Tuesday, June 10, 2014

PAD #16: E3 Goodness

I said that I'd find some good stuff to talk about today, since I don't wanna just sit here and gripe about stuff I don't care about, and boy did Nintendo ever deliver.  I think the most interesting thing they had to show today was Splatoon.  It's basically an answer to the question of "How can we get the younger generation into shooters?"  It's a game of color vs color, and the objective is to splatter as much paint of your team's color on the board as possible before the time is up.  Of course you can splatter paint over your enemy team's paint, and getting hit with the enemy color will eventually kill you and force you to respawn back at base, so it isn't just a game of ignoring the enemy team to focus on splattering paint around.  It has another interesting mechanic in that you can sink into the paint for a form of fast travel, and to reload faster.  There's quite a bit that you can do with it.  A very interesting-looking game.

Xenoblade Chronicles X got a bit more info today.  Forget if I mentioned it yesterday, but there wasn't as much to talk about except for a brief gameplay trailer.  Today they talked a little more about the story.  Apparently Earth got caught in a battle between a couple of warring alien races, and the resulting battle left Earth ravaged, and humans fled on giant arc ships to get away from it.  Seems odd that the aliens would be fighting at Earth when it has nothing to do with either of them, but maybe that gets fleshed-out in the story.  On that, it's been revealed that, despite sharing the name, X is more of a spiritual successor than having any story relation.  Think System Shock -> Bioshock, I guess.  Similar themes and similar gameplay, but otherwise unrelated.  This game is a big part of why I want to get a Wii U eventually.  Pikmin 3 and Smash Bros being two other pieces to that puzzle.

Speaking of which, it was kinda fun watching the Smash Bros Invitational Tourney.  The energy from the crowd was awesome, kinda wish I could've been in there.  Never been to an E3, but it looks like it'd be a lot of fun just for that.  Unfortunately I had to leave for most of it, so I missed any actual info that they released.  I came back in time for them to be showing-off some new game mode, but since I missed the intro, I wasn't really sure what was going on.  Something about gaining stats?  I dunno.  Really looking forward to the game.  I'll definitely be getting the 3DS version when it comes out; Wii U version if I have one.

Last game that I wanna talk about is Mario Maker.  The entire thing is a level editor for 2D Mario.  The feature I watched had graphics from both the original game, and from the "New" series of games.  Maybe you can make levels in the Mario 3 or Mario World style, but I don't know for sure.  It'd certainly be nice, but even with just the two styles it's pretty interesting.  Probably the neatest thing was the idea of creating a level for another player to try and beat, then he adds to it to make it harder and passes it on.  Just the whole idea of passing it back and forth until someone is unable to beat the level is kind of an awesome idea.  Which is to say nothing of the endless wealth of levels you'll be able to get online (or at least I hope it'll have that feature).  Sure there'll be a lot of lemon stages, but there'll be plenty of great ones as well.

Probably be more E3 tomorrow.  Until then, game well.

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