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I’m not typically one to express my joy through popular internet acronyms, but I must confess I was tempted to type “OMG” upon seeing the new Smash Bros. If you have the time, I suggest you ingest this. It’s the newly opened official site for Super Smash Bros: Brawl for the Wii. It has a lot of info that’s worth reading if you’re into Smash. Tasty bits include more screenshots, music, development stories, and a delicious trailer (which you can also find here). Newcomers include Pit (Kid Icarus), Meta Knight (Kirby games), Zero Suit Samus (I really should play Zero Mission), and Wario. And there’s one other special character I won’t spoil for you if don’t already know. Just make sure you watch the whole trailer. Be sure to click on the thumbnails above for enlargenated versions.

Can this week get any better?

Please note that I still trust Silicon Knights to make a good game, but I’m worried about Too Human. I downloaded the trailer last night, and I’ve seen the offscreen gameplay video circulating the internet. Right now, it doesn’t look too compelling. I’ve read decent—if brief—accounts that say it’s pretty good, but the trailers definitely don’t show it. I fear this may be the developer’s inability to make a good trailer though. Just like movies, great games can have bad trailers and vice versa.

That got me to thinking last night. You always hear people saying that trailers or commercials should show more gameplay. That’s BS. If you want proof, just look at any message board mentioning MGS4 and see what you find. There hasn’t been a single screenshot of actual gameplay yet, but people are frothing at the mouth to play MGS4. Why? Because the trailer sets the mood. That’s more important than most people realize. Check out the original teaser trailer for Too Human. Now watch the new gameplay trailer. Tell me which one you’d rather play.

I realize this is just semantics. It’s a good game or it isn’t. I personally believe that Silicon Knights are going to make a kick ass game. I’m just talking about mood here.

I just watched Cliffy B’s E3 playtest of Gears of War. I have to say I wasn’t impressed. For the 360’s supposed “killer app”, Gears of War just wasn’t doing it for me. It may be fun to play, but it was boring as hell to watch. It didn’t help that Cliffy B. appeared to have God mode turned on. Watching the main character’s blood spatter repeatedly with no consequences wasn’t exactly thrilling. Not to mention the incredible amount of lead pumped into each enemy before it fell. Cliffy literally went through clip after clip to dispatch single enemies. Even with a shotgun at close range the baddies took two or three hits.

Headshots seemed to make no difference whatsoever. In a game that’s supposed to methodical—rather than run and gun—that makes no sense to me. Granted, this was a demo and I’m sure certain things aren’t in place, but I saw nothing that really grabbed my interest here. I suppose the actual act of taking cover looked nice. There were plenty of options from cover, including peek shots, blind firing, and just vaulting over low cover. That was actually pretty neat. The gunplay left something to be desired though.

 I don’t know, maybe the graphics are mindblowing in the real world. I just wasn’t seeing the fun part. I guess I’ll find out when a demo hits.

Considering my recent SEGA rant, this announcement is like edible gold. A new Golden Axe is set to debut next year on the 360 and PS3. Maybe SEGA is finally seeing fit to resurrect all of its sequel deserving properties (Eternal Champions, please). Little was mentioned of the game, though a trailer is to be shown tomorrow at E3. I will be there (virtually) with bells on.

Alright, this will likely be one of the last posts for a bit, unless I see something mammoth pop up. Frankly, E3 just has way too much information to be covered by one man—especially one who isn’t actually there. Although I do have to mention the new Golden Axe, which is coming up right after I’m done writing this post.

Now that the keynote speeches have come and gone, what are we left with?

Continue reading “E3 Keynotes: Afterthoughts”

It’s raining outside, but it’s all sunny New Mombasa in my head. I finally laid eyes on the delicious trailer. I kept myself from watching it online at work yesterday, just so I could see it on my TV in HD. Sure enough, I got goosebumps. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can stop reading now.

First off, it’s gorgeous. The demo is real-time, using the current version of Bungie’s Halo 3 engine. Simply amazing. The music is haunting and inspiring, as we’ve come to expect from the series. It even has its own American Beauty-style piano riff now. All I can say is I’m damned excited. Say what you will, but I am a Halo fanboy through and through. I’ve played the games, devoured the books, and the Master Chief himself is currently watching over my DVD collection. I can’t wait for the next book and the upcoming Halo graphic novel.

This trailer raises all kinds of questions. Is that the Ark we see at the end of the trailer? I read a post yesterday that said the trailer proves that Cortana is going rampant. While I don’t doubt that she is, I don’t really think the trailer proves it. Whatever the case, it’s at least seven months and twenty-two days before we’ll know for sure—and that’s if the game came out New Year’s Day 2007.

Oh, it can’t come soon enough.

No live webcasts of the Microsoft conference unfortunately. As such, I won’t regurgitate what other sites are already covering. Suffice it to say, Microsoft thinks Xbox LIVE is the bees knees. It’s going to be integrated into Windows Vista and cell phones of all things. I really wish they would feature their actual games a little more prominently, but oh well. The HD-DVD drive was shown. Looks small and sleek, but no price mentioned. The camera was shown, of course. And they capped it off with a trailer for Halo 3. If you’d care to check out that trailer yourself, head over to Bungie.net. I will be waiting to get home and download it in creamy HD goodness—along with the thousand other trailers I downloaded yesterday.

And that’s all I have to say about that. If you own a 360, you don’t need me to tell you about E3 happenings. Just go download them yourself.

Until I saw a few pics from the Halo 3 trailer, I had forgotten the games ability to make my hair stand on end. I can’t tell you how many times I watched the first Halo 2 teaser trailer. I won’t even read the description of the new trailer for fear of spoilers.

Oh, this has been a good day.

—check out Joystiq’s coverage of the conference here.

Well, I managed to find a webcast of the E3 Nintendo conference that wasn’t banned by the evil office webfilter. All in all it was pretty short, but packed with delicious info, like so much nougat. So much so that to contain it in a single post is maddening, but I shall try.

Continue reading “Nintendo E3 Conference”

Cruising around the ‘net waiting for the Nintendo keynote to start I came across this on Evil Avatar. Basically what is says is that the “cheap” PS3 will not support HDMI. HDMI is needed for HDCP copyright protection. Copyright protection is needed to play Blu-ray movies. You see where I’m going with this? Without HDMI, the low end PS3 may not be able to play Blu-ray movies at all. I can’t imagine Sony shooting themselves in their collective feet so blatantly, so let’s chalk this one up to speculation for now. If it’s true, all I can say is wow.

UPDATE—contibutor SuicideNinja (no relation) has a better explanation. Apparently, if the copyright protection is imposed, it would limit the resolution on non-HDMI connections. Check out the comments for the full story.

Word comes down from the only main desk that 8-bit Ninja has reached the 1,000 hit mark. That’s right 1,000 unique (special and creative) users have visited this establishment since it’s rebirth in April—add my visits to the site and we’re probably closer to 2,000. Thanks for making it happen. Some disappointing news though: my visitor to comment ratio is severely lacking. Including the two spam bots, it’s about 1 in 100 visitors. Ouch. But I don’t care. Your silent approval is all I need. I’ll be keeping track of the goings on at E3, so keep checking for more info.