E3 2010: Microsoft Keynote impressions. Part 1: Everything that isn't Kinect!

For the sake of length this article has been broken into two parts, everything dealing with Kinect will be posted separately.


Due to circumstances beyond our control at Just Stuff & Nonsense we weren't at the theatre live for the Microsoft Keynote speech, and boy is that something we'll be living to regret (more on why later), but both Drew and myself were watching it live online, and now that the dust has settled it's time to run through and over analyse everything that we experienced.

First up was Call Of Duty: Black Ops, and a scene in some dark and muddy tunnels lit only by the players flashlight, the now standard scripted moments that we have come to expect from the franchise were used to good effect with enemies appearing out of the darkness, however what was less standard was how the entire segment felt more akin to a horror game than the usual bravado you'd expect from the series. Once the action had moved outside into a bright lush jungle things started to settle into the usual COD formula with lots of explosions and bullets flying everywhere. The greenery of the jungle was particularly impressive and the game looked a lot more colourful and vibrant than any of the previous titles in the series, it does look like Treyarch are trying to make this product their own, while still sticking to what fans have come to expect from the (admittedly superior) Infinity Ward developed titles. The action then moved into a helicopter section that was particularly impressive with all the rocket trails and explosions erupting around the player, it appears as if this section was fully under the control of the demonstrator, but it could have been on-rails, only time will tell as far as that is concerned.
Don Mattrick then took to the stage and announced that Microsoft has signed an exclusive three year deal that means starting on November 9th when Black Ops releases any DLC, such as map packs for any Call Of Duty game, it will come to the 360 first.

After a bit of talk about the official name of Project Natal now being Kinect, Microsoft brings out their next guest; Hideo Kojima. Based on the dialogue leading to his introduction it did seem a little like he would be announcing some kind of Kinect enabled 360 exclusive, while it did turn out that this wasn't the case his reason for being there was just as exciting... the first game play footage of Metal Gear Solid: Rising. The honour of the actual introduction of the footage fell to Shigenobu Matsuyama one of the producers on MGS:R, briefly he explained that the game is based around a word they created for it, 'Zan-Datsu' which translates as Cut and Take, but you knew that already didn't you?
After what seemed like an entire year of waiting, they finally got round to showing the footage. It opened with a heavily armoured variant on the FROG soldiers from MGS4, something darts across in front of him and he opens fire, Raiden drops in behind him and after a brief skirmish cuts him into ribbons with his sword and pulls out his spine... tasteful. At this point it all looked impressive, but not exactly revolutionary. Luckily this was followed by some very exciting game play footage of Raiden darting around a very colourful town slicing through everything, walls, people, vans, watermelons, it looks like there's nothing that can't be carved up in this game. The physics and damage models were utterly fantastic, and it looks like there will be a lot of potential for applying your own tactics when playing. In one flash, Raiden cuts through the concrete support structure of a building's balcony causing it to tumble and crush the guards that were stood below. The way the sword is aimed for cutting looks very clever with the user choosing the exact angle at which they make the slices. It appears to be very similar to the way that aiming is in any traditional third person game. No announcement of a due date or anything along those sorts of lines, but its certainly looking amazing and fairly finished already.

Phil Spencer briefly comes on stage to inform us that everything that follows from this point forward will be a 360 exclusive. Cliff Bleszinski is the next guest to take to the stage, and there isn't any suspicion about what game he was going to demo. What was a little surprising for anyone who hasn't been paying close attention to Gears Of War 3 news, is that it will feature four player co-op through the story mode, and it was that multiplayer element that they were showing off today.
It was hard to get a feel for the multiplayer aspect, in fact if it weren't for the occasional shout from the other members of Epic staff playing alongside Cliffy B it could easily have been mistaken for footage from single player. The only new interactions seemed to be the ability to pass weapons. The focus of the demo was instead showing off a variety of Lambent enemy types, some of which start off as normal Locust and then mutate into new super-powered ones as the battle goes on. The game looked very good running on the updated Unreal Engine, there seem to be improvements in the way depth of field is handled and in overall graphical quality. The mutated Locust especially stood out as they were a mess of tentacles and slime all flailing around in a manner you'd expect from such creatures. After some running away from the mutated locust and some giant worms (there's a definite giant worm theme in these games) the team is attacked by a really brilliant looking Lambent Berserker, with loose flesh flapping around on it's face and all sorts of tentacles spewing out everywhere. Although ultimately, it was still just a berserker and kept the usual attack pattern, punctuated with a few jumps around. The demo ended with the thing surviving an attack from the hammer of dawn, so maybe things aren't quite the same. The graphical improvements are certainly appreciated even though the Gears franchise could never be accused of being poor in that regard, however the game play looked to be exactly the same as everything we've seen before.

Cliffy B teased that they will be showing a new multiplayer mode entitled 'Beast' on the show floor from tomorrow, best guess is it will be all players working against a super enemy, with the last person to kill it getting to gain control, we'll know for sure tomorrow. Peter Molyneux was the next guest to take to the stage, but he didn't have Milo in tow this year, instead it was a trailer for Fable III. The trailer teased a little about the story and the ability to rule a kingdom, it also spoke about the connection between two brothers, but other than that it looked just like Fable II with slightly spruced up graphics. Unfortunately, there wasn't a game play demo which makes it incredibly hard to get a feel for what the game will actually be like, but there seemed to be an emphasis on bigger battles and a grander scale to the world. Molyneux closed by stating that the game will be released October 26. The Fable III trailer was followed by a live action cryptic Crytek trailer for some form of Roman gladiatorial game currently called Codename: Kingdoms, apparently its part of an exclusive partnership between Crytek and Microsoft.

Marcus Lheto, the director of Bungie walked out following this trailer and went on to talk about the success of the Halo franchise. In summary; 'Its doing rather well', but he wasn't just out on the stage to present the crowd with a bunch of statistics they already know, he announced that Halo: Reach will be in stores September 14, and then started off some in game play footage. Its impossible not to be impressed by the quality of the graphics when compared to the previous entries to the Halo franchise, the Spartans are of course the stars of the show and have been given a makeover, as well as unique individual outfits. The game is still unmistakably Halo and all of the series' standards are represented. For example, we saw lots of running at enemies, recharging shields, and sticky grenades, but these were also accompanied by new features to the series such as 3rd person melee take downs and sprinting. The battle took the small team of Spartans up through a rocky beach and into a USNC base. There was a lot of action going on and the game did a good job of making it look like the player was involved in a full blown conflict and wasn't just a lone super soldier running around dispatching hundreds of foes. The move between the bright light outside to the creepy interior of the base under attack was particularly frantic, with the player fighting enemies inside, grabbing a rocket launcher and attacking an approaching wraith that was blowing chunks out of the environment. The battle culminated with the taking of a launch pad, this triggered a cut scene of the Spartans jumping into some kind of space fighter and flying up to joining the epic space battle that was raging overhead. Most importantly of all, it looked like the player had control over the space fighting. That would be an excellent direction for the series to take, I don't think I've ever been so interested in a Halo game before.

After the Reach video it was time for the presentation of Kinect, please see part 2 of the article to read all about it. Once the Kinect segment of the show had finished it was time for one final announcement... there is going to be a new model of the Xbox 360, this is considerable smaller, shiner and has built in wifi and a 250GB hard drive, it is also 'Kinect Ready' which means that Kinect won't require an additional power supply if being used with one of these new models. Even more excitingly the new look console will be the same cost as the existing 120GB Elite ($299) and to cap off the fantastic news it was announced that the system was shipping today and will be available for purchase later this week. Everyone in attendance was then informed that they would be receiving one of these new look systems for free, alas the deal did not apply to those journalists watching online!

Don't forget to check out Part 2 of our Microsoft Keynote coverage for information on Kinect. We will be covering the EA, Nintendo and Sony conferences as well, and keep checking back for all the most interesting news from E3 throughout the week.

How to turn something great into something average, just by talking about it

Mass Effect 2 is out in about a week, which is incredibly exciting for me and for a lot of other gamers around the world. But why are we excited about it? Well because the first installment of the game turned out to be fantastic, and the sequel can ride on the quality of the original. The Dark Knight was a fantastic film, and was completely sold out at every theatre I tried to watch it at on release night, again a good example of the strengths of the original selling the sequel. But sometimes the strength of an original work doesn't seem to be enough, sometimes because there isn't an original product to be followed, or maybe the previous entries weren't well received. Or maybe because there is the potential to make even more money that anyone could possibly imagine. In these situation the go to resource is hype, a word that is thrown around a lot, but not unjustly.

It's nigh on impossible to talk about hype wihout mentioning a game called Modern Warfare 2. No product has received so much hype from its publishers and yet in actuallity has required so little. Being the sequel to one of the most successful first person shooters of all time all that would be required would be a blank screen with the release date, actually that's not too far off what the original teaser was, however greed took hold and the over staturation of marketing began. Activision went promo crazy, there were teaser trailers, trailers announcing the release of full trailers, random celebrities were invited to play the game then tweet about it, every day some news about the game or it's development was leaked to videogame blogs. Taking a gamble activision initiated the big marketing push a good 3 months before the game was due for release, risking people being sick to death of hearing about MW2 by the time the game came out. A quick look around the net shows that that is exactly what happened, but it didn't stunt the sales of the game any.

It's not just games that become victims of their own hype, films are just as likely to fall victim. Final Fantasy (yes I know it's a game movie, clearly gaming has a lot to answer for) received a push like no other, television specials, dedicated magazines, reputable newspapers even got involved in pushing this film. The technology on display was revolutionary and by the time the film came out there wasn't a soul alive who wasn't aware of how important this film was going to be the industry. Then came the release day, and the film turned out to be so overwhelimgly bad that no amount of fancy pants teu could save it, Square was almost forced to close down as a result of the crippling losses, and technology in films was pushed back 8 years.

Good advertising is an important part of making sure your work reaches as many people as possible, and a little hype can work wonders. But taken too far it can damage the reputation of the product, and yourself, beyond repair.

Advertise responsibly kids!

MAG beta - first impressions

Image via Wikipedia

M.A.G finally got it's public beta this week after a lengthy privates beta. Not being important enough to be invited (or quick enough to get one of the giveaway codes) this has been our first chance to get some hands on one with the game. So what can we say? It's an extremely technically proficient game that's for sure, but should a game survive purely on the tech it uses?

Massive Action Game (an acronym that sounds like it had to fit around the name) is a game by the makers of the wildly popular Socom series, quite possibly some of the best online experiences available on the PS2. Expectations have therefore been very high, and the beta has been bustling with activity from the moment it was released to the general public. More people equals more full games, which works in the favour of MAG as it's main gimmick is that it supports up to 250 players. That's a whole lot of potential tea-bagging! 250 people is an impressive feat on it's own, but the behind the scenes work done by the servers is where this game really excels. In a recent interview the awesomely named producer Alan Van Slyke explained "Before we started working on the front-end client technology, we started working on the servers" an approach that seems rare with most modern online games, especially given that Modern Warfare 2 was recently shamed by not supporting dedicated servers on the PC. The time they dedicated to making sure everything behind the scenes was silky smooth has really paid off, resulting in a totally lag free environment for all players at all times. How lag free? Well we put their fancy pants new technology to the test.

To really make sure that we were playing with fire we connected to the M.A.G server with a 128k connection, please don't try this at home, it'll piss a lot of people you're playing with off. The menus took a while to load, as did the search for a game, but eventually we were dropped off into a full 256 player game. Not a second of lag, not even a slight stutter. No-one complained, no-one booted us from the game, everything ran silky smooth. Because it's only right to do a controlled test the only natural next step was to pop MW2 in for a quick go... Ahem, needless to say it fared less well.

So the background tech is a complete success, the graphics are very attractive considering everything that is happening in the game. There have been some minor complaints about the draw distance, but during our time with the game it never seemed to be as bad as people were making it out to be. But something just doesn't feel right, now this is my own personal opinion and not that of S&N here, but the actual gameplay in M.A.G doesn't do the amazing tech justice. At the end of the day it's another shooter, sure it has a lot of people playing, but that is where the differences seem to end. Trying to get people to actually make a tactical decision seems to be impossible, with such large numbers and very clear objectives to be met there isn't a lot of room for lone wolf antics, and yet the game tends to boil down to 200 people running off doing their own thing, while a select few try and hold it all together tactically. This does in many ways come down to the people you are playing with, and there were some genuinely great moments where plans game together exactly as we had expected them to, but these moments were out numbered by watching wave after wave of people running into the same snipers line of fire as they all ignored your cries to look out.

It's a good game, and an exclusive Sony should be somewhat proud to have on their side, especially because of the amazing propitiatory server tech Zipper Interactive have developed. But until the game has been out for a while and the community has gotten used to the sort of game it is it's really just a fancy tech demo.

My 2009

I'm being very careful about this!

For a start I'm doing this on my iPhone, so apologies for any typos! 2009. 2009! 2009? What can I say? Not a very eventful year for me. Let's see, January I acquired Fallout 3 for the 360. Brilliant game, with amazing DLC later on in the year. I somehow feel that thus game was a huge influence on the slightly disappointing Terminator: Salvation. Huge wastelands, small human colonies, feeling of lonliness, and of course, big robots trying to smash you up! Much like Transformers: ROTF (and that's not me rolling on the floor!)
Much the same as the first Michael Bay robot party, Transformers: ROTF was overly long and not much substance. But what's so bad about enjoying Megan Fox on screen and seeing giant robots beat the bolts out of each other? It's an 80's childs dream!
La Roux tried to capture the 80's Nintendo sound and give it some lyrics! The bonus of this is that it really worked. Great little pop tunes that do the job.
My main jobs this year were being a Modern Warfare soldier and an assassin, not to mention bring locked up in Arkam with The Joker trying to knock me out! For me, Batman: AA, COD: MW, and Assassins Creed II were by far the most enjoyable and addictive games. I haven't enjoyed games like this for a long time. Batman broke the mold of having rubbish comic book games, Ubisoft listened to us and face us a better creed with more variety in missions, and a deeper story, whilst Infinity Ward prove to us yet again, that they are the kings if COD and no one should mess with them! Maybe a few too many challenges, and story not brilliant, but still it came out on top.

To be honest, I really can't think of any decent films I've seen this year. In fact I really don't think there has been much to get meviff the sofa and to the cinema. Had I managed to fit in Avatar, I'm sure it would have come out on top!

And finally music. Two bands have peaked my interest. Muse made a brilliant album, and even proved with Undisclosed Desires that they have the capacity to go electro if they wanted. I even saw them at The O2, and even though I was seated, I still had a he'll of a time. Matt, Chris and Dom know how to make a show spectacular! (proper review if that show soon!)
The other band that have tickled the ear drums ate Them Crooked Vultures. An amazing supergroup who actually know the definition of rock! Dome people may just write it off as another QOTSA album, however, once you delve deep into it, you forget it's Josh Holme on guitar and vocals, and just have to air drum along with the Devil, Dave Grohl! John Paul Jones just follows the trend and joins in the fun really. But if you are going to have a bassist in your band, it may as well ve Led Zeps (also a proper review coming soon)

So that's my 2009! Not much to say other than hope you had a great Christmas and here's to a brilliant 2010!!

-Mike-