June 2012 Archives

At the end of E3 2012 Day Two, while still on the show floor, a couple of guys from the Adam Carolla show asked me if I would mind doing an interview. My first thoughts were, Adam Carolla still has a show? Who runs it? Is it on cable or some kind of doofy satellite radio thing? I still don't know.

Anyway, I agreed. (This was a week before Carolla decided he could still work a few points out of his misogyny shtick.) A few questions in, it becomes clear what I'm in for. The questions aren't about gaming or technology, they're about sports and car parts. I get it. This is one of those bits where they pick some shlub off the street and show off what he or she doesn't know about the topic. The audience hoots because, naturally, they know what Hankook manufactures and can name two teams that play at the Staples Center.

Both questions I got right, by the way. Although on the latter, I cheated a bit and named Devils and Kings... since both teams were in the Stanley Cup playoffs at the time, right across the street from E3.

What you may not know is that, when you're the shlub, you are encouraged to come up with something stupid when you do not know the answer. Or maybe you did know that, since the shlubs they trot out for these comedy bits could not possibly be THAT stupid, could they? The game is to answer some right, then make up hilarious nonsense on the question you don't know. I'm pretty good at hilarious nonsense, so I'm wondering if they used me on the show.

They took a picture of me, and insisted on calling me by my PSN screen name. I'm sure both were used against me.

True story: I could not name either team from the most recent Super Bowl.

The PS Vita is bigger than a cat head.

A few weeks ago, every retailer in North America was offering a free $50 gift card when you bought a Vita. Walmart. GameStop. Target. Best Buy. Amazon. But not Toys R Us, the one retailer in North America that I happened to have over $100 in gift cards for. Unfortunately, TRU did not jump on to the $50 cardwagon... but I cashed in my credit anyway and picked up a Vita last week.

Also unfortunate: just when I buy a Vita, I have two 3DS games and an iOS game in for review. So I have not really had much time for Vita.

First impressions. The screen is nicer than the 3DS, but not as nice as a Retina iPhone/iPad. The twin sticks are great. It's more comfortable to hold for longer periods of time than any DS/3DS, thanks to the curved and indented bottom corners.

The interface is interesting. I hate the cheesy, inconsistently designed circle icons, but I like that you quit an app from the menu screen with a rip-from-the-top-paper-corner gesture. I've never owned a PSP, so I can't say how this UI is better/worse than the PSP's UI. Being able to pull up Trophy info is nice... I actually think the Trophies sync and display faster than on the PS3 itself. Still wish we got the PSN iPhone app over here in the States.

Near needs some purpose. Nintendo's Mii StreetPass Plaza is pure genius; easily the oft-overlooked gem in the 3DS' preinstalled app list. Near needs to be more in that style. Right now, I end up seeing icons of nearby Vita owners, but there is not much to do with them. Occasionally I unlock free DLC for games I do not own. Which is a cool idea, just a tad more mercenary than Nintendo's Play Coins parallel.

I bought the WiFi+3G model because screw you, I want to have the ability to use it online when there's no available WiFi if I so desire. TRU had the launch bundle, so I have an 8gig memory card and the hope of a free game from AT&T at some point before the world ends.

Games. I have the free Motorstorm RC game, which is nothing to get excited about. I bought Touch My Katamari because screw you, I like Katamari games.

I grabbed the three free AR games. Funny that everybody talked about the 3DS AR stuff last year - the dragon-shooting target game, the character picture posing, etc - and no one said word one about the Vita AR games. Or, it's not funny because they all pretty much suck. I think the Vita does a better job of tracking AR cards than the 3DS, however. You can point the camera away from a Vita AR card and the game will not freak out in the way that a 3DS AR game does.

That Table Soccer AR game is a complete nightmare. Plus, none of these free AR games have Trophies, which I'm pretty sure is bullshit.

I also picked up some dumb free Match 3 game, which also has no Trophies. Who told Sony they could get away with skipping Trophy support on free Vita games? Also, in no world am I going to be excited about a Match 3 game unless it's stapled onto the Pokemon franchise.

The Vita stuff I'm really looking forward to is a bit into the future. Retro City Rampage, Assassins's Creed: Liberation, and PlayStation All-Stars, most notably. I'll get the Uncharted Vita game once it comes down off that asinine $50 price point high horse.

Just when I thought this line was dying out, we've seen some new Batman Imaginext product... no doubt timed ahead of "The Dark Knight Rises." We found the Gotham City Jail set at Target. Comes with yet another damn Batman BUT also with Bane.

The Jail does not come with Two-Face and his tiny airplane. That's a Toys R Us find, part of their exclusive Gotham City collection. The plane is, of course, a repaint of a toy from some other Imaginext line. A lot of retail exclusives are just repaints, but we picked this one up since they bothered to have the plane done in a cutesy two-tone. There's another TRU exclusive in the Gotham City line that's Green Lantern with a green motorcycle... and it's the same motorcycle sculpt that has already been painted in either Batman or Robin color schemes. We did not buy that one.

Now, Bane does not have a sculpted head - just the usual Imaginext oval - but I'll let it slide since Bane's mask sort of fits the slight cheap-out. Seems obvious that this Bane is more like the comics, and not the weird beartrap mouth guy seen in the new movie.

But here's what's cool about him:

The Jail has a special light over an interrogation chair that makes Bane's Venom-veins light up! Nice.

The Jail is about the same size as the Joker Fun House set or the Green Lantern Oa set. The activation point on top turns on the light, and the one on the second level opens all four jail doors simultaneously for a prison breakout. Makes me wonder if this wasn't originally conceived as an Arkham Asylum playset, but Fisher-Price opted for the less creepy "Jail" moniker.

Then we found this, also part of the Toys R Us Gotham City line:

Gotham City itself! And I don't think it's a repaint of some generic city set, because there's a Wayne "W" sculpted into the second story floor, plus a very Batcave-esque garage in lower right. You get a Joker with this set (nice job letting Joker set up a crime base directly underneath the bank) and a Bruce Wayne figure.

Bruce is, unfortunately, another round-head. However, the set comes with a cool cowl-and-cape you can use to turn him into Batman. So I guess I have to let that non-sculpt slide as well. The elevator lets Bruce pop out of the top of Wayne Tower, which is really cool. The other activation point opens the bank door and then blows the wall off the left side.

Gotham City is bigger than the Jail, so it would have been nice to have more action points, but whatever. Still a nice playset.

Also: Toys R Us has a Catwoman/Batman two-pack with the pair and their custom motorcycles. So if you're having trouble locating the still-rare Catwoman single, there's another option.

Here's our villain group shot:

Weird: both the Jail and the Gotham City set were only on the endcaps of both Toys R Us and Target. Not with the rest of the Imaginext toys.

So, the big themes from this year's E3:

1. audience members whooping over gratuitous violence
2. Tomb Raider rape discussion and booth babes still keep gaming a boys club
3. everybody still thinks Netflix is an AWESOME FEATURE and not just an expected side app
4. everybody has a second screen strategy, suddenly
5. and not a lot of huge surprises, but plenty of smaller ones

1. I've already talked a bit about how weird it was to hear sports-level cheering as virtual people had their faces shot off. I think Warren Spector has it right in this interview when he suggests that it's not so much the violence itself that's the problem, it's the fetishizing of it. I wouldn't say that gaming is the sole horse in that race, because society is always going to move towards new standards that would have been unthinkable just a few generations before... but it was damn weird to hear people hooting to applaud some pretty stupidly gory moments at the E3 press conferences. PRESS conferences.

I mean, come on, God of War: Ascension. As I tweeted during Sony's show, are we really OK with that asinine brain-removal attack Kratos puts on that elephant guy? I suppose this is no different than the evolution of R-rated horror. Some horror movies are cheap scares, some are psychological, some are buckets of blood. If I, personally, needed any further proof that the God of War franchise is not for me, that was more than enough. That, and the eight minutes that preceded it of Sony making us watch Kratos rip the horns off goatmen over and over again.

2. Booth babes (and I only use the term because I have not heard anything less dopey) were in force at E3. Now, as a marketer, I know that having pretty people sell your product is The Way It's Done. But obviously men can be pretty too, and men only made up maybe 10% of the show floor demo teams. Although when you add in developer staff, then you add a ton of males to the mix. I had personal demos from both: developers and booth personnel. And PR execs, which were mostly female in my experience.

What I'm getting at is that I don't have a problem with pretty people standing around handing out freebies and trying to hustle your attention. But it should be a relatively even gender split, and whatever awful thing they're forced to wear should not be awful. Pretty people can be pretty without wearing short shorts and tight t-shirts.

And as for the Tomb Raider prequel... I think the fault lies squarely with Crystal Dynamix being boneheads. The "attempted rape" scene contains no rape. There is a threat of one, of an assault at the least, with the clear tone that Lara is being sexually targeted by one guy... but Lara gets away and shoots the guy in the head pretty damn quick. It's not like there's some kind of terrible rape minigame where you have to drag Lara away from the attacker. Which seems like that's the angle that is taking root in the mainstream press: in the new Tomb Raider, Lara gets raped.

But Crystal Dynamix put it out there that "they try to rape her," that Lara "turns into a cornered animal to survive" and that this becomes a defining moment in her turning into the heroic, empowered, take-no-shit Lara Croft we all know. And that kind of thematic emphasis just is not necessary based on what actually happens to Lara in the 20 minutes or so I saw at E3. She's already been through a world of pain... nearly freezing to death, starving, lost, and she literally walks off a bear trap wound... so why pretend that a sexual assault is the character-defining catalyst? Why make THAT your media talking point.

Crystal Dynamix has spat out some other sexist malarkey too, which makes me worry that these are leading indicators of a lousy game. (See also: Lara's jungle wilderness is mysteriously littered with arrow pick-ups.) These guys are talking as if Tomb Raider is 100% played by males, made for males, and interpreted by males. It's screwy how these guys are shitting on their entire female audience.

3. Netflix et al. What is it with everybody being so damn proud that they negotiated a Netflix app? Or Amazon or Hulu or whatever. I guess it's easy proof that Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft is serious about being more than a gaming device. But I have Netflix on every electronic device in my house that cost more than $50. So it's not exactly a killer feature anymore. Who had "Netflix" on their E3 press conference bingo cards?

4. Nintendo unveils a second screen controller last year, Apple has destroyed all tablet and phone competition, so now suddenly both Microsoft and Sony show up with second screen strategies with tablet interfaces. Microsoft's SmartGlass is an app that will run on iPads (and Android tablets, but no one has those), so at least they're not trying to invent new portable hardware. And they're not trying to limit it to Windows 7 phones, because nobody is buying those. So that's two smart bullet points to SmartGlass. Sony was more subtle about it, throwing out the Vita's cross-play feature with games like PlayStation All Stars... but I bet Sony is preparing for more PS3-Vita functionality, trying to combine Apple's portable gaming strategy with their own HD PS3 tech (just as Nintendo is with the Wii U). Of course, no one is buying Vitas either.

Me, I love the second screen stuff. I loved it back in the GBA-GameCube days, even as it died on the vine. It seems to me like Nintendo is going to have the easier go at this, since the GamePad is part of the Wii U. Microsoft has to rely on people owning iPads - which certainly plenty do - but they're going to have to see some fantastic early returns on SmartGlass app usage to convince developers to build for it. Sony, well, they'll have to price cut the Vita eventually to get it in more peoples' hands, but they're at least able to start sneaking in the back door with their first-party devs and the Vitas that are already in the wild.

5. Post-E3, there was a lot of jaded smacktalk about the lack of surprises. Whatever. I suppose it's easy for me to lack patience for that attitude, since I was there. It is certainly more exciting to watch new footage from Assassin's Creed III on a three-story-high HD screen than to see ASSASSIN'S CREED III TO FEATURE NAVAL BATTLES pop up on an RSS feed back home.

I get that a segment of the population is going to get sniffy about it, and, yeah, aside from the tweaked Wii U hardware, there's no new console to dominate the media waves. But the "E3 sucks" tact is not going to get any credence from me.

We had some interesting bad luck at E3 this year, Joe Haygood and I. As seen in the pic above, we had a flat tire on the LA freeway. We were in the car pool lane, which is, naturally, all the way on the left. So when the flappy tire noise started, Joe had to ease his car across multiple lanes and then the first pullover spot was the V split between two sections that would each be considered bigger than my usual interstates back home.

But I'll tell you, if you have to have a flat tire on the LA freeway, this is the way to do it. Just as Joe was punching in the number for the roadside assistance that's part of his insurance, the Los Angeles Freeway Roadside Assistance tow truck pulled up in front of us. That guy put on Joe's spare and we were on our way. Total delay? Maybe ten minutes. Sheezus.

That wasn't the first piece of bad luck, just the most photogenic. My luggage was mysteriously put on a different flight in to LAX, so we had to hang out at the airport for almost two extra hours waiting for my underwear to show up.

Oh, and I bent a pin inside my DSLR's Compact Flash slot. Look, it was dark, and Compact Flash sucks, what can I say. That camera is in my office's engineering department right now awaiting repair.

Also: something is dicked with how my Movable Type install imports my Twitter feed. So 90% of my E3-related tweets did not make it to my fourhman.com MySQL database, which pisses me off. What I need to do is ditch MT and switch to WordPress.

Happily, the actual E3 stuff all went great. We got to attend the conferences for Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sony and Nintendo. And I had a great lineup of appointments that filled all three days of the show. This was my second E3, and I'm still in awe of the pageantry and hype. It's just super damn fun, being in the audience of elites who get to see famous and semi-famous people announce famous and semi-famous games.

I do wonder what's going on, however, when the audience starts loudly cheering for violence. I'm no prude; I play plenty of violent stuff. But when something absurdly violent happens, my first reaction is more along the lines of "Eeeooooo." Not "WOOOOOOOO." It's doubly odd when you consider that these press conferences are, you know, for press. When NFL coaches give a conference, do the reporters punctuate the naming of a player's game-winning play with an appreciative hearty bellow?

The answer is that, yes, there's press. But a lot of them are fanboy press. And I don't mean that to be disparaging, just that some press is legitimately and purposefully run by fans. Like, if you run a Halo fan site that's big enough to get a media invite to Microsoft's E3 show, you're probably only focused on huge-ass Halo news and you're super-excited for whatever Halo whatevers are revealed. Or you run a Sony site and when you see Kratos literally cut open an elephant-man's head and pull out his brain as a finishing move, you're somehow beside yourself with glee at how Sony has taken God of War into a bold new direction for cranial dismemberments. I guess.

I also think it would be great if these companies could talk like human beings at their conferences. Here's my take (and yes, I'm going to be a bit of a prick and leverage some of my work experience as proof I know what I'm talking about in terms of presenters).

Microsoft: The worst hosts of the entire expo. Mattrick is awful and so on-script it's fake. It was so bad that when the South Park guys came out, they made fun of the buzzword-laden scripts that dominated the conference.

Ubisoft: Aisha Tyler was a great host, the rare celeb who can both ad-lib on stage AND knows her gaming. Having her around meant Ubi could go for silly skits and patter, because she pulled it off. Ubi's big problem was acoustics; it was hard to understand the speakers in the first part of the show.

Sony: Jack Tretton is smarm personified, but he's the best corporate presenter of the big three. He can deliver marketing bullshit and sound like he actually believes it, while the Microsoft guys are still stammering on cue cards. He sounds natural, which is 90% of the job. Kaz is also great, but he was not onstage this year.

Nintendo: A mixed bag. Miyamoto is always fantastic, perhaps the only guy who actually enjoys what he's doing. And Reggie Fils-Aime, I always feel like he's leashed himself. Like, he could ad-lib if was allowed to. Instead, he just goes script-stiff, and does not have anybody to back him up who is good at being natural, because Miyamoto is never on stage for long. The poor gent who did the 3DS portion was clearly extremely nervous and incapable of patter.

You just wish some of these guys were not so incredibly painful. I get that it's a hell of a thing, presenting on a gimmick-laden stage to a crowd of miscreants hungry for blood, but man, can it get ugly.

I'll get to some first-hand impressions soon enough, once I've satisfied other responsibilities for E3 coverage. But here's a show floor pic of Gandalf battling Tiger Woods in the meantime.

"YOU. SHALL NOT. PLAY THROUGH."

Sort of a rare thing that a male character is posed on a comic cover doing the ol' back-to-the-camera-sexy-head-turn bit. This is standard pose #1 for female characters. Of course, Hawkeye's butt isn't as defined as the typical female drawing, so we haven't exactly hit equal footing yet.