E3 must be a spectacular spectacle. Everything is shiny and new, young people full of hope and wonder traveling from booth to booth soaking up the essence of all things nerd, geek, and fanboy. I can imagine feeling the excitement as everyone piles into a crowded stadium getting ready to hear from one of the greatest game developers of all time, Ubisoft, the Parisian Publisher that brought you Rainbow Six, Farcry, and Assassin’s Creed.
As you are sitting in the seats, the lights go down and the show begins.
The usual suspects are there, the obligatory Kinect title that is supposed to remind me of Sega’s Rez, so much so that they got the creator of Rez to play the game on stage. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood trailer looks cool, somewhat cartoony though, I don’t remember the faces being that rubbery in Assassin’s Creed 2. Shaun White Skateboarding was announced. I guess I didn’t know that he was a skateboarder too. X-games Renaissance man…skating games don’t interest me much, haven’t played one since 720 was in the local arcade.
Okay, here is where the show gets a little crazy…as if seeing someone take Shaun White Skateboarding seriously wasn’t crazy enough…these hooligans run out from the crowd shooting plastic guns at each other. I swear I heard one of them yell, ”Pew…pew…I shot you!” and the other defiantly reply, “No you didn’t, I’m telling mommy!”
Come on Ubisoft…really? This is what you’re showing at E3…Lasertag….whoops, I mean Battletag? Granted it’s Lasertag that attaches to your PC, but who is really going to be Tweeting or Facebooking their Battletag score? These publishers and developers are starting to sound like my mother on a Saturday morning. “Go out and play, Arc! It’s a nice day, you’ve been staring at that TV for hours.” And before you ask, yes, my mother calls me Arc.
Okay, guys, we know that a lot of us are fat…you don’t have to rub it in. I’m starting to get a complex. I can’t imagine what demographic told the eggheads at Ubisoft that this was going to fly with gamers. They should have shown this at the American International Toy Fair in New York, because that is the venue for this product, not E3!
Okay now for some kick ass games right? No…some unnatural red-headed punk rocker, who strangely looks like the mutant offspring of Sid Vicious and Stewart Smiley. comes out and starts talking stress relief.
Really?
The Ubisoft press conference goes from “showing their up-and-coming titles” to “late night infomercial” just like that. It’s called innergy and it will save your life, make you younger, and relieve the stress of this press conference…
HEY! UBISOFT! Where’s the games? Breathe in…breathe out. Uh…oh,! You’re breathing wrong! You’re not going to make it to the end of the presentation.
The press conference moved on and they finally showed Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. It looks decent, although I didn’t think that it would be marketed as a stealth game; the level they showed consisted of a lot of sneaking around. Four player co-op always draws me in and makes even mediocre games a purchase for me, so they got me there. The game truly looks good, so I won’t be wasting my money.
They previewed the new Driver. I was interested until the whole car-hopping portion of the demo where the player can leap up into the sky and fly down into another car. Apparently the bad guy is in a coma…and it’s all a dream. What? So I’m a ghost Driver? Why does Ubisoft have to ruin it by inserting these kind of story elements in their games? It dosn’t make them more intersting. Assasins Creed I and II would have been awesome games without the whole sci-fi genetic memory crap. Oh, well…I’m a Need for Speed kind of guy anyway.
Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, comes out and goes over some projects that Ubisoft is developing. I never get why CEO’ that cannot speak fluent English choose to present to a primarily English speaking audience. It would be like me going to Spain and trying to present an idea. I know Spanish fairly well, but I would still sound like an idiot to most Spaniards at the presentation. To me it was a little hard to follow. He presented information on Project Dust (some God sim or something), Mania Planet (a user content based game system based on popular TrackMania), a set of tools that allow artists to make games such as Rayman Origins (made with love by 5 people) and Michael Jackson? The eighties Hit “Beat It” starts playing and I half expect a robotic MJ to moon walk out onto stage and Yves Guillemot saying “we have rebuilt him, made him stronger, faster, and added lasers.” No such luck, it’s just a bunch of dancers who seem to taunt me with the fact I can’t dance. Michael Jackson what…dance game? The only information that I got out of the Michael Jackson presentation was “we paid a lot of money for this and our stockholders want us to show you something.”
“Now..Beat It!”
The Ubisoft presentation all in all was disappointing. I was expecting more from the Tom Clancy line of games. Maybe with the other developers overloading the first person shooter market, they want to wait a year. Driver might be good, but the premise broke it for me. Battletag is a misser and innergy is a gimmick for gamers to throw at health nuts to prove that games can be healthy.
Let’s hope that the pace of E3 picks up or this year will be dissapointing.
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