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Gaming Sites Sum Up E3
Now that E3 is done and the press have gone home, they're consolidating all their E3 reports into handy indexes. Here's the massive Gamespot index listing all the titles they covered, here's the IGN index for E3, and you can also try the Gamespy E3 index or a multitude of others via Gametab News. Do you have a 'best in show' for E3, or at least a roundly ignored game that people may have missed amidst the hype?
This was my 7th E3. That being said, I'm pretty much immune to the hype and lights, the smoke and mirrors. And I guess this is why each E3 seems to get a little bit less impressive each year.
I'm not a big FPS gamer. I could care less about the Big Three (Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2) so those are automatically out of my Favorite Thing at E3 list.
But I will say what I WAS impressed with - the GBA->GCN Connectivity games.
Yeah, you heard me.
This was something new that nobody had seen before, and that nobody expected. The Pac-Man game was great, great fun. It was a game of tag - three people used the Gamecube controllers and played as ghosts on the screen, while one person used the GBA and played the arcade version of Pac-Man. If a ghost caught Pac-Man, the two switched controllers - that ghost became "It" with Pac-Man and the old Pac-Man became a ghost. It ran on a timer and then at the end, the scores were tallied up.
Tetra's Trackers and Four Swords (both Zelda titles) were fun too, but required a GBA for each person. I'm not sure how many times you'll find people with 4 GBA's with the Link Cables, but if you can find them these are really great party games. In Tetra's Trackers (at least in the demo we played - the training level) you raced the other three people to collect stamps from pirates in numerical order. On the Gamecube would have an overhead map showing the location of the other players and circles representing the pirates. At times, they would how the number of the pirates (so if you needed Pirate #3, you could see which one he was on the map.)
Four Swords plays the same as the GBA version, except the main board is on the Gamecube - you use the GBA as your controller, unless you fall into a pit. If you fall into a pit, you fall into your Gameboy, where you have to climb back up into the Gamecube.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles used the connectivity, but it wasn't required. If you used a GBA as your controller, you could see a map and your status without flipping to another screen. It was a real-time 4-player battle game, much like a Gauntlet Legends type of thing.
And Splinter Cell used it for a map of some kind - I never really looked at it closely, but it was a cool feature. You basically kept the GBA next to you and looked at it when you needed it (such as in Wind Waker with Tingle.)
I was also impressed with the GBA Camera Tech Demo they were showing. They took a picture of your face, uploaded it to the Gamecube, and it mapped your face onto a polyginal naked person. Then, it asked you a series of questions, and determined who you were by your answers. (It actually pegged me correctly - said I was a programmer) So, it had my face, with long hair, glasses, and tshirt and shorts dancing around with other Mario characters. It even blinked the eyes and changed the expression of the face, too. Very, very cool technology that was in it's early stages.
Everyone else pretty much seemed like...eh...But Nintendo blew me away this year. Let's hope they actually do this stuff right - because I was impressed with the E-Reader last year, and the lack of software for it made it stumble in my eyes.