Okay, now that E3 has come and gone, here are my overall thoughts on the various conferences and what was shown:
Eh, the actual conferences weren't that great, but a lot of great stuff did end up coming out of this E3 regardless:
-Scribblenauts Unlimited content-creation demo (as I mentioned elsewhere, this tool for creating your own custom-stuff in the game looks totally amazing. After playing Super Scribblenauts, I didn't think I could be surprised by this series anymore, but this blew me away and looks completely totally amazing. I can't wait to check it out. 5th Cell's definitely still got it):
http://kotaku.com/5916569/scribblen...-wii-u-game-by-a-kotaku-columnist-take-a-look
-Rayman Legends gameplay trailer (Rayman Origins was an excellent game and this game looks to be delivering more of that awesome platforming-fun in extremely well-drawn creative worlds and settings, so I'm definitely excited by this and hope Ubisoft and Ancel continue to do wonderful things with this series like this):
[youtube]HmVtkqypEBw[/youtube]
-Project P-100 gameplay demo, particularly from 7:00 forward (A big surprise, especially as it wasn't shown at Nintendo's actual E3 WiiU conference. At fist I wasn't really feeling it, but after watching this trailer, particularly from the point I mentioned, I felt very safely reassured that Platinum Game's definitely still has what makes them amazing and will definitely be checking this out):
[youtube]V9YjceHWgC8[/youtube]
-Watch Dogs gameplay demo (Another very positive surprise, this time from Ubisoft. The game's concept seems very interesting and novel and I can't wait to see more of it. There are so many different kinds of possibilities for this game and I hope it lives up to that hype):
[youtube]0dTOnyp58NM[/youtube]
-Paper Mario: Sticker Star gameplay (The sticker system seems like kind of an interesting system and seems to have been implemented well, from what Nintendo showed to us. But really, the biggest news about this game wasn't the sticker itself, but the announcement that the game won't have a traditional experience/leveling system and instead the way you'll become stronger in this game and increase your stats is by assisting NPC's in various ways, such as fixing the damage done to a Toad's flower-garden by replacing the damaged flowers with some stickers you found on your journey as shown in the gameplay demo.
I went into more detail
here about why this probably isn't a problem/something to worry over what that means for the relevance of confronting enemies in the game, but suffice it to say that I'm very intrigued by the concept of an RPG that rewards you not for just thoughtlessly slaughtering wave after wave of opponents (which will just respawn anyway) for no other reason than they're in your path and give you experience, or in Paper Mario's case, Star Points that magically make you stronger, but rather for
defeating particular individual and groups of enemies that are actually inconveniencing the lives of NPCs, with the stat-boost reward being for having actually bettered the game's world in some way.
Of course, that's a bit of speculation on my part I suppose, and having not played the game, I can't say anything of how well that system is actually implemented in the game, but I'm definitely intrigued by it and definitely want to see more of the game and how Nintendo utilizes that idea):
[youtube]_pSkacyGOmE[/youtube]
-Nintendo Land Donkey Kong & Luigi's Mansion mini-games (yeah, it's more casual fare, but these games still look like they could be a blast to me):
[youtube]GtQrrpMY7Y8[/youtube]
[youtube]58xf4V6mUbQ[/youtube]
It was mostly just the way these things were presented and how stuff like the Nintendo and Sony conferences were handled that was disappointing at this E3, IMO (well, that and the lack of new stuff, but I still have plenty of stuff to get this year anyway without having any new stuff added on top of that, so that's... really quite fine for now, IMO). The actual stuff they showed there was amazing, as what I posted shows, it's just the way they went about laying out their conferences and organizing it and dedicating the wrong about time to the wrong games that seems to have left kind of a bad taste in people's mouths (and mine as well at first, but that E3's come and gone and I've had time to mull all this stuff over and actually looked over everything they showed, it definitely wasn't for a lack of games or anything that made this E3 bad or disappointing, but just how the conferences were handled).
Naturally, that itself is kind of strange, since all of these companies have shown at prior E3's that they're great at actually showing they're stuff off the right ways and know how to handle it, but something just seems to have gone wrong there for pretty much everyone this year. Despite them all having great stuff to show, they spent too much time on stuff people didn't want to see much of, and too little on the stuff they actually did (like for instances, had Nintendo shown stuff like the latter half of that P-109 gameplay segment at E3 as what they closed their WiiU conference on instead of Nintendo Land, things probably would have went a bit more smoothly). It's like all of them just happened to get new marketing directors at the same time or something, with the new guys not knowing how to properly handle an E3, despite having all the content there and tools to make it amazing.
In any case though, the actual and new trailers and gameplay and such were great, so despite the conferences themselves being strangely uniformly weak, all-in-all, I'd have to say I'm pretty satisfied with what we got from this E3. More new stuff would have been preferred of course, but as I mentioned, just from what they showed I'll already have plenty of stuff to work through, so that's not too much of a concern, at least not yet (and by the time it will be, it will be the time for one of the other events anyway). So yeah, despite the conferences themselves being mostly unsatisfying and weirdly handled, I probably would have to say this E3 was alright. Could have been much,
much better of course, very, very easily, but I'm satisfied for the time being.
