VGA Premieres
While watching the various awards handed at the VGA’s is fun and all, let’s be completely honest: the biggest pull for the awards show is all the premieres. It seems like now everyone and their mom wants to get their premiere on the awards show. This means that you have to sit through some trash in order to get to see the good stuff. Here I’ll give a run down of the different premieres.
Hitman Absolution: Do people still care about this franchise? He wears a suit, with a tie clip, and shoots people. Not quite sure how that makes him the man.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD: I’m sure Tony Hawk enjoys the seemingly endless payday. I guess if every other segment of the electronics industry gets to benefit from the super-marketing HD hype then Tony Hawk might as well too.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2: This genre really should have stayed dead like 10 years ago.
The Last of Us: While the developer gives this title promise, I failed to see anything extraordinary in this trailer.
Command and Conquer: Generals 2: Definitely the biggest let down of the night. Bioware had tipped their hat that there would be a new game in a new genre and such and with the Bioware name expectations were pretty high. Fortunately word got around in the days before the awards who of what was in store for this new Bioware title. More on this in a future article.
Rainbow 6 Patriots: I was a huge fan of the franchise back when they were made by Red Storm Entertainment. Things have definitely gone downhill. This looks just looks so generic and hyper-cliched.
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare: Um . . . did someone miss the memo outlining how poorly Alan Wake sold? Poor release timing? Please. The first game went from boring to stupidly bizarre at the end and I’m not sure why anyone thought pumping out a sequel would be a good idea.
The Amazing Spiderman: So since new Batman games have been really good it’s obvious that people will want to get other things going so now we have yet another Spiderman game. I’ll just say my expectations remain low.
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron: why . . . just why . . .
Fortnite: This was definitely one of the biggest surprises of the night. Epic, fresh off of finishing up the Gears of War trilogy, reveals this trailer as the next thing they’re working on? My first thought was “Well I guess Epic made those Infinity Blade games for mobile phones so this must be a mobile game.” Then the good people at Epic talked about how Minecraft was part of the inspiration behind the game. So maybe Epic is trying to create a ‘big studio version’ of something Minecraft-esque and try to market it broadly. Who knows. I don’t really have any interest at this point in playing Fortnite but I am interested to see what comes of it.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: This looked pretty laughable and obviously not a normal Metal Gear type of game. It’s being made by Platinum Games which is very obvious because the game looks like it plays exactly like Bayonetta and Vanquish. The problem with this studio is taht it seems to be trying to design games heavily geared towards a Western Audience, but they all look terrible. This looks to be yet another classic example of how many Japanese developers are simply not up with the times in making great games.
Bioshock Infinite: Bioshock was fantastic. Bioshock 2 was less than thrilling. When I first got wind of Bioshock Infinite my immediate reaction was a bit of disdain. It is a new game, and follows new people, in a new location. It is not at all related to previous Bioshock games. Why then, does it still retain the word Bioshock in the title? Just move on and call it something else. It’s obvious that Bioshock the brand has a certain amount of value to it and the studio is just trying to capitalize on it. However, the game really does look quite good and I am actually starting to buy into the whole ‘spirit of Bioshock’ thing.
Mass Effect 3: When it comes to trailers, high grade pre-rendered cinematic trailers are definitely preferable, but when you’re dealing with top of the line franchises I’ll gladly take trailers that have mostly gameplay footage. There wasn’t really anything that new or exciting in this trailer except for the massive battle between the giants which looked pretty cool.
Diablo 3: Well this was definitely the best part of the awards show for me. The trailer is the intro cinematic for the game. What I want to know is what happened to Deckard Cain? We’ll all find out soon enough (well not really soon enough, but soon nonetheless).