News: NOT My Promised Obituary

Sorry to disappoint, but I have not died from E3 overload quite yet, but I can easily see why someone would. Though I do think part of me died to create the E3 logo for next year.

The Terrible Three

Well, to be fair, only two were terrible. I think all of us are looking at Microsoft and Sony to ask them “WTF?” Let us first begin with the evil monolith, who surprised us by unveiling Project Babby with the new name Kinect. Get it guys, Kinect? Because you get to connect with the system and other cool casual gamers! Yes M$, we get it, Nintendo made the name pun first, along with the entire motion controller to begin with. That nerdiness aside, Kinect is already disappointing us as we learn that not only can you not play while seated, but that certain midget staff members here will have far greater advantages over the rest of us. But not to fear, beloved XBox owners, for one of the predictions was true! You can now buy yourself a sleek, slender 360 that will make you rage in new and exciting ways. Like no more red ring of death, except now you must decipher between green-and-functioning or green-and-broken. Have fun with that! Sony does not bring such obvious glaring errors, but instead underwhelms with severe mediocrity. A list of games that will get Move Motion Dildo updates, a dorky looking gun add-on to your Motion Dildo, Playstation Plus to compete with XBox Live, new Twisted Metal game, some expensive collector’s add-ons to the already-delayed Gran Turismo…*yawn* Are we done here?

Because what we really want to talk about is Nintendo. The big news is, of course, the 3DS. Joke about the hokey 3D craze all you want, but this new incarnation of the already hugely successful DS made waves at Nintendo’s press conference. All the reviews about the actual 3D performance of the unit have been well-received, though it is theorized that “3DS headache” could be the newest game-related illness up there with “Wii elbow.” The addition of a flat analog stick in addition to the D-pad serves a great functional purpose, but right-handers can already see a serious flaw: WTF power button placement. But both this and the 3D slider, which allows users to change the depth of the 3D (or turn it off completely) are set up this way in current versions while games are still under development, so the system could be changed slightly when it hits production. And what will you play on it when it comes out? Everything, up to and including your mom. Kid Icarus, Nintendogs, Resident Evil, StarFox (ugh, just thinking of a 3D barrel roll make me queasy), Paper Mario, Shin Megami Tensei, Metal Gear, Ridge Racer…the list goes on and on forever. In the battle for E3 supremacy, Nintendo just curb-stomped the ever-loving bajeezus out of Microsoft and Sony.

Information Overload

While there were a lot of games presented at E3, a handful made massive impressions. To appease Grandpa Lusipurr, first up is the next Castlevania game. I am not a big fan of the series myself, but it is undeniable how pretty the game looks. Lords of Shadow brings players a new Belmont to play through fifty levels and adds some graphic God-of-War-blood-everywhere violence to the series. Keeping in mind that this game was originally introduced at E3 2009, we can only hope that the tentative Fall 2010 release date sticks this time. But what if Castlevania is not enough religious blasphemy for you? Then just wait until Spring 2011, when El Shaddai is scheduled to release. Based off of the Old Testament’s Book of Enoch, you play as a human brought to heaven to gather the seven fallen angels before God says “fuck it” and kills everyone.  You are assisted in your quest by Gabriel, Michael, and the other archangels, and even get to hang out with a bad-ass version of Lucifer. The trailers for it are not as pretty as the aforementioned Castlevania, but the styles are different enough that comparing them is hollow. It would be like comparing its graphics to the pixelated Scott Pilgrim game. I will be honest, I do not understand anything that stars Michael Cera, he’s the king of off-the-wall trying-to-be-ironically-indie movies, so I can imagine I probably will not understand the game. But the trailer looks awesome enough that I really do not think it matters. A side-scrolling fighting game reminiscent of a time long past, it immediately instills the viewer with a sense of nostalgia, something that all the geriatric gamers here will definitely appreciate when the game releases this upcoming August. And finally from the realm of nostalgia comes the ageless Mortal Kombat series, which will be experiencing a reboot of its own. The staple of the series, the painful fatalities, will still be there, but they as well as more powerful moves will be more difficult to execute. However, if you can button-mash well enough, expect those super moves to be almost unavoidable and incredibly painful. More realistic physics will be added, though the 3D-rendered characters will still be confined to their 2D plane as is traditional with Mortal Kombat. But like many others, this game is not slated for a release this year.

But you can have a bajillion zombies this year! The creators of Dead Nation are promising players the most zombies ever, a curious statement given the numbers that Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil, and Dead Rising have produced. The game is set to come out sometime between October and December of this year, so enjoy some zombies for Christmas. Or, if you wait even longer, you can BE  a zombie! NeverDead features your standard bad-ass protagonist, who has the uncanny ability to pull himself back together when blown to smithereens. The dark, semi-futuristic fantasy world looks great, but the trailer does not answer one question: if you can put yourself back together again like an endless Mr. Potato-Head, what are the Game Over conditions if you cannot die? Unfortunately, NeverDead does not have any tentative release date, so we will just have to wait and see.

Finally, lightning everywhere! No, not FFXIII Lightning, we do not talk about miserable pieces of turd here. I mean force lightning, as in Star Wars The Force Unleashed II. The trailer and demo for the game are both spoilerrific, but quite pretty and rather bad-ass. To Lucas fanboys all over the world, the newest Force power has to be the most amusing: Mind Trick. Yes, the good old “these are not the droids you are looking for” can now be used in the game. The scheduled release date for this is October 26th, 2010.  For more fun with electricity, inFamous 2 also gave us some beautiful screenshots, featuring our hero/villain Cole in a reimagined New Orleans. While it does not appear to have girls shaking their jubblies for plastic beads, it does feature a group that the developers describe as “the KKK meets Batman.” Please, stop using your imagination, mine already hurts enough. These racists vigilantes are after you, but you can easily dispel them with a lightning tornado. Yes, a lightning tornado, how much more awesome can you be? Unfortunately, you cannot be awesome this year…or can you? I really cannot do much to answer that for you, because Hideo-motherfucking-Kojima continues to dick us around about their final electric superstar, Metal Gear Rising. The game was, yet again, not given any tentative release date, but he did say that Rising will chronicle Raiden’s transition from naked cartwheeling pussy to half-mechanical bad ass.

So there is what Lusipurr.com cares about, everything else at E3 was awful and you should hate it because we do. Ginia was lying when she said we care about your opinion. But please, let us know in the comments what other things at E3 you enjoyed, so we can not care about them some more!