Friday 15 June 2012

The Highs and Lows of E3 2012.

Last week the games industry came together once again for the annual E3 conference in Los Angeles. It’s the time of year when all gamers get excited and glue themselves to live streams of conference after conference hoping to get a good look at some of the games developers have to offer.

Overall it was a decent expo; some developers did well, others less so. There were plenty of highlights to be found and of course inevitable lowlights… All in all there was something for everyone.

If you like shooters for example you should probably check out EA’s conference as that’s pretty much all they’re bringing out in the coming year with Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Battlefield 3 DLC (no idea why this was shown), Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3 all being shown off. For those who don’t like shooters there’s always SPORTS! Sigh.

Possibly the most frightening reveal occurred during EA’s conference; and that was Sim City Social. Yes, EA revealed a bloody Facebook game! Why is this being shown? I really do not care in the slightest about Facebook games, does anyone? Maybe they do, but were they watching the EA conference? I doubt they were, they were probably busy watering their melons on FarmVille. Thanks for letting me know the latest annoyance that will be filling up my game requests on Facebook EA!

Meanwhile over at Ubisoft Rayman Legends for the Wii U was shown off and it looked pretty good, though I have no idea how to actually play it, I’m just happy to see Rayman being used in a platform game rather than mini games with those sodding rabbids. They also showed a new more mature game called Watchdogs that looked decent and everyone is raving about it but I’m not yet 100% sold on it…

The biggest E3 news as ever all centres around the big three: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo who had varying degrees of success with their individual conferences. The three of them can be found in detail below:




So E3 done with for another year, where does the time go? Who ‘won’ this year? Well if I had to choose a winner I’d say Nintendo. It really is close between Nintendo and Sony but if you include the 3DS showcase then Nintendo wins. Sony’s case wasn’t really helped by Playstation All Stars Battle Royale to be honest. Microsoft were the definite losers, pretty much as bad as Nintendo’s Wii Music conference a few years back…

Nothing left to do but pick my favourite game of the expo… and my winner, perhaps surprisingly is… Paper Mario Sticker Star on the 3DS! It’s a return to proper Paper Mario gaming, looks special, funny, theatrical, everything you could ever want! I’m expecting it to take the crown of best game on the 3DS from Mario Kart 7. Take my money now Nintendo!

To wrap up I’ll briefly sum up (in no particular order) my personal highlights and lowlights of E3 2012…

Highlights

Halo 4 (Xbox 360)
The Last of Us (Playstation 3)
Beyond (Playstation 3)
Paper Mario (3DS)
Pikmin 3 (Wii U)
Wii Fit U (Wii U)
Nintendo Land (Wii U)
Assassins Creed 3 (Multi-platform – Ubisoft)
Watchdogs (Multi-platform – Ubisoft)

Lowlights

Playstation All Stars Battle Royale (Playstation 3)
Fable: The Journey (Xbox 360)
Yet another Call of Duty game (Multi-platform – Activision)
Sim City Social (Facebook – EA)
Xbox ‘entertainment’
Internet Explorer on Xbox 360
SPORTS
Falling asleep during the Wonderbook presentation
That hour I’ll never get back watching Microsoft’s conference.

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