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I learned last year, at my first E3, that I don't like E3. I learned this year, at my second E3, that I still don't like E3. I don't like it because it's big, and it's noisy. Eric-Jon Waugh and I both ground our voices into pulps during days one and two, shouting at each other over the din about how cool Halo 2 was, or which strategies would win us that game of Guild Wars, and score that free 32-megabyte USB flash memory card from NCSoft. It seemed to me, again and again, over and over, that the Electronic Entertainment Expo was a big waste of my time. It was a giant place full of journalists complaining about hurting feet, all of them rushing around trying to scoop one another. I caught hear of one journalist complaining to another in the press room about all the "Fucking assholes" who had "snuck in." I won't say who this journalist was, because that'd look like libel or some shit. I'll just say that he said it. The people who had "snuck in," according to this guy, were clerks from such fine establishments as GameStop or Electronics Boutique, places that actually sell games to people, unlike his little pissy magazine, which just talks about them, and provides online arenas for children to call each other homosexuals for liking Wind Waker that way. If it weren't for all these assholes running around, this journalist complained, he'd be able to get his work done. His "work" involved carrying a giant "Xbox: It's Fun to Play Together" bag full of T-shirts where the front design and the back design are identical, only differing in size. He's selling them on eBay right now, I think.
When his companion brought up the idea of a "public day" at E3, this journalist fatcat scoffed. "Public day? The public don't deserve to come to E3!"
The sad fact is that this journalist's work was no more complicated than talking to other journalists. The only thing he gained from going to E3 was the raw opportunity to exist for a few days in the same city as all these people he only communicated with remotely for the other 360-something days of the year. He knew these people. If he wanted, truly, no more than to "network" with them, he could have emailed them and arranged meetings. No, no, he had to complain about the game store "assholes." And why? Well, simply, they were getting in his way of scoring free stuff (journalists call it "swag") and ruining his photo poses with booth babes. They were also taking up demo stations, getting in the way of his playing the games, which he totally needs to do, even though lord knows game magazines don't actually play the games anymore. They were founded by people who played games, and are now put together by typists with a keen eye for trimming corporate press releases.
Even so, there are no scoops to be had at E3. The esteemed Steven Kent broke the Nintendo DS story to USA Today two days before E3 opened. 1up.com, middle finger of the Ziff-Davis Empire, ran impressions of all impressionable games the day before E3 opened. That was it -- there was to be no scooping. Hell. I didn't even have to go to the show. No one did. There it all was, on 1up.com. They should have announced that a week in advance: "Hey guys, thanks to careful political positioning, we're going to be blowing out everything worth blowing out a day before E3. So if you're with, like, IGN or GameSpy, you might not even want to bother coming. Or if you do, you can leave your laptop at home."
I arrived at E3 as a guy who loves underdogs. I wandered Kentia Hall, and found nothing outside of a really awesome-looking Korean ballroom dancing rhythm game, which is really nothing more than Bust a Move with Koreans and ballroom dancing. I fondly watched its demo video anyway, though as a guy who frequently ballroom dances with Korean girls (seriously, and sometimes against my will), I can't quite give it the best of Kentia Hall award.
No, not even Wonder Boy for Sega Master System wins the best of Kentia Hall award. Thanks to the Classic Videogame Expo History of Videogames exhibit, which was small, quaint, and interesting, I played it nearly to the last level, with all my skills intact, those skills that'd make Master Higgins shit his pants. Then I died something like nine times, and gave up.
No, the best of Kentia Hall award goes to Koei, whose little hidden booth we crashed quite violently. Myself, Eric-Jon Waugh, Frank Cifaldi of The Lost Levels, and Chuck Franklin of Games Are Fun were the ones who did the crashing. It was Chuck's first E3, poor guy, and he was excited about things like entering press-only booths. It was actually my PR contact that got us into the booth, though Chuck was pleased either way. We sat in there, and had the new Uncharted Waters massively-multiplayer online RPG demoed, slowly, to us. It reminded one of us of Bethesda's Sea Dogs, and it reminded only me of Bethesda/Akella's Pirates of the Caribbean for Xbox. In this game, you sail from island to island, transporting contraband items. Unlike Pirates the whole world is free for the exploring, and there are no gimpy little missions where you infiltrate caves on foot. To add to the excitement, the game is to be quite massively online. In Japan, where this kind of game is respected (and doubly respected if it's from Koei), it's quite possible it will reach a half a million users. This isn't what got us right-minded white Americans salivating, however. No, the muffins were what got us salivating. They were large as boulders. I had a banana nut. That's a good muffin. It's the muffin that wins them the award, totally.
We were digging our teeth into the muffins when I decided to ask the Koei representative who had composed the music for the new Uncharted Waters. He replied without hesitation that it was Yoko Kanno. Us four muffin-eaters all blinked, at the same time. No way, we said. Quickly, another representative jumped in and explained it to us. Yoko Kanno hadn't exactly composed the music -- here, here, watch the demo trailer. He showed us the CG trailer on a television screen. It was the music from the original Famicom Uncharted Waters, played by a real-sounding orchestra. "We just used Yoko Kanno's melodies," he explained. "It's all the same music, just different quality."
I'm sure the same can be said for Bandai's new Cowboy Bebop game, though Yoko Kanno's music, in that case, is probably lower quality than the original work. I really have no clue what the hell kind of game Cowboy Bebop is, just that it's by Bandai, and based on an anime, and in the words of Bandai producer Daisuke Uchiyama, "No one cares about the quality of that shit."
Also -- and this is kind of an aside -- you know, I have never met a Japanese person who has seen, or even heard of Cowboy Bebop. So who knows? Maybe if this game is made with Westerners in mind, it might actually be kind of better than the newest Naruto rehash, hey?
Back to Yoko Kanno, though. You know, she also did the music for the "Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex" television series, so that game is sure to use a couple of her pieces to good effect, just so it can put her name on the back of the box. Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, I shit you not, would win the tim rogers' game of show e3 2004 if I hadn't already beaten the shit out of it back when it was released in Japan in March. Chuck and I had extensive conversations with the producer at the Tokyo Anime Expo in January. Even then, when the game was yet incomplete, he told us it was a lock for American release. He beamed at his creation. He told us simply -- he had an idea for a third-person three-dimensional run-and-shooter where you can jump and climb and even control your enemies, one with absolutely hundreds of tiny, tiny, tiny levels, and he told his higher-ups at Sony Computer Entertainment about the game, and they liked the ideas he had, and it was weeks later that they scored the "Ghost in the Shell" license, and they told him, hey, why not make your game a "Ghost in the Shell" game? He then tried his best, and will be rewarded by time for making a kickass piece of software. It is addicting to play as it is stylish. It has kung-fu attacks where everything freezes and spins around like in "The Matrix."
The Matrix Online has kung-fu and freezing-spinning special effects in it, too, only I don't know what to think of them. In Standalone Complex, you can feel the game freeze and spin. In The Matrix Online, you're just watching some guy in a SEGA polo shirt handle the mouse and keyboard.
Okay, okay, so at some point -- and some point soon, I imagine -- the game will be playable. As it stands now, the very title is amusing: The Matrix Online. I thought, until shortly ago, that I was the only person in the world who understood how clever the title is. Now, someone among you fine readers has proven to me, in an Instant Message chat, that you understand it, too. Thanks. I don't have to explain it, now.
It makes me feel kind of sad that The Matrix Online was Sega's big "explosive announcement," the one they hyped for a week before E3. It was a kind of stunt to pull people over to the Sega booth. In the end, it was blabbed all over the internet a day and a half before E3 opened that, hey, Sega is making The Matrix Online, and most of these news stories commented on how the game had already been through the jaws of several other rabid game developers, and it was now a tattered, poor, broken thing. I say: don't give up hope yet. The Matrix is, if nothing else, the perfect setting for a videogame. What kind of videogame just hasn't been nailed down yet. I say: let Sega give it a try. Let's see what comes.
As for the rest of Sega -- well, even the underdog-loving me had a shred of hate in his heart. Guys without E3 badges were being let into Sega's off-center concourse booth, and once inside, they were getting bad impressions of E3. I warn you, fine people of Los Angeles who crept into the convention hall and saw only Sega -- as much as E3 sucks, and as much as it sucks ass, it's not all this bad. Sega's "Sonic Team"-produced AstroBoy for PlayStation2 failed to impress anyone. And I'd wondered why it wasn't advertised when it was released in Japan in March. My first play of it reduced me to half-tears. While playing it, for the record, I saw Yu Suzuki for the first time, and gave him a nod. He nodded back. Of that game's Gameboy Advance partner, developed by Treasure and slightly codeveloped by Hitmaker, I said many good things, none of which anyone believed, you damn bastards you. It, too, was playable at E3; seems it's getting a US release this August. Buy it, and then believe; I'll forgive you for your hate emails.
None other than Yuji Naka, producer of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, watched me play OutRun2 on Xbox. That game was the only thing Sega that was truly golden, at E3. Had I a home and an Xbox (or just the right tools to hollow a home out of that Xbox), I'd look forward to that game. It is a fun experience.
Unfortunately, most of that experience has been wiped from my memory by Sonic Mega Collection Plus, perhaps the worst idea on the face of the earth at the moment. It's basically the Gamecube game Sonic Mega Collection emulated on a PlayStation2. As if the Gamecube version's emulations weren't skippy enough, they re-emulated all those emulations on PlayStation2. No, no, I refuse to believe that they built a new emulation engine. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Sonic Jam for Saturn was, most likely, a fairly good emulation of all the Genesis Sonic games, and Sonic Mega Collection was an emulation of those, and Mega Collection Plus is a third emulation, illustrating to us what Michael Keaton explained in the film "Multiplicity," about making a copy of a copy of a copy.
I just thought up another good Michael Keaton quote, too. I might as well put it in here:
"A good cop will never let you know that he knows you're full of shit."
That's not "Multiplicity," though. Hell, what is it?
I'm sure it will come to me.
At any rate, Mega Collection Plus is terrible. You press the X button, wait three seconds, and then see Sonic jump. I shit you not. It takes that long for him to jump. It was the least responsive game in the world, if you don't count my ex-girlfriend (that's a joke! a joke!!). I stared aghast at Sonic the Hedgehog for a minute and a half before an American Sega representative -- bless his heart -- butted in and told me the game wasn't nearly complete yet. He then told me that, when it's done, it will have dozens of Sonic Team games and games related to Sonic Team stuffed into it. It will be far better than the Gamecube one, trust me, he says. Well. For now, I remain skeptical. You shouldn't have let me play that game, Sega. I had no business playing it that early. And there it was, on four demo kiosks. Shame, shame, shame.
"Will it have Sonic CD?" I asked him. I looked him in the eye. The controller was down, by now.
"I can't say anything about that yet," he said, and then he winked at me.
What . . . the hell . . .
"What about NiGHTS?"
"Most likely."
Was this guy shitting me? Had he made a blue "Sega" polo shirt and just snuck into the booth?
I have no way of telling.
Then again, how the hell did I get in there? I'm sure loads of journalists were cluelessly asking one another. Just for your delight, devoted fans, I didn't wear my badge once at this year's E3. I kept it off, for I have not the credentials to wear it, anyway. I was asked, a total of eighteen times, to show it, and I complied. That doesn't mean I wore it. After the show was over, I promptly autographed it, and sold it to a fan for a hundred dollars. How much did you get for yours?
AHA! It was Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown." Only it wasn't said by Michael Keaton -- it was said about Michael Keaton's character Ray Nicolet, to Jackie Brown, by Robert Forster's Max Cherry.
AHEM!!
How did the Infinium Labs people get into E3, too? I don't get that shit. Frank Cifaldi brought great, amusing shame to them by bringing some of the Phantom console's Café Press items into the Phantom booth. A bib and a thong, they were. He wore the thong on his head--yeah, I'll let him tell the story himself. He sure as hell means to. I stepped into the booth to receive an "I BELIEVE" "THE PHANTOM LIVES" T-shirt, though by the end of my tour, I wasn't believing in much of anything. The console was big, and white, and shiny. Booth employees were sitting on sofas, showing people how to navigate the Phantom's thrilling operating system. The keyboard/mouse semi-combination looks kind of cool -- the keyboard part hinges up to reveal a mousepad where you move your mouse -- though that's about it. On a slight dare, I got John Swisshelm to lift the console. He said it felt like it really had some weight in it. The booth employees scowled at us. I lifted the console, too, raising more scowls. When I took out my camera, the scowls turned to circling guys with arms akimbo. I lunged across the shag throw rug, and touched the little boomerang-shaped controller. It felt like the plastic of a PC controller, painted with smooth gloss. We then shouldered our T-shirts, and tried to leave, only to be informed six times that this was the entrance. The exit is over there. Each exit turned out to be another entrance. We ran into the guy who'd been handing out the T-shirts. "So, are you guys going to give us some good press, or what?" he asked. We said maybe, and then busted through an entrance and got the hell out of there.
That was weird.
I then went to the Square-Enix booth, which was a great triumph of wacky design. It was made of some material like in a moon-lander spaceship or something. It bulged up like a bubble. Footsteps made a pleasant echo against its floor. I watched Chris Woodard play Final Fantasy XII for a half an hour. We enjoyed the game muchly. It is very good. Some have said the game is too much of a departure from the other titles in the series. I say that Final Fantasy is nothing if not a game about relentless reinvention.
Also, to the dumb bitches actually enjoyed that pile of cold shit called Crystal Chronicles, who say XII's battle system is too much like Final Fantasy XI, listen here: I have played Final Fantasy XI, and I have witnessed the combat wherein four generic warriors stand in a cross formation around a bumblebee swinging daggers every thirty seconds and eventually dying, all four of them, and now I have played Final Fantasy XII, where ten knights storm into a castle and take out a crowd of enemy knights with great, fast, videogamey fury, and I tell you: though the mind may be alike, the heart is deadly different: this is excellence of execution.
I also say that when I tried to take a picture of Woodard giving a thumbs-up in front of the game, a little Japanese guy grabbed my fucking arm and jerked it backward, which you don't do to an American, especially in America. He's lucky I didn't go with my reflex to elbow him in the throat. I was thinking of the safety of my camera, however. And lucky at that -- I don't need Squaresoft angry at themselves because of me again.
"Only can take picture of LOOOOOOGO!" he bellowed over the loudness of his company's ridiculously shaped booth.
WELL!!
There was a display of Full Metal Alchemist manga volumes, under glass, in Square's little "Museum" area. There was a huge sign taped to the glass: "NO PHOTOGRAPHY." Yeah, I guess we'll just have to go onto the internet, to the comic's official website, to download photos of the covers. It's not like we can see them, anyway, beneath that fucking "NO PHOTOGRAPHY" sign.
Shit.
Listen up, Squaresoft: you make fucking good games, sometimes. Okay, so Full Metal Alchemist really sucks -- it's like a 3D melee fighter with the occasional too-long dialogue scene involving static full-screen character portraits (a technique that screams: this game is both based on an anime and thrown violently together). I only played it because I was waiting for some girl to quite playing Final Fantasy XII in one of your big headphone-equipped chairs (a nice idea that makes me wonder why no one else at E3 does it), and she didn't finish, even after an hour and twenty minutes, so I was quite angry when I played Full Metal Alchemist instead. I quite honestly despise the manga's attitude, and the cartoon nags on the back of my brain, though it's not nearly as bad as that Bobobo bo~bobobo bullshit. Which Don Marco once tried to tell me was "genius" because it's "about Japanese wordplay" and turned up a fucking liar like what the fuck does he know about Japanese wordplay that I don't?!
. . .
. . . uh, yes. I believe I was talking to Squaresoft: you make fucking good games, sometimes. Well, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles was a large piece of elephant shit, and, well . . . nothing you made from Final Fantasy X until just last December was really any good at all. I'm picking on you, and ignoring Enix, because they're cool as far as I know. I'm not going to ask why you didn't show Dragon Quest V or Dragon Quest VIII, the latter of which is easily the biggest game of this present decade, because I think I know the answer. All I'm saying to you is that you need understand that your good games -- and I'm pointing to only Front Mission 4 and Final Fantasy XII here -- are fucking good to the point of being brilliant. They are immersive worlds, and people with the right sense will buy them. Secrecy is not the way to make these games better; neither is having booth staff poke around checking GameStop clerks for cameras and fucking touching people like me in a way that could end up with someone (probably myself, after the Square Police Force shows up) getting brutally hurt. Oh, also, your big theater thing? I didn't go in, don't worry. I didn't like the idea of having to make an appointment a day and three-quarters in advance. I'm sure most people didn't, no matter how much the theater revolved. Also: Final Fantasy for cellular phones does not need to exist. That game is not the Bible; it will hopefully wind up as only a footnote in the chapter of The Great (and Reliable) Videogame History Book that deals with the first Dragon Quest. In closing: the people who make your games are sometimes very cool. Other people at your company are not. In second closing: CHILL THE FUCK OUT. In third closing: YOU GOTTA BELIEVE!!
[next: the awards segment]
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