My Takeaway from the E3 Press Events

So I just finished watching the Nintendo E3 press conference and, now having seen all the big press events, find myself a little unimpressed.  Despite the big announcements, only a few things caught my attention.  I’m just not a Gears of War/Assassin’s Creed-type of gamer, so there wasn’t a lot for me, but a few things caught my eye…

Love, love, love that Nintendo began with Zelda and even went so far as to mention a game for the DSi (the only one of the whole Nintendo press conference). Though certainly not a surprise, leading with a Zelda retrospective, focusing on the upcoming games and even featuring the music from the series may end up being my favorite moment of E3.

Looking back on yesterday, Microsoft is at E3 to talk about Kinect and they certainly have a lot to talk about. As a game controller, the Kinect does little for me, but the “Minority Report” controls are cool, and, hey, they finally found something to do with Bing! The games press are being a little hard on Microsoft’s event, which I thought was pretty good, and I was happy to see game-play from the Tomb Raider origin story.

Definitely respected EA’s straight-forward “here are our games, nothing more” presentation and wished Ubisoft would have followed suit. But Ubisoft did offer an unexpected, and for me the most exciting of the day, announcement — FarCry3 (I agree it’s “the surprise game of the show” according to Ubisoft). Loved FarCry2, and I’m blown away to see another! Looks good, too.

Though Sony’s press conference was a little too Move heavy, the mea culpa at the beginning was admirable. The new PSVita (no comment on the name, but then again WiiU?) looks very attractive at $249, and will be even more attractive if Sony provides a way to get some of the best PSP titles on it at launch. (Monster Hunter Vita, please?)

However, the WiiU, despite the academic sounding name, is the most exciting hardware news of the show, and will, very likely, be my primary console in 2013, especially if publishers like EA are on board day one. It’s not even the gameplay elements that excite me. The WiiU controller offers a new way to interact with an entire platform, and if Nintendo follows through on the backwards compatibility promised in their press conference, it could really be a game changer… a practical peripheral, for a change.

Oh, and Layton 4 is definitely coming to America this fall, but still no word on London Life. C’mon, Nintendo, remember your DS base here!

Glitch, My New Second Home

Late Sunday afternoon the voice of God rained down upon my head and the world around me ended. Sunday, not Saturday. This is not a rapture thing. I’m not talking about the God, just a God. And the world that ended is called Glitch. I’ve never been much for online multiplayer and haven’t spent any real time with an MMO, but I remember spotting Glitch about a year ago and being immediately taken by its unique, children’s book art-style. But along with its innocent look came a promise from the developers to create a world for grown-ups. Curious I signed up for a beta key and promptly forgot about it. Twelve months later, beta invite in hand, I’m harvesting cherries to blend fruit juices in hopes to make enough “currants” to buy a house. Or at least I was until God shut down last week’s test. Such is the disappointment of a closed beta.

Glitch is the latest project from Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, two of the visionaries that brought us Flickr. There’s no hacking and slashing, no violence (except chicken-sqeezing) and the quests focus on learning about and interacting with the world and other players. It’s also a serious contender for your time, with development progressing smoothly, recently into a closed beta, along with a new $10 million in funding. To understand Glitch a little better, here’s how they describe it on their website…

“Glitch” is both the name of the game and its fundamental concept: the yin and the yang, the fundamental force, the alpha and omega, the path, the way, and most of all: the happy accidents of unfettered creativity. In Glitch, things don’t always make sense at first. But that’s where the fun starts. Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world. For starters, it’s all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone’s actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different. We comb the internet every single day looking for fresh and original visual styles. The look varies as you travel around the world, from psychedelia to surrealism, Japanese cutesie to hypersaturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media. We love awesome illustration and animation and part of our mission is to find the best of the best and bring it to a wider audience.

This morning Glitch is back online and though the framerate is low and the world stutters a bit (did I mention it’s newly in beta?), the chickens, pigs and butterflies swarm in vast numbers and I’m running around handing out fruit juices to new players and traveling south to get “My Papers” from the Bureaucratic Hall (see image above, note the beauracrat playing Farmville) just so I can ride the subway and hopefully buy the house of my dreams before it goes back offline tomorrow. If this sounds nonsensical, well, you’re not far off.

Unlike other MMO’s, Glitch aims to firmly set its sights on the social aspect of multiplayer games, creating a world to be cooperatively managed by both developers and players. Although the rural feel, product-management and colorful landscapes are reminescent of Farmville and and it’s ilk, Glitch is far deeper, demanding imagination, cooperative world-building and a desire to interact with those around you. Also, you get to milk butterflies. Seriously, that has to be harder than fighting a dragon (perhaps more dangerous, too).

Pausing a second from scraping barnacles (which is ground into Barnacle Talc, a useful component of construction), I check if a newcomer is of the right level to give a fruit juice to. Offering items to low level players is just one of the quests to keep the game social, but I haven’t been having much luck. Everyone playing this morning seems to be veterans of the alpha, or at least recent converts like myself, happily returning after the abrupt ending Sunday afternoon. But I have had a few really nice conversations with other players, which bodes well for a world meant to be built cooperatively.

I’ll definitely be sharing more from Glitch, and even though I’ve only played it a few hours, the most telling aspect of my experience so far has to be that I already feel at home in this world. If any of this sounds good to you, request an invite here.

(Written for GoodGameGet!)