Category Archives: E3 2009

Robomodo president Joshua Tsui says that the skateboard peripheral for Tony Hawk’s Ride isn’t, it’s a platform in it’s own right.

“It’s really important to us that when people buy this package that they understand that, right now we’re concentrating on Tony Hawk Ride, but we want to make sure that people have a good return on their investment so there are many games that are planned for this peripheral,” said Tsui to Videogamer at E3.

“We look at it less as a peripheral, as more of a platform. The obvious ones are snowboarding and surfing and such, but there are a lot of games that can be used with this board, and we’re really excited to start working on those.”

RIDE is out for PS3 and 360 later this year.

Ever felt put off by the amount of button presses you need to learn in order to pull off the devastating combos in games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden? Well, Sega to rescue as during the E3 demo of the awesome looking Sega slasher Bayonetta, a company rep explained that you won’t have to be a member of the hardcore elite to get a lot of enjoyment out of the game.

Compared with the hardcore, fast-combo pulling crowd “there’s a larger demographic of casual gamers and so for people who are new to this type of game or simply aren’t at that level there’s an Easy mode and a Very Easy mode,” said the rep.

“What those allow you to do is some of the more complex combos that require some of the very complex button inputs will be easier to pull off with the same level of ease [as the hardcore gamer].

“Huge dynamic levels have been created throughout the whole game – even a casual player could get the full experience, that full level of enjoyment out of it without having to be this hardcore, maniac user.”

Bayonetta is out for high def next-gen consoles later this year.

Nielsen’s claimed Halo: ODST has the biggest “probable purchase intent” among gamers, based on surveys performed after E3.

Here’s the top, um, 12, the percentage being the amount polled that said they’d buy the game.

1. Halo ODST – 53%
2. God of War III – 49%
3. Wii Sports Resort – 45%
4. Guitar Hero 5 – 42%
5. Final Fantasy XIII – 37%
6. Madden 2010 – 35%
7. Guitar Hero: Van Halen – 34%
=8. Assassins Creed 2 – 32%
=8. Need for Speed: Shift – 32%
=8. Need for Speed: Nitro – 32%
=8. NCAA Football 10 – 32%
12. Beatles Rock Band – 30%

More detail on Gama.

Will Modern Warfare 2 be longer than Call of Duty 4? Might be. Infinity Ward doesn’t care. The only thing that matters is the sequel being the best game in the world. Ever.

“It’s really hard to say, because it’s not done yet, it’s not balanced yet,” Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin said at E3 on the subject of whether or not the game will be bigger than the original.

“We don’t go into it saying we need to build a 20-hour experience or a ten-hours experience. We say, ‘What’s the best fucking experience we can possibly deliver?’

“And we craft it around that.”

Rubin added that the game’s levels will be “bigger” than those in CoD4.

Megaton game of the year. Christmas number one all over the place. Start betting now.

SCEE president Andrew House has called motion-sensing an “essential” element to PS3, speaking to GI at E3.

“That’s one of the essentials,” he said, talking of PS3′s wand-based motion control system premiered in LA earlier this month.

House was quick to expound the machine’s further virtues, however.

“But the PlayStation 3 is also one of the best Blu-ray players around for high-definition movies and that almost gets lost in the mix,” he added.

“That gives it an enormous sense of longevity, people want the best if they are buying into high-definition entertainment from a television standpoint or from a movie standpoint. That’s an inherently long lifecycle and it helps bolster the traditional gaming lifecycle as well.”

There’s a full interview through there.

Visceral Games head Glen Schofield has told VG247 that EA is “not ready” to show any of the studio’s titles past Dante’s Inferno and Dead Space: Extraction, and has refused to be drawn on timing for a Dead Space 2 reveal.

“Our two big games are Extraction and Dante’s Inferno: we’re not ready to announce anything [else] yet, no,” Schofield said, talking in a phone interview.

“These two games are the games we’re really focussing on. One of the reasons we changed the [studio's] name [to Visceral] is to go, ‘We’re focussing on quality.’ So right now the focus is on getting these two games to the highest quality. The studio is really working on that.

“I think talking about anything other than that just takes the focus away from the games we’re working on.”

When asked specifically when we can expect to see Dead Space 2 announced, EA PR jumped in with a “no comment”.

Visceral said it was working on two unannounced games in May when it rebranded away from EA Redwood Shores.

Just after the rebranding announcement, Dead Space 2 was inadvertently announced via a developer LinkedIn profile, although the title has now been edited out of the CV.

How do you put Ozzy Osbourne into Brutal Legend? Do you motion capture? No, sir, you do not.

“We didn’t mo-cap,” Doublefine boss Tim Schafer told VG247 at E3. “We tried to capture the essence with this really great animation.

“[With] motion capture you get literally what people move like but we went for animation that represents the feel of Ozzy Osbourne; the motions are bigger than life in a way.

“The game has a really exaggerated art style, and [we did] motion in the same way.”

Schafer told us Osbourne was “great fun to work with” and went so far to call him a “hoot”. He’s not a gamer though, apparently, said Tim.

Brutal Legend, Ozzy and all, hits this autumn for PS3 and 360.

id biz man Steve Nix told VG at E3 that he thought news of Duke Nukem Forever’s cancellation was some kind of internet fabrication.

“I thought it was a joke when I heard the other day,” he said. “Definitely extremely saddened and surprising that those guys aren’t there and we may never see the game we were all looking forward to.”

Forever became the most ironically named game in all history in May when 3DRealms abandoned the project after 12 years due to a lack of funds.

Rare. Secretive Rare. Nintendo Rare. Peter Molyneux, Microsoft Game Studios’ newly-appointed super-boss, wants to change all that.

“One of the things I really want to do is help Rare have more of an identity,” he told GI at E3, “and make sure the people at Rare are seen more within the industry.

“I was totally blown away from the amount of talent that there is at Rare, but it’s just that they come from a background where Nintendo required them to be this very, very secretive company.

“I just want to give them the confidence to tell the world what they’re doing.”

We’ll never forget the time we were on a Rare visit, asked to photograph a couple of execs and got the answer, “No. We’re not rock stars.” Best get used to the make-up, chaps.

Full interview through there.

FFXIII producer Yoshinori Kitase told GiantBomb at E3 that work only started on FFXIII’s 360 version when the game’s Japanese demo was released.

“Up to the trial demo version that was released [in April] in Japan, [FFXIII] was PS3-only in terms of development,” he said.

“The Xbox 360 version is definitely following after the PS3 version, but [we] were finally able to come to a point in the PS3 development where some of the staff could take their hands off and start programming the 360 version.”

The title’s supposedly out in the US on 360 early next year.

There’s a 30-minute demo for Darksiders: Wrath of War posted after the break.

Shows loads of swordplay and the like, with the lead designer and creative director chatting to Gamespot about it at E3.

The game’s set in a post apocalyptic demon filled world where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been betrayed, stripped of all powers, and cast down to Earth.

Players take on the role of the first of the Four Horsemen, War, as he goes on a rampage filled with vengeance and revenge with his phantom horse Ruin.

Awesome.

The open-world game is expected sometime in January 1, 2010.

Thanks, VideoGamesBlogger.

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Of course the DiRT 2 gameplay trailer shows loads of racing. What else would it show?

Has stunts, cheering fans, roll-overs, you name it.

It’s posted after the break courtesy of GameTrailers.

Expect it to drift into stores in September.

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Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and founding partner Henk Rogers were at E3 last week, and while having a bit of a chat with Kotaku about the future of the classic puzzler, Rogers revealed that he would like to see the title become more than just a game.

The latest iteration of the series is a six-person multiplayer experience being tested in Korea, using the tried-and-true formula along with new attack and defense items.

“That’s an interesting evolution of Tetris,” Rogers told the site “The future is a country that has 48 million people living in it and the biggest casual gaming site in the country has 24 million registered users. That country is Korea. That’s what’s going to happen in the rest of the world.

“We are going to turn Tetris into the first real virtual sport. Sports like baseball and football were created at a time when our future was a lifetime of physical activities and physical fitness. But now that’s not as important, it’s more about mental fitness today.

“Tetris is a virtual sport that exercises the mind. That is the definition of a virtual sport.”

More through the link.

Sony boss Jack Tretton’s had a bit of a boohoo to CNBC about the fact his E3 press conference got spunked all over the internet before he got anywhere near the LA stage.

“People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry,” says Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America. “It’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties.”

He added: “This is an industry that has trouble focusing on today,” he says “We want to constantly talk about tomorrow.… You have to prepare for people to know things in advance. The frustrating thing is they only know a part of the story and that opens up a lot of conjecture and misinformation that ultimately waters down the reality when you roll it out.”

Full thing through there.

Shane Kim has said that when Project Natal launches it will be as big of a deal as when Xbox 360 hit the market.

“Conceptually, the launch of Natal will be like the launch of Xbox 360,” he told Kotaku at E3. “It’s going to be that big. We’re not just going to ship it when the hardware and software are ready. We have to make sure that there are enough content experiences that are really good.

“That’s similar to how you would think of the launch of a new console. It’s got to have a great launch line-up. That’s the same thing here.”

Kim also told the site that the company’s focus will not be the current generation of casual gamers.

“We’re not focused on this generation’s casual gamers or even PS2 people who haven’t upgraded. This is about the 60 percent of households were a video game console doesn’t exist… the problem is that the controller is a barrier for some people and now with Project Natal we completely eliminate that.”

More through the link.

This won’t end well. Patrick Soderlund, senior VP of EA Games Europe and dev lead on Need for Speed: Shift, told VG at E3 that he’s baffled by Bizarre Creations’ Blur and that his game is “better” than Forza 3.

“Let me tell you this,” he said, sounding very pumped. “I think Split/Second looks great. I’m going to have a good time playing that. Blur to me is completely underwhelming. I don’t understand what’s up with that game to be honest. That’s an official statement.

“Forza, I’m very confident we have a better game than them to be honest. Talking to the press, looking at the nominations, that’s clear. So, I’m glad that they’re confident but I’m as confident as they are.”

Hot dog. Hit the link for more, assuming you’re man enough.

Team Ninja Metroid remake Other M marks a return to the series’s “traditional” values, NoA boss the Reggie “Double-Bomb” Fils-Aime told Gamespot at E3.

“A year ago, someone could have asked me, ‘What’s going on with Metroid?’ When are we going to go back to the more traditional Metroid series versus the path that we went down with Prime? Well, here’s the answer, right, in Other M,” he said.

And don’t panic, Kid Icarus fans. Reinvention’s on the agenda for all of Nintendo’s historical IP.

“Believe me, we’re constantly challenging ourselves on all our key franchises, as to when’s the right time to revitalise it, a how do we do it in a way that’s provocative?” Fils-Aime added.

Watch the interview after the break.

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Speaking to G4, Valve boss Gabe Newell’s assured that Left 4 Dead content updates are to continue despite the fact a controversial sequel’s on the way.

“From a customer’s perspective, we think that given the sort of insane popularity of Left 4 Dead, that people are going to be super excited about getting a sequel to that,” said the exec.

“We’re going to continue to do Left 4 Dead updates and release more content for Left 4 Dead, and then also have Left 4 Dead 2 coming out as well.”

There’s a full interview through there, in which Newell explains the reasoning behind working on a sequel at this point.

More than 20,000 people have signed a petition saying they’ll boycott the game because of its proximity to the first title’s release.

Speaking to Joystiq at E3, Assassin’s Creed II producer Patrice Désilets has confirmed just how popular the original game actual was.

“We sold some eight million copies of it, you know,” he said.

Apparently the king of understatement, he added: “Some people really enjoyed and loved the game.”

Assassin’s Creed II looked very awesome at E3. Now you know why.

There’s a ful interview through there.

Ubisoft announced Your Shape at E3 last week, and today the publisher has detailed the game and its technology a bit more.

“The game will scan your body and then project the image onto the TV, creating a personalized and interactive workout”, said a company statement. “Based on your specific body shape analysis, fitness level and personal goals, Your Shape is able to recommend the workout program that is best suited for you.”

Your Shape also includes a virtual coach that provides motivation.

“The development of the new camera for Wii and our Body Tracking technology means that Your Shape will offer an interactive experience that is a technological breakthrough in gaming, as well as in the fitness category,” said Ubi bossman Yves Guillemot.

The company also claims that the title will include “more exercises than any other fitness game”, and will come bundled with the camera.

Game’s expected to hit retail in time for the holidays.

More over on Gamasutra.