Slashdot Mirror
E3 - Hands On Impressions - Nintendo
Slashdot Games is here on the show floor at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, and over the next three days, we'll be doing brief hands-on impressions of the major games in each booth. First up is Nintendo, following up our earlier press conference summary with a chance to see and play the games in detail. Here's what we found at Nintendo, including Mario Kart, Metal Gear, Starfox, and.. Wario insulting us?
- F-Zero GX is startlingly fast, both in framerate and vehicle speed. There are great-looking light trails on all your competitors, of which you can see most of the 30 onscreen at once. The background levels included a night-based thunderstorm setting, which looked very smart as you looped around the tracks at near-supersonic speeds. Also, the gameplay seemed similar to previous titles, which is good if you're a F-Zero fan to start with. The 4-player splitscreen ran without slowdown, but dropped the backgrounds.
- Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes showed more clearly that it's a (partial?) remake of the PSX Metal Gear Solid, by demo-ing the first area of the original MGS, but Gamecube-ized. It looks slicker and higher-res, keeping the same stylized color schemes, but the real-time cutscenes slowed down noticably due to the screen-filling snowstorm effects. Still promising, though.
- Starfox, being shown exclusively in multiplayer, is puzzling but interesting at the same time. It seems that you can pick to play Arwing flight-based combat, or Fox and friends in ground-based combat. It's possible to be playing in an Arwing while your opponent is running around on the ground shooting up at you. How this works in gameplay remains to be seen (the two people I saw playing in different modes were having difficulty finding each other), but certainly seems that the over-the-shoulder shooter mode and the flight combat mode are both fun and addictive individually.
- Geist is the mystery new Nintendo title from developers N-Space. It seemed to play and look like a Halo competitor, first-person action to the fore, but with the gameplay possession elements of Messiah in full effect. As a ghost, you can take over people's bodies and then use their weapons and identities as you wish. The concept on its own is appealing if done well, and it's visually impressive, so this is definitely a title to watch.
- Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike looked visually stunning, especially in the forests of Endor, where the player could control AT-STs as they stomped through the dense undergrowth, complete with swinging log traps, Ewoks, and speeder bikes. The great-looking lighting and destructible trees really helps make this one of the stand-outs on the booth. The other stages also look excellent, with the player controlling X-Wings and tauntauns in both air and foot-based levels.
- we may cover Final Fantasy:Crystal Chronicles more when we get to the Square Enix booth, but the action was smooth, fast, 4-player simultaneous, and actually very reminiscent of Diablo or Gauntlet Legends. In other words, this is no conventional FF game, but it looks to have made the genre transition successfully.
- Mario Kart Double Dash was running in networked LAN form, using multiple Gamecubes with the broadband adaptor. It looked smooth, fast, with bright and sharp graphics and an excellent frame-rate, a fitting continuation of the Mario Kart legacy.
- the Mario Kart area was also home to the best gimmick in the Nintendo booth. A CG puppet of Mario was displayed on a monitor above the booth, and a voice actor backstage was responding to events in the booth ,while Mario lipsynced and gestured correctly onscreen. Mario even turned into Wario at one point, so he could plug Wario World and be nasty and evil to E3 attendees. Very neat.
- weird exhibit of the booth was Carrera VRS, some real-life slot cars which you controlled via the Gameboy Advance. They ran round and round a slot track, and the players had their lap times, current position, fuel gauge (!), and other stats displayed on the GBA, as they controlled the cars with the GBA itself. Not quite as strange as the Gameboy sewing machine controller, but getting there.
For further impressions, screenshots, and media try IGN.com, Gamespot, Gamerfeed, or all the other usual suspects. More booth impressions soon, and we'll try to get more GBA titles previewed later in the show also.
- Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes showed more clearly that it's a (partial?) remake of the PSX Metal Gear Solid, by demo-ing the first area of the original MGS, but Gamecube-ized. It looks slicker and higher-res, keeping the same stylized color schemes, but the real-time cutscenes slowed down noticably due to the screen-filling snowstorm effects. Still promising, though.
- Starfox, being shown exclusively in multiplayer, is puzzling but interesting at the same time. It seems that you can pick to play Arwing flight-based combat, or Fox and friends in ground-based combat. It's possible to be playing in an Arwing while your opponent is running around on the ground shooting up at you. How this works in gameplay remains to be seen (the two people I saw playing in different modes were having difficulty finding each other), but certainly seems that the over-the-shoulder shooter mode and the flight combat mode are both fun and addictive individually.
- Geist is the mystery new Nintendo title from developers N-Space. It seemed to play and look like a Halo competitor, first-person action to the fore, but with the gameplay possession elements of Messiah in full effect. As a ghost, you can take over people's bodies and then use their weapons and identities as you wish. The concept on its own is appealing if done well, and it's visually impressive, so this is definitely a title to watch.
- Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike looked visually stunning, especially in the forests of Endor, where the player could control AT-STs as they stomped through the dense undergrowth, complete with swinging log traps, Ewoks, and speeder bikes. The great-looking lighting and destructible trees really helps make this one of the stand-outs on the booth. The other stages also look excellent, with the player controlling X-Wings and tauntauns in both air and foot-based levels.
- we may cover Final Fantasy:Crystal Chronicles more when we get to the Square Enix booth, but the action was smooth, fast, 4-player simultaneous, and actually very reminiscent of Diablo or Gauntlet Legends. In other words, this is no conventional FF game, but it looks to have made the genre transition successfully.
- Mario Kart Double Dash was running in networked LAN form, using multiple Gamecubes with the broadband adaptor. It looked smooth, fast, with bright and sharp graphics and an excellent frame-rate, a fitting continuation of the Mario Kart legacy.
- the Mario Kart area was also home to the best gimmick in the Nintendo booth. A CG puppet of Mario was displayed on a monitor above the booth, and a voice actor backstage was responding to events in the booth ,while Mario lipsynced and gestured correctly onscreen. Mario even turned into Wario at one point, so he could plug Wario World and be nasty and evil to E3 attendees. Very neat.
- weird exhibit of the booth was Carrera VRS, some real-life slot cars which you controlled via the Gameboy Advance. They ran round and round a slot track, and the players had their lap times, current position, fuel gauge (!), and other stats displayed on the GBA, as they controlled the cars with the GBA itself. Not quite as strange as the Gameboy sewing machine controller, but getting there.
For further impressions, screenshots, and media try IGN.com, Gamespot, Gamerfeed, or all the other usual suspects. More booth impressions soon, and we'll try to get more GBA titles previewed later in the show also.
Ground-based combat isn't exactly new to the Starfox series.
After completing the difficult task of earning a medal on Venom while playing the game in expert mode, Starfox 64 (or Lylat Wars, as it is know in the PAL market) gave you the option to choose to fight on foot in multiplayer. You could also choose to be a tank after earning a medal on Venom in standard mode. See here for more information.
However, Starfox 64's multiplayer could hardly be considered all that great, so I hope that Namco have done a much better job. This is one game I'm really looking forward to...
GTA and Vice City will come to the cube once the ps2 lease runs out in October. :)
:)
True Crime looks better anyway
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
I keep seeing this same type of comment, but it's actually quite misleading.
;-)
You are correct that the Nintendo Game Studios will not likely be producing any highly violent and sexual games any time soon. They do produce some absolutely amazing games without that, though, as Zelda, Mario, and others, show.
HOWEVER.
That does not mean that third-party developers aren't making them available. I'm currently playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and I have BMX XXX sitting on the table next to my GameCube. Neither of these are "kiddie" games, and both earned a "Mature" rating. Both of them well deserve it, too. You also have the Resident Evil game series, and many others, available.
GameCube may be the system with the largest number of games for "younger gamers", but that doesn't mean that there is any shortage at all of "Adult" games. Quite the contrary, although many people don't realize it. And Nintendo has been working hard lately to increase cooperation between themselves and third-party developers, bringing more and more great games to the system.
As a final note, as someone else mentioned, Grand Theft Auto is in fact coming to GameCube towards the end of the year.
Topher