Sirlin's 2006 Game Awards

Giving out truly unbiased and thoughtful awards is a lot of work and requires a lot of research. It also yields pretty predictable, boring results, so that's why my awards are totally biased and generally unfair. Also, don't you hate it when award stuff starts counting up from like the top 100 when you just want to know the #1 winner? Me too, let's start with that.

Best Game of 2006

Tie: World of Warcraft TCG and Magic: The Gathering

World of Warcraft TCG is a design masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I tried for years to design a card game with a system as good as MTG, but with streamlined design choices and reduced chance of "mana screw." I was on a very similar track to what WoW TCG turned out to be. They made good choices, have good art, good flavor, and good card layout. The concept of special multi-player-only addons like the Onyxia Raid Deck is also great. The only thing WoW TCG really lacks right now is card pool deep enough to support really interesting decks, but that will come with time.

Magic: The Gathering has probably been the best designed game around for many years. Back in 2005, players had to contend with the overpowered Affinity decks and that damned Scullclamp card, but Ravincia and this year's Timespiral are a refreshing change. I especially like the idea of a block where each of the three sets are "past, present, and future," and the idea of reprinting 121 "timeshifted" (aka, greatest hits cards from the past) was an excellent one. Thank Mark Rosewater for that, great job.

It's kind of ironic that MTG is hitting a high-point by printing a block with so many old cards. This practice is an attempt to make a "good game, rather than a new game," but the ironic part is that the "oldness" of the set is the newness. Wrap your mind around that.

It's also interesting to note that neither of this year's winning games is a video game (yes, I know about mtg online, but that's not the point). It goes to show that while card games are focusing on excellent rule design, so many video games are focusing on boring mechanics like testing your ability to aim a cross-hair on a 2d plane. What a joke. (A pretty version of the "aim the cross-hairs game," Gears of War, does not appear anywhere in these awards.)

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend that you play either of the two winning games. Both are "trading card games" which means they use the rip-off scheme of selling you cards in random packs to limit your ability to make whatever deck you want. If you want a constructed, tournament-quality deck in either game, the market value is about $300. Yes, it's possible to somehow play a specific or semi-weird deck that's cheaper, but $300 is about the cost of most tournament-level decks in both games. This is absolutely ludicrous, and you should not support this system. You should instead support my upcoming card game (not to be confused with my upcoming Street Fighter-type card game or my upcoming Pokemon-style card game for Kongregate.com). This new card game will take me a year or two to get anywhere with, but it will NOT use the same rip-off marketing scheme of TCGs and yet it will contain the fun style of mechanics that those games offer.

2nd Best Game of 2006: Resident Evil 4 (PlayStation 2)

You might be saying, "Hey, RE4 didn't even come out in 2006, so it shouldn't be able to win this award," and you'd have a good point. But consider a few things. First, RE4 did not win the Game Developer Conference's award for best game of 2005. In fact, it wasn't even NOMINATED for any award. Instead, Shadow of the Colossus swept just about everything. (Shadow of the Framerate, I call it.)

Shadow of the Colossus should have won these awards:

• Best Brave Attempt at Something that Didn't Pan Out
• Worst Framerate of the Year
• Worst Controls of a Horse, Ever

I usually give the Game Developer's Choice Awards a special significance because awards by game developers for game developers tend to be a little more thoughtful and less political than the rest, but the lack of RE4 to even be nominated last year really took credibility away from the entire affair. Tommy Tallarico's immature jokes while hosting the event didn't help either (why is he allowed to represent the game industry again?)

I remember seeing David Jaffe accept an award somewhere last year (I forget from where) for God of War winning game of the year. God of War is totally awesome and is my second favorite game last year after RE4, but even Jaffe mentioned that he probably only won because RE4 was not allowed into that award process due to a technicality. Well, it just so happens that a reverse-technicality made RE4 eligible for my awards this year, so it wins the #2 spot.

I would tell you about why this game deserves this spot, but I've gone on too long about all this other hoopla, so you'll just have to play it yourself to find out.

3rd Best Game of 2006: Metroid Pinball (Nintendo DS)

I've threatened all year to give this game my #1 game of the year award, but I guess it ended up in 3rd place. This is the most underrated game of the year. It's basically the best possible game of pinball I could even imagine. You fight bosses, you get weapon upgrades, and you play several mini-games that even let you transform into Sammus and shoot alien bugs. Best of all, your mission is to collect 12 artifact pieces as you teleport back and forth between 4 or 5 different pinball boards, plus a final-boss board. How cool is that? It even has a neat little multiplayer mode where you race get a certain score, and if you lose your ball, your points are reduced to equal your enemy's points, if you were winning (that keeps things close, usually!).

Metroid Prime pinball is, for me, the perfect pick-up-and-play DS game. I don't have to remember where I was in some huge story or map, or how this or that mechanic worked. I can just play for a few minutes, or for an hour if I want to try to get all 12 artifacts. Oh, and once you do that, you unlock a harder difficulty for the whole game. What's not to like about this?

4th Best Game of the Year: Wii Sports

My sister and my *mom* play this. Dear Nintendo: mission accomplished, you win.

5th Best Game of the Year:

This is a close one, but I'll say Cooking Mama (Nintendo DS). Lots of DS games are some form of "here's a bunch of touch screen activities" but Cooking Mama manages to give a coherent wrapper to whole deal. It's easy to get into, yet offers some challenge if you want the gold medals, and there's lots of different stuff to cook. I'm sure this is an overlooked game, but it's great.

Let's mix things up a bit.

Best Game Consoles of the Year:

1. Nintendo DS
2. Nintendo Wii
3. No console was good enough for #3.
4. Microsoft Xbox 360

The Nintendo DS has like 20 amazing games right now and easily takes the top spot for consoles this year. Remember when everyone hated the DS when it first came out? Two screens, who needs that? Touch screen is a gimmick. Yeah, everyone was wrong.

The Nintendo Wii is fun and great so far and very consistent with Nintendo's goals. Because it doesn't have that many good games yet, it doesn't quite deserve #1. Thank you Nintendo for supporting innovation over graphics and for keeping the costs of game development low so developers can take risks rather than just making more cookie-cutter games.

The Xbox 360 is solid and good. Good graphics, good processing power, and a pretty good game library at this point. The real high-point of the console is, of course, Xbox Live. This online service blows the rivals out of the water. It's so easy to play any Xbox 360 game online (and to voice chat) thanks to the fairly standard interface and online features Microsoft enforces on all online games.

Xbox Live Arcade is also an amazing, awesome thing for our industry. I totally love it and have personally bought and enjoyed several Live Arcade games. I really hope Microsoft continues to open the doors for amateur game developers to create game games for it using the XNA platform. Current game companies are certainly not where all of tomorrow's innovations will come from. I see MS's first steps toward cultivating the hobbyists and I'm very happy.

HOWEVER, you'll notice that the Xbox 360 somehow managed to lose out the #3 spot this year to, well, a blank entry. That's because the 360 was supposed to usher in the "HD era" and the damn thing doesn't have DVI or HDMI support at all. What an absolute embarrassing joke that is. Do you know WHY it doesn't have these things? It's because of DRM bullshit. Media companies are so paranoid that you will pirate their content that we're mired in this mess of next-gen video connections having DHCP to make sure you're watching a licensed signal. If content creators turn on the ICT bit, then you have to watch the signal at 1/4th the resolution through component cables or any non-DRM's interface. You can read this for more info.

The fake "good news" is that apparently Microsoft and other big companies have made deals so that the ICT bit will not be turned on by content providers for at least a few years. So you will be able to watch HD content through (crappy) component cables without getting the 1/4th resolution thing happening. But what you won't get is a DVI or HDMI cable for you Xbox 360 because Microsoft is too afraid of piracy. DRM politics yet again make a piece of technology Defective By Design.

Speaking of Microsoft and products that are Defective By Design because of DRm, check out Leo Laporte's, um, passionate rant about how the Microsoft Zune is the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a device so cripled by DRM issues that he thinks the music industry will finally lose this battle.

Hey, music and movie industries, I have a sidenote for you. In 2007, I am going to go full gear into pirating your content because your bullshit about DRM has caused so many crippling problems that I can't take you seriously anymore. If you want me to buy stuff again, it's really simple, I'll tell you exactly how. When a new movie or tv show comes out, give me the ability to buy it legally from you. When I buy it, give me unlimited download rights forever to download that show in any resolution I want, with no DRM. If you do this, I will gladly stop all pirating activities. I won't have to worry about torrents being seeded, about getting viruses, or about DRM. I will have no reason left to get content from anyone other than you. Offering a better product (the one I just described) is a better solution than gimping your own product and threatening legal action if people want the ungimped version. Figure it out.

Sony is such a DRM-obsessed dinosaur, I don't even know where to begin with them.

How about some more awards?

Worst Save System of the Year: Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

Dead Rising is great in all sorts of ways, but it's hell-bent on ruining my fun with it's hardcore save system. When you die, you get a confusing message about how if you want to keep your stats, you have to start over. Well, I wanted to keep my stats, so I clicked that one, and I had to start over THE ENTIRE GAME, from the opening movie, on. I was suckered into doing this one or two more times, until I finally decided to just press on. By pressing on, I mean that when I died, I have to "restore game" from my last save point, which might have been hours ago if I forgot to save recently. You can't save anywhere you know, you have to actually go to a save point.

Dead Rising is, on the one hand, a "sand box game" that lets you just explore and do whatever you want (there's plenty to do!) and yet it is also a weak-sauce attempt at some form of Groundhog Day game where I have to keep starting over to get the perfect run, or give up on that but have to keep restoring from save points. What is this, 1980? This excellent game is ruined by overly punishing save system. I have better things to do with my time than put up with that.

2nd Worst Save System of the Year: New Super Mario Brothers (Nintendo DS)

Wow, what were they thinking? You can't save anytime you want, even though this game is on a handheld console. You know, the pick-up-and-play console where you might want to change games often. You have to either get to the next castle or mini-castle to save, or spend some hard-earned special coins to open a mushroom house to save (I totally don't want to spend coins on that).

Here's a thought. Let me save anytime I want. When I save, you don't have to save my exact position in a level (the hardcores would complain there's no challenge). Instead, just save a list of which levels I've completed and which special coins I have, that's it. Then let me turn the DS off so my girlfriend can play Nintendogs or Animal Crossing.

The most insulting thing here is that when you beat the game, you earn THE ABILITY TO SAVE on anytime on the world-map. Wow, so they had the sane-save system the whole time and only give it to me after I beat the entire game, nice. It's not like the save system you unlock makes the game overly easy or anything. The game in general gives you tons of extra lives for no apparent reason anyway.

It is, in my opinion, the highest arrogance of a game designer to think that the precious needs of his game outrank the real-life needs of the player to turn off the game and have some reasonable way to save (most of) his progress immediately.

Two games that did an unusually good job of balancing "always let the player save" with "keep some challenge" are Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS) and Fire Emblem (GBA). In C:DoS, there are save points scattered around the map, like in many games. So you could keep playing until you reach one, then turn the game off. BUT, you can also pause the game at any time and create a "save marker." If you do, the game goes back to the title screen. The next time you load that save marker, the marker will be destroyed. The result is that anytime you want to stop playing, you can create a save marker instantly, then turn the thing off. You can resume from exactly that point. But saving right before the hard part doesn't help, because you can't go back to that save point more than one time.

Fire Emblem does something similar. You don't need to actively create a save marker though, you can just turn the game off anytime you want, it will automatically resume from exactly that point. I don't mean put it in sleep mode by the way, I mean turn it off and take it out of the console. Again, you can use the in-game system of save check-points, or you can create a save marker automatically turning the game off, but you can't return to that marked point more than once.

These games pass. They thought about accommodating the player, and they made some reasonable design decisions. Dead Rising and N:SMB should stand as examples of exactly what not to do.

Most Overplayed Fighting Games of the Last 10 Years:

Tekken Series and Street Fighter 3 Series

As for Tekken, Virtua Fighter is deeper and Soul Calibur has better, easier controls. Tekken is in a weird middleground that I don't understand. As for SF3:3rd Strike, it's overly floppy animation, total lack of focus on controlling space (parries ruin the positional games common in fighting games), and generally simplistic engine make it a bottom-of-the-barrel offering. Try one of the games below, instead:

Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:

Guilty Gear XX: Slash (Japanese PS2 Import)

Often, retrospective awards take into account how much of a breakthrough a game was at the time. My award is meant this way: If, *today* you have every fighting from the last 10 years in front of you, which should you actually play?

The Guilty Gear series has combined the best features from the genre's history into an excellent overall game. Nice art, most varied set of characters in any fighting game (far more varied than any 3d fighting game), and great, great mechanics. Yeah Ky is too good or whatever, but oh well. This is a masterpiece of fighting game design and deserves your attention if you have any interest in the genre at all.

2nd Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (playable on Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 on PS2 and Xbox)

This game is much simpler than Guilty Gear, but there's something about it that holds up. It's still played in tournaments today, including the Evolution Fighting Game Series (www.evo2k.com). You can even check out my 30 minute video tutorial on this game, in the post before this one.

You can seriously still be reading this, so I'll end now. Congratulations to all the winners and losers.

--Sirlin

Update on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 8:40PM by Sirlin

Gears of War

I meant to post this weeks ago, but after some of you told me to take a second look at Gears of War, I did. My first impression of the game as "just another pretty shooter" was not fair. As a single player game, it has a remarkble similarity to Resident Evil 4 (a good thing).

• In both games, there is no reticule by default and left/right on the analog stick is for movement.
• In both games, you hold a shift button to bring up the reticule.
• Both games are 3rd person, not first person (yay).
• In both games, you can perform context sensitive moves when close to objects, just as opening a door by pressing X.
• Both games rise above their shooter mechanics by putting the player in a long seires of carefully designed situations/mini-missions.

Gears of War also has a multiplayer game, which is "Counter-Strike without objectives." I personally like the format and found multiplayer to be pretty fun at my low level of skill, but I suck at it, so what do I really know. One thing I found strange was that the successful players seemed to hardly ever really fight at mid-range, and instead just dive around until they can shotgun you (or sometimes melee you) at close range. It seems like the designers intended more mid-range cover battles, but it either didn't turn out that way or my view is skewed or something.

I never disputed Gears of War's great presentation, so I probably should have given it "Best Production Values of 2006" at the least. Given it's presentation, solid controls, good mission design, and pretty good multiplayer, I think it probably deserved to be somewhere in the top 5 of my overall list--not as high as Resident Evil 4, but perhaps a bit above Cooking Mana DS. ;)

CliffyB: impressive job as always. Please make an update to Unreal Championship 2 where melee is just as good, but with even more lock-on abilities to reduce the importance of aiming. Thanks.

--Sirlin

New Super Mario Brothers

Unfortunately, I have to give the New Super Mario Brothers (DS) a 7.9 rating out of 10. My first impression, like pretty much everyone else, was somewhere around 9.5. The game has *great* presentation and plays as well as ever.

 Mario has a million game mechanics now. Really huge mario, really tiny mario, wall slide, wall jump, butt stomp, floating after jumping on springboards, diving from the float, ability to carry springboards, sidling on ledges, tightrope walking and jumping, one way floors, one way doors, turtle shell Mario, and so on and so on. All sounds great so far.

I have three main criticisms. First, I do not like the philosophy behind the secrets in this game. Every level has 3 large secret coins to find (sounds good), but the methods used to hide these coins are just not up to par. They are similar to the methods used in Donkey Kong Country 1, rather than the much better DKC2. NSMB has far too many cases where you really have no way of knowing if you should have done this or that thing to get to the coin, then you see you guessed wrong and now you must do the level over to get it. Even DKC2 had some of this with the forced-advancing levels, but NSMB has tons of it. I got really tired of seeing that I rode the wrong platform or whatever, and realizing I'd have to restart the level to get the secret coin I just passed. Secrets should encourage exploration, not constant restarting. DKC2 remains the best platform game at hiding secrets.

Not liking the methods used to hide secrets might not seem like a big deal, but it is in fact the central goal of the player. I take the entire goal of the game to find these secrets, so if they are about a 7.9/10 fun to find, then that's unfortunate.

Second, the emphasis on pits that kill you. Yes, the original Super Mario Brothers has lots of pits that kill you, but we're not in the 1980s anymore. Dying and doing the level over and over is a dated mechanic, and I expected NSMB above all other games to show us that. Unfortuantely it doesn't and is full of those familiar instant death pits, the concept of lives, and restarting levels. Just like God of War shows that a game is fun when dying makes you repeat as little of the level as possible, NSMB *should* have showed us that platform games are about exploring to find secrets, rather than lots of instant-death pits.

I can imagine some people disagreeing with my second point, but there is really no excuse for the third: you can't save anywhere! The only times you can save the game are when you beat a castle for the first time (end of world), beat a tower for the first time (middle of world), or pay secret coins to open a mushroom house. This is really, really bad.

For example, let's say that i just finished a level and got 1 of thd 3 secret coins because I jumped down the wrong shaft to get this coin or killed the only turtle that could be used to get the other one, or whatever. Then I play the level again and accidentally fall into a pit of instant death and die. Then I play it again and fall into some other instant death pit. Then I play it again and die again and again, because that's what happens in this game. Ok, I finally get the other two secret coins, yay! Now I repeat that entire process on the next level. Now I feel like playing some sudoku on Brain Age or my girlfriend wants to play Nintendogs. But NSMB won't let me save the game! I have to beat a tower or a caslte or spend coins on a mushroom house (which I probably wanted to save for some specific use).

One year, Shigeru Miyamoto was kind enough to appear at the Game Developers Conference and give a keynote lecture about game design. I still think about that lecture. In it, he said the #1 rule of game design is "When you press the jump button, the character should jump." He isn't kidding. In the original Tomb Raider, you don't jump when you press the jump button. Instead, you jump the next time that your running animation reaches the point in your stride where jumping would "look good." You should jump when you PRESS the jump button. He's really talking about having responsive controls in general, and doing stuff like having a basic attack come out when the button is released or something, as opposed to pressed.

Anyway, it's a great rule that reminds about responsive controls. Here's my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supercede the player's real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever. In NSMB, an example way to handle this would be to allow the player to save the game in the pause menu at any time. It wouldn't have to save your position in a level or the state of enemies in the level or anything so fancy. The only thing that really matters is if you finished the level or not, and which secret coins you found on the level.

In fact, they even have a mechanic in place already that would prevent you from getting the coins in a way the designers didn't intend. There are some coins you can get by jumping into a pit or something and getting the coin on the way down just before you die. Interesting to note that you don't actually get the coin until a couple seconds after you touch it, because it has to fall down to the coin holder on the bottom screen. So even if you got a coin, paused the game and saved right before you died in the pit, you wouldn't really have the coin. That's fine because you weren't SUPPOSED to jump into the pit to get the coin. The real puzzle was to do some certain jump or throw a turtle shell at it or whatever, and adding this save feature wouldn't diminish that.

Anyway, the game is fun and great looking and all that. Secrets should have been hidden much better, the game should have graduated from the 1980 idea of instant-death pits everywhere, and there is really no excuse at all for the save system. Believe me, I wanted to give this thing a 9.5 as much as anyone else.

--Sirlin

E3 2006 Report

Last year's E3 was probably the worst I've ever seen, so I was reduced to giving out backhanded put-down awards. This year, I only have genuine good things to say.

Best Game of the Show: Spore.
Spore is really on another level from everything else. The high concept looks like it's starting to gel into a cohesive experience. There are 6 different phases of the game, each one of increasing scale. Each phase has it's own editor. If I remember right, the 6 phases are cellular, creature, tribal, city, civilization, and space. The transitions between these modes are looking seamless and great, especially the transition of zooming out from the surface of a planet to seeing the whole planet and rotating it around, and the transition of flying around in space and landing on a planet and going to the surface view.

Spore showed off an even better looking creature editor than ever this year, and a new twist on the "sporepedia" that's basically a pokemon-style catalog of which creatures/buildings/whatever you've seen so far. You can click on any item in there (such as a creature) to see a trading card of that thing. They said you can print out the card and maybe play a trading card game based on the creatures (wow, I'd love to design that for them, hehe). Also, every item is labeled with the name of the person who made it. When you make a creature, it gets uploaded to Maxis's master database and other players can see that same creature (or building or whatever) in their world. You can also see how other creations by a creator you like, and you can see how many other players have seen or used your creations.

Spore is an amazing thing both technically and conceptually. It's a game that can only exist when the following 3 things collide: 1) the extremely unusual intelligence of a game designer who looks mostly outside the game industry for inspiration (go Will Wright!), 2) a team of great, solid people to support him and and believe in him because of past success (Sim City, The Sims), and 3) the infinite resources of EA, both in terms of money and in the power to contact any expert in any field that Will needs to talk to. A Magnum Opus game like Spore might a one-time event in our lifetimes.

Best Action Games: God of War 2 and Heavenly Sword.
Two wins for Sony, here. God of War 2 has great graphics for a PS2 game, and the same deep understanding of visceral gameplay and well-timed combat as ever. If it weren't for Spore, this might be this year's Game of the Year.

Heavenly Sword has amazing graphics. It's one of the best looking games at the show for sure. It also seems to have a handle on good combat, partly because it's a blatant copy of God of War (it should be called Goddess of War) and partly because the game's combat designer admitted that his he has a good background in playing Virtua Fighter and an even better grounding in Street Fighter. Considering God of Wars combat designers are also veterain Street Fighter players, it seems foolish for any game company to invest millions of dollars in a melee combat game without hiring expert Street Fighter players to guide it. Yes, I'm serious.

Best Peripheral Game: Eye of Judgment
Yeah Guitar Heroes 2 is nice. No one cares about PSP peripherals. But Sony did get on my radar again with this "enhanced reality" card game. Contrary to popular belief, it does NOT use the EyeToy. It will use a proprietary camera that will ship with the game, and that camera doesn't even have an actual product name yet.

In Eye of Judgment, the camera points downward at a game board with 9 squares. The squares start unowned by any player, and the first player to own 5 of the 9 squares wins the game. You place physical cards on the board (kinda like Pokemon cards). They represent monsters that will fight for you. The novelty is that when you look at the TV screen, you you can see that the cards are summoning 3D monsters that sit on top of the cards. The 3D monsters fight each other, adding a lot of flashiness to the card game genre.

The technology was a bit buggy, but that's understandable for an early prototype. Also, all those flashy monsters interactions took waaaaaay too long. The game itself looks like it's shaping up not to be fun. I would love to design a game for that system if I were in any position to do so, but I'm not. "Enhanced Reality" games like this could be a big new category someday, though.

Best Presenter: The Girl Who Gave The Spore Demo I Saw
I don't know who she was, but she was one of the best presenters of anything I've seen in a long time. She was a blonde woman with a ponytail and a chisled, pretty face. She had a thorough understanding of what she was presenting, was clear and articulate, and had to roll with the punches in a very unpredictable demo that involves interacting with AI that has emergent behavior. She was able to deliver a whole lot of information in a very short time without it seeming rushed. Whoever she is, I hope her boss sees this.

Best Proof of Concept for Why the Nintendo Wii Will Reach a New Market: Nintendo Sorts: Tennis
The tennis game used no buttons. You flick the controller up to toss the ball up so you can serve. You swing the controller to hit the ball. That's it. If you swing in a wimpy way, you'll get a very weak stroke. You have to really put some effort into it and move around. Everyone I saw play this game understood it immediately and had fun.

Interlude about the Wii
Note that I played the following Wii games: Tennis, Wario Ware, Pointing Demo: Shooting (aka Duck Hunt), Dragon Ball Z, Metroid Prime, Zelda.

Wario Ware is great (as is every version of that game) and I'd definitely buy it. The duck hunt demo illustrated using the device as a precise pointer. Pointing and shooting large baloons is easy, and aiming at tiny targets is pretty hard, for human reasons more than software reasons. Dragon Ball Z seemed overly designed with confusing controls, just like always. Metroid Prime illustrates that a solid first person shooter is possible. After having actually played it, I can say that it has a pretty good interface that could perhaps rival mouse and keyboard. I was personally clumsy at it though, and people who aren't "core gamers" are going to have just as difficult a time coordinating one thumbstick and one freehand controller as they would with a dual analog. Metroid is very good, but it's a gamers game. Moving the Zelda character through the world is just as easy as any other game that uses a fixed camera angles and a single analog stick (aka: easy). The various free-hand actions and weapons/combat were all implemented well. It will of course sell 10 zillion units.

Most Crowded Booth of Anything Ever at Any E3: Nintendo
I have never seen anything like the mob scene at Nintendo. Lines for DS games like the New Super Mario Brothers and Starfox were pretty damn long. The line to get INTO the area with the Wii was absurd, with something like a 2 hour wait. On thursday, Nintendo closed the line at about 1:30pm becaus they already reached capacity. I was there on Friday, and inside the Wii area (after the crazy line), every station had massive lines. Nearly an hour wait each for Metroid and Zelda, and at least 10 minutes for most other games, probably more. The sheer number of people in and around Nintendo's booth and in the many and various lines was just staggering. It was pretty clear who owned the show.

Also of note: the total number of PSPs I saw in use by actual real people (not paid workers) was ONE. That's right, in 3 days of being on the show floor almost all day, I saw one. One of my friends saw 3 PSPs in that time and another saw zero. Meanwhile, the number of Nintendo DS's was too large to even count, certainly in excess of 100. Every line at E3 seemed to feature multiple people with DS's. Some joined in impromptu games of Mario Kart, several were playing Brain Age, a few were playing Tetris, and some used the Picto-chat to communicate with each other on the very noisy show floor where cell phone reception is spotty at best. I guess a 100:1 ratio of DS's to PSPs is a pretty interesting indicator of the state of the industry.

Oh, that reminds me:
Award for the Games I Will Actually Spend the Most Time Playing: Brain Age 2 DS and Clubhouse Games DS.
These are two unassuming little titles. The new Brain Age is even better than the last, and I'm sure I'll mess around with it quite a bit. Clubhouse games has 38(!!) games on one cart, that I counted at least. Half are card games such as poker, hearts, and rummy. The others are various board games such as chess and backgammon, and there's also random stuff like darts and bowling on there too. I'd probably buy it for chess alone, so I consider the other 37 games to be a bonus. There's a difference between flashy games that look good at E3 and the games I'll actually spend time playing. I'm sure I'll end up pouring hours into both of these games.

MMOs: There were a lot of MMOs. They all seem to involve aiming a reticule, which means I have zero interest in them. Guild Wars builds on it's very strong base of good ideas with even more new good ideas, more classes, more pve missions and story, and more pvp game modes. It reamains in my mind a "theoretically wonderful game." It has the exact same interface problems as it had ever since the alpha test: interface. It's still too interested in making me click-to-move even when I supposedly turn that off. It's still too awkward to pivot the camera without affecting my character's movement. When you click on an NPC or PC, you still get that totally ugly rectangle with only a name in it, instead of something reasonable like a nice border and a portrait. Guild Wars **NEEDS** to drop whatever it's doing and give me UI that functions like World of Warcraft. That is it's number 1 problem, and I wish that would be solved and announced so I can get on with actually buying it and playing it.

And finally: Game that Will Make the Most Money: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
Although it has a great art style (much better art direction than Guild Wars), World of Warcraft looks technically dated compared to every other MMO at E3. The expansion will have two new races (who cares?), level cap increased from 60 - 70, flying mounts (at 70), jewelcrafting and socketed items. It also will probably have tons of new raid content and more half-hearted attempts at small group and solo content that will ultimately keep the game focused on it's current elitist group-only time-ocracy mentality. I *want* to be this game's biggest spokesperson, if it would only stop mimicing EQ, embrace the concept of inclusiveness for all (skilled players and time-sinkers alike, solo and small group players and raids alike), and stop treating the player base overly aggressive Terms of Service.

Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone that it doesn't matter that World of Warcrft is looking graphically worse than its competitors. It doesnt' matter that it can't show much of anything flashy gameplay-wise at E3. It's well crafted, it's addictive, and it's has fun locked up in it, and it will sell. The power of Warcraft will go toe-to-toe with Halo 3 and GTA. Blizzard please come back to us and stick with the original promises the game made during beta.

Final Summary:

• Nintendo owned the show.
• Sony had a few very strong titles, but the PSP is looking shaky. The $600 price tag is mostly irrelevant anyway because they'll only have 2 million units available (if that) by the holidays, so only that hardest hardcores will get one then, and after that the price will drop.
• Microsoft didn't have much of anything inspiring to show, but Gears of Wars looks great of course. Halo 3 and GTA will make tons of money, and Xbox Live is still the best online experience in town. Also, Xbox 360 will probably reach 8 or 10 million units before PS3 even *launches* so Microsoft is doing just fine...but we didn't need to go to E3 to figure that out.

Long report, but I hope you find it useful.

--Sirlin

Various Games I Should Comment On

In no particular order...

I played Oblivion for about two hours and found nothing fun about it. I ran around a mostly empty field, chased a deer, found a random dungeon and killed everything in it for zero useable treasure. Finally I went to town and there seemed like a lot to do there, but at the 2 hour mark, I should have had a lot more fun already. The interface is not nearly as good as the World of Warcraft interface I used (mostly Discord Action Bars, but various other mods thrown in), and of course it couldn't possibly be as good. One game has a single, game designer-created UI while the other has an open system that lets anyone create almost anything.

All Oblivion did was make me want to play Warcraft again, since a few of my friends are on Ysera, the newest PvE server. They're looking to do at least 5-man content and to dominate the battlegrounds at 60. Anyone want to join? (horde)

Resident Evil 4 was the best game of last year. God of War was second best. Both were amazingly polished and well crafted. God of War had a good story, RE4 had good everything else.

Brain Age (DS) is awesome. I've had it for a month now because Nintendo's President Iwata gave it out to game developers at GDC. It's exactly what he was talking about last year when he said "games are only one planet of the software entertainment solar system." The entire game you just use the stylus (and occasionally the mic), with no buttons needed. It's not a "game" but it's entertaining and easy to get into.
Bleach (import DS) is incredibly good. It's a fighting game that's almost as good as Guilty Gear(!) and it's on the Nintendo DS! I'm totally blown away that such a good fighting game could be on the DS, but leave it to Treasure to pull that off.

Guilty Gear XX Slash (import PS2). This is the best designed fighting game, period, in my opinion. The GG series has always had soooo much variety in its characters that you can't even believe it. One character has inifine guard reversals, another can control two characters at once, another is the best version of Zangief ever, and so on. The two new characters in Slash are each weird and crazy each have 3 different modes: weak, good, too good. Each has totally different mechanics for going between those modes, and totally different trade-offs. No other game could have *that* much variety and still be a tournament-quality game. Arc Systems, you guys are on another level from everyone else.

Lost in Blue (DS). Seriously, screw that game. It is beatiful and peaceful looking. It has an interesting premise of being stuck on an island and trying to survive/escape. It has interesting use of the DS with digging up burried thing using the stylus to blowing on sparks with the mic to make a fire. It's as if someone wrote a game design for a calming, relaxing game, then gave that document to Itagaki at Tecmo to actually make the game. He must have said "I want the player to die over and over and over. Then die more. Die." Also, the screwy save system makes it so you are afraid to save because at any moment, you might be in an unwinnable situation already. I hope you like redoing the same parts of the game over and over. Being on a beatiful beach and having your character say "ugh...I'm dyyying" is eerie in a very bad way.

Guitar Hero is great and my girlfriend loves it.

Burnout on 360 is an A game trapped in a C wrapper, just like the previous Burnout. Also, it's way to similar to the previous Burnout (same tracks and most of the same features). But at least it's a racing game for people like me who don't even like driving. You can totally smash into everything and knock enemy cars off the road in order to get super-meter. Yay. Why can't I just pick a course, pick a mode, pick a car and go? Burnout 3 had this, and the last two have omitted this obvious, basic feature. Why does it autosave (and force me to wait and kick me out of the track selection menu) when I get a measly bronze medal on a new track? It wastes my time when I just want to restart the track to get a gold. There's a lot that's unpolished about the features, but underneath all that, I find it to be an excellent game.

Dead or Alive 4 (Xbox 360). This game is a lot better than people give it credit for. It's a reasonable fighting game with some interesting guessing games. Most of the time when you are in a combo, you have the ability to attemt to reverse out (meaning grab an incoming arm or leg). First there were Combo-Breakers in Killer Instinct (bad). Then there was the fixed version called Burst in Guilty Gear (great, you can only do it about once per round). DOA4 has an interesting new take in that you can "combo-breaker" during many, many combos, but if you guess wrong, you just let the enemy reset the combo and own you even more. Also, it has hands-down the best online play experiene of any fighting game. (And Gen Fu rocks.) I don't think it's nearly as good of a tournament game as GGXX, but it's still pretty good, and at least I can play anytime I want (online, there are plenty of opponents). Fighting game players should really buy this game to tell developers that good online play is vitally important.

Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition (PS2). DMC3 was another A game in a C wrapper. The Special Edition really addressed the issues of the last game by toning down the difficulty and implementing a non-retarded save system. You can play as Virgil as well as Dante now, too. If you like action games, it's worth playing.

Capcom Classics Collection Remix (PSP) just came out, by yours truly. It has good presentation and extras in the form of tips, art, music, and game histories. It also has the most configurable buttons ever: you can even turn the PSP sideways (for vertical-oriented games), set your buttons however you like, and even assign functions to various directions on the analog stick. Gamespot rightly called us out as the best networking on a PSP game collection, and best networking on a PSP game, period. Just like in an arcade, anyone can join in (from their PSP, ad-hoc) at anytime, and you don't have to reset your game or go to a staging room with them, or any of that bs that the other game collectiosn make you do. Oh, and this time around, all these games are perfect arcade emulations.

That's over 10 or 12 games I've mentioned. I'm tired even writing about them, much less playing them all!

--Sirlin