Thanks for this. Looks like the only one I'll watch is Sony. Not staying up past 4am. Will awake to horror or happy surprises I guess. Really dislike about everything I saw from Nintendo's pre-E3 show.
Highlights:
- Wii U controller now has Analog sticks rather than those god awful circle pads.
- Wii U will have pro-controller. Looks to be completely wireless, so no stupid tethering to another controller
- Social will be a big aspect of the console, including what appears to be built in comment threads for games. That is a neat idea, but i question how it will work in implementation. Nintendo has said they are concerned about preventing spoilers. Not sure how they'll do it, but it's nice that it's a concern.
- Video chat appeared in a promo video
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MX7 wrote:I'm not a fan of a racist, gun nut brony puking his odious and uninformed arguments over every thread that comes up.
I'm interested to see what the Wii U has to offer, as the talk of attaching games to online accounts for the other main players has properly turned me off them for the next gen. I can't see how the controller works for anything other than Aliens: Colonial Marines, because the tech demos look fancy but ultimately gimmicky. I hope the Wii Remote style system for FPS/action games stays around, but I fear it'll just be there for little more than legacy Wii support (like GameCube controller support on the Wii).
It looks like graphics have topped out at the moment (my PC's 3 year old 512 MB card doesn't break into a sweat with anything), so the right innovation might just swing it. Nintendo seriously need to stop living off the same couple of IPs though.
Another lukewarm conference from Microsoft. No dumbass kids flapping their arms, thankfully, but they're still trying to flog Kinect by slapping voice commands into every big franchise, even though you should only need the headset that comes with most 360s. Aside from that it was franchise sequels, connecting every device to every other device for no good reason, more franchise sequels, a couple of unimpressive new IPs, and more franchise sequels. The only good thing was that they didn't announce a new console.
That was a terrible conference. MS had virtually nothing new to show. Yay, Internet Explorer for Xbox, and you can control it with fart-commands. My video game dream finally came true. Who wants exciting new games anyway.
Well that was just awful. Only high points were Tomb Raider and South Park. The damn Splinter Cell game didn't even look like Splinter Cell and Sam was not voiced by Ironside.
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MX7 wrote:I'm not a fan of a racist, gun nut brony puking his odious and uninformed arguments over every thread that comes up.
I actually thought smartglass looked pretty neat. Having touch controls for consoles would be good for some games. The rest was disapointing but that's to be expected really.
Weak Boson wrote:I actually thought smartglass looked pretty neat. Having touch controls for consoles would be good for some games. The rest was disapointing but that's to be expected really.
I doubt we'll see anything interesting done with Smartglass for games. It's a gimmick for the multimedia functionality. No major title is going be designed specifically around it, as it relies on 3rd party hardware of varying sizes and configurations that a significant chunk of consumers won't have. This leaves developers with two options. The more likely is low budget XBL games or minigames slapped onto retail titles that play with the one dimensional simplicity of most ios shovelware. The other option is to use smartglass for maps/menus in addition to a controller, but that would require the player to have their phone or tablet balanced on their lap while playing, then switch back and forth between the phone and controller all the time.
This is just an awkward attempt by Microsoft to pre-empt the Wii U's awkward controller.
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