Ryan's E3 2010 Top Five

Trying to wrap your mind about both the massiveness and the density of everything on display at E3 while you're actually at E3 is the kind of thinking that will drive you mad; like, crazy bug-eyed, Cthulhu mad. Better, then, to give yourself a little time to process what you saw and try to parse out the actual games from the whole spectacle. So, now that a good two weeks have passed, what are the games I saw at E3 that have stuck with me? Why, thank you for asking, rhetorical person!
 

Kirby's Epic Yarn

 After the uncomfortable and underwhelming Zelda demo, and the Wii Party and Mario Sports Mix announcements that seemed designed to underline Nintendo's laziest tendencies, I was checking my phone and completely ready to bail early on Nintendo's press conference to beat traffic. But it bounced back big from a weak opening by announcing just a whole slew of new, interesting-looking games. Among them was Kirby's Epic Yarn, which piqued my interest the most with its homespun art style. Playing a few levels of Kirby on the show floor supported my suspicions: this isn't going to be a challenging or high-impact experience, but the very fabric of this subtly inventive platformer will charm your pants off.

Face Ace

Face Ace is less a game and more a proof-of-concept for all the fancy new gear Nintendo is packing into the 3DS. More-so than any of the other 3DS demos I saw, Face Ace was the one that needed to be seen to be fully understood, so bear with me here. Face Ace starts by taking a picture of your face, which it then maps onto a winged-helmet-wearing head. Face Ace knows, roughly, where your eyes and your mouth are, and can twist your puppet-face into some crude, yet still profoundly disturbing animations. These faces, your faces, then start flying at you in 3D. Oh, and Face Ace remembers some of the previous faces it saw, so I had the pleasure of Brad's face coming at me and trying to kiss me. It was… uncomfortable.

So these faces are flying at you in the foreground, and the background is being generated by the two 3D cameras on the front of the 3DS, so you're seeing whatever is right in front of you, on the top screen, in 3D. I had the pleasure of watching these marauding little me-demons shoot out of the nearby crotch of Gunnar Johansson from Fatshark. Again, uncomfortable. Making the whole augmented reality angle that much more weirdly immersive is the fact that you're using the motion sensors to actually move the 3DS around in order to target incoming faces.

If that all doesn't sound totally insane and at least a little bit clever in its use of the 3DS technology, then I have done a very poor job describing the actual experience to you, and for that I apologize. I don't know if this could ever survive as a standalone game, but it gave me a weird-ass sense of hope for the future of Nintendo's new handheld.

Dance Central

Harmonix's Kinect-powered dancing game was the first piece of Kinect software I experienced first-hand at E3 2010, though it remained the most impressive for the duration of the show. Part of this speaks to relatively weak competition--most of the other Kinect games I saw either felt like tech demos, or did an abnormally apt job highlighting Kinect's shortcomings. 

The interface and presentation are what make Dance Central work. Smartly, it doesn't rely on your movement data to generate your on-screen avatar's animation. This avoids the whole marionette issue that plagues many of the Kinect games I saw, and makes it easy for the game to both show you how to do the dance move correctly and highlight the parts of your body that aren't in the correct position. I also found the cue cards that show you the name and the starting position for the next dance move helpful when transitioning, but it's all these factors, plus a very, very generous learning curve, that softens the inherently intimidating premise of getting up in front of your TV and trying to dance "correctly."

I was a nervous wreck walking up to Dance Central for the first time, but I wasn't even through my first routine to Lady Gaga's "Pokerface," on easy, before I started feeling all cocky. Playing Dance Central at E3 was the first time since, let's say Dance Dance Revolution 2nd Mix, that I really enjoyed a dancing game. Even two weeks later, this is the game from E3 that I most wish I was playing right now.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

This left a lasting impression in part because I really thoroughly enjoyed Assassin's Creed II, but nothing about that experience suggested that it would be much fun in a multiplayer setting. Assassin's Creed is all about the cat-and-mouse dynamic, so where would the fun be in just adding more cats? I hadn't considered that the cats could also be mice, which seems to be the simple twist the concept needed to work. If you thought it was satisfying to calmly walk up to some nasty Templar NPC and slip a hidden blade between his ribs, well, that's really kind of creepy, isn't it? Moral judgment notwithstanding, it's even better when it's a live target.

Super Scribblenauts  

Scribblenauts was a game I adored in concept, but could barely be bothered to play once it actually came out. This was due in part to a few design and control missteps, both of which appeared to be high on the to-do list of developer 5th Cell for its sequel, Super Scribbelnauts. Apparently also on that list was the decision to add adjectives to the game's dictionary, which exponentially increases the number of objects that you can conjure up to help solve the game's puzzles. Super Scribblenauts is a simply awful game to try and play in the middle of all the sound and fury of the E3 show floor, though I got just enough of a taste of its silly, puzzle offerings to know that I want more.


Looking back on my list here, I'm personally kind of surprised at the complete absence of more traditional, core games. It's not that those games weren't being well represented, I guess it's just that they were known quantities. In a weird way, this was a hardware year for E3, just not in the same generational way it's been in years past, and the most exciting games for me were the ones that really showed off the potential of that new hardware.