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Thompson

The Electronic Three: 2012

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Is there a huge group of people watching these things other than the live studio audience and all the nerds watching the live streams? I keep wondering who they're targeting. Do they show these things to their shareholders or investors or something? These are big companies with marketing and PR departments – there has to be a sensible explanation for why they keep doing these embarrassing/phony presentations. You don't see them in the trailers or other kinds of marketing; just/mostly these live things ... why?

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Well, E3 was originally a press only thing, right. It's only in recent years that it all started being livestreamed, etc.

But, yes, they're utterly awful.

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I thought the Nintendo press conference yesterday was wonderful. The presentation itself was top notch with Reggie once again showing he is the top performer in this field and a great sense of honest fun all around (apart from some stilted guests droning their lines).

The games were great as well. I got very enthused seeing Pikmin 3 and Lego City: Undercover, Zombi U and the Mario games. Racing after gold coins seems like frantic fun. The only thing that didn't convince me was Paper Mario. Those stickers, meh. It's all just a new bunch of locked doors you have to find keys for, but it doesn't seem at first glance to deliver particularly interesting new gameplay.

There were stinkers, of course. Arkham City Armored Edition is something no one is really waiting for and Nintendoland, I have no words for it. I wish the creator of Animal Crossing had just made Animal Crossing the menu for the Wii U. How supreme would that be? The Wii U menu would be a delightful little village with folks walking around and tons of casual stuff to do.

I heard there were some complaints about the lack of a Zelda or Metroid announcements, but I don't agree with those sentiments. I thought it was wonderful to see Nintendo give away such a warm and fun presentation (you know, fun! That thing that was sorely missing from everything Microsoft was doing) without leaning on their old franchises like a leper on crutches.

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Was the lack of a Zelda or Metroid really something people complained about? What struck me was Nintendo's utter, utter failure to present me with anything that at least felt fresh. Pikmin was Pikmin, 3 fucking Mario games, another Luigi's Mansion game, Wii Fit U to please the "casual" crowd and that Nintendoland thing, which I'm sure has a bunch of fon minigames, but looks like a game for 10-year olds (which is fine, but you're not going to sell your system to me with that). Even the mini-game they took way too long to explain seemed like a re-appropriated version of that Pacman GBA/Game Cube game from years ago.

I really like the idea of the hardware. You could do so many cool things with it, but if anything they showed complete atrophy on the development side of things. Yes, Mario will be fun. Pikmin will be fun. NintendoLand will be fun. I'm just so tired of all their shit, I just want to yell at them a bunch.

http://www.rockpaper...e-becomes-vile/ And thank fuck someone wrote this. This has been my biggest issue with this years conferences.

Meanwhile, you got all these idiots arguing about who "won" E3. No one did, they all get a D- and can go fuck themselves! :( :( (I'm just angry, incredibly frustrated and disappointed, but then maybe I'm taking this stuff a bit too seriously)

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Did anyone else start to get interested in a game while watching a trailer or playthrough, then become quite bored when it turned to a parade of throat slashing and decapitation? The Last of Us and Dishonored both did that to me.

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The Last of Us was brutal in the right way, though. It made sense in the context of the last of the humans fighting against each other for survival. That's probably the game I'm most excited for out of everything I've seen so far, except maybe Watch Dogs. Although, if it ends up being nothing BUT that combat, I'll lose all interest. I'm hoping they just did that for the purpose of demoing the game. Also I don't have a PS3 so I can't play it anyway. ) :

EDIT: eughraaaa single colon emoticon is starting to drive me nuts

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I only watched the The Last of Us gameplay video, and yeah, it was super-brutal. It was sort of sad to see, since it indicates there will be a lot of this sort of fighting, which is the opposite of what I enjoy in games. As I'm sure everyone agrees, used sparingly, brutal, hard-to-watch violence definitely has a place in any medium, especially in that sort of desperate, scavenging every-man-for-himself setting, and can be a great, VISCERAL way of conveying that desperation, but it loses its effect really fast, and realistically there's a greater chance it'll be used as primary gameplay mechanic, rather than as a poignant way of describing the world and how desperation changes us.

I still have hope it'll be more of a survival (horror?) thing, with focus on traversal and exploration, and Naughty Dog does that really well. Unfortunately they are also known for AAAA action shootfests.

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The Last of Us was brutal in the right way, though. It made sense in the context of the last of the humans fighting against each other for survival. That's probably the game I'm most excited for out of everything I've seen so far, except maybe Watch Dogs. Although, if it ends up being nothing BUT that combat, I'll lose all interest. I'm hoping they just did that for the purpose of demoing the game. Also I don't have a PS3 so I can't play it anyway. ) :

Or this.

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http://www.rockpaper...e-becomes-vile/ And thank fuck someone wrote this. This has been my biggest issue with this years conferences.

I'm actually ok with The last of us and Farcry 3, well I wasn't when watching it but that's the point, in fact even if I was being silly when the ubisoft demo was playing, I felt it was still pretty obvious the tone Farcry 3 was going for. There's a bigger problem with Splintercell's (apparent) torture sequences and the fucking shameless death to america bad guys. Also Medal of Honour showing robocop mowing down men with rusty weapons and flip-flops weirded me out. Oh, watching the first person perspective of a stationary sniper shooting people hiding under cars and stuff in Black Ops 2 was also odd.

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Perhaps the sheer parade of violence on E3 made me extra happy with Mario chasing after gold coins, or Pikmin gathering fruit.

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Yeah I actually quite liked the Last of Us for that reason. If you compare it to the Uncharted games, it shows Naughty Dog reducing the number of enemies by a factor of ten and making the combat feel scary and impactful. A group of four is a genuine challenge, and the things your character has to do to get through them give even his companion, whose life he is protecting, pause. That kind of violence and the pure daft score racking up killing stuff that something like Bulletstorm or Saints Row might have are both ok with me, it's the stuff in the middle that is realistic and lacking in humour but unimportant and potentially even glorified that can be a bit dicey. Medal of Honor is probably the best example from what we've seen so far, and one of my friends said much the same as you, Scipio, it actually made him feel quite uncomfortable.

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There's a bigger problem with Splintercell's (apparent) torture sequences and the fucking shameless death to america bad guys.

I sort of give Splinter Cell a pass on this, not because I enjoy it or whatever, but because coming from French Canadians it seems more like parody or at least an over indulgant fantasy... sort of like Team America. The problem though isn't that its so absurd that it can't be recognized, but that everything else is just as absurd, so without any context of the people making it, it turns into the same old death to american enemies, hoowah and is no better then a modern warfare.

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Did anyone else start to get interested in a game while watching a trailer or playthrough, then become quite bored when it turned to a parade of throat slashing and decapitation? The Last of Us and Dishonored both did that to me.

Yes. Didn't watch Dishonored yet, though, but Watch Dogs had the same effect. I haven't watched a lot of coverage, but I'm getting sick of killing-based games so the E3 event doesn't seem very interesting.

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Watch Dogs looked like really impressive tech with the swaying trees and cloth, but the gameplay didn't actually do a whole lot for me. I like, abstractly, the idea of hacking into everything around you and that could possibly be a cool way to get into the personal lives of characters, but it seems like it's going to serve a really run of the mill hitman story. PLUS, the obvious implication in the trailer is that you can do things the way you want to do them, but if you look closely it becomes clear that everything here is really scripted to happen just this way. The whole crossroad traffic collision seemed really cool and spontaneous at first, but then it turns out there's a scripted cutscene for exactly that scenario.

So, really, it's Assassin's Creed with hacking instead of parkour. It will probably still be a very enjoyable game, but I'm withholding enthusiasm until I know more specifically about the story.

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The only thing I didn't like about the Last of Us trailer was the stupidly excessive cursing. It started making the game sound badly written if everyone is just yelling FUCKING FUCK BITCH. The brutality was a bit shocking since it was like I was seeing it within Uncharted, but I'm fine with it concerning the subject matter.

The beginning of the gameplay trailer gave me hope a lot of the game would involve more exploring, much like a few of the awesome beginning chapters in Uncharted 3.

Also, why so many games starring Ellen Paige?

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Also, why so many games starring Ellen Paige?

Technically, the girl from the Last of Us is not Ellen Page. She's voiced by a different actress and it has never been stated that she is physically modelled after Ellen Page, though there do seem to be some similarities.

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I only just saw this and... I'm excited. O_O

WEIRD.

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That was a pretty badly put together trailer. HOWEVER, it looks like a goddamn epic co-op experience.

"I lost over seventy thousand people including the president because of Simmons!"

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That is one franchise for which I can never again be excited.

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That was a pretty badly put together trailer. HOWEVER, it looks like a goddamn epic co-op experience.

"I lost over seventy thousand people including the president because of Simmons!"

I hereby declare that we shall be playing this game and saving the world, one cheesy cutscene at a time! KTHANKS.

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That 3DS thing Nintendo did was odd. A lot of things we already knew about. That's actually like the theme this E3. "You read about this, here it is again!"

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We're in a

That 3DS thing Nintendo did was odd. A lot of things we already knew about. That's actually like the theme this E3. "You read about this, here it is again!"

Yeah I think it's because we're heading towards the end of the cycle. So everything that's being made, we heard about, the few things for the next round that were shown had to keep a low profile because the manufactures weren't ready to annouce the actual hardware.

Next year will be the big annoucement event.

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http://www.gamasutra...Disillusion.php An interesting read I saw posted up on the website I was gonna name, but has the name right in the URL, so that seemed pointless... So yea. This largely speaks to my feelings about the whole thing as well. In conjunction with that, earlier today when I was listening to David Jaffe talk on the Giant Bomb podcast (at around 75m Jaffe comes on), he offered an interesting point of view as someone who has worked in big budget game development for a long, long time. It's sometimes hard for me to look beyond my own negativity and actually try to understand a little more what is going on in the games industry. Still, I'm glad there is some pushback to the stupidity of this years E3.

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Listening to Jaffe on Bomb Cast. I'm gonna have to listen again so I make sure I'm digesting his point(s) right.

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I didn't pay attention to anything E3 related at all because I never care much for E3. However, normally it seems like there are scoops that are so hot that I end up hearing about them anyways. This year that was not the case, everything I knew and cared about in the world of gaming is 100% the same as it was a month ago with the exception that I guess there's a Starwars game and now I know that CS:GO is going to be 15$.

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