It's E3, Bitches! - Day 3 (Final Verdict)

E3 is finally over - the booths are packed up, the lights are off, and the glitz and glamour are dead for another year. Except for the two videos below, I didn't find anything new worth posting, but I do have a few parting thoughts about this years conference.

Darksiders: Wrath of War is a game in which play War, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that looks like a combination of God of War and Devil May Cry (though they cite Zelda as an influence, I don't see it). While I'm not convinced they put a whole lot of thought into the story (War seeks to redeem his integrity after being framed for wiping out humanity?) it looks like it could be fun.


I had seen a few Bioshock 2 videos with a short, looped reel of actual gameplay in the background, but this is the first good taste I've seen yet. Looks interesting, and I'm a shameless Bioshock fanboy, so I get hard at the sight of this stuff.


Final Verdict: I have to say, if I had actually wasted my time and money going to E3 2009 I think I would be incredibly pissed. More was announced in the weeks leading up to E3 than at any of the press conferences, and it didn't seem like a whole lot of those titles were shown off. There were way too many games whose only presence was a logo, a few screen shots, and a pre-rendered teaser trailer. I was glad to finally see Bioshock 2 in action, but even that was rather meager. I was incredibly disappointed that there was absolutely nothing about Thief 4, Deus Ex 3, or the next Hitman game. Though I suppose Sony came out on top of the conference with more solid titles announced, there wasn't any obvious game of show that I saw.

Both Sony and Microsoft are now obsessed with gimmick controllers, with Sony showing off their new EyeToy add-on, the motion sensing Wand, and Microsoft showing off their new camera based motion system, Natal. Sony probably pissed a lot of people off by announcing that the new PSP Go (which has no UMD drive at all, bringing up questions of the availability of the PSP's back-catalog) is going to be $250 but still only has one analog stick, no touch screen, and the screen is rumored to actually be slightly smaller than the PSP3000 which gives consumers very little incentive to upgrade. The biggest surprise, in my opinion, and the announcement that seemed to create the biggest geek uproar was that of Left 4 Dead 2, which was announced only 7 months after that of the first, which has a fair share of problems that gamers feel should be fixed, but the fact that Valve has yet to live up to the promise of downloadable content for L4D. Valve has tried to backpedal by assuring players of the existing L4D that after-launch content will still be released, but this leaves most people feeling a bit neglected and taken advantage of since it seems hard to believe that L4D 2 isn't stealing some of the fixes and content that was initially slated for L4D.

Overall it was a lackluster E3, the surprises were mostly negative, the omissions at the show were sorely missed, and god knows how much money was wasted on a show whose efficacy was pretty much obliterated by the press release extravaganza of the weeks preceding the show. Yay, E3 is back!