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Feature Articles > Features > E3 2006 - Day 2
The adventures of Cary and his dad, Randy, continue on Day 2 of the great big E3 show! Before I get on with more games and booths at E3, there are some things I forgot to mention in the last article. At Capcom's booth I played a neat 3-D action adventure game called Okami, which featured cel shaded graphics that made the game look like a Japanese painting. In Okami you play as a wolf, who is some kind of sun goddess in disguise, charged to save the world. Running around and attacking like a dog is fun enough, but the big feature of Okami is that at any time, you can change the background into a piece of paper. Then you use a calligraphy brush to draw things that can affect the world around you to solve puzzles and open pathways. Draw dabs in the sky to connect a constellation of stars and bring a dragon to life. A thick line can make a bridge or split open a gate. Okami looks to be a creative and fun PS2 adventure. The other thing I forgot to mention was back at Namco's mobile gaming booth, they had a Pac-Man competition going on all three days of the E3 show. Winners would get classic Pac-Man prizes. But I didn't enter because the competition was for the cell phone Pac-Man game only, which is hard to control and even harder to see. I couldn't even tell what my score would be if I won! Konami had tons of games at their booth. The Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer for PS3 was a big hit with show goers. But that's not really my kind of game. Konami had a HUGE display for Dance Dance Revolution that took up nearly half their booth. But what caught my eye was a little section dedicated to Frogger's 25th Anniversary. I was expecting to find a classic game of Frogger there, but instead I found a kiddie DS game called My Frogger Toy Trials. In this game you play as a boy, and Frogger is your pet. You're at some kind of toy pet competition and as soon as you arrive, a girl befriends you and her pet frog Lily takes a liking to Frogger. You can then walk around the island, talking to other visitors and little robots. Some robots will take you across the island on rubber rafts, and others will present challenges for your pet Frogger. These challenges play like the previous modern Frogger games. But for my money, I'd rather celebrate Frogger's 25th Anniversary by dodging cars and hopping on logs in the classic game. EA, being one of the largest video game publishers, had a lot of games at their booth, too. But nothing I was really interested in. Except for one. I've been reading a lot about a game called Spore by Will Wright, creator of the Sims. You can control the life on a planet, from amoebic beginnings to advanced critters who can travel to other planets. The concept seemed interesting but I still wasn't that into the game until I saw the E3 demo. It has a really cartoony look that I like, and I think I'll be paying more attention to Spore in the future. Activision is another one of those large publishing companies with a huge E3 booth and tons of games that I don't have much interest in. But they did have a half pipe set up at their booth with skateboarders doing stunts, and it was pretty entertaining watching them. They did that to promote Tony Hawk's new line of skateboard games, I reckon. Buena Vista games had a lot of Disney licensed titles, including Pirates of the Caribbean. Ubisoft had a video for their new Rayman game, but it was hard to get a bead on what the gameplay would be like since the video only showed Rayman dancing disco with an afro. Vivendi Universal had a big display for Eragon, a game based on the upcoming movie and book series which my little brothers love to read. My little brothers told me that Eragon was written by a homeschool student. I didn't know that! The Games Factory had a lot of licensed cartoon and movie games, including Strawberry Shortcake, Cartoon Network Racing, and a game based on the new CG Garfield movie, A Tale of Two Kitties. I'm surprised they're even making a sequel to that crappy movie, and while the video game looks like a generic 3-D platformer, at least the characters look really good. Natsume had another version of their popular Harvest Moon farming games, this time on the Nintendo DS. I bet you get to use the stylus to interact with your farm animals even more, like petting them, shearing sheep, or milking cows.
 D3 Publishing had two games that caught my eye. One was a Breakout/Arkanoid clone for the Nintendo DS called Break ‘Em All. The other one was a PSP game called Work Time Fun, which was called Baito Hell over in Japan. Work Time Fun is a collection of quirky mini-games, very similar to Wario Ware. In the demo I sorted photo-realistic baby chicks by gender (the girl chicks had red bows), and I chopped wood in a game with poorly drawn yet funny graphics. To trick you, sometimes they would place something else on the chopping block besides a piece of wood, and you'd have to refrain from chopping it. I accidentally chopped up a pink bunny this way, and it flew into two halved chunks. Probably not as family friendly as Wario Ware, as if the abbreviation of the name Work Time Fun didn't give that away anyway. Microsoft's Xbox 360 booth was as big and green as it has always been. They seemed to have a strong showing at this year's E3. Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 (and also the original Xbox) is still out of my price range, and there are not enough games for it that interest me anyway, so I didn't really spend as much time at the Xbox 360 booth. But I did pause and check out one new game in particular: Viva Piñata. It's kind of like a cross between Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing. You raise Piñata animals on a farm, customize them how you wish, and then trade them with other players on Xbox Live. I saw how you could customize a bear piñata by giving him a blue backpack to wear. Since the game was made by Rare, I wonder if the blue backpack on the bear was paying homage to another one of their older games: Banjo-Kazooie. To populate your piñata farm, you can trade with friends, catch them out in the wild, or have your own reproduce. In the demo they showed how two worm piñatas fell in love and did a cute little ‘romance dance' to make a new piñata egg. Sometimes you have to take care of piñata animals as well. The demo showed a mean raccoon piñata that was full of sour candy. He would attack other piñatas. You could break him open to get rid of him, but then his sour candy would spread around your farm and infect the other animals. So instead you could nurture and take care of the raccoon piñata instead and earn its trust and make it into a good piñata. The graphics were bright and colorful and the papier mache textures on the piñatas looked really great. They're even making a Saturday morning cartoon out of Viva Piñata already. If I ever got an Xbox 360, I think Viva Piñata would be the first game I would get for it. Sega's booth had lots of Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Monkey Ball. Super Monkey Ball Adventure takes the rolling monkeys and drops them into an adventure game. I rolled around the baby monkey across a lush vegetation landscape, talking to other monkeys and just doing some general exploring. Some flowers helped the baby monkey in a ball jump to higher ground, for instance. I found the controls to be a little bit too sensitive, but it may just take some getting used to. Monkey Ball fans need not worry as the puzzle challenges and mini-games were back in the demo. I played a four player mini-game that was kind of like Q*bert. Your monkey in a ball would hop around on blocks, changing the color of the top of the block to a specific color. You had to change as many blocks as you could to your color, but don't fall off and watch out for the other monkeys. Sega also had Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz for Nintendo Wii on display in video mode only. Too bad you couldn't play it. I saw two mini-games in the demo: a hammer throw game and a hurdles running race. It looked like players would shake the controller to make the monkeys run faster, and flicking the controller would make them jump over hurdles. Sonic is blasting off in three new games. Sonic Wild Fire is for the Nintendo Wii as well, but they showed even less of that at Sega's booth. I know what the title logo looks like and that's it. Sonic Rivals for the PSP features classic 2-D Sonic gameplay with 3-D graphics. It kind of looks like a Klonoa game, or the boss battles from Sonic Rush on the DS. The lush green classic style checkerboard backgrounds looked great, and there were lots of cool obstacles and things in the stage, like logs on the ground that Sonic could roll over and leap off of to reach new heights. Unfortunately, the ‘Rivals' title of this new PSP Sonic game may end up being the annoying part of the game. All throughout the level, Sonic had to race Shadow the Hedgehog. You could spin jump on Shadow to jump on his head and get a little boost, but it seemed that Shadow was always nipping at my heels, even though I was clearly going through the level faster than he was. And Shadow just BARELY beat me at the end. I think I'd rather just have a plain old Sonic game with those cool 2.5-D graphics on the PSP instead. Last was a new Sonic game on the PS3 and Xbox 360 called simply Sonic the Hedgehog. That was actually the only PS3 game I was interested in playing at the show. There were two levels on the demo. The first was Sonic's, and while the graphics looked great with lots of detail in the background, the loosey-goosey controls and camera made me run Sonic off of cliffs at every turn. It was very frustrating and I'm not convinced that this will be the ultimate 3-D Sonic game after all. The other level in the demo fared a little better. In it, you play as newcomer gray hedgehog Silver (Silver the Hedgehog? Come on Sega, can't you be a little more creative than that?). Silver couldn't run fast like Sonic, but he had powerful psychic moves at his disposal. He could levitate huge objects like crates, boulders, and even cars, and then charge up and fling them at enemies. The levitated objects you carry around glow with an eerie green color and it was cool to have boulders and cars hovering around you as you walk around. Silver could also use his psychic powers at certain places to bend steel bars and jump off of them like a diving board, or make platforms out of boulders and other objects. Behind all the poker and casino games at Crave's booth was some interesting kids' games, like VeggieTales. Titled LarryBoy and the Bad Apple, and supposedly based on an upcoming movie, you play as Larry the Cucumber in his imagined super hero form: LarryBoy. A bad apple is luring the citizens of LarryBoy's town to temptation, and the apple even trapped LarryBoy in the world of temptation, which in the demo looked like a world made out of candy and chocolate. I was tempted myself to reach out and munch on those platforms shaped like chocolate chip cookies! Luckily, LarryBoy gets help from his assistant and butler Alfred (Archibald Asparagus). The game uses voices from the cartoon, and Alfred helps LarryBoy all through the demo. "There's always a way out of temptation," he says. LarryBoy's adventure on the PS2 takes the form of a generic 3-D platformer. LarryBoy can do most of the required 3-D platformer hero moves, even though he has no arms and legs. Larry can double jump, glide with his cape, and do a spin attack with his plunger ears. He'll even have to find less violent ways to better his foes, like luring ghostly baddies to a vacuum suction vent. Some of the jumps were a little frustrating, so I made a suggestion later on to the development team that maybe they could add a move where LarryBoy grabs onto ledges with his plunger ears, since he doesn't have any hands. There is also a Game Boy Advance version of LarryBoy coming out that played more like a classic arcade 2-D ladders and platforms game like Donkey Kong. Behind the LarryBoy section of Crave's booth were two more GBA titles based on popular Cartoon Network properties Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends and Camp Lazlo. The Foster's game was a 2-D platformer where you controlled the little blue ghost monster guy as he collected scribbles from around the house, just like that episode of the cartoon. The Lazlo game was very early and I only played an annoying berry picking mini-game. Both games looked kind of bland and generic, which is a shame because the Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends cartoon is brilliant. I also played another game by Crave called Gun Club. Using the NRA license, Gun Club has you using the PS2 to guide a cursor around to aim many types of guns and shoot down targets at shooting grounds. I think the game would've been more fun with a light gun controller, though.
 THQ also had many types of games to play at their booth, and they had a strong lineup of kids' games as well. Most of them were Nickelodeon licenses, like Barnyard, SpongeBob Squarepants: Creature from the Krusty Krab, Monster House, and Avatar, the Last Airbender. All the games looked like generic 3-D plaformers except for Avatar, which looked like a 3-D sidescrolling beat-em-up like Final Fight. The guy showing me the Avatar game said that is Nickelodeon's most popular cartoon right now, and the cutscenes in the game looked exactly like the show. But my favorite kid game from THQ at E3 was Cars, based on the upcoming computer animated Pixar movie. It's a racing game, of course, and it featured excellent graphics. Race as all the characters from the movie and you could give them custom paint jobs, too. I could tell the Cars game would have loads of personality since when you bump or pass cars, they would talk to each other. And since you're controlling a living car, their whole bodies would lean into the turns. You could earn "safe driver" bonus points by passing cars without hitting them, or get trick points for doing things like tilting and riding on two wheels. Cars also features driving based mini-games. In one, Luigi (the car, not the plumber) drove around town finding hidden tires. The game had a rock n roll soundtrack with vocals, presumably from the film. I can't wait to see the Cars movie now. Last on our tour of South Hall's booths was GameTap. GameTap provides an online service where you can play over 500 games and watch original online shows as well. Play arcade classics and PC games and even some Sega Dreamcast games via GameTap. At their booth they were doing some live recordings of online shows like Space Ghost Coast 2 Coast. With upcoming Sam & Max episodic point and click adventure games, and rare Namco arcade classics to play like MetroCross and Hopping Mappy--all for only ten bucks a month, GameTap looks mighty tempting to me. If I had more time in my day, I'd definitely check it out. I think they sold my dad on GameTap as well. He has five other little boys, and at their house, it's hard to keep up with all the game CDs and cases and systems and controllers. GameTap would make things a bit easier for them, although now my dad would have to sell that idea to his wife and the boys! After South Hall we went down below to Kentia Hall. Kentia has more of the smaller game and accessory companies, so there really wasn't much of anything of interest down there. But there were some neat finds here and there. The Classic Gaming Expo people were back with displays of classic consoles and arcade cabinets you could play. Lots of mobile phone game companies were at Kentia, and Hudson Soft, makers of Bomberman, had a cell phone puzzle game featuring characters from Milon's Secret Castle, one of my favorite NES games. Red Octane was also there showing off the sequel to their hit Guitar Hero game, and their booth was crowded with people rocking out. On the way over to West Hall where Sony and Nintendo were, we stopped by some other game company booths. I didn't have time to check out all of LucasArts games because I had a meeting with Nintendo soon after, but I did check out LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. It has all the fun and humor of the first game, set in the worlds and storylines of the original Star Wars trilogy. You can ride on vehicles during the levels now, like the AT-ST walkers. But you have to build them out of LEGO bricks first! Those dinosaurs that the stormtroopers ride on poop out brown LEGO bricks—don't touch those! Characters have special attacks like Chewbacca, who rips the arms off of LEGO stormtroopers. I think I'm the only person in the world who liked the Ewoks, so I had to ask if they were playable (and they are, yay!). You can mix and match character LEGO body parts to make your own special character to play in the levels. The lady at the demo station made a character with Chewbacca's head, a pink hair piece, Leia's slave outfit body, and a pink lightsaber! LEGO Star Wars II comes out on nearly all consoles the same day the original trilogy will be released on DVD, September 12 (three days before my birthday, too). Another game I saw at LucasArts' booth was ThrillVille, an amusement park simulation game like Roller Coaster Tycoon. Except this was a bit more interactive. You controlled a guy walking around the park, like a 3-D platformer, and you could talk to each and every guest (there were a lot), and find out what they would like to see in your amusement park. I wish I had time to see more of LucasArts' games, like their new Indiana Jones title and a PSP music game. SNK had a really cool booth last year, but this year they were a bit more subdued. SNK has a really exciting upcoming lineup, but I was kind of disappointed with their playable showings at E3. I was hoping they'd have a playable version of their upcoming SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS. Card Fighters Clash was my favorite game on the Neo Geo Pocket Color. It was a card battle game featuring characters from popular SNK and Capcom games, and I thought it was more fun than Pokemon. The only playable games they had at E3 was Metal Slug Collection for PSP, which will have all six games on one UMD. They also had a new King of Fighters game and an early version of Metal Slug for GBA that had all the stages, but no enemies. They did mention details about Metal Slug Collection for the Nintendo Wii, which will have extra bonuses and features. You might be able to use the Nintendo Wii remote controller to do things like throw grenades by flicking the remote. Atari had a lot of games but I was only able to check out one: HOT PXL. It's a PSP game that's just a collection of mini-games like Wario Ware. HOT PXL features street art style graphics done by an artist. He was there, but I couldn't talk to him because he was being interviewed by a TV station. The thing I liked about HOT PXL was some of the stages were based on old Atari games. I played a mini-game that was like BreakOut, for instance. Midway had an assortment of games and I tried out a few. The Ant Bully, based on an upcoming movie, looked like your typical 3-D platformer. The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, based on the popular Cartoon Network show, played like a fighting game similar to Super Smash Bros. or Power Stone. There is going to be a Spy Hunter movie coming out starring The Rock and they have a game of that, too. West Hall is mostly filled up by Sony and Nintendo, but a few other game companies squeeze in there as well. I really wish I could tell you about Tecmo's games, but every year the only thing they have at their E3 booth is a stage show with a bunch of booth ladies. All I could glean from their booth was that I think they're making a new Dead or Alive Volleyball game and a new Tokobot game. Finally, Altus had a very strong showing of games this year. Twice as many games as they've had before! GBA titles include two games based off the popular B-Daman marble shooting toys, two games based off the Super Robot Wars series, and Yggdrasil Union from the makers of Riviera. On the Nintendo DS, one of their games coming out is Touch Detective, a mystery point and click game with a unique art style and characters. Atlus' partner, Nippon Ichi, had Disagea 2 for PS2 on hand. And Atlus had a video for their launch title for the Nintendo Wii: Trauma Center: Second Opinion. It's a sequel to the DS Trauma Center title. On the DS game, you used the stylus to perform surgery, and you'll do the same thing in the sequel with the Nintendo Wii remote controller. Except in the sequel you may get to move the controller toward and away from the screen as well, perhaps to perform injections. But my favorite game at Atlus' booth was Steambot Chronicles. Called Bumpy Trot in Japan, Steambot Chronicles is an action-RPG set in an Industrial Revolution world, except instead of cars, people ride around in walking mechs called Trotmobiles. It's like a Miyazaki cartoon come to life. Steambot features an open ended gameplay experience, and some of the things you can do remind me of other games like Animal Crossing. Steambot Chronicles has charming characters, settings, and translations, and I highly recommend that anyone with a PS2 gets it when it comes out May 23. And I think that's enough for now. In the third and final part of my E3 article, I'll talk about the PS3, first party games for the PSP and DS, and at long last—the Nintendo Wii!
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