Loafing at E3: the Sony booth
June 22, 2009 at 12:24 pm by Garrett Martin in Games & Tech
Unchartered 2: Among Thieves screenshot
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
PlayStation 3
Rated T for Teen
All told, third-person shooter Uncharted 2 might’ve been the best game at E3 this year. Its strongest rivals were games that were only playable for judges (Splinter Cell: Conviction, Assassin’s Creed 2) and quirky underdogs like Scribblenauts. It’s difficult to adequately gauge a game’s quality after only playing the multiplayer for maybe 10 minutes, but Uncharted 2 impresses so thoroughly in so many ways that it’s hard to not be excited.
Like its predecessor, Uncharted 2 promises to be highly cinematic without resorting to long-winded cut-scenes. During the single-player scene demonstrated at Sony’s press conference and in a private session in Sony’s booth, gameplay and narrative bleed seamlessly into one another, as lead character Nathan Drake avoided a helicopter by scampering through various blasted-out buildings. That chopper was a total asshole. Drake used environmental objects like desks and tables for impromptu cover, and scurried about in a freewheeling fashion that reminded me of the guy in Infamous, but slower and with less freedom. Drake had the help of a few support characters, including Elena from the first Uncharted, which means co-op play must be a possibility. This tiny fragment of gameplay was almost unnervingly exciting. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to try it myself.
The new multiplayer mode was playable, though. The squad-based deathmatch was standard stuff, like Call of Duty but with a third-person viewpoint and light parkour elements. It’s just distinctive enough to make an impression, though. I assume the single-player’s controls will mirror the multiplayer’s, which were responsive without being jittery or floaty, and didn’t take any time to get used to. The game sure looked pretty, too, with surprising detail in the architecture and character designs.
Again, it’s way too early to tell definitively, but Uncharted 2 is in exceedingly fine form thus far.
MAG
PlayStation 3
Tentative release date in the third quarter of 2009
Rating pending
MAG stands for Massive Action Game, which, despite being a completely horrible title, is a fairly accurate description of the game. MAG is an online-only first-person shooter that supports up to 256 players. So now you can have your sexuality questioned by an entire school’s worth of 12-year-olds at once.
At first, not so shockingly, MAG felt like another standard first-person shooter. I joined up with one of the game’s three warring factions, spawned on a sprawling battlefield, and ran around looking for enemies to kill. Differences quickly became apparent, though. My platoon had specific goals that didn’t just include rampant murder. After penetrating the enemies’ defenses, some of us had to protect our newly gained territory while others progressed deeper into their complex. Meanwhile, other platoons from my army were waging war on opposite sides of the map; I couldn’t see them, but I could hear the explosions and gunfire from their battles.
With massive armies and missions that constantly evolve during large engagements, MAG is more complex than a typical online shooter. The immediate gameplay might be overly familiar, but with wider, overarching goals and an emphasis on hierarchy and order following, MAG can be enjoyed both as a straight-ahead shooter and as a Risk-style strategy game viewed from the ground instead of a war room.
Heavy Rain
PlayStation 3
Release date and rating pending
For more than a year, Heavy Rain’s been hyped as a game that’ll bridge the uncanny valley, presenting photorealistic graphics that won’t creep technophobes out. It wants to be a moving cinematic experience, but it looks more like “Law & Order: Special Dragon’s Lair Unit.” The demo at E3 revealed the game to be a series of unexciting contextual button presses, in the style of Shenmue’s quick time events. There were some unique and promising techniques that unite gameplay and storytelling, like controller response becoming sluggish or erratic to reflect the character’s nerves. It wasn’t fun to play, though, and I wasn’t impressed by the writing or dialogue in the scene I played, either. It was simply bad crime fiction boilerplate, with a troubled tough-guy cop tussling with an imposing murder suspect in a junkyard. Again, I can’t judge Heavy Rain’s overall quality based on 15 minutes, but this demo dampened my interest.
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