Tag Archives: Trade shows

Editorials, Games

I Miss Good Trade Shows

Leave a comment

The general disappointment at how TGS was pretty much a non-event this year, coupled with the continued decline of E3, the complete absence of a relevant UK show, Nintendo’s increasingly token – at best, often – appearances and reluctance to resurrect Space World, Microsoft having neglected its own shows since X06, and Leipzig’s support among the console holders varying each year got me thinking: will we ever again get a trade show to match the gaming decadence and one-upmanship of E3 in its heyday?

Probably not, I would guess. I miss never being able to visit a ‘proper’ E3, but you can see why things changed. It gave the industry a focal point each year, providing an excuse for a mention on the evening news for one day of the year and to drive ad revenue for the gaming websites, but it cost a tremendous amount of money and, really, did it do anything that the new, low-key events couldn’t?

Nowadays we’re just as likely to see a big announcement happen out of nowhere, or to see a platform holder or even individual publisher hold a small ‘gamers’ day’ type event. Hype it up, invite the specialist press, get it on their front pages, and you have pretty much the same net benefit as the old dog and pony show, right?

I’m not so sure. I think the industry needs a big focal point of an event like Hollywood needs the Oscars and the music industry needs its Christmas number one. Without E3 there’s no one event for all the big announcements and this year’s major releases to start the hype train in advance of the Christmas season. Do we expect a mainstream press that’s ambivalent at best, if not outright dismissive, about gaming to bother with a dozen minor events to show the latest sequel? Of course they won’t.

From the perspective of a gamer I actually like the constant trickle of news that comes from surprise events and developer visits, not to mention the wholesome nuggets of new information that often appear on development blogs, but it doesn’t make it easy to find, either on an individual basis or for the media outlets themselves – how many sources would you have to cover to read every piece of news? E3 got everyone’s attention and everyone expecting the big announcements and unveilings to be there. It was so big and extravagant that the TV news couldn’t help but pay attention, and now we don’t really have anything like that.

It’s a shame, and I don’t know whether or not it’s going to change. There is all kinds of whining after another disappointing show on the GAFs of the world, but most people don’t know or care and I’m sure that, if I was a major publisher, I’d be looking at the few million dollars that I’d just saved in not putting on a light show and losing weeks of development time, and shrugging my shoulders. Money talks…

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

E3 2008 Conference Review

1 Comment

Same format as last year, but with added bitter fanboy tears. In chronological order:

  • Microsoft – I wasn’t blown away, to be honest. Seeing live gameplay of Resident Evil 5 was initially my highlight, in the same way that the Call of Duty 4 was a gem in a pile of (mostly) shit last year. Gears 2 and Fable II both look good and are certain purchases that it’s nice to have dates for, but things like avatars do nothing for me and the occasional cool feature and probable gem do not a great conference make. No Alan Wake (the new Duke Nukem Forever?), no big new IP announcements, a new interface that I’m not convinced about. Just the warm feeling from the fact that there was no motion controller announcement… yet.
     
    But then Square dropped the bomb. As last words go, FFXIII on 360 put most of Steve Jobs’ infamous “and one more thing” reveals to shame. Not even a rumbling of this news before the show, which is remarkable in itself, and it dealt a big blow to Sony early on. With the possible exception of Gran Turismo, this has been Sony’s trump card since FFVII in 1997, and it was the one third-party PS3 exclusive that I thought untouchable. Make no mistake; that announcement was huge.
     
    It doesn’t change the fact that the rest of it was relatively lacklustre, but it feels like it was all a ruse to lead up to that. For the biggest E3 megaton – something that I thought was becoming a lost art – since “five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars”, this one gets a…
     
    B     
  • Nintendo – If you ever need reason why so many hardcore gamers seem to have abandoned Nintendo to focus on the fight for second place, this is why. Last year’s Wii Fit reveal was a disappointment and in that respect this at least had something that vaguely interests me in Animal Crossing, but it’s still basically the same thing as Nintendo brought out on N64, GameCube, and DS. It might have more online functions, but all I’m going to be thinking about is how much better it could be done on Live and PSN.
     
    Add another mini-game compilation, another peripheral, and, in Wii Music, one of the most pathetic ideas I’ve ever seen (I can’t help but think of the musical chairs game in The Simpsons when Bart was put into the remedial class). Someone summed it up for me on a forum post when they said: “At least now that Nintendo has show that it hates hardcore gamers we won’t have to pretend to like the Wii any more.”
     
    Thanks for the good times back in the day, Nintendo, but I’ll take an insular industry that makes games that I enjoy over this popular tripe.
     
    D-     
  • Sony – Sony really didn’t deviate too much from what was largely a successful formula last year. The embarrassing Home jokes were gone, and no baffling cameo from Chewbacca, and we just got games. It deserves credit for making the most entertaining Powerpoint presentation in history. LittleBigPlanet can make anything interesting.
     
    On the games front, Resistance 2 looked good but early, and while stuff like God of War III and MAG sound promising, didn’t Sony learn anything about showing CG trailers a couple of years ago? When your big reveals are CG and your lead game is one that pretty much everyone who cares enough to watch a conference has finished at least once since it came out a month ago, it doesn’t make it look like there’s a lot of content.
     
    C 

This E3 will go down in history for the Final Fantasy XIII announcement, which put the Microsoft conference ahead on entertainment value alone. Other than that, very disappointing in my opinion. No big new game announcements (so far), no proper price drops or anything, and the bitter taste in my mouth that the mainstream press is going to be fawning over Nintendo finding a way to charge you to play air guitar.

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

E3 Conference Review

3 Comments

Microsoft – Only showing games to be released this year was an interesting gimmick, but ultimately I felt that it was a mistake. It did a great job of showing off the 2007 release list for the 360 which is, in my opinion, by far the best of the three consoles, only to leave 2008 and beyond as something of a vacuum that left the door open for the other two to take the plaudits. The likes of MGS4 aren’t coming out this year but they still carry a lot of weight as franchises.

And why did Microsoft choose to show only their 2007 titles and then show Resi 5 anyway? Why not just show other future titles and plug the strength of the 2007 lineup? They could easily have had their cake and eaten it.

The show itself fairly poor until it was saved by some excellent gameplay footage of big games like Call of Duty 4 (plus online beta!) and Assassin’s Creed. I’m still as hot for Halo 3 as I ever was after that trailer, as well, although it was admittedly not a brilliant trailer. It’s just that they played it safe, had their aforementioned high points, a couple of low points (the Madden thing was…ugh), and came out just affirming what we already knew: that the Xbox 360 has a strong 2007 lineup. They need a huge X07 or TGS now.

Overall: C+

Nintendo – I don’t doubt that every mainstream outlet on the planet is writing glowing features on Wii Fit as we speak and it’s going to make ridiculous amounts of money, but that show was a lesson in how to alienate your hardcore fans. I’m admittedly a lapsed Nintendo fan and a Mario game doesn’t do it for me like it used to (I’ll still buy Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 for sure, though), but nothing there did it for me. What was there except Wii Fitness and half a dozen new Wii peripherals? Vision Training? Not even any big DS announcements!

Mario Kart? It looks the same as Double Dash and they already did it online on the DS. No Animal Crossing. Little new on Smash Bros except a release date met with dead silence. The focus on Wii Fit meant that it ended up coming off like an infomercial for a step machine like you get on Five US when CSI isn’t on, and just affirmed for me that Nintendo and the Wii is no longer going with what I, as a gamer, want.

Overall: D

Sony – Mainly given the advantage of following Nintendo’s show and having only to be better than last year, Sony only really had to show some games that weren’t coming out this year in order to ‘win’, and they did. It started badly with some cringe-worthy Home skits and a painful appearance by Chewbacca, as well as so many plugs that it felt like I was watching Casino Royale again (“Spider-Man 2, now available on Blu-ray Disc, DVD, and UMD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment”; “connect your PSP to your Sony Bravia flatscreen TV”; “Home on my Sony-Ericsson mobile phone”), but then it was uphill.

The new PSP is a good improvement even if it didn’t have internal memory (I’ll buy one when it gets hacked), Echochrome looks cool, and MGS4, Uncharted, and Killzone all look superb. For the first time since E3 2005 I’m seriously considering when I plan to buy a PS3 and which game is going to do it.

Overall: B+

Overall, though, I think we can all agree that the new E3 is a disappointment for those of us who like to sit back and enjoy the show. Bring back the old one, I say!

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

E3 Predictions 2007

2 Comments

Even if the big show isn’t the same as it used to be (I miss it already), that doesn’t mean that the big companies aren’t up to their old tricks. This is what my money’s on the big three announcing at their conferences – which start with Microsoft’s a fortnight today – along with a few outside bets.

Microsoft

  • $100/£80 price drop across all SKUs.
  • Halo 3 campaign demo, hopefully closer to the real thing than last time.
  • Ninja Gaiden 2. I then spend an hour trying to clean up the mess I made.
  • Some real PGR4 and Fable 2 video.
  • Rare bringing back one of their classics (I don’t think it’ll be Killer Instinct, for the record).
  • At least one current PS3 exclusive coming to 360.
  • Shenmue III. Please? If enough of us believe they’ll have to do it.

Nintendo

  • Lots and lots and lots of sales graphs.
  • Animal Crossing Wii shown and it’ll be a kind of walled-garden MMO: you live in your town with friends over the net, using WiiConnect24 to let anyone mess around in the persistent town at any time. Ban this sick burglary simulator!
  • Mario Kart Wii.
  • More Smash Bros shown, with a new feature that we haven’t seen. I’ll be upset if the Ouendan team isn’t in it. Sonic finally making it in is an outside bet.
  • A new console for the Virtual Console. Neo-Geo?
  • Miyamoto waves something around and Reggie has a new line for the fanboys to run into the ground for the next year.

Sony

  • Absolutely no sales graphs whatsoever.
  • $100/£75 off PS3.
  • PSP redesign.
  • Killzone 2 is finally shown and looks very good, albeit no E3 05 trailer.
  • Home and LBP. Lots of comparisons to MySpace put me off it even more.
  • Sony ruins their palindrome with the announcement of the force feedback Sixaxis. Shockaxis?

Any thoughts or predictions of your own are, of course, welcome.

Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

So Long, E3

Leave a comment

So fresh off one of the biggest and certainly most controversial E3s in recent memory we find out that it’s going to be the last. It’s certainly going to change the dynamics of the average year in this industry but now how are games journalists supposed to get an annual free holiday to California?

Honestly, they might as well not bother putting on a show now. Publishers hold their own little events all year round (EA and Ubisoft have had them in the last month, for example) so nothing will change there, and since the huge events are incredibly popular it’s tempting to speculate that this is only going to make the venerable Tokyo Game Show and neophyte Leipzig Games Convention even bigger. Tempting in that it’s easier for me to get to Germany and preferable for me to go to Japan than Los Angeles.

But now how are fanboys going to endlessly debate who “won” E3? How are we going to see Peter Moore’s tattoos and Kaz Hirai’s hyperbole in the same place? What else do kids who run fan sites have to blag their way into? Where can shitty doomed peripherals go without Kentia Hall? And now there’s one less career path for jobbing “actresses” who are willing to drape themselves over cars and guns while overweight men in shorts have their photos taken with them.

And I’m not at all bitter that I’ve never been and now never will…

Completely off-topic I know, but I’ve also written a review of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS which can be found here and on the review index. Take a look.

Editorials, Games, Impressions, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

E3 Thoughts

2 Comments

Nothing mind-blowing from any of the big three, then. Some impressive stuff, to be sure, and some things better than others, but no clear advantages for this console war. My biggest thought so far has been “OMG!”:

Halo 3's Ark...or is it?

This is probably going to be a long post…

First the conferences. I stayed up late to watch the Sony one live and, like most people seemed to, came away disappointed after all the hyperbole. Only three games really struck me – Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Virtua Fighter 5 – and the rest seemed spectacularly unspectacular. Tekken 6 didn’t even look as good as DOA4, and Resistance looked like a browner Call of Duty, for example. I was impressed with the very cool Eye of Judgement demo and the aforementioned three games, but then…$600. It’s not even a generation ahead of the 360 but is $200 more? No thanks.

There is a $500 unit, but who wants that? You lose the HDMI (so none of the advertised 1080p, ever), memory card slots, and wi-fi. At least if you buy a Core 360 you can buy the things to take it up to the premium one at a later date, but with the PS3 you’re stuck with the crippled one. I’m not going to get started on the “amazing innovation” (their words) of the motion sensitive controller but suffice to say that Nintendo must have been pissed.

What made me laugh was listening to Radio 1 the next day which is usually the home of PlayStation fanboy chavs and the opinions that were called in were universally negative. They even said that the consensus seemed to be that they’d “copied Microsoft and Nintendo and slapped a massive price tag on it.” Continue reading E3 Thoughts →