BOOZE AND SHOES

Excuse the week vacation. I’ve just been going through this writing malaise that will probably be apparent in this post, but whatever.

All week I’ve been keeping up with the E3 happenings. For the uninitiated, E3 is a conference where  videogame developers announce their plans & products for the upcoming year or two. I think Microsoft has had the strongest conference, just because of the amount of quality titles and features they’ve announced. Nintendo’s pretty much sucked until they announced Mario Galaxy 2 and dropped the epicbomb that a Team Ninja collabo on a new Metroid series is on the way. I didn’t care for Sony’s conference all that much, although the God of War 3 demo looked a-mazing.

The announcements that Sony and Microsoft would be making these motion controlled peripherals however to me is a desperate attempt to replicate Nintendo’s success in grabbing the casual market. Do people really want to sit in front of their TV’s, stick their hands out, and pantomime driving a vehicle? Would you really be down for standing for periods at a time while playing videogames? To me, the optimal gaming experience is sitting on my can and playing videogames the way I have been for the past 20 years. Although I’ve had some fun with Wii’s motion controller, I’d much rather play a game that didn’t require me to flail my arms at the TV. I actually think that it’s an art in itself for a game developer to make a player feel like they’re jumping or sniping someone through the controller medium. I point to examples like shooting a pistol in Halflife, or clearing impossible l0oking gaps in the original Super Mario Bros. These two just feel perfect in how they’re executed – completely natural and for me, performing these things feel like how it would be if performed in real life. Turning arbitrary button commands into an emotional response is something I can only get from videogames, and it’s something I’ve appreciated during my time as a gamer.

I’ll go back to the Tony Hawk topic here. For Activision to put out a skatedeck peripheral in my opinion is completely mental on their part. The first 3 Tony Hawk titles were great until they started cranking out 7 games a year and deviated from what made the game so damn addicitve. I really can’t see anybody spending an hour standing on this board and really feeling like they’re hitting kickflips or clearing gaps. It’s futile to believe that this device could replicate such activities. Whereas in Rock Band’s case, I’m actually hitting on drums or strumming on a guitar.  From what it looks like with the TH title, you’re just standing there and leaning or spinning the board (and please believe you’re going to hear cases of people eating shit for trying to perform some of these moves).

I know currently, people are eating this stuff up and are fine with housing all kinds of unsettling looking plastic around the house. It’s just that I’ve been pleased with one controller this whole time.