June 2011 Archives

In the wake of E3, I have picked up a ton of games for review! I'm working on 750-word articles for most of them, but here's some quick impressions of a random assortment of games I've been playing lately.

Duke Nukem Forever (PS3) - I don't think it's as bad as people say, but I don't often play the kind of shooter games that Duke stands beside in competition. If you just want something where you're shooting stupid AI, this will probably serve you just fine. It is an old-feeling game, but in this case nobody is using that as a retro positive. Like the Green Lantern movie, I think we're seeing reviewers who were just itching to hate something. It's not a great game, but it's not terrible either. 3 out of 5.

I hate to admit this, but I think the game should have been dirtier. It wants you to think it's super-lewd and sexy, but that accounts for maybe 5% of what you see over the course of 10-12 hours in single-player. OK, so you can grab a poopturd and chuck it at a wall. So what? That's just one dumb interaction balanced against the sixty thousand times you hit the Shoot button. There is apparently an interactable glory hole in the strip club scene, but I never saw it (truthfully!) What good is a Jackass-dirty game if you can innocently skip everything that's supposed to define it?

The game pulls up short in nearly every area. But on my scale, 1s and 2s out of 5s are reserved for games that are far worse than this one.

Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters (PS3) - This is actually pretty good. Definitely good for a movie/tv game, where games routinely show up unfinished, unpolished and unbeatable. It's overpriced, that's it's problem. For $40, this is a great game. For $60, it has to stand against stuff like God of War 3 (from which franchise Green Lantern lifts much of its combat-focused gameplay) and it's just not long enough or deep enough.

It is fun, and your playable Hal & Sinestro 2-man co-op team have a great selection of Green Lantern energy weapons from which to choose. This one could have been a LOT worse, so I think it deserves points for exceeding recent standards of the super-hero movie game genre. It seems obvious to me that they could have either A) artificially extended the game's length with more planets and more enemy-bashing, or B) focus on making the combat extra fun and detailed. They chose the latter and it was the right decision. 4 out of 5.

"Rise" is going to be an easy Platinum. This is for sure a great rental for kids+families, at the least. It would be great if they add in some DLC stuff like extra playable Lanterns and new attacks, but I highly doubt that will happen. Even Clark noticed the game was lacking in Lanterns.

DualPen Sports (3DS) - This one surprised me. Yes, it's a collection of sports minigames (now in 3D!) but the presentation is really nice. Namco Bandai seems to have realized that these sorts of games have to go head-to-head with Nintendo's homegrown casual products, so all third parties must bring their A game. Their A minigame.

The gimmick here is that the sports minigames all require two styluses. The game comes with two, which is nice because they could have just assumed you already have one (which you do) and just popped one additional stylus in the box.

Not all of the minigames have a good reason to use two, however. Boxing makes sense, since you have two hands. Parasailing makes sense since you use two hands to steer such a contraption. Things get weird in Archery since you use one stylus solely to raise the bow, which is an action dozens of other archery games have already eliminated. Baseball? I know you use two hands to hold a bat, but you don't need two styluses to simulate that action. In fact, you can't.

But there was nice design work done on this one, which helps it feel like a complete release and not just a crapped-out minigame collection. If you do well in a sport, you will occasionally get score doublers in the form of classic Namco arcade icons, like Pac-Man, Pooka (from Dig-Dug) and Mappy. Mappy!

Mystery Case Files: The Malgrave Incident (Wii) - Another nice surprise. This is a search-and-find picture game embedded inside of Myst-style puzzle-exploration game. There's great voiceover from the creepy jerk leading you around his abandoned island, a compelling mystery to solve, and lots of 3D environments with a painterly look to them to match the search scenes.

It's not as good as the Professor Layton series, but it's definitely in the same ballpark. Puzzle games with adventures grafted on to them.

Anybody complaining that we haven't had any Mystlikes for a while should check this out. It's priced to move at $30, which makes it this year's Endless Ocean. Except better.

Akimi Village (PSN) - This is essentially a Keflings game, made by the same people who made the XBLA Keflings games, but totally not called Keflings because presumably Xbox has some kind of lock on that.

It's quite good. When I played Starcraft, I would often get distracted by building my town / upgrading units and forget about the war. Akimi Village is THAT part of Starcraft, the intricately balanced town-creation system.

Wii Play Motion (Wii) - Definitely better than the original Wii Play. Unfortunately, it is still a simplistically-presented minigame collection. I thought Nintendo had learned so much about making minigames palatable when last year's Wii Party came out... none of that expertise went into Motion, as far as finding ways to make minigames part of a larger, grander scheme. You now have two bundle choices for getting a new MotionPlus controller: Motion and FlingSmash. FlingSmash is probably better, because at least you have some structure to it.

Although, one item to note: there's a game in Motion called Spooky Search, where you have to point the Remote around your room to locate unseen ghosts (and then drag them onto the TV.) This is 100% the kind of thing Nintendo was showing off at E3 for the Wii U. Play some Spooky Search, then imagine playing it with a touchscreen that can show ghosts actually in your room, all around you.

LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean (PS3) - Not as good as LEGO Harry Potter. This one has a bizarre emphasis on making characters walk across thin balance board-type objects... and the perspective issues that have haunted the LEGO series since day one have not gone away during the transition to HD.

And I may be crazy, but I think the co-op splitscreen is flakier in Pirates than it was in Potter. Feels like it is too willing to fracture the screen even when you're still close together. A zoom-out would have done just fine in most cases.

Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D (3DS) - Very pretty. Ton of tutorial levels, which is weird. Like, the first level of the game, 1-1, teaches you how to walk. You don't shoot anything until 1-3. You're still getting tutorial suggestions from the Unseen Narrator into world 3.

I have not done much more than learn to shoot, so I can't form a opinion on it just yet. I have a feeling that this one is what it is. This was an unlockable sidegame in the last two Resident Evil games, and now we're expected to pay $40 for it on 3DS... but, you know, it's portable and has multiplayer and all that.

I'll tell you one thing: I could give a flying fuck about whether or not I can delete my save file. Christ, the things people have to get all entitled about.

One more thing: the Resident Evil Revelations demo that rides along on Mercenaries? Complete pants. It lasts all of two minutes.

How could I spend a week in Los Angeles and not find a way to go to Disneyland?

This was my first time in Anaheim, at the park that Walt built with his own two hands. Not only do I owe the Haygoods for hosting me during E3 2011, but I also owe them for ferrying me to Disneyland for a day. My first E3 and my first day at Disneyland in one week... that was two dreams come true.

I was there when the park opened, and I spent the first hour in a constant state of giggles and/or tears. I was there. I decided I would eschew Fastpassing and go into total discovery mode. I was mainly interested in seeing the rides we don't have in Orlando, and checking out the differences between Disneyland and Magic Kingdom.

I wanted to skip Fastpass because I did not want to have to report back to Ride X at a certain time. But I also knew I wasn't going to burn hours standing in one line, because there's only so much to look at when you're stuck winding around the base of the Matterhorn.

I hit Fantasyland first, and did Mr. Toad's Wild Ride straight away. I believe the last time I was on that was in 1991, so it was fantastic to see it again. It's sort of odd how that ride has survived in Anaheim all these years, when the much larger MK turned Toad Hall into a fancy Pooh attraction a decade ago. Toad is also still part of another Anaheim classic, the Storybook Land boat ride. the picture above shows an unusual moment: the Wild Ride with all the lights on during a full stop. A child lost her hat somewhere in Londontown and the Cast Members put the entire attraction into park so they could go find it.

Since it was early in the day, I was able to see most of Fantasyland in an hour or two: Pinocchio (which I did in Paris, but is absent from Orlando), the slightly revised Small World (I LOVE the new Mary Blair-styled Disney characters! No reason to hate them at all), and Storybook Land (which is also found in Paris but not Orlando).

I did notice right away how cramped everything is, and how the park ends up with a lot of weird branches and dead ends. Tomorrowland in particular is a navigational mess (the massive queue for the revamped Star Tours did not help).

I also made sure to do Roger Rabbit's CarToon Spin, being an old Roger Rabbit fan and that ride being another CA-exclusive. It struck me as almost the same ride as Mr. Toad, which is another reason to be shocked ol' Toady has kept his claim.

I can't believe there's still a Disney Afternoon remnant out there! Gadget's Go-Coaster, which, from what I saw, has absolutely no vestigial Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers elements aside from the name. Things are just plain weird in Anaheim.

Since they just bulldozed the Mickey's Toontown part in Orlando, it was cool to get another look at Donald's boat house and the other Toontown props.

Did the Nemo ride, portions of which have been recycled for a not-at-all-structurally-similar ride at Living Seas in Epcot. I guess I'm glad the old 20,000 Leagues subs were given a new purpose instead of being entirely removed like in Orlando, but the whole process of getting in and out of them, plus the general clunkiness of having to look out a tiny porthole and potentially seeing the entire ride out of sync with the audio had to have given Anaheim execs severe pause.

I was surprised to see the original Tiki Room still operating, since we've had the Under New Management show forever in Florida (although a recent Iago robot explosion seems to have finally put the kibosh on the unpopular revamp). I remember the Tiki Room being a favorite of my grandmother's, so sitting in an room identical to where I would have sat beside her when I was five, hearing the same audio and seeing the same talking birds... that was powerful. She's gone now, but in the Tiki Room I was with her again.

Funny how the frilly rides I hated as a surly teen - the Tiki Room, Small World - have become must-do touchstones for me.

I spent some time at California Adventure, another weird amalgam of all-new stuff and familiar rides cherry-picked from my beloved WDW. Got to do Tower of Terror, which was cool since during our last Florida visit Clark was too little, so we skipped it.

And hey, DCA has a completely working Tough to Be a Bug show! The last two times we were in Orlando, the Animal Kingdom version enjoyed a busted Hopper (like, the awesome audioanimatronic never rises from the hiding place, so you just hear disembodied audio when he interrupts Flik's show), plus all the "let the little grubs leave first" bits were in working order! Has Florida Hopper worked at all in the last five years, or have we just been extremely unlucky?

The new Little Mermaid ride just opened, and the line was not a problem at all (especially when compared to the also-new Star Tours over in Disneyland). The scenes are all great... the way they have robot Ariel's hair move like an animated underwater mass is just plain startling. Not a lot of visible technology at work though. Not in the way the Pooh ride uses fancy LEDs and bouncing cars. The animatronics are no doubt near-sentient under the skin (and I noticed some digital screens being used to animate Sebastian's eyes), but to all outward appearances it's a dark ride in the classic style: guests in cars riding through endlessly looping set pieces.

I thought DCA was another weirdly assembled park (although again there were interfering forces; a good portion of the middle of DCA is in barricades for the construction of Cars Land). I guess the years of having the easy-to-walk roughly-circular layouts of Magic Kingdom and Epcot have spoiled me. Even Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios strike me as easily loopable circuits; the massive footprint of Walt's Orlando purchase has everything to do with the Florida four being friendly and symmetrical.

So now I have been to three of the world's Disney resorts: Orlando, Anaheim and Paris. Shall I make it a lifetime goal to visit all of them?

We have just returned from an excellent week in Cape May, on vacation with my sister and her family. We stayed at a rental house that, aside from your own underwear, had everything we needed. Most importantly, WiFi, but I'm not here to talk about that just now... I'm here because I had fun examining the provided books, games and movies.

I'm guessing that if you own a nice vacation rental property, you furnish it with media that looks good on the shelf, might entertain guests should they so choose, and was probably bought on a great discount. Don't misunderstand, there was genuine great stuff here - Clark and I enjoyed several games of the Harry Potter edition of Clue - but the mix of books, DVDs, and VHS tapes (!) was pretty unique.

Finally, a VHS edition of "Bedazzled"! And we actually had two copies of "The Idiot's Guide to the Gulf War." Most of the unboxed VHS was kids stuff... Wiggles, classic Disney, etc.

I cleared out some space on those shelves to the left because I needed space for the PS3, Wii and Apple TV.

A fascinating find: both the novel and the animated version of "The Prisoner of Zenda." You could maybe do a comparison study.

And what's a beach house without one random volume of shojo manga?

Maybe I find this hilarious because my own movies are so strategically organized, but these were all right beside each other on the shelf. From right to left... a no-budget Hans Christian Anderson cartoon, a pair of Harry Potter movies, the only blu-ray in the place: an unopened copy of Up, and an Italian porno from the 1970s. Yes, I looked that last one up. I suspect it is only a porn in the prude American sense, where any movie with full frontal nudity and brief jokey sex scenes in considered pornographic.

How about the complete Indiana Jones saga? First three only available on VHS, just as Spielberg and Lucas intended.

And winning the prize for seriously unappealing character designs: Kurt Warner's Good Sports Gang. "Inspirational and life-affirming." Hey, if VeggieTales can do it, why not Kurt Warner?

It is probably not worth very much to have me, as a big Green Lantern fan for decades, tell you that the Green Lantern movie is really good. Or maybe it is, because you might expect I'm coming at it from a pickyshit fan angle.

We even had to see it in 3D and enjoyed it.

It seems to me there are several vectors out there sabotaging this movie. You've got the hardline Marvel fans out to thumbs-down anything coming from DC. Nothing unusual about that. Not that most movie-goers have any clue about which char acts are Marvel and which are DC, but the endless partisan venom does hurt GL inside the fan community that Warners is banking on coming to see over and over again.

There's super-hero genre fatigue. We have already had Thor and X-Men: First Class rise and fall... and the marketing for Green Lantern is so continuous and so perversive it almost makes you sick of it before ever hitting a theater. Thor had 7-11 cups and X-Men had nothing. GL is everywhere.

Then there's the tricky one: the Green Lantern subject matter itself. Here's where I can fly my fan flag. Much of the plot complaints I see being tossed about by reviewers who have plainly been dying to trash a big-budget film all year are lifted exactly from the comics. It's stuff that has been part of the story for so long, it's like suddenly pointing out how weird it is that we call a fly a fly. Yes, "fly" is a completely useless name for such a creature, but it's what we came up with so that's what it is.

Like the Guardians. All they do is sit there, these supposed all-powerful cosmic entities. Why do they do nothing when faced with Parallax's re-emergence, something the movie makes pretty clear is their fault? Why even include them in the film, I saw one reviewer note.

Because that's all the Guardians have done for generations of comics. They are, as I should think is highly obvious, an allegory for the slow-moving, ineffective, over-traditional, afraid-of-action, very human government.

Or the lack of serious space action from the Corps. Many reviews have expressed a desire to see all those aliens do something other than stand assembled at Sinestro's weekly town hall pep talk.

OK, I'd like to see the GLC get into some stuff. The movie has, like, one scene with the Corps in space using the rings, and most of them get cacked. I'd say this is more of a fault of the compressed movie timeline, the same reality that puts Hal in Kilowog's boot camp for about three minutes. I'd hope that we get a sequel that gives the Corps more to do, but this first film is chiefly Hal's story outside of Oa.

I suspect it is easy for people to dismiss a movie with such a patently silly set-up: bizarre aliens in space with magic rings. It's tough to dial that down to make it seem like something that could actually happen, even if it is no less impossible than what Tony Stark does in a cave in Afghanistan. Thor may have had human super-gods, but GL has the cast of an animated series at the core of the Corps.

And what about Hal? The movie nails something that has been part of Hal Jordan since forever: he is not especially weighed down by being a super-hero, he has fun with it. This is common with many of DC's lineup, and it is owed in large part to the time frame in which those characters were created, and the simpler stories DC was telling in those days.

Now, when Marvel arrived half-a-decade later, Stan and Jack put the company on the map by adding real-world issues to their super-heroes. Which certainly is a talking point, but if you go back to the early Marvels it usually just means that the hero has to worry about holding down a job in addition to being impossibly handsome, in love with two or three beautiful women, and defeating the bad guys with then-current pop cultural references.

On today's comics racks, both companies are telling the same stories, more or less. Both make an effort to have the characters seem they like could exist in our world, both try to make sense of age-old foibles of the genre so they can seem relevant and modern without losing the merchandising investment.

In the Green Lantern movie, there is an attempt to make Hal seem contemporarily insecure, but it doesn't last longer than it takes Carol Ferris to give him a good stern talking-to. Then he is back to laughing, charging in without thinking and just generally having a good time.

I've seen reviews complain that the movie tries to fit in too much stuff, and reviews that say the movie doesn't do enough. It certainly pulls few punches when it comes to presenting the comics stories as written. The origin of Parallax is just about the only swing from the books. Whenever a book (comic or otherwise) is made into a movie, the refrain typically turns to whining about what was changed. In this case, very very little substance was changed, and that is a rare treat.

One interesting experiment attempted during E3 paid off: I used the iPad as my chief work device. I made a deal with myself that I would do brief write-ups on each booth I had booked with appointments, for my office, plus I did a couple articles for Aeropause. And I made it happen even though the entire experience of getting up early and riding in to LACC and stalking the convention floors was all fairly exhausting.

The only tech error was when I tried to use public Dropbox to stash an image for an Aeropause article. Even though WordPress has a non-Flash uploader, it would not run, so I went for Dropbox. The Dropbox link actually worked, except when the article bumped down to summary mode, then the IMG tag broke.

Since I had hundreds of photos to get back to my office, I used Haygood's PC (and Dropbox) to shift those files around. But the writing was all iPad.

I only booked two appointments for Day 3: Capcom and Nintendo. I really really like what's going on with Resident Evil: Revelations for 3DS. It looks great, and it brings the series back to actual survival horror. Not that Resident Evils 4 and 5 were not great, but they sure were not survival horror games. Revelations puts Jill on a cruise liner (holy crap! Gun Survivor!) that somebody has made resemble the famous Raccoon City mansion just to mess with her. Although this Jill still is not the old-school anime cutie in a blue beret from Resident Evil 1, it looks like Capcom prettied her up after her ugly-stick turn in RE5.

Dead Rising 2: Off the Record looks like the Dead Rising 2 I wanted in the firs place. Frank is back, running around the same environment that had us play as Chuck in last year's Dead Rising 2: No Subtitle. I spent the entire demo take photographs and ignoring zombie combat. $40, which is actually Capcom being cool and not raking us for the usual $60.

Street Fighter X Tekken has a hook I like: the combos are easier to pull off. I have argued for years that the Street Fighter franchise needs to stop catering to the hardcore half-circle back punch right right kick crowd. It will be seen as a concession to the relatively younger Tekken controls, but this game is much more approachable. Particularly when it comes to switching characters, but again, that's Tekken at work.

I spent an hour with Capcom and then walked across the aisle to Nintendo. Nintendo had plenty of games to sample, covering four different systems. It was unplanned, but incredibly smart that I made Nintendo my last booking of the show, because I spent three hours there, mostly in the cordoned-off 3DS deck.

I got to check out the Wii U for around 45 minutes. The Wii U is too far out for Nintendo to have retail-bound games ready for prime time, so all of the Wii U stations were tech demos and gaming concepts. They did a Mario+Miis version of Pac-Man Vs, which is great. I did the pirate ship rhythm game... which is noteworthy for showing off the idea that the New Controller screen can be used to display a 360 degree virtual world.

It is going to be great. "Regular" games will be controlled just as we expect, but with the obvious benefits of a touchscreen. The Wii generation of silly motion control games will carry on untouched since the U will still use all your Wii controllers. And we'll get a new set of Wii U-specific games - like the pirate world thing - that will use the touchscreen in ways we haven't imagined yet. OH... and we'll get games that run entirely on the touchscreen, just like an iPad. This is very exciting stuff.

So this will be the Wii's last holiday. It had a great fall last year, but the spring seasons have been abandoned for years. Kirby Wii should be cool, Skyward Sword will be the usual brand of amazing, If the hip Rhythm Heaven makes it stateside this fall, that won't be bad at all. Toss in Fortune Street, a board game with Mario characters and Dragon Quest characters, as a bonus grab... I don't think anybody expects that one to excel at retail, but it will be a nice addition to the holiday lineup.

I think the last few years of Wii releases might have outlined to Nintendo how nice it would be to have competitor-comparable third party support. Nintendo does great stuff time and time again, but they can only field one AAA first-party game each quarter. They need third parties to fill in the rest of the year. The reel of "hardcore" franchises headed to Wii U had the press conference audience continually gasping in shock. Of course, I think every Nintendo product launch has claimed massive third party support, but for one reason or another it flops.

Although just having big third party multi-platform titles is great, Nintendo needs the support system that surrounds them. Those of us already invested in PSN Trophies and Xbox Gamerscore are going to be difficult to get to actively choose the Wii U version of a particular title. People who don't have a PS3 or 360 should have plenty to look forward to. If Nintendo can leverage the games they excel at with the social systems and digital storefronts that the other guys have had for years, it will be incredible. Nintendo made a lot of promises (and gamers made a lot of assumptions) in the transition from GameCube to Wii, but I can't help but hope the Wii U hardware strategy will help Nintendo play in two worlds: their own, plus everybody else's.

Day 3 stats: 5,527 steps. An hour in StreetPass Mii Plaza.

I was a little worried that I was not going to complete the required two passes through the Find Mii game. At the end of Day 3, I was right at the last boss fight on the second round! Would have sucked if I was stalled out at that point, since I never get any StreetPasses at home, ever.

I finished the Puzzle Swap stuff by Day 2. I was worried about that one too.

Luckily, my Disneyland trip squeaked in just enough additional StreetPasses for me to defeat Find Mii! My current Mii Plaza totals are 389 Miis and 428 StreetPass tags (which includes people I StreetPassed twice or even three times over the course of E3.)

Everybody, EVERYBODY, uses their StreetPass info to pimp their websites and Twitter accounts. I want to roll through my Mii population and come up with a list of all the sites and people I encountered.

This was my busiest day at E3. I booked myself for booth appointments every hour on the hour. It's a bit of a risk, because some companies may want to keep you around for a while so you see absolutely everything. Plus there's a fair walk between the two main exhibit halls, which could lead to unpleasant sprints if your appointments are tight and alternate from one hall to the next.

I actually did really well, which is great considering I did not pay attention to the two halls problem AT ALL when booking. I went from Atari to THQ to Halfbrick to Natsume to Disney to Majesco to Bethesda on Day 2. Throughout E3, I was not late for a single appointment.

One thing I learned right away: I am not there to Gotcha these poor people. You're talking to developers, producers, brand managers, PR experts... and yeah, to some extent they are all there to snow you and convince you their product is the One True Must-Have of the show, but I just can't stand there and attack them on past releases, technical issues and perceived fan slights. I'd love to ask the Capcom rep, "Hey, WTF happened with DLC for Marvel vs Capcom 3? You guys seriously prepared a scant two additional characters, and then priced them at $5 each?" But I don't know that I have that in me, when all they're trying to do is give me an advance look at a game that's no doubt still in beta and won't see store shelves until Holiday 2011.

I did ask a Natsume rep, "You guys make a lot of Harvest Moon games. Tell me what's new about this one." Which is easy, although it sounds sort of dickish, because of course the new release has some kind of hook to differentiate it from the previous twelve. And the reps are well practiced on delivering that message.

Couple surprises for me from Day 2...

First: Saints Row the Third. I have never played a Saints Row, because, honestly, I thought it was a half-assed GTA knock-off. I remember the first game being turned into a viral video joke thanks to tons of stupid bugs like invisible cars. So when the second edition went multi-platform, I ignored it. Now there's a third coming, and I am so down.

Yes, there's some easy playing-to-the-base at work here when your main character can wield a giant purple dildo as a weapon (true story: I've seen it), but the ridiculous GTA-gone-Jackass world looks fantastic. In the guided demo, we saw the player perform wrestling moves on sidewalk citizens, jump into cars feetfirst through the window, and tool around the city in a damn jet. If GTA is getting more serious in tone, Saints Row is heading into complete adult cartoon territory.

Second: Disney Universe. The title had been outed before the show, but now we know it is NOT an MMO but instead a four-player platformer for Disney geeks. YES. From what I saw, it may not have actual Disney characters in it, but instead focuses on little gremlin-like dudes who wear Disney costumes and sally forth into Disney worlds. I played a Monsters Inc-themed level and wore costumes based on Lion King, TRON and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Since there's no Kingdom Hearts III any time soon, this random combination of classic Disney and currently-mandated-promotable Disney will have to fill the void.

Daily stats: The 3DS reports 7,001 steps for Wednesday. 47 minutes in StreetPass Mii Plaza and 45 minutes in Dead or Alive Dimensions.

At some point after Nintendo had moved through the Zelda anniversary bit and the 3DS bit (which included a WONDERFUL backdrop-encompassing custom animation featuring all five upcoming 3DS games) and into the big Wii U reveal, I think I leaned over and asked Haygood, "So is the controller the entire system?" And he said something like, "Doesn't look like it, there's another piece to it right there." And he pointed to the Wii-looking box visible in the stock photo onscreen.

Then I felt sort of stupid because, duh, yeah, there it is.

So I guess I understand why the gaming press did not feel the Wii U hardware was explained properly, but it's hardly of any concern. That box just isn't that important. The "New Controller" (their term) is what's important. The main thing to know about the Wii U's head is that it has to be there. And if this is final hardware (and it's not), then the red sync button is on the outside, not hidden under the SD card flap.

I love the multi-screen approach. I love the idea that inventories and stats and pause-screen info could be handled on a touchscreen right in my hand. I love that this device could resurrect all those crazy GameCube-GBA ideas that went unexplored and unloved simply because the GameCube was purple.

There's a mic on it. A camera. Four shoulder buttons. Two 3DS-style circle pads. D-pad and four buttons. Start/Select/Home. Stereo speakers. An open plug for attaching the New Controller to other devices (one demo showed a new Zapper that sort of turned the NC into a rifle scope!) There's a lot of cool ideas that are going to come out on this thing, both "regular" gaming experiences and all-new gaming experiences. I am way more excited about this controller than I was when I first saw the Wii's original Remote and tethered Nunchuk.

Nintendo announced a new Smash Bros, which should be no surprise to anybody except that they said it would be coming to both Wii U and 3DS. Which would be the first handheld Smash Bros!

I had two appointments on my first day on the show floor: SOE and EA. I was pretty excited to get to SOE because they run DC Universe Online and I remain a big booster for that one. I got to chat with some of the DCUO team and tell them my favorite parts of the game (including a pair of Clark stories from his time with DCUO) and they showed me the soon-to-be-released mission pack that includes a battle in Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

At the EA booth, I got to go hands-on with the new SSX. Stepping away from the hip visuals of Tricky, this SSX takes real world mountains and turns them into extreme sports courses, with sort-of-recognizable landmarks included in them, which is a pretty cool hook. Even for people with fancy media passes like me, the wait times here were pretty rough, so I did not get to see absolutely everything EA had at the show.

Since I had planned out an easy day, I spent a lot of time just wandering the two show halls and checking out all the neat booth designs and layouts. And mentally noting the booths I would be visiting on the following day for my personal tours. E3 is a convention, just like all the Origins and Comic Cons and trade shows I've been to in the past, just with far more spectacle and art to it. Some booths are stupid loud. Some are built high into the air. Some are nothing more than a pop-up table with a curtain. Some offered wide open spaces with giant TV screens, others were like complicated windy paths with lots of Disney-style queue theming. It is amazing to see.

I had one special appointment after the halls closed, an invitation to Tuesday night's Nintendo Developer Roundtable. You can watch a five minute synopsis of the evening here; the actual presentation was more like 90 minutes. I am clearly visible in that video at least half a dozen times, including this brilliant unfocused closeup near the end:

At the beginning of the roundtable, Miyamoto waved off any questions about Wii U, instead concentrating on the slate of new 3DS titles and the incoming Zelda game, Skyward Sword.

For me, the best reveal was when he copped to switching his long-awaited third Pikmin game from Wii to Wii U. He intimated it will be a launch title for Wii U, which would make sense given he straight up said he wanted to release it for Wii this year.

Yay, Pikmin!

Almost forgot the stats: 7,611 steps and ALMOST TWO HOURS in StreetPass Mii Plaza. Between the two Nintendo conferences and the show floor, the Mii exchange thing exploded.

After spending Sunday night before cutting some embarrassing Yoostar videos with Joe Haygood, not to mention a stab at Kinect Joyride (and yeah, let's not ever mention Kinect Joyride), the old E3 pro Mr. Haygood started Monday by taking fellow writer Roberto Olano and myself downtown for the first official activity of E3: the media check-in. These two are both LA locals, so I got to be the tourist and gawp at the extreme changes in scenery you get out that way. Where I'm from, you have two types of terrain: trees and shopping malls. In LA, there will be this huge desert mountain, then some urban sprawl, then a residential zone with those crazy tall cliche trees. Then another unused mountain that you can't believe hasn't been bulldozed and turned into Disneyland North.

At the LA Convention Center, the check-in area was just shy of abandoned on Monday morning. Then we parked in the media hospitality room and watched the Microsoft press conference stream, since none of us managed to get an invite to the 360 Kinect show.

I was glad to see some actual creative-looking kid Kinect titles arrive that aren't just bullshit Wii Sports ripoffs. I would totally buy Disneyland Adventures, Sesame Street Once Upon A Monster, and maybe Star Wars Kinect and Fable: The Journey. We tried out the new Kinect Fun Labs stuff that night. There's one lab toy that turns your picture into an Xbox avatar, including whatever shirt you happen to wearing... but the facial transformation stuff is about as good as the 3DS Mii Maker (which is to say, not very), and there's no way you'll be allowed to use this photo-tar as your official friends list avatar since it would be too easy to make an obscene shirt.

Another one of the free Fun Lab apps is Googly Eyes, which lets you scan in an item (front and back), then watch as the program attaches googly eyes to it and makes it dance. If Nintendo added something like this, the internet would call for the immediate dissolution of the company. But because 360 used to primarily have nothing but shooters, the peanut gallery gives them a pass on this crap.

The "hardcore" uses for Kinect were best exemplified by Mass Effect 3 and worst exemplified by Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. ME3 lets you use voice commands to order around AI partners (which is nothing new) but more importantly turns the player into an actor of sorts when choosing dialogue responses. That's some slick stuff. Ghost Recon, however, has you using hand gestures to assemble custom guns and then test them out with even more hand gestures. You use one hand to point where the gun should be pointing, and then pop a jazz hand to fire. Terrible. There's no way anybody wants to play the actual Ghost Recon game by pulling a million jazz hands a minute; seems pretty obvious this Kinect interface is for the gun assembly minigame only.

Just before the Halo 4 announcement, we bailed out of the convention center to start walking to the site of the EA press conference, the Orpheum Theatre. The theater first opened in 1926 and has played host to Judy Garland, Jack Benny, Will Rogers and the Marx Brothers. I was there to see EA talk about the new Madden.

And other stuff. I think the new SSX looks pretty good, and the new Need for Speed intrigues me since it is not entirely about driving (although I gather driving fans already hate it.)

In the EA show was when I started actively checking in with my 3DS to collect StreetPass data. This would prove to be a major distraction through the expo... but this was my only chance to actually experience the tech in action, so I had to take advantage of it. I've had a 3DS since before launch, and in my hometown I have had exactly one StreetPass.

After EA came Ubisoft. This was at the Los Angeles Theater, a venue constructed partially by Charlie Chaplin in 1931. Ubisoft has a cute looking Kinect Rabbids game (another one I'd probably get, if I had a 360), and of course their one big franchise, Assassin's Creed. It's good that worked out for them, because I don't what Ubi would have to talk about without it. They have a new Rayman side-scroller coming that looks fantastic... a lot like Donkey Kong Country Returns, but with an Earthworm Jim kind of look.

Then we boarded buses for the short drive to Sony's press conference, held at Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena... opened in '59, this location was the site of Wrestlemania 2 in 1986, the 1960 Democratic National Convention that gave Kennedy the gig, and Michael Jackson's last full performances in the US (during the "Bad" era in 1989.)

Although it was cool to see EA and Ubi give their game forecast - although almost nothing mentioned for Nintendo products, I noted - this Sony show was a big deal for me. I was very interested to see how they'd handle the outage talk (Tretton apologized), and I've been watching their E3 show from home for the last two years. This would not be the last time that I would silently and excitedly remind myself that I was at E3.

Lots of stuff we knew about and have seen a ton already, like Uncharted 3. Lots of stuff we knew about but had not seen much on, like Sly 4. Some welcome it's-about-time announcements like Move tools for LittleBigPlanet 2 and a arrival date for the ICO/Shadow collection.

The Vita price announcement was a clear cannon shot right at Reggie Fils-Aime's forehead: $250 for the non-WiFi model. If the Vita does indeed arrive this year (Tretton said "this holiday" in the presentation, but I have heard rumors that it could get pushed... but that could be referring to rollout in other territories), that puts two new handhelds on the racks at the same price. Then it totally becomes a features/games comparison, which is just as it should be. I'd give the edge to Nintendo for the holiday season since they'll have months of quality 3DS titles out by then and the Vita will likely have the usual anemic kickoff, but into 2012 both companies will have to fight for market share. And it will be dirty. We'll see if Nintendo cuts the 3DS price anytime soon to get a leg up; I'm sure they were confident in their $250 because they figured that's no possible way Sony could enter a new portable at anything under $300. Now they may have to rethink that.

After the conference, Sony raised the curtain and held a massive party. Almost a mini-E3 all by itself. Vita was there, most of the big games were there... they even had performance art dancers and a DJ. My iPhone battery was dying by this point, so I was unable to do any live tweeting during the conference, plus when Haygood and I were separated during the party it became a very real problem to locate each other with my phone dead. I found an outlet in the mostly-abandoned press box area and was able to charge up enough to tell Haygood where I was. We left during the Jane's Addiction concert.

Day 0 stats: the 3DS pedometer says 6,403 steps, and most of my 3DS time was spent in the Notifications app (15 minutes checking to see if I was receiving StreetPasses.)

I had big plans for today. My plane(s) put me back home pretty late (and pretty hungry; meals cost extra on cheap flights these days) so after being welcomed home and sharing E3/Disney gifts with Rhonda and Clark I sort of passed out. Today, Sunday, I imagined I'd go through my trip photos, start writing up some E3 weblog entries, etc.

And then I turned on my brand new iMac - which had been powered off all week - to be greeted by a dead hard drive. The kind where the OS throws up a blinking ? icon and you hear a faint clicking sound from somewhere deep inside the machine.

There's not much you can do at that point. We hustled out to an Apple Store appointment where the guy told me what I already knew: the HD was, somehow, dead. So they swapped me for a new iMac, and I have now spent the entire evening re-migrating data from the old iMac (now Clark's) and re-establishing all the iPhone/iPad connections.

I lost some file data from the last few weeks, and because I had already wiped the iPhoto and iTunes from Clark's iMac, I had to re-establish all of our pictures and media from slightly older backups. In the last month, I had not yet set up a Time Machine official backup. Because, shit, I ordered the thing the day it was announced, I did get it delivered until the week of May 16th, and I was out of town all last week... so that's barely three weeks in jeopardy. Could have been a lot worse.

I'm doing Time Machine now. Who would have thought a three-week old hard drive would fail?

I did not post anything about E3 (except for work, which was actually quite a bit) because E3 week was rather awesomely busy... and today's adventure explains why I've been dark even further.

So I am on my way to E3. I never imagined I'd get to attend, but hard work and perseverance and all that.

Rhonda and Clark dropped me off at the airport about an hour ago. When I stepped pout of the car, the airport radio was seriously playing Dueling Banjos. WTF radio station, even an in-house corporate PA loop, has THAT on its playlist?

I understand this to be some portion of the Rockies.

I have a heap of appointments booked, but the crown jewel is being able to get to both press conferences for Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo is showing off their new system and I'll get to play it... while Sony is apologizing for a month of system outage and swearing they can dig out of third place in the US.

Although (as far as we know) only Nintendo is debuting a next-generation system, everybody has a changed world ahead of them. The astonishing prevalence of iPhones and smartphones with cheap games and apps has completely altered the gaming playing field. In some ways, it's good because EVERYBODY games on their smartphones, so the modern language of video gaming is more commonplace than ever. But it means that Nintendo and Sony no longer control the environment, particularly in pricing of handheld games/devices. I think Nintendo is finding out that already, with the 3DS. It does a lot of great stuff, and Nintendo has ruled the handheld gaming space for decades... but $1 games on a device that lives outside of a pure gaming world has undone their fiefdom. The 3DS is currently going through the painful first months of every gaming system in history - starter software and a lot of grand promises that only matter to those of us already inside the hobby - and I wonder if that old strategy just isn't too slow when you buy an Android phone and already expect a thousand apps to browse.

That question is going to frame a lot of E3 coverage this year, although the discussion has been ongoing since Apple arrived on the scene. 3DS sales will force the analysis, even if the curve does end up being relatively normal when compared to Nintendo's past.

Poor Sony. I can guarantee that every mass media article is going to begin with a recap of the recent system hack, painting the former king as a struggling, victimized naif. Tomorrow I'll see what Sony is up to in person, and then write my own Poor Sony article.

I think we're going to put together a trip to Six Flags Great Adventure this summer. I haven't been there since I was a teen (was that the park where I was pickpocketed? I don't even remember) but it would be all new to Clark. Great Adventure, like many Six Flags locations, has been slowly branding ride after ride with DC Comics theming. So I'm sort of surprised that this trip has not already happened. Jersey is, like, right over there.

There's a new Green Lantern coaster (which is a repainted coaster relocated from a Six Flags park in Kentucky that closed last year) that apparently affords an excellent view of the parking lot.

Great Adventure has several other superhero-themed rides, all hilariously scattered about, according to the website. Batman is in the Movietown land, which makes some sort of sense, I suppose. Green Lantern and Superman are at the Boardwalk. Bizarro is found in Frontier Adventures.

Although Bizarro is certainly one of the last characters I'd pick to headline a public-facing theme park ride, perhaps his home in Frontier Adventures makes sense to him. Right alongside the Runaway Mine Train and the Log Flume.

Six Flags; version of Disney's FastPass is called Flash Pass. Yes, featuring the Flash. It's like they want to do a full-on super-hero park but just can't see spending the money to chuck out old, lame-themed stuff that still works. I mean, they have some pirate stuff! And a couple rides that are named in Spanish!

Not that Green Lantern is a masterpiece of theming. The press videos show a lot of bare concrete, two awkward flat enlargements of comic artwork, and a prop jet fighter (with a painted pilot's name: Hal "Highball" Jordan, #eyeroll).

I don't know that Clark is tall enough to ride ANY of these coasters, which sort of sucks. For him. And it looks like the kid area sidesteps superheroes entirely, WTF, to spotlight the Looney Tunes characters. Because there's a brand with lasting appeal for the ten-and-under set, current revamp show notwithstanding.

There's precious irony in Bugs Bunny fronting the kiddie section, straight from 70-year old cartoons that were made for adults as much as kids... while the DC superheroes own all the hardcore adult-sized rides, hailing from continually published comics that largely exist in the public eye as kids toys. It's our cultural bias against anthropomorphics, I tell ya.

From easily the most memorable Smurfs episode ever, the one where the whole village gets infected and they all die in the end or something. The virus traveled by the Smurfs biting each other on the ass, and the infected Smurfs made a horrible "gnap" noise.

The toy can be found at Toys R Us. In the animated version, the feral Smurfs were substantially purpler. The figure is black because the original French comic storyline had the blue guys turning black when bitten. In fact, Les Schtroumpfs noirs was the first Smurfs adventure to see print, but in the 1980s we did not realize we were seeing faithful adaptations of twenty year old French comics.

Finished L.A. Noire tonight. I wish the entire game was as tight and polished as the last bit. That screwy interrogation minigame just saps too much fun out of the process. Then there's the fiddly drudgery of getting stuck on your turning radius when you're chasing someone, or stupidly spinning in circles to pin down a clue.

It's a boogered-up experience, to be sure, but I'm still glad I did it. It is a fun game to see in action, even if I rolled my eyes way too many times at the rookie developer mistakes.

DLC plans were announced today, like we couldn't see that coming. I think $4 per case is sort of obscenely overpriced, given that I'm figuring they'll last an hour apiece and will not hold much replay value. There's four cases coming this summer (plus some Who Cares items like new suits... ask me how many times I changed suits during the 20+ hours I put into beating the game) and if you buy early you'll be able to get all four for $10 in a bundle deal.

So I'll do that, yeah. I thought this was unexpected: the "PS3 Exclusive" DLC case is NOT part of the four coming this summer. The cases available as a Walmart exclusive and as a Best Buy preorder are, however. This ends up being pretty slick for PS3 owners... effectively five extra cases for $10, some of which come with Trophies.

Won't stop the game from being weird, I'm sure. L.A. Noire's looks are affording it some critical passes that a lesser-graphicked game would not receive. Imagine a standard-def Wii game with the exact same gameplay and no fancy facial motion capture. It would be yet another third party strikeout, lampooned by gamers for its bizarre lack of action.

I like what it attempts, even if it does not succeed, so I'll back the game's play.