A rueful look back at E3, Part 1: Fable: The Journey

Pointless Side Quest is back in action, and to commemorate this momentous occasion in the world of obscure video game humor blogs we'll be taking a look back at the second most momentous yearly occasion in the world of video games, the E3 show. So sit back, turn the date on your computer and any other nearby electronic devices back a month, and start gulping down the dissociative substance of your choice until you're confused enough to forget the actual date so that you can enjoy the excitement of hearing the hottest news from E3 for the first time. Today we kick things off with:

Fable: The Journey

Lionhead Studios revealed the next game in the Fable franchise, Fable: The Journey, and showed a short game play demo. The game is built around and will require the Xbox360 Kinnect. The demo was distinctly unimpressive, revealing game play that apparently revolves around moving along a predetermined path, being narrated at by an old woman,  and occasionally thrusting your arm outward to magically blast enemies like some cross between Gandalf and Phoenix Wright.

But, for once, this isn't just about my dislike of motion controls, or my lingering resentment at the disappointing bill of goods we were sold with the original Fable, or my numerous unpleasant memories that involve being stuck on a long vehicle trip sitting next to someone who keeps talking and talking and talking until I'm ready to stab him in the throat with a shiv carved from a tire pressure gauge and take my chances with whatever happens next as our now-driverless car continues to careen down the highway at 65 miles per hour. It was poorly received by many, and Lionhead's Peter Molyneux has since said that the demo did not include the game's navigation controls and that the actual game allows much more freedom than the demo suggests.  Which is a vague statement, since in a qualitative sense any increase from “none whatsoever” to “more than none whatsoever” can be a profound change, but one can hope.

And one should hope, because as it is now it looks like it's basically an HD version of Operation Wolf, if the 1987 arcade classic were transplanted to a generic fantasy setting and had its cool mounted force-feedback lightgun removed and replaced with a somewhat more dignified U-Force.

Announcing Kuribo's Shoes

New posts for this site are coming soon- gotta have the latest breaking E3 news before the competition, after all- but first an announcement. As part of my ongoing quest to write at as many sites that aren't this one as possible, I'm happy to announce that I'm one of the writers for the newly launched humor site Kuribo's Shoes. Updated every weekday with the most important, cutting-edge, not strictly-speaking-actually-true news in gaming! So, check it out. And Like their page on Facebook, while you're at it.

Here are my articles there to date:


Archaeologists uncover records of early Duke Nukem Forever development in 4,500-year-old Sumerian ruins: The sort of rigorous historical scholarship that has always been my hallmark.

New breakthroughs in computer science, quantum mechanics may make maximum-settings Crysis possible within our lifetimes: Arguably the best video game-related humor article referencing Bose–Einstein condensates, Neal Asher, and Colossus: The Forbin Project published in the past year!

Gamers, developers shocked by revelation that The King of Fighters series has an actual plot: I'm as stunned as you are, gentle reader.

Sony takes gaming into the fourth dimension: Because I don't get the chance to wax Lovecraftian or use the word "tesseract" often enough.

Infamous 2: This is one of those rare times where appending "Electric Boogaloo" to the title would actually sort of make sense, but I'll restrain myself

I had intended to write something about the demo for Sucker Punch Productions' Infamous 2 over the weekend, but was thwarted when my entire neighborhood lost electrical power (because of a thunderstorm, ironically) on Saturday and subsequently became caught up in other business. Some would argue that writing about the demo is sort of pointless when the actual game is now out, but at Pointless Side Quest we strive to make everything we present here timeless, with a relevance that will endure long after some arbitrary date on a calendar. This post fails at that, but it's not as if that's ever stopped me before. Some thoughts:

The demo's most striking, immediately noticeable change from the original game is how fast protagonist Cole is in this game, both on foot and when's he's gliding- when I take to the rooftops I have a much stronger feeling of momentum. It also helps that you get a small boost upwards when you first activate your glide power- a lot of building -to-building leaps that would have previously required me to glide towards the target building, fall slightly short of the roof, grab hold of the side, and pull myself up are now one smooth motion. It makes a difference, especially when you're trying to go from roof to roof to roof at high speed.

I was sort of thrown off by Cole's new voice actor at first, but was fine with him once I had time to get used to him. I enjoyed Cole's voice in the original, but I like the fact that he sounds less gruff and overtly bad-ass in the new one- he seems more like a regular guy who was unexpectedly thrust into the role of superhero and less like a grizzled off-duty space marine who's been smoking two packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day since the age of 8.

I like the little events that pop up as icons on your map, which you can then intervene in- stopping muggings, rescuing people being marched off as prisoners by the bad guys (I'm assuming; maybe New Marais just has really stern tour guides), and so forth. It's convenient when you're looking for some action outside of a mission, and it made the city feel more alive to me-there's stuff going on around you whether or not you choose to involve yourself with it.

I just hope we don't have anything like some of the asinine recurring missions that have appeared in some previous open world superhero games, like that damned army of kids in Spider-Man 2 whining at you to get their balloon back for them. I don't want to see that here. “What's that, kid? Well, I was about to head out to save an innocent person from being shivved in an alleyway by a band of muggers, rescue a group of people being dragooned to God only knows where by heavily armed paramilitary thugs, stop the massive rival gang shootout that just erupted downtown before they tear half the city apart, and subdue the rampaging horde of grotesque mutant  hellbeasts emerging from the swamps and killing everything in its path...  but sure, I'll put that off so that I can recharge your talking Optimus Prime action figure. What could it hurt?”

Early concept art for Cole's appearance at maximum negative karma in Infamous 2, later rejected by the game's designers for looking "too healthy."

This item is actually more of a question than a comment. I always played as a good guy in the original and so don't have much experience with evil version of the character. In one of the three missions in the demo you play as evil negative karma red-lightning Cole, so I was wondering: was evil Cole that pale and corpse-like in the original, too? He looks like what would happen if the lost love-child of Conan O'Brien and Wednesday Adams was raised underground in absolute darkness by Morlocks for the first 25 years of his life and then immediately contracted tuberculosis and joined a Norwegian black metal band upon reaching the surface. The guy from Nosferatu looks positively ruddy by comparison.

Zeke is back, and he looks even more like a 70's-era Elvis impersonator than he did in the original. Which is awesome. At this rate of transformation, he'll be guzzling down barbiturates like trail mix and wearing a jacket with enough rhinestones to outshine the sun by the time Infamous IV arrives. Sucker Punch, make this happen.

Relics

Game retailer GameSpot has announced that they will still be honoring preorders for Duke Nukem Forever from any time in the game's aeons-long long development history, all the way back to the beginning. So if you were one of the poor souls who said, “I need to make sure I'm able to get a copy of Duke Nukem Forever the moment it comes out! And while I'm at it, I'll upgrade my PC's RAM to 32 megabytes!”, you're in luck.

Though you'll presumably need to actually have a receipt from whenever you pre-ordered it, and I don't imagine many people hold on to 13-year-old preorders for legendary vaporware. So that's likely to be problematic, unless you're the sort of obsessive hoarder who lives in constant peril of being buried alive if the floor-to-ceiling stacks of windshield flyers, Trotskyist newspapers, Sears catalogs, and back issues of Datamation and Confederate Veteran that fill 95% of your house's internal volume ever lose structural integrity.

But if you are that guy, I wish you the best and hope the game doesn't disappoint.

New at Robot Geek

I've got some new articles up over at Robot Geek. Sadly, my work there is hamstrung by proprietor Dan O'Connor's expectation that I provide actual commentary about games instead of just making things up, but nevertheless, please to enjoy:

Chilling tales of gaming horror presents: Daikatana

Red Faction Guerrilla: Sometimes a ridiculously unfair enemy is exactly what a game needs

Square: The golden age

Read all three for:

• Lengthy apologia for gameplay mechanics everyone else hates!
• The hottest, most up-to-date industry news of the late 1990s you'll find anywhere on the web!
• Absurdly convoluted metaphors involving the First World War!
• Motorhead!
• My nerdy-even-by-the-standards-of-people-who-blog-about-video-games childhood!
• Muscular post-apocalyptic warlords clad only in tiny shorts and their unabashed confidence in their own masculinity! 

And so much more!

The one. The only. Tetris.

Japan has traditionally enjoyed a dominant position in the lucrative Discomfort-Inducing Store Display market, but now Italy is apparently throwing its hat into the ring. Sure as hell hope it's a hat, anyway.

More specifically, there are now  Tetris-themed Tampax displays advertising feminine hygiene products in Italian stores, and... OK, this is sort of awkward, because 1. My attitude towards the human body, its various activities, functions, and constituent components, and the emanations and effluvia thereof has not changed appreciably since I was about 8 years old, and  2. I write this blog with voice-recognition software and thus have to say all of this out loud. There are stacks of Tetris blocks arranged so that they only need one more properly placed piece to clear three lines, and the tampon is a long vertical Tetris piece descending towards the... well, gap.

Which is very bothersome, because if we accept the display's conceit that the tampon is somehow analogous to a Tetris block the tampon's arrival at its destination will cause several full rows of adjacent blocks to simply vanish into oblivion.

And even if we leave aside the ad's grisly suggestion that Tampax products somehow have the power to annihilate the user's lower torso, Tetris blocks seem like a remarkably unappealing thing to compare the product to. Most of the advertisements for feminine hygiene products I've seen over the years revolve around comfort and softness and freshness and women carefully avoiding any clear references to the actual product or its function as they converse while engaging in various outdoor recreations together. There's nothing wrong with trying to break from the formula, but I'm not sure “It's a tampon with the comfort and convenience of a brick” is the way to do that.

That said, I wish Tampax luck with this effort, and I'm sure that in the years to come video game-based promotions will be helping break down the taboos and awkwardness that so often surrounds items of such a personal nature. I especially look forward to seeing the “16-bit Link returning the Master Sword to that altar at the end of A Link to Past”-themed displays Trojan will no doubt be unveiling in the near future.

PLAYSTAPOCALYPSE 2011! Days 12 to 18: New releases for the week of 01-05-11

Bugger All (PlayStation Network)

This has been tearing up the PSN sales charts for the past few days. Gets kind of repetitive after a while.

Moon Diver (Xbox Live Arcade)

I actually own the PlayStation 3 version of this, which- much like a young Kal-El launched from a dying Krypton, or Keanu Reaves refusing to appear in Speed 2: Cruise Control- was released shortly before PlayStation Network was snuffed out. It's a side-scrolling action game, and it's quite good; it feels sort of like a suped-up version of classic 16-bit action games, and it pulls that off quite well.  If you enjoy action games and own a console with an online service that isn't a nonfunctional bag of ass, I recommend it.