[:plant:] E3 2012

It is shockingly clear now that Nintendo did video yesterday to try to get ahead of this.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Sony's conference was mostly boring and predictable as shit, no big surprises really. While that's fine since you can't always have huge surprises or whatever, holy shit is the Vita dead. All we got was shit we already knew about: AC3 spinoff (which to be fair might be fine I suppose), Sony Smash Bros, Little Big Planet and CoD (which they couldn't even show footage of). The PS3-side of things was mostly things we all knew about, but at least there were games there that were quality. A few months after the Vita release at the biggest event of the year we got no price drop or any indication of support for the thing in the fucking slightest.

Can't wait to score one for $100-150 a year or two from now for Persona 4 and like 2 other games. They really threw this thing under the bus didn't they, holy fuck. Oh and they couldn't even announce a date for PS1 support. What are they even doing.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Why Am I Allowed to CABLE INSTINCTS

I'm happy that the whole "we'll talk about the 3DS at a later juncture" thing turned out to actually mean "we have a 3DS focused thing on wednesday", instead of "oh we'll talk about it in two months".

Basically at this point if they use that time to talk about Paper Mario for 30 seconds I'm prepared to call such a segment conference of the show.

Caught up on everything, and jesus fucking balls today was a sad state of affairs. Holllllllly shit.

I fucking lol'd at work at the TORtanic spin, though. Ahaha. Comedy GOLD.



It's really quite hilarious. You won't have to wait that long for that sort of price liquidation though, I imagine.

I'll grab one on sale when the Falcom shit drops and that'll be that.

Agreed on the Paper Mario bit, I bought a 3DS for that game. There were a few highlights of the day (Halo 4 looks fucking amazing), but generally it was just stuff that we either already knew about, or that was announced last week as everyone tried to get ahead of E3....which left about nothing new to announce at E3. I wonder if people were expecting more bombs to drop and then nothing actually happened. Pretty clear indicator that we are at the end of a console generation. To be fair though you hate pretty much everything.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Uh, new consoles next holiday are basically 100% confirmed, at least from MS (and I can't imagine Sony will give them a head start). Epic's Unreal 4 engine is for next generation, and some developers have had 720 dev kits for almost a year and have confirmed they're working on next-gen titles o_O

Anyway, outside of Pikmin 3 (which they opened with) Nintendo's press conference was pretty fucking awful. And we already knew that, Paper Mario, and NSMB2/Wii U were coming. Considering that console comes out in 6 months right now they have given zero reason for people to buy it. I'm genuinely shocked, Nintendo knocked it out of the park the E3 before the Wii launched, we got jack shit here. Is this the first year ALL of the press conferences have sucked total dick overall? MS and Sony are somewhat understandable given this is likely the last year before new consoles are announced, but what the fuck at Nintendo.


Edit: The best thing about this E3 has been the rage-filled texts I'm getting from Skills.

Most amazing jew boots

Probably not. But given that they've already said it will be more expensive than the Wii, and by all accounts be even less compelling at launch, they're failing at that audience as well. Also consider that things have changed dramatically since the Wii launched; both 360 and PS3 do the whole living hub/entertainment/motion control thing as well and probably better. Also the super casual crowd that bought the Wii and just play Wii Fit, Wii Sports, etc on it every once in a while is a crowd that is probably even less likely to spend $300+ on the exact same thing again. Sony and MS both had things for casuals in terms of dance/karaoke/party games on their conferences as well, the Wii U isn't the outlier the Wii was. Plus when the Wii came out it was unlike anything else, every time I talk to anyone who doesn't play games about the Wii U, their response is usually something like "oh it's like an ipad right? I have one of those." So being not as compelling for multiple reasons for the casual market AND basically flipping the bird at the hardcore market is a bad thing. Especially since assuming at least the new Xbox (if not new PS as well) come out a year later the Wii U will already be a half to full generation behind spec-wise, so they will lose the multiplatform bonus then as well, since developers can't as easily just dump their 720 games on Wii U, etc. Nintendo has handled this super badly.

Also new news that makes the Wii U even more fucked:

-The Wii U Gamepad takes 2.5 hours to charge, and only lasts 3-5 hours depending on the screen brightness. Are you even kidding me.

-The framerate on Wii U drops to 30 FPS when two Wii U Gamepads are used. What.

-A "partial" list of Holiday and "Launch Window" games for the Wii U was posted on Nintendo's media site. NO games are listed from Capcom, EA, or Activision. I wouldn't fully believe that, but if this thing is coming out in 5-6 months we can't even get an on-paper confirmation of CoD, Madden, Fifa, RE6, or anything this year? Apparently Activision will not even outright confirm that they are working on a CoD for it (and the CoD games actually sold incredibly well on Wii oddly enough). Jesus. Also Pikmin 3 and the Platinum game are "launch window" which would almost certainly mean next year, and Rayman is TBA. For at least me the only game I would have the slightest interest in at launch is NSMBU, at least assuming that "holday" = launch.

-One of the AC3 devs said that while the Wii U is "stronger in some areas" than the 360/PS3, AC3 will still run technically identical on the Wii U, including framerate. I know the hope was that even though the Wii U was not much stronger than current-gen, the thought was that we might at least get some minor improvements on multiplatform games (framerate being the easiest) and that's looking like even that may not be the case. That also further drives the nail in the coffin on multiplaform games on Wii U once 720/PS4 hit since those systems will almost certainly be enough of a leap where they can't just be straight ported to Wii U.

With every Nintendo system up until now I've accepted and been fine with the fact that basically you get it only to play Nintendo games and that's fine, but this time they even seem to be dropping the ball with that. At this point they'd need a US release of PSO2 or something totally crazy like that on it for me to even consider this in the first year or two.

I was speaking idiomatically.

So if they don't announce Fire Emblem 3DS for NA tomorrow are you going to liveblog slitting your wrists?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

It's not really that so much as it is that I don't think we've ever had a year where all three of the big conferences were total ass pretty much across the board. When you have pretty much every gaming site saying all of the conferences were shit, AND mainstream media saying that they were all shit (example: Forbes - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo Tie for Last Place at E3) that's bad.

Microsoft's was alright considering that 720 is coming out next year; Halo 4 looked good, Gears fans probably happy with more Gears, etc. The bing/smartglass/social shit is par for the course like you said. Where it starts to fall apart a bit on the MS one is that a lot of people are unhappy with the direction that Tomb Raider and Splinter Cell have gone in compared to previous games, which is opinionated, and also no real surprises/exclusives. It was at least passable overall.

Sony's was shockingly bad in that not only did we not get any big surprises or anything new outside of Beyond (which got leaked before hand, and let's face it Heavy Rain was fairly niche) and the storytime book bullshit, but the Vita which came out FOUR MONTHS AGO was completely and utterly thrown under the bus. Games they announced last E3 for Vita were not even mentioned, and the big CoD game they kept touting for Vita announced last E3 that is supposedly coming out in 6 months is some sort of sidestory/spinoff and all we got was a logo. Judging it from the PS3 side only it would have been passable if not disappointing for lack of any surprises at all, but when you factor in the complete non-presence of Vita it's abysmal.

Nintendo was equally bad as Sony's; they have a new console coming out in 5-6 months with a to prove; there has been a lot of skepticism regarding the system's power, 3rd party support, cost, etc. They didn't at all address price or launchdate (which was expected). They started out fantastically with Pikmin 3 which is a big fan favorite, and Reggie coming out saying they were showing 23 Wii U games on the stage. Then Reggie started talking about other stuff that he wasn't going to have time to talk about because they had so many games, but then he kept talking about that. Then they showed shit like Batman, Darksiders, and Ninja Gaiden 3 coming out on Wii U after they've already been out on other consoles (Batman for a year!) with obviously tacked on tablet bullshit. Then they did the casual stuff like Wii Fit U and all of that which is expected. New Super Mario Bros Wii U was also known but that's still alright, but a bit disappointing that we can't get a "proper" Mario game on the system for launch especially considering Mario Galaxy 2 will have been out for what, 3 years at that point? But then...that was it. No announcements; not even a TEASER for Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Smash Bros, Starfox, Metroid, Animal Crossing, anything at all. This was their big coming out party, and they came out with virtually nothing. The Lego game looks pretty interesting but I don't think they provided a timeframe on it (aka is it a launch game) as well as it doesn't seem to be doing anything uniquely compelling on the Wii U specifically. The Nintendoland thing is sort of a wash either way, but they spent forever on it and it didn't seem super compelling from either a hardcore or casual perspective. This was their biggest moment to sell the system, especially with the mainstream coverage, and they utterly failed. The E3 before the Wii came out that thing was enormous, they handled it well, they actually showed shit and had support for it, and the coverage and word of mouth was fantastic. The only two things I came away with any excitement for from the entire conference was Pikmin 3 and Paper Mario 3DS, both of which we've known about forever.

I agree with your sentiment except that I don't agree with there still being tons of Q4/Q1 AAA games coming out, at least that I care about. I'd attribute that partially to it being the end of a console generation and whatnot though. But for the past several years usually every month there was at least one "must buy" game for me along with maybe 1 or 2 must buy digital/download titles (XBLA, etc). Including digital titles for the entire rest of this year there are only six games I consider "must buys." Philia only has two, and they overlap with my six. I could personally care less about a lot of the Q1 titles for next year as well (I don't trust Ninja Theory to make a good DMC game, Dead Space 3 is totally going in a shooter-bro direction, etc). I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed that this is usually the showstopper for games for the year, and it was pretty much total shit. I'm extremely looking forward to the games I am getting this year so it's not like I won't have stuff to do, but the first parties seem to be floundering a bit, and it has me wondering what nextgen is actually going to be like.

FELIPE NO

No, I'm just disappointed. Skills always hates everything, so this has just been extra bad for him.

Oh, Last of Us is a 2013 release. Not surprising since they said initially they weren't sure if it was going to make this year, but that's disappointing for Sony, I don't think there's really any big 1st/2nd party stuff for them this holiday now is there?

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

So Nintendo's 3DS conference had jack shit, including no news on Fire Emblem for NA. The rage messages I'm getting from Skills are actually pretty amazing.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by A Sometimes Mountain

My guess for why they didn't say anything at the 3DS shindig tonight is because they were focusing entirely on games set to be released by the end of this year. Following this logic, it's going to be a 2013 release.

Agreed, although it's still weird, with NSMB2 out in August there's not a whole ton of competition for it on 3DS as a holiday release, I don't think it would directly compete or hurt Luigi's Mansion or Paper Mario which are the only other post August big 3DS releases I can think of. Nintendo is the master of sitting on shit though; by multiple accounts Luigi's Mansion was a finished game last E3. Supposedly it got pushed into this year because Kid Icarus was going to be the fall game last year, but then that got pushed into this year. It's bizarre.

In any case though apparently Reggie wasn't supposed to say anything about this, but once he did so many people were asking about it that they had to throw out an announcement of some kinda ASAP, which is kind of amusing. Normally I give Kotaku a lot of shit, but good on them on this one.

Okay this is fucking brilliant, jarosh (from GAF) nails it again. The Uncharted music killed me.

YouTube Video

There's nowhere I can't reach.