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I just woke up from a dream. In my dream, I was sleeping naked. That's slang for sleeping "in the duff," which is slang for sleeping "in the buff," which is also slang for "in the nude," "in the jude," or "in the dude." Anyway, in the beginning of my dream, like out of some piece of postmodern literature, I wake up, naked, in the very bed in which I was sleeping in the real world. I feel around this bed for a pair of underwear, and eventually find some boxer-briefs. I find two pairs, actually -- no, wait, they're not two pairs: they're two pairs somehow stupidly sewn together. It's a . . . set of boxer-briefs, with four leg-holes, like for a pair of siamese twins joined at the lower-back. It perplexes me. Clearly, the person who designed these thought they were offering the men of the world "TWICE THE COMFORT" or something like that. I stand in the middle of my bedroom, flexing vegetarian my manly muscles in the moonlight. I put on the boxers by slipping my legs through two of the leg-holes at random. When I pull them up, I notice that I've caught both of the left leg-holes, meaning that neither of the two slit-pockets in the cloth meant to facilitate bathroom usage is lined up with the front of my body. I pull the underwear off, only to try them on again. Each time, in the darkness, I miss putting them on the right way. It's like putting a shirt on in the dark, and ending up with your head in the arm-hole, only with more superfluous parts, and therefore more ways to fuck up. Eventually, I board the underwear through one left leg-hole and one right leg-hole, and look at myself in the mirror. To my stupid horror, I've put them on diagonally. I sigh, wondering how I'm ever going to use the bathroom now. Then I think, "Hey, these underwear are a lot like that Metroid Prime: Hunters game on Nintendo Dual Screen handheld gaming system, which I played last week at the 10th Annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, California!" I then wake up, to find myself already wearing boxers, and in violent need of urinating. It is 7:18AM on Tuesday, May 25th, 2004, and I'm finally ready to write something about E3. So here we go:
Last year, I wrote an article about E3 while E3 was happening. I'd return from the show each day to sit on Vincent Diamante's sofa in his apartment in LA, and write up impressions of every game I could. This accounted for a rambling style in which I name-dropped every game I'd so much as looked at. The first page was a giant list of games I'd played. If you want to search this site's archive for that article and read it, knock yourself out. Know only that the information is a year expired. At the end of that article, at any rate, I told you I'd be back next year, with a more refined style. That is why I forced myself to not write anything about E3 until today. I wanted to suppress it. I remembered the past, before all these updated-by-the-minute websites had taken over the world. E3 was something that happened in May, yet something we read about in July or August because magazines were so damned slow in coming out. People who choose to walk the life-path of "game journalist" will often tell you that E3 is hectic, busy, restless, exciting, and important. People who choose to walk the life-path of "game journalist who is keeping it real" will tell you it is not. It's a big joke, a big sham. Who do you believe? Well, if I were you, I'd believe me, when I tell you that E3 is something in between a big joke and a necessary event. Which makes it, if nothing else, a lot more boring than some might hope.
I have put distance between myself and this year's E3, by not writing about it for a week. What I write about in these pages will reflect not what happened at E3; it will reflect what I, Tim Rogers, remember about E3. A writer of novels once told me that, if you're not fully satisfied with a manuscript, and you don't know what your exact problem is, you should just rewrite the whole thing from the beginning. If you forget any details in your writing, chances are they weren't important enough for you to remember. And if the writer can't remember them while writing, what are the chances the reader will remember them while reading? So that's how I'm going to write this E3 article. It should be not as long as last year's article (or it might be longer!), and it should, at least, be some good reading, if you don't hate me (and even if you do!).
Before I begin, let's talk about why I'm beginning now. I'm beginning now, essentially, because yesterday, I read Jerry "Tycho" Holkins' impressions of everything Nintendo over at Penny Arcade. He talked about the Nintendo DS in that update, and his impressions of it are mostly confused; his confusion reminds me of my confusion, and pushes me to write this.
I must admit I was wowed by the system when I first played it. Maybe, however, this was because, just a minute prior to playing it the first time, I'd been handed a deluxe Nintendo DS stylus by none other than Charles Martinet, the voice of Super Mario. Insert Credit's own Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh and I then spent ten minutes messing around with the Nintendo DS picto-chat mode, and we loved it, for the most part. We dubbed it honorary game of the show, in fact, and that distinction stands even now, as of this writing. The chat mode is fun. We especially had fun freaking out a Japanese executive of some gaming company by writing in Japanese. Four DS consoles were linked together around a big, round, track-lit table in the dark DS playing area. These four systems were all connected to the same little chat room. Using our styluses, us four brave chatters -- myself, Eric-Jon, a gorgeous black booth babe (I call her a booth babe because she was a booth babe, and she was also black, and wonderful-looking at all of these things, in a fully respecting way), and this Japanese man -- wrote inane messages like "Hello" and "HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN!!" to one another. Eventually, I started writing in Japanese. This caused the Japanese man to look up and around.
"Hey, you," I said, in picto-chat.
"Me?" he asked.
"Yeah, you."
He looked around again. "Who are you?"
"Take a guess."
"Oh, come on -- tell me."
"I'm one of these four people, I'd imagine. Maybe I'm you!"
I was getting good at writing kanji on the DS. Kanji -- Chinese characters, for those of you who never aspired to read your favorite manga or whatever in its original language -- are complicated to write with a good sharp pencil, and here I was polishing off multi-stroke characters with the DS stylus. The screen response is good. The secret to using the stylus to write lies in using the edge of the (adjustable!) tip. If you do this, you can write anything. With the finest selectable line-width, you can write tiny, yet legible cursive letters. Or you can just turn up the line-width and scribble the hell out of the screen, covering it in blackness.
"Come on, don't play around. You write Japanese well."
"And so do you, big boy." I had adopted the writing style of either a gay male or a hot lady.
The Japanese man looked up at the booth babe. She, trained to know when a man was looking at her, looked back, smiled, and waved. When she waved, the Nintendo DS stylus was stuck between her forefinger and thumb.
Soon, Eric-Jon and I left the picto-chat table. I had a wide-eyed look of horror on my face. Eric-Jon caught on to it. What he perhaps did not catch on to was that the Nintendo DS had frightened the ever-living God out of me, so endless were the possibilities. I then played some Super Mario 64x4 on the DS, and was impressed, if nothing else, by the game's graphics. I was not fully impressed when I used a control pad where I'd once used an analog stick. It certainly was in 3D. It certainly was Princess Peach's castle, too. The gameplay was nothing special -- control your character on screen one, running from point to point (points marked on screen two), picking up coins. The person with the most coins at the end of the time limit won the game. It was simple, yet slightly dead. The thrill was not thick. Playing the game with the Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP D-pad didn't feel right. I wanted an analog stick, yet, at the same time, understood how annoyed I'd be if they tried to put the exact same analog stick on there that they've been putting on systems since 1996. I was at a standstill in my discomforts. And soon, the lights were up, and the booth babes were telling us we had to get the hell out of there, because more people wanted to see and touch the system. On our ways out, T-shirts were thrust at our chests. The T-shirts are good old American extra-large sizes; shoulder-to-hips, they're roughly triangular in shape, and I'd never dream of wearing it. Oh, well.
Back in the Nintendo booth, we caught up with Chuck Franklin. We hadn't been able to take advantage of our press passes -- Nintendo told us we'd have to wait in line like everyone else -- and that meant getting odd treatment. As Eric-Jon and I discussed the beauteous parts of the DS picto-chat, Chuck Franklin stood confused. All he'd gotten to play, he explained, was some shitty Pac-Man game -- called Pac-Pix, by the way -- which he didn't understand one bit. What had happened was this: we'd all waited in line together, and entered the booth together. Upon entering the booth, Nintendo employees filed us into six lines. We then, standing, watched a video demonstration of the DS's power. Many of those standing in attendance smirked at the video demonstration. I didn't smirk. It was a life-or-death matter for me, mostly. I was slightly confused. The beginning of the demonstration showed businesspeople in a businessoffice, playing Metroid Prime: Hunters on the DS. One guy got his DS ripped out of his hands by a woman who was supposedly his higher-up. She sat at her desk, took a cautioned glance over her shoulder, and then fired up the DS for some Metroid action. She then was de-DSed by another, more-higher-up. This chain of events continued in true silent-movie fashion as Charles Martinet (a very sexy man, I must say) laid out the DS's features as they'd been explained in the press conference the day before. Two booth babes (sexy as well) spoke lines of comic relief. It took me until the very end, when the lights came up, and the DS playing area was opened to us, to notice that those two booth babes were real, identical twins.
Before the end, though, the video demonstration shifted into something else. As Martinet discussed the DS's capabilities as a device of social importance, the video showed us kids at a high school. During class, they withdrew DSes from pockets, and used the picto-chat trade inane notes, just like Eric-Jon and myself would be doing in five minutes' time. Soon, the kids were out of school, and sitting on bike racks, still chatting with the DS. A boy -- with simple short hair and a face an internationally powerful corporation couldn't be ashamed of -- was asking two girls if they'd like to get together. These two girls sat giggling just feet away. They said yeah, sure, let's go get some chocolate malts, or whatever kids did in the fifties, even though we're in the 21st century now. Martinet described this: you can chat with this thing. You can open it on an airplane, and see if there are any other DSes in the area, and then immediately begin chatting with them. I beheld this with glory. It's truly beautiful. A member of the press -- also rejected by Nintendo's PR desk? -- was snickering at the video like someone must have snickered at the first video of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. That game was snickered at because it looked like a cartoon, and the people snickering would rather be shooting life-like demons on some game on Xbox, because only games with life-like demons are cool with the ladies. The people snickering at the DS promo video were snickering because it involved kids. They probably finished demoing the games and ran up to the press room, where they called the console "ANOTHER BABIES' TOY FROM NINTENDO TEH OMG" on their professional sites. Probably in German, those sites were.
I was enthralled, however. I was pleased that Nintendo was starting so small. I was pleased at how they'd taken a small idea and evolved it: the very idea of a stylus was being taken to some kind of entertainment-value-incorporating level, and I liked it, even without having yet played it. Palm Pilots and Personal Digital Assistants of the past had allowed users to write whatever they wanted, so long as they used some ridiculous shorthand alphabet. I remember an Amish kid in college teaching me how to write my name on his Palm. I gave up after a hundred and seven or so attempts. I figured I didn't need this shit. Why did every letter have to be one stroke? And why did that stroke have to be so . . . idiotic?
Years later, PDAs have on-screen keyboards you can tap with a stylus. Better PDAs have pocket keyboards you can unfold, plug in, and type away. The best PDAs have built-in keyboards full of tiny buttons you can break your fingernails on. Wired's own Chris Baker was spotted at E3 several times, by me, even, using a HipTop. He was probably IMing in news updates to an editor. Savvy, that man is. He knows his useful technology, and he knows how to use it.
The DS is not "useful technology." It is an entertainment device. Its main function is to entertain the person who carries it. And it had better do that, too -- it is thick, and chunky, and not as sleek as your standard PDA. When it is opened, it is big. It has a headphone jack (yes!) because music is important to the experience of using it. It has four face buttons, proving that Nintendo is not completely blind to the demands of their public. Its chat mode is best enjoyed with a stylus projecting your own handwriting, so long as you make it legible (not too difficult), though an on-screen keyboard is available. The booth babe seemed to enjoy it well enough, at any rate, to learn to draw portraits of Mario's face either from memory or from the giant picture of Mario perched at the opposite end of the booth.
There are games on the thing, too.
Perhaps because Nintendo didn't want everyone to know how fun the picto-chat was compared to the various technology demos that served as games, they segregated showgoers at the booth door. When the video demonstration was over, the booth babes announced that two of the six rows of people would be given a "special prize." Lights then came up -- two rows of lights. These two rows of lights marked which two of the six rows were free to enter the door on the right. Eric-Jon and I were each in one of these rows. Chuck Franklin was not. Eric-Jon and I got to try out picto-chat and Super Mario 64. Chuck Franklin got stuck with some boring Pac-demo that Pac-sucked. He also did not get a free stylus.
When I first held a DS in my hand, and I realized its sweet chunkiness, I knew there was only one thing to do -- squeeze it. I pressed my thumbs against it, securing my four fingers against its bottom. I lowered my ear to the plastic. There was not a creak. The little thing is rock-solid. This pleased me. The hinge between the top screen's housing and the rest of the unit, too, is rock-solid; the little hollows on either side of the top screen attest to the D-pad's and the buttons' thickness. They protrude from the unit nicely, unlike the space-saving little candy-buttons of the Gameboy Advance SP.
Some journalists commented on the unit's not being as "sexy" as the SP, and I groan to even recall this. Get over it, people. You want a pocketable device a woman's going to consider "sexy," get a goddamned vibrator. And then read the manual. These journalists also, I would like to point out, probably have no respect for a good old-fashioned booty--
We will cease talk on the physics of sexy at this point. If you want to hear me discuss it more, start a thread in the forums. We will bring this back on tracked with an emboldened "AHEM!!"
AHEM!!
The DS is a sexy piece of plastic. It is also completely free of markings. Not a logo on the sexy thing -- and this is because the system is yet to have a name. "DS" is just a code-name, see. As long as they don't call it something idiotic like the "NITRO" or the "N-GAGE," we'll be alright.
It's funny, though -- the system the kids were playing in the demo video? It had a black "Nintendo" logo on it. The one the businesspeople were playing didn't have that logo. The one we got to play at E3 didn't have that black logo, either. Could it be that the video segment involving the businesspeople was completed last? If so, why? Was it built to replace a scene of, say, a child's mother taking away his DS, and then playing it until daddy came home? What does this say, if not that Nintendo has finally learned how to push our buttons? And why did it take so long for them to learn how to push our buttons, when we've been pushing theirs for so damned long?
The New Zelda Game for Gamecube is, if nothing else, the manifestation of the rumor that Nintendo is learning things. I hesitate, however, to place a positive connotation on the phrase "learning things." Learning something is not always a good thing. Ask the guys who watched their friends die in Vietnam if they didn't become better people by learning that an M-60 bullet aimed at an outstretched index fingertip would result in a severed arm, and you might get punched in the neck.
This new Zelda video -- I'll be the not-first to say that it looks pretty. And as something pretty, it looks pretty good. The graphical style is alluring. What we see always has a big impact on what we feel, and I feel that this new Zelda will sell probably three million units the week it hits the ground. I also feel it will probably be released in America a few weeks before it's released in Japan, simply because games do that sometimes, these days. It interests me that Link's tunic is an earthy brown in color rather than a crayon-green. It almost interests me that the enemies look "mature" and "grown up" and like something out of a "Lord of the Rings" movie. If you ask me -- and you do, sometimes, don't you? -- Wind Waker was far more immediately exciting. The cel-shaded look had never been done better, or more fluidly, than it had been done in that little demo. The game, in virtuoso fashion, carries this excellence in cel-shading through to the end.
It is in the design element that the game is lacking. Forcing us to sail for hours in an empty sea is one thing the game does wrong; it goes on to do many others wrong. It talks down to us for its duration. It remains, though, a good game, for the most part. This new Zelda, for all we, the self-professed enlightened thinkers of the gaming world, know, might just be a similar bundle of design flaws wrapped in a package more palatable to the American mainstream demographic.
I'll say it again: it looks like a "Lord of the Rings" movie. I, for the record, enjoyed all three "Lord of the Rings" movies, sometimes very much so. I probably would not have enjoyed them as much, however, had the hero been Shigeru Miyamoto's Link (now, Shigeru Miyamoto in a blazer, a "1up" mushroom T-shirt, and a cosplay Master Sword and Hylian Shield . . . they're not paying you enough, Shigs!! "KOSPUREE NIICHAN!! MODOTTEODOTTEKUREYO~~~!!") and the goal been simply to rescue princess Zelda. I also, for the record, think that Majora's Mask is far more respectable for the risks it embodies than Ocarina of Time is for its completeness as a game. Then again, what the hell do I know?
I'd prefer that this new Zelda took a departure from its predecessor, as Majora's did. You see that part where Link is fighting a million demonic Moblins on horses, while riding his own horse? Wouldn't it be bitchin' if that battle was going on from the start of the game to the finish? Like, every time you left the main town, there you were, on that battlefield again? In Ocarina of Time, every time you left Hyrule Castle, you were in "Hyrule Field," where skeletons occasionally claw their way out of the dirt simply because you need something to mow down with your horse as you come running by through the emptiness. Some of the people who complain about "random battles" popping up out of nowhere in a Dragon Quest game will turn right around and say that Zelda is a perfect game. To them, I ask: why the hell are these skeletons popping up out of nowhere? Why do they fight Link? Why are they there, in the context of game design, if they're just going to get run the hell over by the horse? Why is there a horse, if it isn't challenging to ride him?
Now, I said before, in my Jak II review, that Ocarina's horse was an experiment in transportation methods through a large game world, and I stand by that. It's true. The horse will stay where you leave it, and can be summoned by playing a special song. You feel proud of that horse. How much more proud would you feel, though, if the horse could die? A lot more, especially if you kept the horse alive.
On the eve of the Nintendo press conference, Insert Credit's mascot Joe "Chutney" Barnes played The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask on his Nintendo Gamecube at a time when he should have been studying for a calculus final. I reclined on his sofa with a glass of piss-warm, shit-strong Trader Joe's cranberry juice and a BRC from El Pollo Loco, thinking of what a polished little exercise of concept over content over execution over design that game was. I still think it today, two weeks after seeing that new Zelda for the first time, years after Majora's Mask was released and was compared to Tim Burton films and "Groundhog Day," which is not a Tim Burton film. I hope this new Zelda has some kind of compelling concept to go along with the crowd-pleasing visuals. Then again, hoping for something like that, at this point, is like wishing from the bottom of a well. There's no telling what it'll be, just that it looks nice.
You know, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, released last year for Xbox, looks really good, too. I played it at my friend Doug's house just two days ago. Looks like you're playing a movie, it does. There's a new Lord of the Rings RPG for Gamecube (and I think PlayStation2, and Xbox -- if so, get the Xbox version) by Electronic Arts, too, and its battle system is just about fully inspired by Final Fantasy X, which can't be a bad thing. It used to be that Westerners would invent something, only to see the Japanese make it better. Now, the trend is turning, quite frighteningly, perhaps, for the Japanese. Anyway, I mention this game just because I want to get it out of the way, in case I forget to mention it somewhere else in the mass of writing that will follow. I will now continue talking about game concepts:
Concept is all the DS has going for it. Thank God it's a hell of a concept. An hour before the close of the show, on day three, thanks to Chris Kohler, Chuck Franklin, Eric-Jon and myself got full-on journalists' looks at the DS. I got to play Pac-Pix, and found it amusing, if not brilliant at all (you're just drawing a Pac-Man shape and watching it go; you then draw a line for Pac to bounce off of; he continues eating ghosts until time runs out or you start to suck; that the score blank runs up to seven digits frightens me, because I couldn't score more than a thousand points). Chuck got a stylus -- two of them, in fact. Eric-Jon and I had another heartwarming chat, which Chuck joined in on, and together we frightened a new Japanese businessman. It turned out he was one of the designers of the DS. So he said in picto-chat. I told him, "Well, you sure made a sexy unit." He said, "The PSP is sexier." I told him to quit being so humble. He then looked at the three of us. I pointed to my chest, told him it was me. We shook hands.
"You like it, huh?"
"It's a nice piece of system."
"You gonna get one?"
"Sure thing."
"Right on. Right on. Don't let me get fired!"
"I'll send a letter on genko-yoshi paper to Nintendo along with my proof of purchase."
"Do that! Use nicer handwriting, though."
"Ha-hah!"
He was a funny guy. Perhaps our picto-chat session had lightened him up? Indirect forms of communication are responsible ice-breakers for so many friendships these days. He looked like he was in his early thirties. He probably carried a Gameboy Advance SP on the train.
The next game I tried out was the Sonic the Hedgehog tech demo. The demo required me to rub my finger across the bottom screen until the high-speed near-Dreamcast-in-graphical-quality 3D Sonic on the top screen hit a . . . high speed. I don't know what I was supposed to do. Probably, the demo was just to show how nice the graphics can look, if developers try.
It was just minutes before the bells rang and the gongs sounded that I picked up Metroid Prime: Hunters. I'd suddenly realized I was wasting my time with Sonic, and was forgetting all about Metroid. This was sad; Metroid was mostly all of the reason we'd gone back to see the DS. I played the game; not three minutes into it, I felt as though bile had crept up and caked itself beneath my fingertips. It was not fun. I was moving Samus around with the D-pad, while aiming and shooting with the stylus. Using the stylus to aim was, as an idea, kind of cute -- it responds well, and the screen turns well. Yet -- tapping the stylus also makes Samus shoot. What if you want to turn around continuously while firing rapidly? What if you don't want to fire while looking up? Truly, this game is a shooting game, and most of your time is spent shooting things. There's nothing to lose from shooting something. There's nothing to not gain, either. A shot in the right direction might hit an enemy, and kill it. As far as I can tell, there is no wrong direction to shoot. Still -- shooting when we consciously don't want to shoot feels like a sin of game design. Moreover, I'm using half of my palm to cover up the damned screen. Why not put the action on the top screen, and let us aim and shoot on the bottom screen? If people say that it'd be too hard to aim on a screen where you're not looking at the enemy, respond by saying that some people are perfectly capable of typing without looking at the keyboard. Still, it doesn't seem much like the modern Nintendo, whose Zelda: The Four Swords on Gamecube reminds players every damned time they pick up 20 force points that "THIS IS TWENTY FORCE POINTS."
"Super Mario 64x4" and "Wario Ware on DS" sound like tech demo names. "Metroid Prime: Hunters," which has lovely graphics, by the way, sounds like the name of an actual game. It has a title screen that shows an image bent across both screens. It is also fundamentally retarded in its design. It leads me to believe that a lot of the system's games, if left to the Nintendo that, for years now, has forced game developers to incorporate Gameboy Advance connectivity into Gamecube software, will be equally flawed. It's kind of scary, because I love the idea of the Nintendo DS. It's the most refreshing thing I've seen in videogames in a long time, and it is with slight fear that I call it the star of the show for 2004. Perhaps, like all good action heroes, the DS is more intriguing because of its self-conflict.
I like to think the DS will rise up above the odds and show us something truly awesome. I think this because I have seen the N-Gage fail once in 2003 and fail twice in 2004 with its new design (unless you're talking about the vegetarian sushi and free Coke -- or alcohol). It was design that, originally, did the N-Gage in; it hurt to hold the thing, and it hurt to look at its screen. It is design that will do the N-Gage QD in for good. At their N-Gage QD press conference, Nokia spokespeople spoke, like people do, with conviction, and all the conviction in the world couldn't save them from the crime they had committed. The system still does not compel. Sega's Pocket Kingdom is a heap of disappointment. Billed as the first Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, Pocket Kingdom is, in reality, just a point-and-click map-navigational affair studded with faux-side-scrolling battles it seems no one controls, least of all either players involved. The N-Gage QD's still-palm-burning design makes even simple pointing and clicking on locations unbearable. The worst problem with the Nokia N-Gage might be Nokia's president's own belief that it, really, doesn't suck. All the red lighting, free alcohol, and chatty booth girls in the world can't hide the look on one female executive's face when the president of the company says, in his thick accent, that the original N-Gage sold 600,000 units. He's lying to the press, and many of his subordinates know it. It's a confusing place to be in, and I thank God only that this little console that couldn't might serve as an example to future fools who try to go toe-to-toe with the yokozuna at Sony and Nintendo. Most saddening of all was the demo reel Nokia showed: EA Sports titles like Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf are overhead, two-dimensional human-lifeless exercises of blue lines tracing ball-paths on green fields. I beheld this game and Electronic Arts spokesperson Gerard Wiener's faltering declaration that it would revolutionize the way people play games on the go with a sinking feeling in my heart. Just an hour before, they'd let us into the press conference even though we weren't on the guest list. An hour and a half before, their hired bus driver got us lost in South Central. Just an hour later, they'd be handing me the freebie of E3 2004, a sturdy, heavy-duty military-style rucksack emblazoned with the Pathway to Glory logo. That game, by the way, a kind-of massive online real-time-strategy in which you control, uniquely, only one unit, looks like it might not suck if it were for a capable system. The demo reel on it shows old photos of World War II, then late Super Nintendo-era green wireframe models of in-game skeletons of the buildings in those photos, and then shows us early PlayStation-era computer graphical renderings of the finished environments. Hushed, John-Williams-y music plays underneath. It is to call to mind the glory of war, or something. I found the trailer jaw-droppingly naive, and almost cried at it. Then they showed the Rifts trailer, and I cried with cackling laughter. They claimed that "Rifts" was a "worldwide popular tabletop RPG," and maybe they were right. I wouldn't know. Well, in the trailer, we see none of the game -- only pre-Final Fantasy VII PlayStation-quality full-motion video of a lizardy man fighting a woman warrior. The woman looks outmatched. She jumps back to avoid the brute. She does a flip, and lands on one foot, balancing with the grace of an abacus. She spreads her arms out like goose-wings. A hole opens in her forehead. A white laser roughly the width of a sausage pushes its way out. The laser hits the lizard in the chest. He screams, and then explodes into triangles. I looked over at Josh Hsieh, who was drinking a Kirin beer by my side. He was wearing sunglasses and a wrist brace (the same wrist brace I'm supposed to wear every night for my carpal tunnel) and carrying a long-lensed Sony Cybershot. He looked at me with an expression like he was a mirror-image of myself. We were aghast. And then they showed the Glimmerati trailer, in which semi-slick computer-rendered images of cars glide around as though wet; the large-breasted female silhouettes on the hood ornaments dance, and Eurobeat beats on. It was horrifying. Far more horrifying than the Phantom console would prove to be, on day two.
Yet I must say -- Gerard Wiener is PR person of the show. There was something very human about how he talked. He had nice blue eyes that pierced right through Josh, Brandon, and myself when we were chuckling it up at the Rifts trailer. (Okay, so we were more like laughing our asses off.) He was wearing a white shirt a size too big, and when he took the mic, Brandon and I -- vegetarians who know much of skinny arms -- figured out why: his arm inflated like a suddenly-stuffed football. The man was ripped. He had guns. I christen them the biggest guns of E3, even bigger than those in Halo 2.
I beheld those guns, and I spoke: "That's the most Gerard Wiener I've ever seen!"
That was a good one.
Though, I don't know -- that was then, the PSP was now. Day one of the show, I saw the PSP, and part of me died with joy. It looks really nice. It looks scary nice, in fact. The screen size is roughly gigantic, and I wouldn't mind watching DVDs on it. A Sony representative told me the system would come with a carrying case packed-in the box. The carrying case is bubble-like in shape, and sexy. I told him I'd planned on carrying it in a purple velvet Crown Royal whisky pouch. He said that's funny -- he'd been thinking he'd do the same with his. I asked, so you're planning on getting one of these, too? He hit me back: oh, you're not? I must say: with no solidly announced software outside Death Jr. (and, while we're on the subject, what the hell is up with that? It looks lame) and Metal Gear Acid (Hideo Kojima, says (to me! INSERCREDIT.COM EXCLUSIVE!!), "It is, at its heart, an adventure game, like Gyakuten Saiban 3." I say: "You mean like Policenauts?" And he says, "No."), the system still looks . . . necessary. I need it, bad. I need it not like a drug -- I need it like a food. The package designs for the UMD (that's Universal Media Disk, for those who came in late) look nice. The neck-strap / headphone jack (yes, combined) looks like something I wouldn't be afraid of wearing around the ladies. The plexiglas cell-phone number-key attachment (with numbers that light up fiber-optic-style) looks as slick as the system itself. And the real kicker -- Eric-Jon, back me up on this one -- is the sick realization that the little holographic circle on the back of the unit is actually a window to the spinning disk. The post-mortem-kick-to-the-junk: the little black bump beneath the D-pad is an analog stick, and probably the best analog stick yet to exist on a videogame console. It glides around on the surface of the unit like a lily pad on a chain in a pond. It is, to this date, a more Gerard Wiener than any I have ever seen. Oh yes, I need one of these.
Hopefully, at Tokyo Game Show, there will be some games.
As of E3, though, in the PSP versus DS war (this war in which the N-Gage QD is not even a competitor), the DS is a clear winner, in that it has games, and it has picto-chat. I am not, however, saying that PSP should have picto-chat. It seems to me that the two units just might be able to coexist. This will be a first for handheld systems, as far as I can see. It is refreshing. DS's picto-chat exists because that system has stylus usability, and a second screen to write on. PSP can play movies because its storage medium allows it. N-Gage has a phone attached because -- because why? Because its maker also makes phones? Because the mobile technology for "N-Gage Arena" online play is usable for phones, as well? Why, really? It's a chicken-or-the-egg question, is what it is. Was N-Gage originally designed as a game system, or a phone? It's hard to tell. It's easy to tell, however, that the DS and the PSP are gaming systems first, multimedia devices second, and absolute necessities to continue living third. Similarly, though you can use Xbox Live's new voice mail and video chat modes to talk to your grandmother in Boise, Idaho (gaming capital of the universe, I've heard), Xbox Live is primarily a service for playing Halo 2 -- or, uh, playing lots of games, even EA Sports games, as of later this year. When J Allard said, of Xbox Live, that it would "revolutionize social entertainment," and he said it kind of scaredly, some fat Frenchman with a laptop, clicking up impressions, laughed at the word. I was behind Allard one hundred percent. Let's do it, then, people. Let's revolutionize social entertainment. Hell, let's put a DS in the hands of all the kids at the local high school, and see what happens. Televise that shit on Nickelodeon.
As I reach the end of this, the first segment of my E3 coverage, which will go on for five more segments (I think), I ask a question: does Nintendo know that a fat Frenchman laughed when J Allard claimed Xbox Live would "revolutionize social entertainment"? Does Nintendo know that a journalist chuckled when the DS demo reel showed kids at a park outside their school? Something tells me Nintendo knows lots of things -- that so-very-brown, "mature" Zelda video is that something -- and something else tells me to be afraid of Nintendo's gestures to make everyone happy. That something else may or may not be Metroid Prime: Hunters, where you fire when trying to turn around, and feel upset about it, even though firing isn't doing anything you're not going to do anyway. And it's not like the game counts your shots. This game feels, to me, like overreaction to criticism; only I can't tell what criticism that is.
I feel uneasy at the thought of overcompensation, more than anything else. I don't want Nintendo to try too hard. I want Nintendo, and the other videogame companies of the world, in this year, to understand what criticism is worth taking to heart. Next thing you know, Hanes is going to make boxer-briefs with four leg-holes, for twice the comfort.
[next:the three most insane games of all-time]
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