So E3 hasn’t even started, but in less than five minutes of poking around the usual places I’ve come to find out that…
- Twilight Princess will use the Wii-mote to sword fight, shoot arrows, and go fishing.
- It appears that there’s definitely going to be a Star Wars lightsaber game for the Wii after-all.
- The new Wii Tony Hawk game is officially the first “Oh God, are all Wii games going to look this under-powered?” train.
- Yuji Naka has left the building (that being Sega HQ) to form his own company. Which is being funded by Sega anyway…
- Virtua Fighter 5 will be for the PS3 only.
- Lumines might be coming to Xbox Live.
- Ouendan is coming to the US with a different name, different art, and different music (so it’ll practically be a new game).
- So is Magical Vacation 2 (yes!).
- As well as BaitoHell Master (and its going to be called WTF).
- And I have no clue how I could have possible missed this wonderful piece of PR magic courtesy of my old bosses at Ubi Soft. As they would say, it’s “tres super cool!!!”
Plus here’s an example of that annoying pre-E3 bitching I talked about before which is nothing more than a transparent vehicle by game journalists to show everyone how awesome they are. Specifically…
Look, I’ve been with IGN for a freaking decade. During E3 week, I don’t EVER see my family. I wake up before they wake up. I return after they’ve been asleep for ours. My head constantly aches. I pop pills. I never get stuck in traffic because at 4:00 am, there is no traffic. That’s E3. It’s the dumbest freaking idea anyone could ever have. Show one gazillion games at the same time.
Who is it for? Who is E3 catering to at this point? Retailers, media buyers… the press? Gamers?
Nope, it’s a damn pissing match is all it is. Three guys get together in the loo and cross streams. Then the doors open and a hundred more come in and piss in the sink. Since there’s not enough room, they piss all over each other. That’s E3.
E3 will not be the death of you. It will be hard. It will make you even more nervous than you usually are. Things will break. Connections will go down. Websites will crash (for example, my prediction is that GA Forums will be down within three minutes of the first Wii footage being shown).
We’ll all be working really hard. You’ll have new-found respect for people you thought you hated. You’ll hate people you thought you had respect for. When the dust settles and you’ve published 9 billion gazillion videos, readers will say “YOUR COVERAGE SUCKED! I DIDN’T SEE A CLIP OF MONKEY UNITED SOCCER DESTRUCTION LEAGUE!!!1!” You will be sad. We all will be sad. Then we look at our traffic reports and we go “holy crap, look at all those people.” Then we look at our E3 indexes and we’ll go “who the hell is ever going to read/watch/view all that stuff?”
Then it hits you. It’s not about giving the readers what they want. It’s all a test. Some being up in space — floating naked in protoplasm — is testing you. Can you survive this exercise in futility without going insane? Can you get through it without killing someone? Will you have respect left for the people that built your publishing tools? Or the people that read your site?
Then you look back at what you did during “E3 week.” And you will be proud. And you’ll sleep. And the next E3 will be 362 days away.
… Again, I can’t stand game journalists who act as if they have the hardest and most important jobs in the world, the same ones who think they are the news. Sorry, but I’m still suffering from allergies, hence the bitching.
But hey, check out the trailer for Pac Man: The Movie.. Though this has yet to be topped.
