Late E3 Post With Some Extreme Sports Terminology

Okay, another Night Shift, another late blog entry. And it's gonna be a long one!

So E3 came and went, with both the HARDCORE companies going mainstream with Motion Controls, and Nintendo basically said "Waggle is so 5 years ago" and showed new games from every one of their franchises bar Star Fo- No, wait. Star Fox 64 (AKA Lylat Wars) is being remade on the 3DS.

Yeah, That one!

Last year, Nintendo had the whole fiasco of showing a crappy conference culminating in the Wii Vitality Sensor. And everyone collectively groaned and reached for their riot weapon of choice. And suddenly, they pulled a complete 540 on us and almost nonchalantly announced Metroid: Other M -  a Metroid game designed by Team Ninja, makers of one of the greatest action games of all time, Ninja Gaiden. ALL IS INSTANTLY FORGIVEN!

Microsoft E3 2010

Back to this year: Microsoft managed to completely alienate and anger its psychotic killkillkill fanbase (Those thirsty for new Gears of War, Halo and Call of Duty) by unveiling the newly renamed 'Kinect' (Formerly 'Project Natal') a camera that captures the movement of your body by mapping out your skeleton. Impressive technology maybe, but we already had the EyeToy for the Playstation 2, and the Playstation Eye for the PS3, which generally did the same thing. (Though skipping the mapping of joints and such)

The problem with the Eye-Whatever cameras were that they didn't work very well. They generally needed a focal point to work properly, and freaked out when that focal point wasn't there, or something interfered with it. From what I've seen, the Kinect has similar issues, as well as not being able to pick up Black clothing very well. Which is shoddy when you think that Black is a very common colour to wear nowadays.

Copyright Joe Vargas and Noah Antwiler

Anyway, Microsoft's 'Kinect' and Sony's 'Move' (Glowing lollipop controllers that interact with the PS Eye Camera) are pretty late to the party. But it's good to see they've realised that Nintendo had the right idea. One that they initially ridiculed.

In fact, Nintendo have been incredibly ingenious with what they've done. Five years ago, they set out to expand the gaming audience. With games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit and the like, they got older and 'casual' players involved in progressively more traditional games. Then they introduced the Super Guide (Again a hated idea by the traditional gamers) that offered help on more challenging games.

You see? They've expanded the userbase and are now attempting to merge that userbase with the existing one! Taking new gamers and giving them the ability to play the games traditional gamers play, as opposed to those like Wii Sports and other 'casual' games.

Now they've unveiled a massive line-up of classics, with Kirby, Donkey Kong Country, a streamlined Zelda game... all of which may include the Super Guide so that those casual gamers can buy and play them too.

Bravo, Nintendo. You sly dogs.

Oh, and one last thing. Nintendo also unveiled their 3DS. The evolution of the DS and DSi (not just a redesign) with improved graphics (around the level of the Wii) a higher capacity game cartridge (Around 2GB as opposed to the DS' 256MB) and also a wide 3D screen that works without glasses. Holy. Crap.
This thing even has Sony saying that they and Nintendo should work together to promote 3D technology.

Nintendo tried the perspective based 3D before with the Virtual Boy, a Red and Black screened, GameBoy-graphiced goggle thing which gave people headaches when they used it. And now with the 3DS, they seem to have covered themselves by having a 3D slider to increase/decrease the 3D effect of the screen. So if the 3D effect is causing problems, not all games have to use it, or not all the time anyway.

I'm gonna shut up now, as I'm rambling. See you guys next time round!