E3: (Officially) Day One: The Sequel: Migraine Mania!

There are only so many times you can watch a vaguely militaristic man, armed to his digital wisdom teeth, fire a pulse weapon at some marauding zombie/leviathan/genetic freak/Wookie before the bloom pretty much gets eviscerated from the rose. And I write this after just the (official) first day of E3 — I've still got two more jam-packed days of giga-pixeled decapitations to wade through. "Wait, Adam, do you mean to tell me that you're actually complaining about getting to spend your Tuesday learning about videogames as your job?!" No, dear reader, I'm not, promise. (Before I explain why I'm not complaining, though, mega bonus points to my colleagues Wook Kim and Gary Eng Walk for doing me a solid and filling in so awesomely yesterday.) There was plenty to enjoy yesterday, and I'll get to all that shortly. But it's also my job to be honest, and, I gotta tell ya, this isn't exactly turning out to be a blockbuster E3.

Exhibit A: Nintendo's morning press briefing, which took place bright-and-early at the famed Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Surely, the company with the hottest home and portable consoles around bussed in gaggles of E3-ers from their downtown Los Angeles hotel rooms (and dragged me from my apartment ten minutes away) to the home of no less than the Academy Awards because they had something to seriously dazzle the teeming sea of laptop-tapping jaded journalists and industry big-wigs? (Whew.) Um, no. And after the jump, I'll tell you what Nintendo did instead, along with the highlight's from Sony's confab, and which games made the biggest impressions.

NINTENDO
The presentation started off with a live demo of the upcoming Shaun White Snowboarding by the flying tomato gold medalist himself, using the Wii's Balance Board to ride the slopes. (More on this game later.) It was all pretty much downhill from there. Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata took to the stage to talk up Nintendo's efforts to "destroy the psychological barrier" between so-called "gamers" and "non-gamers," so much so I wondered if they were about to debut a new game called PsyBarrier Destructor! in which you were employed to do just that. Instead, Iwata casually mentioned that the Mario and Zelda designers are working on new versions of their venerable franchises for the Wii, and then turned it over to the rest of his team to unveil Nintendo's wares. Here's what we learned about:

WiiSports Resort: The biggest news by far was the announcement of the sequel to the title that hooked everyone on the Wii to begin with — it includes a frisbee-tossing game, a jet-ski game, and a sword-dueling game — but with one major caveat: It will come bundled with something called the Wii MotionPlus, a little square hub of plastic that clicks into the bottom of your Wiimote and evidently makes it extra-super-sensitive to wrist movement and the Wiimote's actual location relative to your body. So until the game hits stores next spring, it seems you'll all just have to dumbly swing in space with your now-inadequate Wiimotes.

Animal Crossing: City Folk: Long anticipated (so I'm told), the first version of this DS blockbuster is due for the Wii by the end of the year. The biggest innovation is the introduction of Wii Speak, a communal microphone that let's you talk with your online Animal Crossing buddies as you all, say, go fishing at the local virtual pond. You can also explore your own city, which, according to Nintendo, means an auction house, "happy room," fashion center and hair salon. (What, no tattoo parlor?) And, like previous Animal Crossing games, your character lives on 24/7 whether you're playing the game or not, which proposes some weighty philosophical conundrums that I'd just as soon not entertain. (Who wants a visual-stimuli headache to explode into a a full-on cerebral hemorrhage?)

DS games: In but one of eight bajillion mentions of some version of Guitar Hero that we'll get this week, we were told Guitar Hero: On Tour: Decades for the DS would include "song sharing." And the only console version of Wil Wright's Spore — i.e. Spore Creatures for the DS — would include "animal sharing." Then, in the only announcement that roused any spontaneous reaction from the crowd, we learned Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars would come exclusively to the DS this winter, although given the GTA franchise's previous MA ratings and the DS's decidedly family friendly rep, I wasn't too surprised that there was no mention about whether this game would involve any sort of "fluid sharing." (As in gas. For the stolen cars. Get your head out of the digital gutter!)

Wii Music: Best I can tell, you shake and button-smash your Wiimote and Nunchuck (and, occasionally, Balance Board) while roughly in the position you'd play whichever one of 50-plus encoded instruments you've selected (violin, drums, trumpet, etc.). Then a pre-set melody awkwardly tumbles forth from your speakers in the rhythm you've created with your aforementioned gyrations. With no visual guide for how to play the music — something Nintendo bragged about several times — it all ends up sounding exactly like a seventh grade band recital, and not in an endearing way. (I know this because four Nintendo employees demoed the game by shambling their way through the Mario Bros. theme song, to the horror of most in attendance.) You can record your Mii's musical performances and share them with friends, but why you'd want to is really beyond me.

SONY
After Nintendo's presentation whimpered to its conclusion, we all trundled to the Shrine Auditorium just south of downtown LA for the Sony press briefing. Backed by, no kidding, 58 flat-panel Sony TVs (and seven massive Sony monitors, one of which was bigger than some movie screens), Sony's only real hardware announcement was that, in September, the Playstation 3 will be available only as a $399 80GB model. But there were plenty of software highlights to go around, including the announcement of God of War III (though no release was given). Here's the rest:

Resistance 2: A extended live-demo — in which our muscle-clad hero fires pulse weapons at a skyscraper-sized leviathan marauding through a demolished 1950s Chicago — duly impressed, as did its announced 8-player online co-op mode and 16-player online competitive mode. The strong extended trailer at the end sealed the deal: This was a sequel to watch. It's out this fall.

LittleBigPlanet: Rather than further demo this much-buzzed create-your-own-game-levels title (out this October), Sony Computer Entertainment of America president and CEO Jack Tretton used it to present a delightfully engaging rundown of Sony's business statistics and strategies, giving a whisper of hope to all those sick and tired of mind-numbing Powerpoint presentations.

Playstation Network: Long dogged for playing second fiddle to XBox 360 Live, Sony spent the longest stretch of its time on stage building up its online presence, including touting new downloadable games like Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty and something called Fat Princess that looked completely hilarious. Far less hilarious was the notion of Gran Turismo TV, a car-racing enthusiast network you can only watch through the game Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. And while there still was little to see of the Playstation Home (i.e. Sony's answer to Nintendo's Miis and Microsoft's recently announced Avatars), they did announce a new movie and TV download service, launching as I type this, that's comparable in price-points, offerings and portability to Apple's iTunes — although, at this point, only Microsoft offers downloadable content from NBC Universal.

DC Universe Online: Comic-book artist and professed gaming über-geek Jim Lee presented the first look at this massively multiplayer online game that allows players to create their own superhero (or supervillain) and interact with the canon of DC Comics characters. There was debate among my colleagues whether gamers would really want to play as, say, UltraGary rather than Batman or the Green Lantern, but since I'm writing this entry, I'll say that, even with no release date in the foreseeable future (as none was given), the world will soon be a far better place once Adam the Loquacious Wonder takes to the streets of Metropolis. 

MAG: Massive Action Game: A doozy: This mammoth online game pits up to 256 players against each other in military-style campaigns, each side organized into 8-player squads. Watching the hulking soldiers in the trailer fire weapons at their marauding enemies, impressive as it was, I still kept wondering "what's going to happen when one side's internet decides to go out? That sure doesn't happen on the real battlefield…yet."

UBISOFT
After Sony concluded, it was back to the LA convention center for the rest of the day. Game publisher Ubisoft showed off much of their wares, and among all the titles, these stood out the most:

Prince of Persia: The newest version for this venerable franchise really caught my eye, and not only because it isn't titled Prince of Persia 7: Just In Time for the Movie Version. Rendered with a painterly touch that the game designer called "illustrative," the live demo had me mesmerized with its near cinematic fight sequences and stunning visuals. I should have a chance to check it out more up-close-and-personal on Thursday, so I'll report back more in two days.

Tom Clancy's EndWar: A game you play entirely with your own voice. I'll withhold judgment about how exactly it will work until I hopefully get a chance to try it out on Thursday.

Games for Girls: Rather than describe these games, I'm just going to list some of their titles, because they're all pretty much self-explanitory (and all set for the DS in the near future): Petz Crazy Monkeyz, Petz Catz Clan, Petz Horseshoe Ranch, Imagine: Rock Star, Imagine: Fashion Designer, Imagine: Wedding Designer, Imagine: Movie Star, Ener-G Horse Riders, Ener-G Dance Squad, Ener-G Gym Rockets. 

Shaun White Snowboarding: Rather than snow-board down a pre-set course, players can march up a mountain and ride down it as they see fit, never taking the quite same route twice. Gnarly.

LUCAS ARTS
My first chance at playing the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and all I could score was the Wii version, which I'd be more enthused about if I hadn't somehow whacked myself on the head something fierce with the cord connecting my Wiimote to the Nunchuk. But it was still kinda cool to fire a pulse of concentrated force at my attacking enemy. We also got a demo of Star Wars: The Clone Wars — essentially a light-saber dueling game for the Wii — and a new franchise called Fracture — replete with hulking military-like dudes firing pulse weapons at marauding enemies!

FALLOUT 3 (pictured)
After catching this game's demo yesterday during the Microsoft presentation -- included a hulking hero firing pulse weapons at…well, you get the idea -- I got an extended one-on-one sit-down with the game myself, and it's far from a run-and-gun shoot-'em-up. The exactingly rendered atmospheric vibe reminded me the of Bioshock, one of my favorite games of the last few years. But Fallout 3 is about five times more dense, with a sprawling and  open-ended post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. landscape that you're free to explore any which way you like. Case in point: Even though I was supposed to hunt down info on my character's missing pappy, I instead managed to wander into a hamlet I believe was called "New Bethesda" — that's after taking down some nasty giant mole-like creatures and avoiding lakes of irradiated water — only to have my head blown clean off by a shotgun wielding local. Lovely!

Phew! That was quite the day! With Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony's press confabs finally out of the way, though, today promises to be a much less harried—and, wonders!, it looks like I'll finally get my hands on Spore. If they manage to tear me away, I'll have a full report for you tomorrow. For those of you who've read this far, I thank you, and ask you these questions: What's your biggest gaming pet peeve? What games are you most jazzed about? And will you ever look at your Wiimote the same way after learning that all this time it's not been rendering your wrist movements as accurately as it could?!