This Old Neon Forum

I was pretty unimpressed by Nintendo's conference. They actually did announce some Metroid game for 3DS, but it didn't look good. I'm skeptical about Paper Jam as well. I was a huge fan of the Mario RPGs until recently. The most recent entries in the series blew it, which leaves me not very optimistic about this one.

I thought most of the other presentations at E3 were decent, though some were laughable like Ubisoft's (as cool as a new South Park game is).

My main takeaways include my newfound interest in "Fallout 4," my continued interest in "AssCreed London Z: The Redundancy but With Trains This Time" even though I don't think we learned much more than we already knew if anything), and "Unraveled" looks pretty interesting and beautiful.

Also am glad "Last Guardian" is on the horizon again even though it's old news in a lot of ways. I'll be all over that as its predecessors are among my favorite games and perfectly executed. Forgive me if I said that in an earlier post already (I know I did in the chat), but it's certainly true.

I'm still interested in "Uncharted 4," too, but wasn't interested in seeing more gameplay. I'll wait.

I think I'll be pre-ordering Mario Maker, Dinobots, and Last Guardian for the Amazon kickback, and also the Collector's Edition of the Destiny expansion.

EDIT: Wait, nevermind. Mario Maker is $75. Even at 30% off, that's $50 plus tax. Fuck that.

Kong Wen wrote:I think I'll be pre-ordering Mario Maker, Dinobots, and Last Guardian for the Amazon kickback, and also the Collector's Edition of the Destiny expansion.

EDIT: Wait, nevermind. Mario Maker is $75. Even at 30% off, that's $50 plus tax. Fuck that.

I ended up ordering 8 games, saving $131. Games I would have picked up anyways, so at least my game purchases are good until around this time 2016.

I was kind of shocked to see mario maker at full retail price (plus the Canadain mark up). Given that Nintendo offered smaller games like Kirby and Toad at $40, you'd think they'd do the same for Mario Maker.

Mario Maker at full price might be a good thing. My logic here is that the added cost is to cover the infrastructure for online share/view/play/rate purposes. Still seems about $20 too high though.

[EDIT] Might as well use this post to write my E3 impressions.

- Games are coming
- I will buy some of them
- Nintendo sprang for real Muppets, which is bloody awesome
- Everyone else employs bobbleheads
- E3 is still much ado about nothing.

The muppet thing was amazing.

I went to Best Buy and tried Mario Maker and Zelda Triforce Heroes.

I didn't create anything in mario maker, just tried a couple levels. Same levels as on the E3 floor, so you can see some of those online. Editing is the big part I want to try, but the levels were cool to play, and it was neat seeing the original SMB style in HD.

Triforce Heroes was fun. The level we played was actually a decent challenge, took about 10 minutes to get through and we were on our last life. It kind of has a funny New Super Mario Bros vibe where you're constantly knocking your team mates off a ledge on purpose or by accident. Like a couple times I would use the gust jar and someone would run in front of me while I was doing it and get blown into oblivion, pretty funny. Requires a good amount of team work for puzzles and bosses, everyone usually has their own role to play. I'm still worried the puzzles might be a little too simple since like in Four Swords you can only bring one item with you at a time, which limits the puzzle possibilities. The biggest thing I want to see though is what there is to do inbetween dungeons, since the charm of Zelda isn't just about dungeon crawling.

These are the official reactions to E3.

Sony:
Horizon looks really neat. Uncharted 4 has good graphics. The Last Guardian looks the same it did 100 years ago, but that's still okay. I'll probably borrow a PS4 sometime in my life. I don't have a connection to Shenmue, but even I was excited and amazed when they announced the... Kickstarter? Weird thing to do, but okay. They spent like 30 seconds on the Morpheus. What gives?

Microsoft:
They didn't announce any of the Rare stuff I wanted to see, but I do like pirates and the water in their game was pretty. I will probably not think about it much again. Cuphead was beautiful and I will play it. By the end I realized Notch was spot on with his predictive Tweet, and chuckled.

EA:
Unravel will obviously be stunning. I will install Origin on my computer for Mirror's Edge and Battlefront. So good. Pele's a good guy.

Ubisoft:
South Park will probably be funny, but I didn't play the first yet. Trackmania Turbo will be excellent, and you will be able to get sick in VR with it.

Square:
Just Cause 3 is an open world game I can get behind. We'll have to wait and see on the new Hitman. Why haven't I played Human Revolution yet? I own it... When I watched the KH3 stuff I remembered that I did not understand anything in the first two games, still looked nice. I still want to play FF15.

Nintendo:
Star Fox looked like dookie, but it probably plays great. But I mean, complete dookie, seriously. Zelda Three Swords Adventure, I dunno if I can round up a crew for that kind of thing anymore. Mario Maker reminds me of my SMW rom hacking days. Do I still have my levels somewhere? Too many amiibos. Metroid got robbed.

PC Show:
New Killing Floor 2 gore system , uses PhysX D: . Somehow Phil Spencer announced the most stuff, but of all the Gears games to port over, they're choosing a remake of the only Gears game that already has a PC version. I don't know if I'll check out Killer Instinct. Too many developers came out to say, "Hey guys, we have nothing to show right now, but check back later". AMD was laying the advertising on a bit too thick, that said I'll spend $650 for their stupid graphics card. No Man's Sky confirmed for PC. I thought we knew this already? I also like that this is really the only conference where the audience can get excited for American Truck Simulator. It's truly a different market over here.

Show Floor:
I forgot to follow anything. Oculus Touch sounds incredible, but I think I'm still sticking with Vive. Morpheus games actually do look nice, but it seems few of them really, REALLY make use of VR's unique strengths.

Final Thoughts: The Last Guardian, Shenmue 3, and a FF7 remake all happened in the span of an hour. I think Half-Life 3 might be the last white whale left in gaming.

Great job!

Spore wrote:I think Half-Life 3 might be the last white whale left in gaming.

Great job!

And a Banjo Threeie

Slurmee wrote:

Spore wrote:I think Half-Life 3 might be the last white whale left in gaming.

And a Banjo Threeie

You are correct. In my delusion I forgot this was the exact game I was hoping for Rare to show.

VictorViper wrote:Mario Maker at full price might be a good thing. My logic here is that the added cost is to cover the infrastructure for online share/view/play/rate purposes. Still seems about $20 too high though.

There are $4 indie games with this infrastructure. People can justify a full price for this great tool, but not like that.