Examiners at E3 2009, Day Three

June 5, 11:30 PMSF Gadgets ExaminerAdam Mills

From the intense crowds, to the camera crews, to the swollen and bloody feet, day three at E3 was an exciting finish to an action packed three days that never took their foot off the gas.

Lets preface this with the notion that if you haven’t attended the event before, get the but’s, if’s and no’s out of your vocabulary and make plans to make it to LA in June of next year.

If you love electronics and a fantastic atmosphere, E3 is really in its own league. The successes of this year may mean that they open it up even further for the public come 2010 and if they do, get yourself to the LA Convention Center and join the festivities.

You won’t regret it.

(I will be nagging you again when I release my complete summary of the show and a best of show article over the next few days.)

Thursday started off like the first day, with a meeting. This one however, was one that we had been looking forward to since the moment we scheduled it. It is a great company and they have put out some of the more expansive and beautiful games in recent memory. That company?

Bethesda Softworks.

Their booth was completely enclosed so you could only view the games they had with an appointment. We went upstairs and were led into a room with seats that were fit for first class on a luxury airliner. Remember, Bethesda has come out with the Elder Scrolls franchise and Fallout 3, both of which were as awesome as they were successful so their extravagance was not surprising.

As fans of their studio, we could not wait to see what was in store for us. A designer from UK based Splash Damage Studios, best known for their work on Enemy Territories and now working in partnership with Bethesda, turned on the dual TV set up and introduced their new game:

Brink.

Here are a few random thoughts about the game. Remember, full summaries of the games we demoed and saw at the convention will be featured in a wrap-up article.

The game takes place in 2035 on a floating city called the Ark which has apparently lost touch with the rest of humanity. The two missions that were featured involved one at the Ark airport and another in Container City, the dockyard of Ark City.

Brink features two factions to play as, the resistance and the security forces, each with their own different objectives. This will come into play with the heavily narrative driven storyline that will play out over the course of the game.

It featured something called S.M.A.R.T. or Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain, which enables the player slide, jump and transverse nearly every obstacle in the players view. Nothing is off limits, and when it is employed in battle, it really looked spectacular.

Create a character, like normal, but this time you can advance him through the story (gaining xp through missions based on the character type you choose) in an offline state, cooperative play with up to seven friends or in 8 on 8 battles between the resistance and the security forces.

Both the game play and the experience ladder is class based meaning that you earn experience for completing different objectives based on the class you selected. Some of the one’s we saw included an operative who can go behind enemy lines, an engineer who could deploy turrets and your general tear em-up soldier who is completing objectives on the front line. The experience is also based on the level of difficulty or how important the objective you may be completing is to the overall mission.

You can change character types during the levels.

The menus looked smooth with arrows pointing the character in the direction of key things. The graphics were startlingly impressive but the best part seemed to be the sound. You would have had to have been there to hear it, but you felt like you were there. Every bullet whizzing by, grenades dampening your hearing, sound coming from both the enemy and the environment.

It was truly a treat and will even impress audiophiles.

We can’t begin to tell you how impressed we were by this demonstration, so much so that I basically covered everything we saw here, instead of in the summary, but hey, hearing about it again is good for the soul.

Next we had a meeting with EIDOS, you know, the guys who did Hitman, Tomb Raider, published Deux Ex and Hitman. We had no idea what to expect, but boy, isn’t E3 just full of surprises?

In 2010, EIDOS plans to release the sequel to Just Cause, the Best Adventure Game at E3 in 2006. The title is fittingly:

Just Cause 2.

The game was set on the fictional Panau Island in Southeast Asia and the map looked absolutely gigantic as we were shown merely a tiny speck of it and even then, that area was impressively huge.

The game center’s around the main character’s use of a parachute and a grappling hook to move around. It might sound kind of dull, but to put it bluntly, it was spectacular. From dragging people with the hook off guard towers to parachuting and grappling from car to car taking out enemies to parachuting out of a helicopter, grappling to the enemy helicopter, flipping up and taking control of it, the system was impressive.

It runs off the Avalanche 2.0 graphics which really brought the island to life with different weather effects, vertical game play and no artificial barriers in the terrain. Mountains and terrain in the background looked majestic, detailed and expansive adding to the on-screen experience.

There are tons of guns, over 100 different vehicles and even better, tons of missions to accompany a non-linear storyline that gives you control over what you do and when you want to do it. Basically the game is about causing as much chaos as possible and you are rewarded based upon how much destruction you cause during your mission.

If you were a fan of the first Just Cause, this will not disappoint. It looks to be a thrilling game that really has a chance to make a big splash in 2010.

With that, let’s end this with a few tidbits from the last day of E3:

Still was unable to play Tekken 6. Ulcer is forming.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii looked fantastic and it was 4-player, more on that in the show summary.

The line to test God of War 3 stretched all the way from the Convention Center to the Staples Center.

A shake of the Stalin fist at Activision for not putting out a Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare 2 demo for everyone to try.

Some people may not appreciate it, but Triumph Studios looks to have a great sequel for the underrated Overlord on their hands. Overlord II was a fun play.

The booth babe posing as the main character of SEGA’s Bayoneta deserves to be commended because that costume looked like it might have taken over 24 hours to put on.

Lastly, note to self: Do not pack all dress shoes next time. Unless feeling like Stryker at the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is desired.

For more info: Contact Adam: admillios@gmail.com