Category: Videogames

I couldn’t be looking forward to Civilization IV any more than I already am. Especially if they keep this screenshot of The Internet wonder.

But they’re trying to make me more excited, with their genuinely funny CivAnon ad campaign. It’s in competition with the Burger King and Geico ads, and of course Cartoon Network’s bumpers, to make me think advertisements are actually worth watching again.

My current guilty pleasure for a commercial that I can’t help but like is the one for travelocity.com. It’s the one with the gnome talking about how easy the website is to use and dispelling the myth that American appliances don’t work in European outlets. It’s the bit where he says, “Am I going to die?” Sorry, I can’t help but laugh at that.

I was having trouble telling whether my inability to find anything interesting about this year’s E3 was because a) I don’t have the patience or industry clout to see what’s going on behind closed doors; b) since I’m not actually working in videogames anymore, I’m just not that invested in it; or c) there’s really nothing that interesting about the show. After hearing some other people’s recaps, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

The bar has been raised pretty high, and pretty much everything you find on the show floor is fairly polished. But nothing stands out. “Katamari Damacy” is the only game I can think of that truly invented a new style of gameplay, and its release this year is a sequel. There were plenty of games that looked interesting — “Sly Cooper 3” and “Kingdom Hearts 2” for example — but of course they’re sequels too. I’ve got a feeling that whatever becomes a hit from this year’s crop of games is going to be just due to random chance. Mac and I waited around the Square-Enix booth for a while to see if they were going to release any details of “Final Fantasy XII,” but it was another behind-closed-doors trailer movie. Again, it would’ve been easier just to stay at home and download all the movies from videogame websites.

But even when I was more interested in games, I was down on E3 as just marketing nonsense. The best part has always been getting to hang out with friends after the show, and I got to do that tonight. It was a nice, fairly low-key time with friends from the Sims 2 Console team, with the reassurance that people are still passionate about making good games, and it’s just not what “drives” me anymore.

Also, Anouk described part of what is so awful about LA, something I’d forgotten because I always drive into the city. She said as you fly into LA, you can see nothing from the plane except for a perfect square, paved grid that stretches out as far as the eye can see. And that’s totally true; it’s just depressing. While it did make it relatively painless (except for traffic) to drive from place to place tonight, it does tend to suck the soul out of a person. My geekified reference is that it’s like seeing one side of a Borg cube buried in the middle of a desert.

Most exciting bit of the day was that I got to go on a mini-tour of the Disney Imagineering facilities. I had either gotten so jaded, or it’s been so long, that I’d forgotten how that’s been a lifelong dream of mine. And it’s damn cool just to be able to see it, much less to have the opportunity to work for them. I was so excited by it that I’m thinking about heading down to Disneyland tomorrow and pushing my way through all the 50th Anniversary crowds by my lonesome. I’ll see tomorrow morning if I still feel like it, or just drive back to San Francisco.

Cool! My blog’s first cliffhanger!

So yeah: the show itself. It’s tough to come up with anything to get excited about. Microsoft has a huge booth set up for the Xbox 360, but it’s fairly unremarkable. The highlight is a big game from Rare called “Kameo”, notable for having hundreds of enemies on screen at the same time, but to be honest I assumed it was running on an old-school Xbox at first. Apart from that, there’s an unforgivably cheesy “Grand Theft Auto” rip-off, a racing game, and a couple of sports games out on the floor. Nothing to get all that excited about; it seems it would’ve been better for Microsoft to milk another year out of the original console before putting all that expense into showing off a lack-luster successor.

To be fair, it’s quite possible that Microsoft were showing the good stuff in private. It’s been at least three years since I’ve been to an E3, but it seems to have outlived its usefulness to the general videogame public; it’s a lot easier just to let the press and retailers deal with the nonsense and catch all the real info online. The last show I went to was Sega’s dream year, with big, impressive displays for “Jet Set Radio” and “Space Channel 5;” this year, everything worth seeing is sequestered away from the smelly masses. The PS3, the new Zelda game, and a game based around Peter Jackson’s King Kong movie, all had semi-private showings behind closed, huge, very expensive-looking doors, each with at least an hour-long wait in line. As it is, I just kept thinking of how expensive all these displays must’ve been.

Part of it could be that this is The Year of the Handheld, and there’s more new stuff to show for the PSP, the GBA, and the Nintendo DS, but handheld games don’t lend themselves to the huge screens and excess of E3. Sony went balls-out on their booth, with a huge video screen showing off the PSP, but it’s all over the place instead of focusing on anything. There’s a platformer spin-off of “Jak and Daxter” called just “Daxter” that looks really nice, but wasn’t all that fun to actually play. Apart from that, and a version of “Animal Crossing” for the DS, none of the handheld stuff really caught my attention.

There were a couple other minor highlights: a Japanese ink-brush themed game called “Okami” for the PS2, and “Shadow of the Colossus” from the makers of ICO. Bethesda Softworks had a bunch of announcements of cool-sounding games, “Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion,” “Fallout 3,” and “Call of Cthullu” game, but they weren’t showing anything except for a non-interactive trailer for “Oblivion.” I’ll see if I can make today the “survey” day and see stuff in more depth tomorrow.

Another thing: I saw Brian Posehn again. I see that guy everywhere — the Wonder-Con, E3, and an episode of “Tom Goes to the Mayor” featuring him was just on TV. I think he’s stalking me or something.

My friend Seppo from work bought a PSP this morning, and I went to check it out. Even though I should’ve known my “just checking out” a shiny new piece of personal electronics would be like Robert Downey Jr. “just taking one hit” off a crack pipe. I became like a man possessed.

I finally found one at the Best Buy in Palo Alto. I had to get the bundle, which is what I’d been trying to avoid, but in the end I don’t think I got screwed too badly. I would’ve bought a game anyway (I got Tony Hawk Underground), and I figure paying too much for useless pieces of plastic in the form of a screen guard and a clunky cover is just a fine for my having no patience. The whole escapade took two hours, so I had to stay late at work, but it was worth it.

After using it for a few minutes, I was like Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona. “I love this thing so mu-u-u-u-ch.” The screen is what sells it; it’s just astounding. And the whole thing is just slick and, for lack of a better word, futuristic. They tried to go for the whole “We are Sony. Welcome to the 21st Century.” thing with the PS2 front-end, but it really works on the PSP. It feels like using a tricorder, but without all the nerdy connotations. It’s just damn cool.

They include Spider-Man 2 with it, which was a nice touch because I would’ve written off its potential as a movie player otherwise. Again, the screen is what makes it worthwhile. The picture is remarkably clear, and it’s as easy to navigate as a DVD player. I might even build up a little UMD movie collection, although it’ll never be more than a novelty.

I really hope that Sony’s not serious about its being a “Walkman for the 21st Century,” because its potential as a media center has all kinds of problems. It’ll never take the place of the iPod, because it doesn’t have a hard drive and you can’t fit that much data on a memory stick. It’s too large and heavy to replace a Flash-based MP3 player, so the iPod Shuffle is safe there. Movies are fine, but again, UMDs are never going to replace DVDs. And I thought at least I’d be able to pop pictures from my Sony camera onto my Sony PSP as a little novelty, but I can’t even do that because the memory stick format is completely incompatible. That was a spectacularly boneheaded move on Sony’s part.

So it’s a game machine, and that’s fine, because the games are already the best available for a handheld, ever. The other game I got is Lumines, a Rez-meets-Tetris game which is so good at showing off the PSP that it should come standard. It’s just a fairly simple 2D puzzle game, but it’s insidiously addictive and presented extremely well — music and visuals and multiplayer capability and it’s aimed right at their target market.

And speaking of Lumines, the song they use on the first level sounds a lot like “Star Guitar” by the Chemical Brothers. The video of that song happens to be by Michel Gondry, I found out, because I bought a DVD of his videos the other night. I think it’s overtaken “Weapon of Choice” by Fatboy Slim/Spike Jonez as my favorite video ever, partly because I have no idea how it was made. Watching the rest of the videos on that DVD was neat but a little depressing, because I couldn’t stop thinking, “I will never ever have that much imagination.”

I really didn’t think it were possible for me to get this much into a videogame again. Sure, I had a good and unhealthy obsession going with The Sims 2 when it came out, but it’s always been and is always going to be more about the potential of what you can create out of it than just being an “experience.”

And the whole “Steam” copy protection/installation nonsense for Half Life 2 sucks ass. It’s intrusive, it’s annoying, it’s slow, and it’s even offensive in its Big Brother-ness. As my friend Cory would say: F MINUS. In fact, the whole installation process pissed me off so much that I was all set to hate the game. I spent the first fifteen minutes or so thinking, “Big deal. Textures aren’t all that impressive. Whole setting is boring. Nothing I haven’t seen before. And they got the havok engine. Whoop-de-shit. Great. A big physics engine demo. With a see saw and some cinder blocks. Bravo, Valve. What else you got?”

Then, I’m in an apartment building and the shit hits the fan. All of a sudden noise is going on all around me and people are yelling at me to get to the roof. And all of a sudden, I’m no longer thinking about level design and triggered events and texture maps and enemy spawn points, I’m just thinking I’ve got to get up to the roof. Running through hallways, not even bothering to stop and look, oh crap there’s another bad guy!, where the hell did he come from?, out the window, up to the roof, getting shot at, not looking back to see who or what is shooting at me, until I finally get to safety. And when it was over, I just stopped and though, “Okay, now that’s the way you make a videogame.”

Sure, I’ve still got issues with it. It’s not really a big virtual world; you can tell that there’s a single path through the levels and a solution to every puzzle, even though they’ve attempted to integrate that into the story. There are jumping puzzles and a whole Mario-esque sequence I still think was too “gamey.” And they rely on some of their gimmicks, especially the physics engine, a little too much to where it knocks you out of the story.

But then, I’m riding in a speedboat, jumping over dunes, turning tight corners, running down evil guards and hearing the beep of their communications failing fade off behind me into the distance, knocking down scaffolding to kill other evil guards, being chased by a helicopter shooting at me and dropping mines to slalom around, narrowly avoiding a burning car to smash through a barrier and jump over a big wall of fire made from more exploding cars, and tears of joy are just streaming down my face. It’s just bad ass; there’s no better way to explain it.

I’m going to have to take a week off for Thanksgiving, and I’m already missing it. Is this going to mean I’m actually going to like playing videogames again?