Arnold-KatayevE3, I No Find You Attractive Anymore! ….NOT!
I've got more to say about E3 this week. Specifically, how its
relevance may have drastically been downgraded, largely because
of its timing. With E3 previously in May, it allowed the industry
to reveal games just in time for the holiday push. The holiday
push is a PR timetable that begins at the end of Spring, and
that's precisely when E3 used to land. Being in July, E3 is now
past that 'push' time, and which makes it un-ideal for game
announcements and revelations.
By this time in the years before, E3 would've just ended and we'd
just be coming back home. While there was no E3, companies
weren't going to let the pivotal month of May go to waste. If you
noticed, a lot of games and announcements were made over the past
week or so. The E3 of yesterday has essentially been replaced by
private Gamer's Day events, such as Sony's event. Much like Sony,
Square-Enix also had a lot to reveal, much of which was Final
Fantasy, but an entire event was put together, regardless. Other
publishers and developers made a plethora of announcements, and
suddenly our work load feels almost no different than what it was
during past E3s. While E3 as we knew it is done with and changed,
it hasn't changed the fact that May will remain the most pivotal
month for game companies to reveal their upcoming plans.
So now that we've got a whole bunch of cats out of their bags and
the PR train is rolling, the next thing left to do is let 2000 of
us go and play these games (plus other unannounced stuff) and
make our impressions even more public. These recent gamer's day
events allowed publications nearby the expo to check out the
games, which means not that many people have been exposed to
these games just yet – E3 will change that. Still, I can't help
but feel a bit apprehensive when it comes down to my expectations
for the show. Honestly, I'm going in with pretty low
expectations.
I Want Off This Ride They Call a Videogame…*hurls*
The next topic at hand regards games that are so poorly developed
that they can induce nausea and motion sickness to the point of
vomiting. Most recently, I've endured some seriously nauseating
gameplay after playing F.E.A.R and Spider-Man 3 back to back most
of last week. FEAR's choppy framerate really made it hard to play
the game any further than half an hour. But Spider-Man 3 was
probably even worse, not only does its framerate absolutely suck,
but the game's camera is absurdly wild.
There's a danger to games developed like this, largely because of
how easily it provokes nausea. Maybe I'm getting old or something
(I'm 22, so that can't be it), but so many of these games have
these wild camera swings and stuttering framerates. And I know
I'm not the only one who complains about feeling sick and having
a headache, many of my friends do too. Developers need to realize
what they're doing, and publishers need to stop allowing crap
like this go through just so they can meet a deadline. Either
force your staff to work harder on the game to iron out its kinks
before the deadline, or don't publish a broken turd that is
making me sick after I play it. I get these games for free; but
worst of all, I feel sorry for the people who pay $60 + tax for
them. Spider-Man 3 sold over 210k copies on the PS2 and Xbox 360
combined, within 3 days – and that's just for those two consoles.
This Fantasy Isn't That Final…
Lastly, after seeing Square-Enix's plans for Final Fantasy, I'm
glad that the series seems to be primarily staying on Sony
consoles. I was also happy to see Square-Enix reiterate that the
core Final Fantasy games were exclusive to the PlayStation 3. I
also feel as if I may have stumbled on to something I believe is
quite correct: we'll be seeing a Final Fantasy VII remake on the
PlayStation 3. Square is doing quite a lot of Final Fantasy VII
whoring, and I'm not being funny, I'm just stating the truth. You
see, a lot of people don't know what Final Fantasy VII is all
about, since it is a 10 year old PlayStation game, which would
have made quite a number of PS3 and PSP owners today too young to
have played it.
So with all of these FFVII based spin-offs, prequels, and movie
sequels, Square-Enix is clearly working on getting that
hype-train to chug at full speed for the 'real' thing.
Watch, as soon as FFVII: Crisis Core is released for the PSP in
Japan in a few months, there'll be some sort of announcement made
regarding FFVII to coincide with its release. And there's a good
chance that the Final Fantasy VII remake has actually been the
reason for Crisis Core various delays. Square probably wants to
have the remake follow Crisis Core's release within a certain
time frame, and so if development on the remake hits bumpy roads,
Crisis Core has to suffer.
But that's just my crazy, wild theory…