It's E3, Bitches! - Day 2

Day 2 of E3 is over and while there wasn't much new of interest announced (Kojima unveiled his 3rd Metal Gear game of the show, and a new Castlevania game that looks like a shameless God of War clone), there was a lot more hands on time with the games announced over the last several months. I'll refrain from commenting on my overall disappointment in the show until tomorrow, since there is one last day to redeem itself. Oh, and it seems I fucked up yesterdays post and only the intro went up. It's fixed, sadly a whole day later. So if you want to catch up on my picks for yesterday, please do.

As far as I'm concerned Tim Schaefer is a god. He's responsible for the Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and now Brutal Legend - a Heavy Metal inspired comedy brawler starring Jack Black (who is NOT a god, in my opinion). Unfortunately you have to put up with the constant stuttering of that G4 douche Adam Sesler. Also of note, those Donkey Kong noises you hear in the background throughout the video is more than likely Steve Wiebe trying to break the Donkey Kong score record (WTF? You say? Go watch King of Kong, though take it all with a grain of salt)


I really enjoy sneaky-bastard games, and was a big fan of the first few Splinter Cell games. Unfortunately it seemed that as they progressed they got further and further from what I loved about them to the point that I didn't even bother to finish the last one. After seeing the heavily revamped SC: Conviction and a darker and more brutal Sam Fisher (no more Emo Sam) I am getting pretty excited about this one.


I've had a secret crush on the developer Quantic Dreams since the release of the flawed but brilliant Omikron. Despite the annoying quick-time events in Farhenheit (their 2nd game), I felt they were taking a step in the right direction with their quest to meld the dramatic story telling of a movie with the interactivity of today's video games. Now we finally get to see footage of their 3rd game, Heavy Rain, and it's starting to look like they've gotten it right. This is a pretty long interview/demo (19:00), but worth watching. Also, skip ahead to about 1:30 into the video cause they have technical difficulties they don't bother editing out (sloppy ass Gamespot).


And that's pretty much it. There were quite a few videos with the Alan Wake team, but they all showed the same few, mostly uninteresting seconds of gameplay. There were also interviews with Tell Tale Games about the recently announced Tales of Monkey Island episodic series (there's also going to be an XBLA/PSN re-release of The Secret of Monkey Island), but not much of interest was shown. I'm still hoping for something big tomorrow, or to see some footage of recently announced games that have yet to be seen at E3, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll do a wrap-up tomorrow regardless.