E3 Thoughts: Sony, Nintendo

Sony

The Indian opening was reminiscent of the God of War orchestra from last year, and I immediately guessed right with the correct game; Uncharted Lost Legacy will be some kind of spin-off title featuring a former partner and rival of Drake teaming up in India, looking good! That is, the ladies and the game.

The Frozen Wildlands is your frozen DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn, a highly successful new IP that will surely be an irresistible with it's content, but as many AAA games get DLC nowadays, I will patiently await for the right moment to dive back into this.

Unfortunately there were audio isues during the trailers of these adventures, but around Days Gone's lengthy gameplay trailer, it was gone. That game is trying to look smart and manipulative with the hordes of zombies, so I wonder how that will turn out.

Monster Hunter World from Capcom is a slap in the face for Nintendo's position on this third party franchise, and it looks like it will perform easily and just fine on the PS4. The Shadow of the Colossus remake/reimagination/remastered is perhaps the only true surprise during this conference.

Marvel VS. Capcom Infinite will surely bring back the solid 3V3 fighting gameplay, but it seems that plenty of old characters have been cut, or reserved for DLC. It's nice to see Call of Duty returning to it's root settings in a modern fashion.

Skyrim in VR felt like a joke, while I wasn't excited for the rest of the VR trailers shown, including going fishing on a bromance with my bro's from Final Fantasy XV. God of War's trailer was awesome, but I'm still not sure if this is a sequel or a reboot.

Detroit: Become Human's theme seems to have changed more towards revolution and rebellions rather than identifying and surviving as androids againsts their masters, meaning more action was shown, but I'm still interested in the narrative and plot qualities of Quantic Dream's development here.

I will easily skip Destiny 2 as the 10 year promise of the first Destiny was easily exaggerated, and I still stand by my "Korean grind festival" argument in my review of it. Spider-Man however is easily the highlight of this shown and it looked epic, entertaining and beautiful with gameplay surely inspired by the Batman Arkham games.

Sony's conference was great stuff in general, purely focused on gaming itself! Although there were no true surprises, I am very content with what I saw, and there still is plenty of interesting upcoming games coming for the PlayStation 4.

Rating: A

Nintendo

Will Nintendo save E3?

An intro montage including Rocket League was shown, and then the Nintendo Spotlight started!

Confirming a Holiday 2017 release, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is looking dazzling with a new artstyle and familiar British voices, yet the gameplay is intact and the world remains massive to explore! I'm sure that Monolith Soft knows what it's doing and that the story and music will be improved upon.

A new Kirby is announced and frankly it looks like yet another traditional platformer but with partners returning, but at the same time, Kirby never dissapoints with it's overall quality! The same could almost be said with a new Yoshi in development, both coming in 2018.

METROID PRIME 4 IN DEVELOPMENT, FUCK YEAH! Nintendo just won E3 in my opinion in this shortest announcement ever, but it's exactly what the fans have wanted, and I hope that it will sit along the trilogy just nicely.

I don't care for Musou's so Fire Emblem Warriors is not interesting for me.The DLC's for BOTW look like good fan service, I wonder if Nintendo will consider their first GOTY edition of this game? We'll see what will happen.

And then Nintendo throws in the best and most wacky trailer of the show, with Super Mario Odyssey mesmerizing with a jazzy song, gorgeous and varied worlds, and apparently everything turns into mustached Mario's, including a MOAI MARIO!

Better yet, after the Nintendo Spotlight, I saw ANOTHER Metroid announcement, a 2D remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, appropriately named Samus Returns! I can't believe that Nintendo is pulling off the same double punch again, just like with Prime and Fusion back in 2002! And this is also the reason why AM2R, a fan remake of Metroid II, got taken down.

Honestly, I will definitely get a Nintendo Switch this holiday, especially if Super Mario Odyssey is bundled!

Rating: A

E3 Thoughts: PC Gaming Show, Ubisoft

PC Gaming Show

For a while now, this "conference" has been the most boring and annoying out of them all. Can they really deliver and differentiate this time?

Spoiler alert, THEY CAN'T!

XCOM2 DLC looked meh, Mount & Blade II Bannerlord  was too short, Total Warhammer 2 looked similar to the previous one, Killing Floor 2 DLC actually looks like good times!  Just got this game for free through PlayStation Plus, I'm eager to try it out.

Wargroove is an Advance Wars clone long overdue, since AW is dead anyway, and instead of an Age of Empires 4, we get another HD Remastered!

Just boring as usual.

Rating: E

Ubisoft

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle crossover, the rumors were true! 3 years of development, looks pretty, some kind of strategy game!

Assassin's Creed Origins is looking good, The Crew 2 as well, Southpark the Fractured But Whole is an exciting sequel because the gameplay was spot on! Transference looks like a hack with no gameplay, and Skull & Bones is another new IP with just a cinematic trailer...until the gameplay footage was shown, and then I got intrigued as the 5v5 PVP between ships seemed to be the core gameplay.

Just Dance 2018 is your average milked franchise,  South Park Phone Destroyer seems random, Star Link looks like a Skylanders clone, Steep is meh and Far Cry 5 is looking like friggin fun, time to start on that damn FPS series already!

Beyond Good & Evil 2, FINALLY! Awesome trailer, after 15 years, and it was a great emotional touch to see Michel Ancel shed a tear live! I love revival surprises such as these, so the Ubisoft conference was very much saved by this!

Rating: B

E3 Thoughts: EA, Microsoft, Bethesda

 Electronic Arts

EA Play is a combination of conferencing, live gameplay, and trailers, while several locations come and go, so not just 1 stage, which means that this concept is rather creative. Star Wars Battlefront II seems to be going all out with the source material, while Need for Speed Payback is looking good and promises to combine past formulas into it.

Anthem looked very generic, while A Way Out  is offering an interesting co-operative experience. Other than that, there are your usual sports games announced, this time with story/narration modes, and there was some Battlefield DLC, but in overall, EA was a very dull conference.

Rating: D

Microsoft

Xbox One X is looking like a monster indeed. Forza 7 is looking good, but  Metro Exodus is when this conference really started for me, looking to combine underground with open world gameplay. Assassin's Creed Origins Ubisoft frankly is looking very good, this just might pique my interest to continue this huge franchise.

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is basically what the fuck,, Deep Rock Galactic too, State of Decay 2 is your average zombie survival horror, The Darwin Project is Hunger Games/Battle Royale the game and Minecraft is getting a 4K upgrade, HAH!

Dragonball Fighters is looking good with 3v3 functionality while Black Desert is an MMO, I missed the pixel game name, The Artful Escape is basically Brody Quest, Code Vein might be interesting, Sea of Thieves is a mixture of promises, Tacoma had the shortest trailer and Super Lucky's Tale genuinely looks fun!

Likewise towards Cuphead, which might spawn a bunch of imitators if it performs well. TERRY CREWS LOL a great opening for a run and gunner named Crackdown 3! After the cool indie compilation we got a glimpse of Ashen, a cooler glimpse of Life is Strange  Before the Storm, and Shadow of War is more mindless killings of orcs, with expanding landscapes and the Nemesis system.

Ori and the Will of the Whisps is a surprise sequel!  Anthem's gameplay reveal is looking very good with those jetpacks, they should had showed this at their own conference, but what a surprise from EA!

Many good looking games were shown which means that this was a very good Microsoft conference, delivering with exclusives! Backwards compatibilty towards the original Xbox is a deal breaker for me as this just might be enough for me to buy this shit in the future finally!

Or I could just stick with Windows 10 and my future monster PC :) :D :P

Rating: B

Bethesda

Nice montage of developers and their children talking about the profession and fun in general, while Bethesdaland is a nice and funny theme to use during this short conference of roughly 35 minutes.

The Evil Within 2 has a very stylized trailer and I'm liking what I'm seeing, but if Shinji Mikami can't fix what annoyed me about the original then I will skip it. Quake Champions is marketed as esports material and I think I saw a rocketjump somewhere in there.

Wolfenstein II is another stylized and somewhat funny trailer which kind was all over the place with setting, graphics, characters and the more idealistic plot between nazism, communism and capitalism, but I got genuinely excited when the gameplay footage appeared near the end, I loved the 2014 reboot, so naturally this is my most anticipated Bethesda game!

VR features games, paid mods, DLC and ports round up Bethesda's conference, which was just about okay, except for perhaps those dreadful paid mods.

Rating: C

E3 Expectations

Like everyone else around this time period, I too will also share my brief expectations and predictions with the world towards the biggest game convention annually; the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Considering that the rumour mill is saying that the good stuff from Nintendo AKA the Nintendo Spotlight(not Direct) will only run for 30 minutes, either we will get sales and marketing talks, or we can arguably get a trailer every 2 minutes and a reveal every 5 minutes, or something.

As Super Mario Oddysey will lead the way, and ARMS plus Splatoon 2 will accompany alongside the rest of the confirmed developing titles of the Switch's launch year including Xenoblade Chronicles 2, what surprises will and can there be?

Maybe if I don't wish for a Metroid, Advance Wars, F-Zero or a true Paper Mario announcement this time, then they might finally happen, so let's try to think like that for this year! I'm expecting the online service to be detailed further, the Gamecube virtuality considered, and the 3DS to take a much needed backseat.

As for Sony, which at the moment is actually my favorite press conference to experience for the last 2 years, they've got plenty of guns and rockets to blaze through, and if the rumors are true, if Japan Studio and From Software are collaborating again, anything they touch will turn into gold then.

Next towards that likely wish, there are the likes of The Last of Us Part II, Uncharted : The Lost Legacy and God of War which will ensure that any PlayStation fan will get their time and money's worth. There's also Days Gone, Detroit: Gone Human and Shenmue III to consider.

All of the other press conferences are just either bonuses, memes or boring to me, they can fluctuate. Bethesda might be cool with a Wolfenstein announcement, PC Gaming might finally become interesting in general, Ubisoft might stop milking and EA might stop making unfinished products, we'll see.

So let's get this week over with and start E3 2017 officially at the end of the weekend!

Famicom

It's about time I put up a review about the Japanese counterpart towards the Nintendo Entertainment System; the Family Computer or Famicom. After buying a HVC-001 AKA the first edition of that in Japan last year, I recently got it AV-modded.

A repair specialist who has worked at Guerilla Games as a (level) designer for 10 years now offered the service and made me very happy once the games started working on PAL tv's. My 100+ Famicom games which I recently won through auctions all seemed to work after excessively cleaning them with q-tips and alcohol ketonatus.

But even though my Player 1 controller was also extended with it's cord length and the audio output sounded great, I started to notice vertical lines in every Famicom game I put into the console, and then, to my horror, the specialist and the internet confirmed to me that this issue, also known as JAIL BARS, is common for all of the official Famicom models, minus the AV Famicom.

Despite that I don't mind graphics in general, these jail bars really started to annoy me, especially when I now know that the AV Famicom is the best authentic way to play composite AV output, so it looks like I will have to get this in order to finally enjoy the games authentically, while a 72 pin to 60 convertor will cover almost all of the NTSC games, especially all of those exclusive USA games.

So anyway, back to the orginal Famicom, it's best feature is that awesome stylish look, especially the controllers sitting between the cartridge slot in the middle is an iconic look. It's smaller than the NES, but as I said, the audio chip is better, plus there's an expansion slot at the front, which among other things can unlock a second library through the Famicom Disk System.

I haven't experienced or bought the FDS yet, but I'm sure that I will get to that eventually. The main reason I bought the original Famicom in the first place is out of respect towards Nintendo, but secondly and most obviously, the exclusive games.

I have managed to acquire quite a bunch of them already, but notable, accessible and good examples include Splatterhouse Wanpaku Grafitti, Getsu Fuuma Den, Radia Senki: Reimei-hen and the shining Holy Diver. I've only managed to review the first example so far, and I can't wait to discover and experience more.

Next towards having seriously started to collect very recently into the retro scene, I have learned a ton of facts and information about hardware, mods, upscaling and compatibility when it comes to the Famicom and the NES models, it's clone systems, and so on.

For reference, I will share 3 of them, but of course all of the information can be found online if you are as dedicated and passionate as me when it comes to 8-bit gaming:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.nl/2010/02/famicom-av-best-overall-choice-for-nes.html
http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.nl/2017/05/hdmi-solutions-for-nes-mid-2017-edition.html
http://retrorgb.com/nes.html

The Family Computer looks amazing, plays well and it has some very interesting exclusives that never made it to the West, some of which are very English friendly. Unfortunately, if I had discovered earlier that the AV Famicom would be an overall better choice, I might not have bought the original.

It looks like it will share a room with my original PAL NES  in the nearby future :) . Also, as you might have noticed, I talked quite extensively about all kinds of topics in here, and I easily could write more articles about this interesting generation.

So let's see how things will develop from my end as I will search for an upgrade, and then I just might do a follow up article towards this, sooner or later!