E3 Final Impressions

Every year E3 is a battle of announcements, flashy trailers, and lots of smoke and mirrors luring gamers into thinking game “A” is the best and this applies to systems as well. What was a bit of a surprise about this particular E3 is that while the game quality was very solid with lots good titles, there was absolutely nothing this E3 that stood out above the rest and was a clear cut Game of the Show or even AAA title. The games, while nice, were all a bit standard and because of that, a bit boring. The show didn’t really instill confidence that the next year would be a great one for gamers, yet at the same time it didn’t really indicate that the market would crash and gaming would end during that time frame either. It was both a good E3 and a bad E3, so basically it was an average E3.[more]

Sony: 3 out of 5

Positives: Sony’s booth showed solid support for the PS2/PSP and showed much greater support for the PS3 than Microsoft had done for their X360 last E3. With over a dozen PS3 games that mostly looked and played nice, the future is fairly bright for the system if they can get people to swallow the price tag and pick it up.

Negatives: The PS3 controller was terrible. This is coming from someone who thinks the Dual Shock 2 is the best controller ever. The new L2/R2 triggers are the worst buttons ever seen on a controller and impossible to use while playing, and the lack of rumble really hurts experiences like Resistance as the guns give no feedback at all when fired. The tilt thing is fairly pointless as well, but hopefully developers will give an option to use analogue sticks or tilt and not force tilting. Also Heavenly Sword, while looking very nice, has no jump button or camera control. This makes it a lot less enjoyable than it should be and I mean, how many action games don’t have a jump button?

Microsoft: 3 out of 5

Positives: Strong lineup of titles. Games are definitely showing improvement in visuals. Splinter Cell 4 looks pretty good, as does Saints Row.

Negatives: Lineup is once again all Western games, with Japan putting nothing out on the system. This means X360 games are all falling into a few genres and the market is looking to get flooded with racing games/fps/GTA clones, whereas there will be almost nothing in a lot of other genres. Basically it’s still not looking like a well balanced library. Also the framerate on a lot of the games was really bad. Too Human was laughable and looked like one of the worst games ever in motion. Hopefully that has many months and months left of development to turn it into an actual playable game.

Nintendo: 3.5 out of 5 (3 out of 5 for Wii, 4 out of 5 for DS)

Positives: Completely dominated on the DS side. Between great announcements and excellent games on the show floor, DS was for the second year in a row, system of the show. Wii showed off a variety of titles and at the same time showed the Wii controller has potential to take games into a new direction. Mario Galaxy was awesome.

Negatives: DS titles were great, but there were very few AAA standout titles; could definitely use some variety. Final Fantasy III had longer load times on a cart than FF7 did on a CD, so hopefully that’s just really early and not optimized yet. Wii was a letdown. It had lots of games, but most of them weren’t very good and the control showed that it has lots of problems in terms of accuracy. While good in concept, if games don’t match up to the quality of Mario Galaxy, the system could end up a disappointment with lots of weak graphic games coupled with weak controls.