidz do want thems Guitar Hero 2 World Tour Backstage Bang Bus Special Edition. Yawn.
JOIN US… WE’RE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE…
It’ll be like The Wizard… except lamer. And with nobody watching.
I’m heading to Denny’s. Updates to come.
Update Time – 2:00pm
Denny’s was pretty good. I got a hamburger. I also decided to make a visual representation of my E for All Experience so far:
The Tokyo Game Show
E for All
Here’s another one of the two together:
One is full and one is empty. Notice I’m drinking from the empty one.
But my brother called excited that he was in the upcoming Raw VS SmackDown 2009 and that made things better.
“Dude. I wrote the lines for that section of the game. I told you you were in the game months ago.”
“Really? I don’t remember.”
“I definitely told you.”
“Cool. It’s good money.”
If that’s all it means to him, I should have tried to put in some embarrassing dialogue and see if it would geo past THQ and WWE.
I returned to the show and went straight for THIS thing:
Gee… I wonder why everyone in the room was there?
I guess WCG is one of the 7 pro gaming companies on the floor. They had a bunch of stations that looked like this:
These guys must be good. Too bad my attention was drawn to THIS:
Gears of War 2. They had a few stations set up where people were playing against each other in waves. You had to wipe out wave after wave of COG or Horde opponents.
Immediately I noticed a few things. The game mechanics are way better. It moves easier, you’re character doesn’t jump into certain hiding spots as automatically and so it’s a bit more fluid than Gears 1. The other thing I noticed was how much more destructible the environments are. This game looks a LOT better than the original Gears. The details are fantastic. Call of Duty 4 level of detail in a Gears game. Everything is a lot clearer.
And you definitely want to have that extra detail… BECAUSE NOW YOU’VE GOT A FLAMETHROWER, MOTHAFUCKAS!!! YEAH!!! You thought this was fun in GTA? Now you can walk around torching people in Gears of War! These people don’t panic and run around like in Liberty City. They try and fight through their burning skin before they crumble.
And when you DO down an enemy… IT’S HUMAN (or Locust in this case) SHIELD TIME!!! HAHAHA!!! I had flashbacks to the human shielf stair case scene in Total Recall when I picked up my downed Locust and used him as a shield to approach his friends and shoot at them. It was pretty damn satisfying. I mean, just look what they did to my beautiful plaza!
The game is going to rock when I’m carrying Gilmore helplessly as a shield while coming up on Jake108 to deliver a shot to his head… “I’m bringing you a present, Jake… Gilmore’s lifeless husk!” BLAM! I’ve got it all planned in my head.
From there, I wandered over to a RTS MMO called Beyond Protocol. The space battle that was playing out on the screen in front of my looked like Starcraft meets Battlestar Gallactica, but is definitely a RTS. The guys who were fighting each other had been going at it for hours and pieces of the hundreds of dead ships they had wrecked were laying all over the map. NPC Pirates were coming in and scavenging the wreckage for new weapons and technology. Something a player could do if they weren’t busy shooting at each other.
PC strategy enthusiasts might like the game a lot. You can also play it on a Mac with a Windows emulator. If you’re interested in the game, Dark Sky Entertainment was nice enough to offer Geekscape visitors access to the Beta. Just go to www.beyondprotocol.com and use the password EForALL087h6axsg When you’re shooting lasers into the enemy ships, tell them SAM sent you.
The next place I stopped by was Entropia Universe. This is the Second Life style online world that uses REAL currency in the game. Someone in Europe bought an asteroid for $100,000 real world dollars a few years ago and made the money back within a year by building a mall on it, apartments and hunting ranges and renting out space and hunting expeditions. It’s pretty impressive if you have that videogame entrepeneurial attitude and don’t want to sell WoW weapons or characters off on eBay and get busted by the cops. It has a real world ATM card that works with real cash and game cash and all of the prices in the game are determined by the marketplace. Here’s a mall:
This dude I was talking to finds costumes in the game that you can make and sell to players to wear in the game.
And then he makes them for real and sells them to people who want to act like the real world IS the game. Check it out:
It’s like The Matrix meets Project Runway. But you get beat up for this.
Finally, I found a frisbee and a wristband. The frisbee is for my dogs and the wristband is for Gilmore’s sweaty palms/girlfriend.
I’m going to run back to the floor now so I can try and play some JoJo’s Fashion Show.
Final update: 4:15pm
Okay, so there’s not a whole lot left on the floor and JoJo’s fashion show ended up not being very much fun. Tomorow, Ben, Gilmore and Jake are coming to check things out with a camera and scheduled interviews, so that’ll be a lot meatier. I’ll be busy in Orange County at Pugtoberfest, where Hank, Cheese and I pursue the ever elusive costume contest title. We’ve got a Peter Pan theme going on this year and I’m pretty confident that the title will be ours.
Coming back to the show, I saw a Nintendo Wii Fit contest set up like Double Dare, where two contestants had to race to Wii Fit stations through tires, a balance beam and a ball pit. I stuck around for a bit, waiting for the two goobers to break one of their ankles but was foiled by the fact that when your bones are mostly made of Slurpee, its hard to snap. It was a pretty big dissapointment for me, all around.
There was a Rock Band competition where you could perform with your “band” for prizes. Man, did it sound terrible. Here’s a picture of a band that I’m PRETTY SURE didn’t win…
Where’s Jiminy on guitar when you need him?
I ran into an employee of Nexon and he introduced me to their game Combat Arms, a PC FPS that is free to play online… if you want to lose. The game makes money by charging players to upgrade their weapons, armor, etc. It’s a COD4 style miitary game and looks like a lot of fun, but if I’m gonna be losing money online, I want the chance of making it back. So maybe I’ll stick to selling merkins on Entropia Online.
Still, the game looks pretty cool:
The rest of the floor was pretty ho hum. Here’s a guy playing a flight simulator.
He wasn’t shooting at anything so I was like “this is a game?” Then I realized that the company makes these really lifelike piloting controls with switches and stuff. Great. Now people can learn how to give tours from the comfort of their homes. Or terrorists don’t even have to move to the US to learn how to pilot commercial planes. Good thing we have a ton of fake looking games that teach you how to shoot them down with lazer guns or alien spaceships. I can only hope that the terrorists fall asleep before they figure out all of the controls… and there are lots of them.
Of course, you’ve got your needless tie ins:
No me gusta.
And you have this thing:
It professes to make you the hero in your very own game. It takes your picture, gives you some stats… and then:
“BLAH! I NO HERO! I DEVIL COME TO KILL YOU!!!”
This poor Chinese kid probably THOUGHT he was gonna be the hero when it took his picture. Instead, it turned him into the little troll guy and the hot hero girl and buff hero dude are going to kick his ass. Look at the kid! He’s in fucking PAIN! THE GAME LIED! IT DOWNRIGHT LIED! AND NOW HIS VIDEO GAME ASS IS GOING TO GET KICKED! THRICE!
So how can I recover? Is there any hope left for a cool game after Gears of War 2?
Yes. There is JoJo’s Fashion Show! Let’s go! I must have my E for All experience saved!
On the way, I actually DID discover a cool game:
Machinarium by Amanita Design, is a pretty cool adventure puzzle game where you try and navigate a ChibiRobo looking tin man through an environment using the mouse. It reminds me a bit of Zack and Wiki for the Wii and had a pretty good sense of humor. That, and the artwork was gorgeous. I don’t know much about this independent game, but I hope it finds a publisher and we can all play it one day. It was pretty cool to check out.
Here’s the robot after falling into this room. How does he get out?
So now it’s time for the final test, the last game I wanted to play at E for All…
JoJo’s Fashion Show
Hit that:
“Yes! A new sexy gazelle in the office! A new challenge… for Weird Name Flamboyant Guy!”
Dudes, this game sucked. You literally had to work in an office and click though text forever. I don’t even know if there WAS a fashion show involved, because I was so damn bored clicking through retarded text like “Yes! A new sexy gazelle in the office!” that I wanted to shoot myself in the face. Notice that the office looks like a startup bomb shelter. Way to go, JoJo. You’re game officially sucks.
So, that’s my time at E for All. We’ll see what Ben, Brian and Jake-mothafuckin’-108 can bring us from tomorrow. It’s been fun writing this up for you… but only because I got to flamethrower a Locust and use him as a shield against his friends.
