Wednesday, July 11, 2007

They said it would never happen

Another E3, that is. But the shining cubic zirconium lurking in the crown of the gaming calendar is upon us once again, and that means more gaming news than even my brain, custom-made for the task as it is, can handle. I shall be brave though, and press on through.

One of the novelties of the age we live is that we get content straight from the show, as soon as it's out there. The internet is filling up with trailers that I can't watch due to the ineptitude of my aging laptop, but much of it falls off Xbox Live and onto my television. Something that did this today was the new Halo 3 trailer. I played the public beta of the multiplayer, and was in no way particularly impressed. It was more of the same, and I'd played a lot of Halo 2. I'm not much one for more of the same. The single-player campaign that was shown off today did stir me a little, and I have to say, without anything really standing out, I am definitely looking forward to it. Going to a midnight launch looking forward to it? We shall see. Haven't been to one of those in over a year now, so it may be worth doing just to reaffirm my alpha geek status.

A couple of demos appeared as well. Ace Combat 6, as you might guess from the facts:

  • That it's called Ace Combat

  • That it's the sixth in the series

is a staggeringly bad game. It's afterburner, but takes place on top of a crudely pixelated Google map.

Thankfully, there's also Blue Dragon. It looks lovely, with some great character design by Akira 'I inflicted Dragonball Z upon the world' Toriyama, and surprisingly decent English voice acting. It's far too complex to really appreciate from the demo, but what I've seen so far appeals to me, much more so than most Japanese RPGs. I'd been looking forward to it, as it's appearance on the release lists was really the first major sign that the 360 wouldn't suffer the drought of decent Japanese software that the original Xbox did. Seems my patience has been rewarded.

2 more days of overly-keen analysis to go, folks...

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