Ubisoft's E3 Showings
2old2play had a chance to sit in on the Ubisoft Press Conference at E3. After taking some time to absorb what was shown, here are some thoughts... Ubisoft's P
2old2play had a chance to sit in on the Ubisoft Press Conference at E3. After taking some time to absorb what was shown, here are some thoughts...
Ubisoft's Press event was a little bit of everything, and all over the map. Some stuff I am excited about, and other things not so much... I'll cover the titles in the order they were presented to us:
Child of Eden
The show started off with this... Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the creator of Rez and Lumines was on stage and the music started kicking and the crazy visuals were on the screen and he's waving his hands wildly (Kinect), while kicking ass. The game looked really fun and cool.
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Wow. Wow. Wow. Everything about the 3rd installment in the Assassin's Creed series looks simply amazing. We watched an extended trailer for the game, followed by a demo from Vincent Pontbriand and Patrick Plourde. Enemy A.I. has been improved tremendously, and no longer are enemy attacks at an unrealistic pace. At the same time, Ezio has a whole slew of new attacks and weapons in his arsenal. From cannon's, to "airstrike's", to crossbows, to disarming enemies and using their own weapons against them, there is plenty of new stuff here. In the demo, Ezio disarmed a guy, then picked up the axe and threw it right into another guy's head. Epic! Oh yeah, and there is going to be multiplayer for the first time in the series.
Shaun White Skateboarding
Shaun White showed up... He explained that he loves to skate almost as much as snowboard. Now just about everyone has seen the live action trailer and preview, but in a nutshell, SWS takes place in a world where all the fun has been ripped out of it by some oppressive government agency. You shred your way to recolorizing and rebuilding the work by dynamically shredding the environment into something new and different. The game has the arcadey feel of the Tony Hawk games before they went and got tired...
Battle Tag
Yeah... I said it... Tag... And no, it's not a video game. It's like Laser Tag on steroids. Weird - yes. Unexpected - yes. Potential - maybye. People ran into the theater shooting each other with these little guns. Classic... It's basically 2 guns and a bunch of sensors, and you either play conventional laser tag style team or solo games, or you use the sensor thingies as preset objectives to form more mission-based games. The whole thing jacks into a computer and provides all sorts of stats... It could be either really cool, or not so much...
Innergy
OK. This one is just plain dumb. No offense to the people at Ubisoft, but WTF? You put this little sensor thingy on your finger, then try to breathe slow. WTF? Really... I wasn't even going to put a picture with this one, but here's one for a laugh.
Motion Sports
Motion Sports is probably exactly what you'd expect. It's a bunch of sports mini-games for Kinect. They showed us a pre-canned video of people dressed in sports outfits split-screened with gameplay footage. They showed off football, soccer, skiing and some other stuff... Looks OK if you want a bunch of different things to play via Kinect in one purchase...
Your Shape: Fitness Evolved
Felicia Williams and Michael George came out for this one. Felicia basically did the exact same demo of this that she did for the Microsoft Press Event, so not much new here. It's basically a fitness game with great Kinect support.
Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time
We were then treated to a little cutesy video of the rabbids doing just that... Traveling through time... It was all pre-rendered, and there was no actual gameplay footage, so I have no idea about this one really, except that it's coming to the Wii.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
Wow. Now I'm not usually a 3rd person shooter guy, but this looks great... In the picture below, there is actually a guy, but he's wearing the badass futuristic predator like camo stuff. The game now features a great mix of the long range and close quarters combat thanks to the new cloak dynamic. Oh, and the game just looks great too...
Driver SF
This driver game seems to get back to the roots of the series with real cars and really slick gameplay. The twist in this game is that the player is able to switch switch which car they are driving on the fly. There may be a spoiler as to why that is, so I'm not going to say anything else. There are going to be over 100 licensed cars in the game when it launches.
They capped the show off with a dance number celebrating a future Michael Jackson dance game, of which no footage was shown...
Overall, I'm super excited about Assassin's Creed most of all, followed by Ghost Recon and Shaun White. Some of Ubisoft's other stuff was a bit off my charts, but the beauty of video games is that there is something out there for everyone.
- Derek "DSmooth" Nolan