May 15, 2006

E3: The vomit inducing headache machine of doom...

E3 made me sick on thursday but before all that I was having a great time and even went back for more on Friday, that's how good the show was this year. God of War 2 showed quite well from what I could gather so all the late nights and time away from the world as a whole were worth it for 3 days under the gaming world's microscope.

Michael Cheng pulled some strings for us so we did not have to wait in that abyss that was the Wii line. Once we skipped that thing we landed inside to find chaos and more lines with no system in place to move people in and out of the area, I did manage to play a few games just to get a feel for the controller. I want to believe but for now will hope they allow for personal calibration for all titles because it was either too senesitive or completely unresponsive, for now I am fence sitting. Nintendo had a massive DS showing although I must say the games all seemed a bit more mainstream and licensed oriented which sort of bummed me out but such is the way in the middle of the consoles lifespan. Speaking of the DS, I bought a DS Lite and OMG what a sexy little machine. I was a hater on the original DS so I am discovering the world of DS for the first time with the DS Lite plus New Super Mario Bros. comes out this week!!!

The 1Up Show kids totally made an effort to show us a good time by sending tickets to the Ziff Davis party along with a t-shirt for Derek due to his medical condition. We showed up to the party and they would not let Derek's girlfriend in so we pulled some trickery and threw the arm band over the fence for instant access. The party was crazy crowded but there was lots of food and they even had one of my favorites, Vanilla Tootsie Rolls (I pocketed a gang of these before leaving)! That Jane girl was kind enough to chat with us over some loud music for awhile along with some freelance writer guy that was quite entertaining yet I forget his name, sorry. Overall it was a nice way to end the first day so thanks again to the 1Up Show!

Cory Barlog, was part of an awesome panel series entitled Cracking the code of creativity, give it a read because the people knew their shit! Cory gave the God of War combat team a shout out too so that made me smile too bad he blew me off for some aussie reporter after the panel ended, I think the Hollywood nickname may return.

Overall show highlight for me was sitting down with SaiTong Man the combat designer on Heavenly Sword for about and hour to chat about all kinds of stuff. The guy was awesome and when we found out he was a Street Fighter kid it all made sense as to why that game feels so good upon first picking it up. It will be fun to see that game develope over the next year in conjuction with our own and even a nice healthy rivarly will begin or maybe we will just hire the guy! (just kidding of course)

Ok, I am really just rambling so I will stop for now because everyone has covered E3 so much already that anything else I write you have already read somewhere else.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Gee wizz, cheers for making me the highlight of your E3, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Meeting you and Derek was fantastic. I honestly didn't think combat designers really existed apart from inside Capcom, Namco, Sega and Tecmo. And to be true they don't really considering the sheer number of bad combat games out there. I think we are killing off my initial assumtion now though anyway.

Just want to add that my name has a capital T in it, SaiTong Man. A bit odd, but thats how I like it, typography and everything.