Yay here we go with more Shinohan updates. E3 started today and it kicked off with Microsofts Media Brief followed by Square Enix’s Press conference. The two most important pieces are up on Shinohan, and if you’re too laze to go over to Shinohan fear no more links are going to be supplied at the end of this post.

What did Microsoft show us today then? Obviously everything was based around the Xbox 360.

We had a quick preview of a live demo for Fallout 3 which started with a slightly funny as well as disturbing intro which resembled a hybrid of the 50s and very far in the future. Once the demo started you find yourself in a post apocalyptic Washington DC in the year 2277. From here on onwards it’s just your everyday FPS with weapons unique to the game, which is really all there is to the game from what has been shown.

Next down the line was Fable 2. Now a lot of people weren’t too happy with Fable in terms of what has been promised and what actually was delivered. This time around it shapes up to be pretty damn cool again, you create your own character, depending on your action you grow up to look like this and that, you can get married, have children and even watch them grow up. Your world evolves as you play and even that is based on your actions, now this makes the game unique to each and every individual playing the game which brings us to the next cool feature, instant invitation! You can invite a friend from buddy list straight into the game, no lobbies no delays. As his world will look different it’s a new game every time… or so Molyneux promises, I guess we will see.

Gears of War 2 shows what you expect really, a live crumbling world right in front of you, loads of aliens to blast into oblivion a very smooth covering system that even makes GTAIV look stiff and of course the Chainsaw gun thing. The chainsaw actually saws through enemies pretty smoothly from what I saw. The release date for Gears of War will be November the 7th 2008 so that’s that.

After that they kept on going on about thew new OS upgrade for the 360 with Avatars and what not, all kinda generic stuff which you expect to just happen rather than making a big fuss about it but well. Microsoft then went on trying to get a slice of the cake which solely belongs to Nintendo at the moment - which is of course trying to grab the casual gamer, and what easier way than with music games, oh and they also tried to re-invent eyetoy, marketing it as they’re the first one who ever tried.

President of Square Enix Yoichi Wada then came to the stage confirming the three titles for Xbox 360 which are The Last Remnant, Star Ocean 4 & Infinite Undiscovery which really isn’t ‘news’ per se… but wait he’s coming back to the stage? ‘There’s is one more thing’ he goes like Steve Jobs would do it and casually announces Final Fantasy XIII for the XBOX 360… and no this is neither a joke nor a typo. The only question I have is how they will do that, will the game come out on 20 DVD’s, or just be delivered with a harddrive as a standard?

Oh Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 was of course also part of the mix which showcased the Online co-op mode.

Final Fantasy XIII for Xbox 360

Resident Evil 5 Live gamplay - Online Co-Op mode

I downloaded the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database off of the Japanese Playstation Network (PSN) which was prominently displayed on the first screen. After the installation you’re being run through a quick guide on how to use it properly and what not. Then you dive straight into it, now if you expect something fancy you’re barking up the wrong tree. This IS a database spanning over all Metal Gear installments, including an encyclopedia for all terms used throughout the series. Once you start reading you will be caught up in it, and click on all the links, just as you would when you are gathering up information on Wikipedia really. I can’t unlocl all features of it though as it can’t find a save clear file for MGS4 on my system, I do have one but I think the problem causing this will be the fact that I have a Japanese PS3, a Japanese MGS4 Database but a European Metal Gear Solid 4 game. Thus I am locked out on all the explanations regarding events and terms appearing in Metal Gear Solid 4. Genereally I think this is a bit stupid, as it’s in English so shouldn’t it be able to detect all files from every region? Anyway, I’ll give it another go once the EU port is available.

On an unrelated sidenote, I just preordered Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 for my DS! Yeah that’s it, though I might throw it in here.

Hells yeah I am writing again, that means I kept a promise that I made within a blog for the first time in my life! I think that is quite the revolution now… don’t worry I don’t expect you to agree with me on that one.

So why am I writing? As someone who has been playing Resident Evil since day one of it’s official north american release I have always been very excited with new Resident Evil installments. I wasn’t too fond when they went all Capcom on Resident Evil though, what I mean with that is the fact how Capcom slaughters it’s franchises out and rapes every single sellable item within it. Of course Capcom is not the only one that is doing this, in recent years especially Square Enix followed this trend. Squaresoft is a big name over here in Europe and in the US but when you ask people what they know of Square Enix most people outside of Japan will most likely only be able to respond with Final Fantasy! Square made the decision to whore Final Fantasy out as far as they can go, that’s not a bold statement of mine but solid facts, all you have to do look at what they did with Final Fantasy VII. But back to Capcom - now Capcom is very well known for it’s Street Fighter and Rockman series (that’s Mega Man for us here in the west). I love Rockman and always have. When Nintendo came up with the SNES, Rockman X was released on that platform and it looked just outright amazing. At the time I didn’t make much of the X and just assumed it’s the continuation of the NES and Gameboy games but as I said, little did I know. Although Rockman X - X6 are my favorite Rockman games of all time it boggled my mind when games such as Rockman 64, Rockman legends, Rockman Zero and even an RPG called Rockman X: Command Mission surfaced. Apart from the Rockman Zero series all the other random titles (which even include kart and soccer games) are below quality standards. Street Fighter on the other hand also has seen god knows how many different games. If you’re not someone who plays one on one fighters let me give you a quick low down:

Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Turbo, Super Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II Turbo - and these are just the ones that are most known as the first three were all ported from the arcade to the SNES. Now there is a lot more to just Street Fighter II. Three Street Fighter III games, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter III Double Impact, Street Fighter III 3rd Strike, and I don’t even wanna think about what they’re going to do with Street Fighter 4.

As we have established now how Capcom whores out its very own franchises, a series such as Resident Evil wouldn’t stay without harm. To my knowledge it started out with Resident Evil dead aim which is sort of in First Person mode but somehow not and it’s horrible. The stories found in these games are dull and do only very little to the main plot, in fact if you skip those games you’re better off as it’s really just plain boring with no value whatsoever. If you look at the progression of the ‘real’ Resident Evil titles they all have received a very well reception with the consumers, with the exception of Resident Evil 3 which was a bit bland but still very far away from games such as the dead aim series. Resident Evil Code Veronica which was originally just a Dreamcast game which was later on ported to the PS2 and the Gamecube was a step in the right direction, all the pre rendered backgrounds have been replaced by by real time rendered graphics the switch from the 32-bit consoles to the 128-bit ones just looked stunning. Now Resident Evil 4 was announced and as a big shock it was a Nintendo Exclusive, nobody really expected that.

The first trailers shown had Leon S. Kennedy (one of the two protagonists of Resident Evil 2) running around some sort of ghost-house with… well… ghosts around. The game seemed really slow paced and although looking very good, the feeling to play it yourself wasn’t really there. From what it looked like it gave away the feeling that you might end up struggling with the controls due to responsiveness.

Some time passed and the next trailers were nothing what the first one held for us. All of a sudden we had an action packed game that had hordes of, possible sane, villagers running at you attacking you with whatever you had in your hand. Now what was the change? The change was that Resident Evil no longer had nothing to do with Resident Evil apart from it’s title and characters. Resident Evil is… was a game that was meant to scare you and use the momentum of suspense to visually attack your brains so you dropped your pad. Resident Evil 4 didn’t do that anymore, but Resident Evil 4 was one hell of a game in fact to this very day it’s one of the best games you can get. Bit it comes with a bitter aftertaste. Resident Evil was now layered into missions, re-spawning enemies that dropped items, which led to ammunition farming and a lot of other things which are cool updates and yet went far away from what Resident Evil stood for.

From what you can get out of the Resident Evil 5 trailer so far is that it’s basically Resident Evil 4 in HD, of course nobody’s played it so god knows what it’s actually like but that’s what the trailer looks like for now. It’s nice to be able to control Chris again, which we haven’t seen since Code Veronica and I am praying that Resident Evil 5 goes the path of Resident Evil 1 and 2 with 2 stories one for Chris and one for the new Character which has been introduced in its newest trailer. The biggest problem I am looking at is playing the game with a pad a gain. Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition’s controls were just fucking out there, pin point aiming with absolutely no sacrifices in controls what so ever, even the gesture knife slashing was a brilliant addition. Now on the PS3 (or 360 *shrugs*) this will be quite tedious again, using an analog stick to aim and what not. Either way I am very much looking forward to this game and I am sure so are a lot more people.

That’s it for today, just been waffling really but hell, it’s nice to have some sort of medium where you can just ramble on!

Sascha