Post E3/ACen Ramble
Ah, too full weeks eating half a meel a day and getting an average of two hours sleep a night. Not to
mention the staggering travelling costs, and the nasty flu I picked up. All in all, it was a great trip!
The small number of people who bought a little cheesy merchandise didn't come stalk me at ACen and have me sign anything, although a surprising number of people did manage to track me down and take my picture and such. On a similar note, while it took my aunt and my mom a full five minutes to find me at airports, Stom, who I've never met face to ace, managed to spot me in about five seconds in LA.
Now then, I suppose I should begin on the most mundane note possible. After returning from L.A. I found myself sitting around in my cousin's room, so I pulled out his Genesis and played some obscure old games. Games like Earthworm Jim 2, which can pretty much be summed up with the statement that one level is called "Jim is now a blind cave salamander", The Lost Vikings, which I'm told is actually by Blizzard, before they got big enough to plaster their shiny logo on things, and Ecco 2 WHICH I BEAT IN ONE SITTING. That's one of the more significant gaming achievements there. I believe that's the hardest Genesis game in existance. Tempted to whip out Fantasy Zone 2 now, but I doubt my reflexes are at a full blown 8-bit level right now. Anway though, let's move on to something you might actually care about!
Anime Central. The last couple of years I've gone to Anime Central, I got to see anime freshly translated that I'd never heard of. This year, I got to see anime that I watched every episode of months ago thanks to fansubbing connections I recently acquired. So I didn't watch much. The last couple of years I got to see really funny anime music videos. This year, well, my personal stash is better, although a couple were pretty funny. The last couple of years I saw some really amazing things in the costume contest. This year, well, I didn't have costumes at home, so that breaks the pattern, but oddly enough, most of the best costumes weren't actually in the costume contest, including a Wolfwood who actually made an 8 foot tall cross AND managed to keep a fully smoked but unflicked cigarette in his mouth pretty much the whole time. Needless to say he had trouble getting through doors. The winner of the costume contest for the record was a mecha-godzilla that actually had a complex setup to move the head and digitize the speach without the guy having to stick an arm up the neck. Anyway though, bottom line is I spent a lot more time this year going to neat little workshops than actually watching stuff, but here's some one word reviews: X- Awful, Nadesco- Funny, Utena- Deep, Trigun- Spiffy, Kodocha- Hyper. Also during this leg of the trip, I got a chance to borrow and watch the Utena movie. It doesn't give closure to the series, it doesn't really explain anything, and it's excessively surreal, but still pretty amusing. Of course, while I was watching it, my aunt happened to wander in during a scene which, when glanced at, looked like it was about to turn into some sort of lesbian love scene, garnishing a disgusted look from my aunt who kept walking through. This scene was of course perfectly innocent, and I almost called her back in to prove it, but then I recalled that she had some background in Freudian psychology. Remember kiddies: Utena and Freud DON'T MIX. Something about all the roses and pulling swords out of people's chests just gets really tainted by his interpretations.
Moving along, E3. I made a point of looking all over the show. Most booths were just a little display showing a couple games, usually playable, with someone standing around by it. Nintendo had a big huge room full of lasers and playable GameCube games. About half a dozen copies of a dozen games all playable. Very nice. I particularly enjoyed Pikmin, a querky puzzle game where you command hundreds of little plantish antish workers to perform various tasks. Then of course there's huge monsters that will just eat huge mouthfuls of the little buggers at a time, but can be killed if you sneak up on them and hurl 50 or so of your little pals onto their backs. Then after they hack it to death while it tries to shake them off, they drag it's corpse home as food to get more. As violent as that sounds, it actually has a happy kid friendly look to it. The whole game kinda reminds me of playing WarCraft 2 and only using peons.
Anyway though, getting back on track, Nintendo has a very nice system. Every game they were showing off had NO load times, realtime graphics that looked as good as FMV, and a good number of them had the most amazing water effects I've ever seen. Slosh around in the water and you can see both the distorted image of your legs, and your shimmering reflection getting distorted by the waves you're making. Then a couple games showed off some other nifty graphical things. Luigi's Mansion screamed Tech Demo Game at me since your arsenal consists of a flashlight, a vacuum, and a water gun. All of these affect the environment, and all the characters have stretching and transparency things going on. Then again, there's Pikmin, where you have literally hundreds of characters with pretty freakin' highly detailed models all performing different complex tasks at once. Anyway, you get the idea. Making graphics hardware more powerful than this would be a complete waste of effort. I had a feeling that would happen this generation. It should also be noted that these are FIRST GENERATION games. Then of course there's the controllers. They might not look it in photos, but these are the best controllers ever designed period. The grips neither make you want to rip the controller in half like the PSX's, nor do they act as sweat magnets like the N64's. Just comfortable. The buttons are aranged nicely, easy to hit'em all, easy to hit'em in different combinations, easy to tell which is which by touch, mostly because they're different sizes and shapes, and it's nice and light too.
Then there's the X-Box's controller. It's the size of a freaking DREAMCAST, weighs a ton, Has that gaudy green thing in the middle that does nothing but make it even more unnessessarily wide, everything's angled wrong, and the buttons are so high up on the giant hunk of garbage that the average person can't even reach them, and for that matter, even if you have abnormally large hands, you're going to hurt your thumbs trying to reach the top ones. I took a survey of everyone I saw playing with the thing (roughly 25-30 people), and ALL of them agreed that they flat out could not actually use the thing to play any sort of game. The system itself has similar problems. It looked like it was roughly the size of two Saturns (the biggest console ever made... except maybe some 4-bits) glued together. Despite the fact that the final hardware specs still haven't been nailed down (gotta love how every single X-Box tech demo has been running on completely arbitrary hardware, making them completely useless as a basis for judgement). Ahem. Anyway though, actually seeing the thing in action I was amazed at how utterly unimpressive it was. I'm not even talking about the slowdown and choppiness that MS claims will be gone when they finally nail down the specs, I just didn't see anything about the graphics that couldn't be done on older systems, like, say, the Dreamcast, or heck, the N64. Then of course there's the games. Non-exclusive games I won't even mention, because they don't sell systems. That just leaves a couple generic games that don't really bear mention, and Oddworld. On the off chance that people from Oddworld Inhabitants actually read this page, could you PLEASE drop me a line and tell me what the heck you were thinking? I seem to recall press releases about making a series of 2D games with no inventory or money to keep track of, just challenging gameplay and infinate lives? Not to mention being Flashback style games. That was a good ideal. Why oh why did they stray from it and make some relatively easy 3D game with money, and even give the main character the ability to take out enemies on his own? In other words, I'm not happy with it. Oh, and did I mention that this over-bulky system whose specs aren't nailed down, whose controllers are unusable, and which has no exclusive games worth a glance, is slated to launch in just a couple months? Do they really expect to make a profit off this?
I suppose I should mention the other two consoles. PSX2: Nothing worth mentioning. FF10 looks like FF8, but now Squall has Down Syndrome. MGS2 looks fun at least, but, well, I'd already played it by the time I got to E3. In general though, the PSX2 just strikes me as just a clone of the PSX than can push more polygons. Still look fairly ugly though. Then there's the DC. Sega had a closed booth, and while we did have a meeting with them, during which the great Shigeru Miyamoto himself popped in and played PSOv2 on the GameCube with everyone from RPGamer who was there, I was on a plane at that particular momment, so I can't tell you about it. Wah. Again though, DC and PSX2 have been seen. X-Box joke, Nintendo mindblowing. It seems like we might all get to save some money!
Anyway though, that about covers my trip, except for attending various meetings and discovering just how informal most gaming PR people are (Atlus meeting: "Hey, wanna play Dodgeball?"), in fact Working Designs was the most formal meeting we had... that's just not right! Then I wondered off to Blizzard's booth, where one of the developers of WC3 was just standing around, and asked him everything I could think of about it. The three most notable points: They scrapped the whole units must be attached to heros concept since it wasn't that fun, elven buildings (huge trees), can get up and fight in a pinch, quite cool, and the reason Blizzard never let's Mac users in on their betas is that we don't have weird hardware configurations that need to be tested. Thus I can feel superior not leftout. Yay.
One last thing before I give you your scary pic thus ending this long dull ramble. Upon returning home from this trip, my mother, out of the blue, suggested that I open my own anime store. She was actually being serious as it turns out, so now I must ask myself, do enough people who both like and can afford anime (and don't have a better place to get it) come to this here page for me to clear a wholesale hurdle and sell you stuff really cheap? My personal guess is no, but if I'm wrong, uh, speak up!
and now...
here it comes...
you've seen him do Sailor Moon...
you've seen him do Lime...
he didn't decide to do Lum...
yet...
and he was the security for the costume contest...
here he is...
Bubba Sammy
