I think it may come as no surprise that I'm not much of a journalist. Let's not mention the fact that CTZ and TopGear already covered most of the juicy tidbits of information in their respective posts. Sooo, rather than attempting to give you a half-assed recap of every game, I will simply link you to the pertinent information! (Hint: Commando3 comes with SF2 HD beta.) Instead, I can provide you with a recap of the event from my perspective as a gamer. I will try to give you as much information as I can about my two favorite parts of the spectacular Capcom Digital Day. (Hint: eating food and playing games)
So, without further ado here is my recap for any of you other fellow night-owls/vampires.
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After a terrible 2-hour drive from Sacramento to San Mateo, let it be known that I am now absolutely terrified of Bay Area traffic. When I pulled into the parking lot of Capcom HQ, I let out a sigh of relief and took a moment to thank a number of various deities for allowing me to live to game that day.
As I walked in the front door I immediately noticed the cold, grim, calculating stare that the guard at the front desk was giving me behind his thick glasses. I knew, one false move... and I would be forcibly removed from the premises. I timidly walked up the the table where they were presenting name badges, apologized for being late, and was shuffled off into an extremely crowded room to catch the tail end of the presentation.
THEN IT WAS ON!!!
I grabbed a cup of orange juice, downed it like I had been walking through a desert for the past two hours, and took a much needed leak.
THEN IT WAS REALLY ON!!!
I dashed back to the room as quickly as I could and of course by dashed, I mean walked briskly, and hopped on Street Fighter 2 HD right away! As I'm sure many of you have probably been reading everywhere else, it was sooo damned pretty! The characters and backgrounds all looked extremely well done, if that's not enough top it of by the fact that it was running in full widescreen 1080p glory. The game played exactly how you would expect SF2 to play and in conjunction with the amazing new visuals and sound/music, that is honestly a very good thing!
To my surprise, there was no one else playing. I grabbed the closest person and challenged them to a match. It happened to be a fellow from GameSpot. I got the chance to play against a guy from Capcom as well, of course he kicked my ass most rounds.. but nevertheless, it was pure win! Apparently GameSpot was capturing footage via live feed the entire time, so if you watch their newest footage... well anything but the black or orange colored Ryu and Ken is probably me. ^_^
Needless to say, I was the most excited to finally get my hands on SF2 HD, but there were a lot of other great games being played at the event as well.
I would have to say that my favorites were definitely the new 1942 and Commando 3 for XBLA. I got the chance to play 1942 with a guy who I think was the Design Director (of course, don't quote me if I'm wrong.) while GamerTV took some gameplay footage and did an interview. I was also fortunate enough to try out Commando 3 with the same guy as well as the Art Director while Gamer.TV interviewed them.
Both titles were very solid co-op arcade experiences. 1942 definitely seemed to stick true to its roots. For those of you that may have never played it before, it is a WW2-themed vertical scrolling schmup in which each player controllers one of a few various planes. One of the key differences that should be noted was that the game is now presented in full widescreen which definitely adds a new level of challenge to maneuvering your plane through the stages.
Commando, a series I was completely unfamiliar with prior to playing Commando 3 at the event, was a 3-player co-op vertical scrolling schmup. There is definitely less bullet-dodging and more straight up action than a game like 1942. The game focuses on 3 soldiers on the ground, so you can imagine the gameplay experience is still going to be quite different even though it is essentially the same genre. I saw all the staples, weapon upgrades, super powers, and even an awesome boss fight were all implemented in the build that we played. Even vehicles were present in the game and could be operated by all 3 players at once allowing them to mow down everything in their path with relative ease.
For my short time with each of the games I actually had a ridiculous amount of fun and will most definitely be picking them up when they hit XBLA later this Spring/Summer. Of course, it helps that Commando 3 will be including a beta for SF2 HD! :D
For fear of dragging this post on too long and because I didn't get enough time to do an honest recap of some of the games I will refer you to CTZ's reviews for the rest of the games.
So, to wrap it up. It was an awesome fun time. I was so lucky to be invited out for the event and it was well worth the nightmarish two-hour drive. I got hang out with and meet a lot of awesome people, play games before everyone else, and even eat free lunch. Capcom was so considerate, they even had some pretty damned good cheese sandwiches for those of us that don't consume flesh of the living.
"Good evening. The following story is one that needs to be told, and told through pictures. To keep the site work safe on the main page, the pictures are going to be included in the post below this one. However, I will use this space to ensure that our resident Fluff Girl, Miyavi, gets the due attention she wants & deserves."
The Game Developers Choice Awards for 2008 took place on Wednesday the 20th and because I am too tired to post anything that requires significant work or thought right now, here are the results of the show. Below are the awards and the criteria by which the winners were judged in the order that they were presented. The few pictures I managed to take are at the bottom of the post, sorry most of them are so blurry... it was the best I could do with my camera phone. :(
Best Game Design The Best Game Design Award recognizes the overall excellence of design in a game - including, but not limited to, gameplay mechanics, playability, play balancing, and level design.
Portal
Best Debut Game The Best Debut Game Award recognizes the best game from any development studio which released its first publicly available title in the year 2007.
Crackdown (Cracktime)
Best Audio The Best Audio Award recognizes the overall excellence of audio in a game - including, but not limited to, sound effects, musical composition, sound design, orchestration, etc.
BioShock
Best Downloadable Game Best Downloadable Game Award recognizes the overall best game released on console or PC platforms specifically and solely for digital download - with an emphasis on smaller, more 'casual'-friendly titles.
Flow
Best Technology The Best Technology Award recognizes the overall excellence of technology in a game - including, but not limited to, graphics programming, artificial intelligence, networking, and physics.
Crysis
Ambassador Award The Ambassador Award honors an individual or individuals who have helped the game industry advance to a better place, either through facilitating a better game community from within, or by reaching outside the industry to be an advocate for video games and help further our art.
Jason Della Rocca
Innovation Award The Innovation Award recognizes the single game that demostrates true innovation, advances the state of the art, and pushes the boundaries of games as an expressive medium.
Portal
Best Visual Arts The Best Visual Arts Award recognizes the overall excellence of visual art in a game - including, but not limited to, art direction, animation, modeling, character design, texture creation, and so on.
BioShock
Pioneer Award The Pioneer Award (formely known as the First Penguin Award) celebrates those individuals who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history - paving the way for the myriads who followed them.
Ralph Baer
Best Handheld Game Best Handheld Game Award recognizes the overall best game commercially released on any handheld platform during 2007.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Best Writing The Best Writing Award recognizes the overall excellence of storytelling in a game - including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, dialogue, and other major factors.
BioShock
Lifetime Achievement Award The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of a developer who has made an indelible impact on the craft of game development and games as a whole.
Sid Meier
Game of the Year The Game of the Year Award recognizes the choice of game developers for the overall best game release during 2007.
Portal
As you can see, Portal and BioShock dominated with 6 out of the 10 total awards combined including Game of the Year. I'm sure this much was expected by gamers who played either of the two amazing titles last year.
All award descriptions were taken from the GDCA website.
As of today, Jan. 16, 2008, Sheik has been announced on the official site for Super Smash Brothers Brawl!
Use Zelda’s down special move to transform into Sheik! Once you do so, you’ll have access to a new character completely unique from Zelda.
Sheik doesn’t appear in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but we based her model on a design that was drafted up during the development of that game.
So, I officially have my Expo Pass for Game Developer's Conference 2008. The question I have now is: Who else is going? I definitely don't want to be wandering around the Moscone Center the whole time trying to find someone that looks familiar to talk to! Comment below and/or add me to your myGDC.
The original article is here. Curse was kind enough to provide the translation below.
The boy Hans Joergen Olsen were outside walking in the woods with his 10 year old sister when suddenly an angry moose attacked them.
- "My sister ran away, but I tried to scare the moose. When I noticed the moose wasn't stopping I started to run also. The moose chased me and after a while I had no strength left to run." says the boy to the Norwegian newspaper Avisen.
The moose head butted him in the back, but the impact was absorbed by his backpack. When he fell to the ground he did a trick he usually does on "World of Warcraft."
- "When you get to level 30 you learn the skill "Feign Death", so that is what I did, and after a little while the moose walked away" says Hans to the newspaper.
That is definitely one hunter I would want in my party. When things go wrong, he pulls aggro off the priest and prepares to take one for the team.
Ok, so I didn't exactly mean that last part literally, that's just what they happen to call your first time attending the convention. So, CTZ already covered Yaoi-con on the CBlogs as well as Jtor, but I figured it needed a second opinion especially since I managed to somehow survive the entire weekend at the con. Of course, before I really get into the post I would like to preface it by saying that I am by no means a fan of Yaoi, but I'm not really offended by the stuff either. I am just a silly nerd who enjoys a broad range of anime and the thrill of attending related events. So now that we have that out of the way...
What is Yaoi and what is Yaoi-con? Honestly, the best description is going to be found directly on their website. Don't worry, it is completely safe for work as Yaoi is not necessarily porn or hentai. If you are too lazy to click, Yaoi is basically boy love and the convention, like any anime convention, is a gathering and celebration of that. It should also be noted that Yaoi is typically created by females and for a predominantly female audience.
So what the hell goes on there? Well, like any decent sized convention they have all the standard events that one might expect to see. For those of you who may have never attended a convention before they would typically include things such as an AMV contest, cosplaymasquerade, panels, anime viewing rooms, gaming center, artists, and dealers. Yaoi-con also has a few unique events which include a maid cafe, bingo night, and auction, all of which more often than not featured scantily clad bishounen men.
The maid cafe is basically a makeshift restaurant with male waiters who serve and chat with the patrons, nothing too crazy. Bingo night is a little bit more exciting, winning a round results in getting the man of your choice to take off an article of clothing on stage in front of hundreds of screaming fan girls. The auction deserves its own section entirely.
What!? An Auction you say? The auction was a completely different beast and definitely takes the cake as far as entertainment for the weekend goes. It is a four hour event and also happens to be the main form of fund raising for the convention. The Bishounen Auction typically involves one of the many bishounen performing some sort of act on stage. What they perform can be anything ranging from a simple song and dance to any other number of other random and sometimes unspeakable acts. After the performance, and this is where the fund raising comes in, bidding begins at a mere $10 and proceeds in a standard auction style. The bidders raise their cards and the price increases by increments of $10, $50, and $100 depending on how high the bid gets. The winner of the bid receives the pleasure of spending a measly two hours with the bishounen of their dreams. All of the money goes back to the convention, but never before in my life did I imagine that I would witness so many desperate girls willing to fork over more than a thousand dollars for the privilege of hanging out with some random dude.
Any unofficial events? In addition to the standard fare, con attendees will sometimes organize unofficial cosplay gatherings or events. The events are always different and can be something simple like a gathering of all the characters from a specific anime to eat and take photos. I've even seen people hold marches through the city simply for the sake of frightening the rest of the population. Every once in awhile though there is an event that really stands out, something out of the ordinary that people usually remember. For those of you who might be familiar with Naruto, on Saturday they held an awesome marriage ceremony in complete Yaoi-con style at the hotel. I would try to describe it, but I managed to get permission to post a picture instead!
Is it as scary as CTZ made it sound? It certainly could be if you let it, but you can also have a whole lot of fun too. Sure there is definitely a lot of weird shit that goes on at anime conventions, Yaoi-con especially for that matter. You are always going to run into the extremely weird and stereotypical nerds, it is pretty much unavoidable. Fortunately, most of them are pretty nice and honestly they will probably never deliberately bug you unless you want them to.
For any fairly normal person this probably would be the last thing you would ever want to spend your weekend doing. On the other hand, if you are a fan of anime, cosplay, Japanese culture in general, and especially meeting other people who share similar interests then it is definitely worth it to check out a convention at least once in your lifetime. Of course, I wouldn't necessarily recommend attending Yaoi-con, especially not as your first convention, unless you are a. extremely secure in your sexuality or b. very open-minded. I actually feel really bad that CTZ was so weirded out by the whole thing as it is definitely not what a normal convention such as Fanime would have been like. I definitely did have quite a bit of weird shit happen to me over the course of the weekend, but I'm unfortunately (or fortunately) going to leave it out of this post. Feel free to inquire further if you are really that interested.
For those of you interested in all things Japanese and plastic, the new Final Fantasy Tactics Trading Arts as well as the Final Fantasy Miniature Trading Figures are now available at Play-Asia.com. They are apparently a limited availability item, so if you must have them make sure to pick some up soon. For those who don't know what the point of them are, they are typically highly sought after collectibles and work kinda like Gashapon. The figures run 5-7 dollars each, plus shipping obviously, and in return they send you a random figure in a sealed box. The idea is to collect them all, but since the boxes have no distinguishable markings, you have no idea what is inside until you open it up. There is always a chance that you will get duplicates while trying to purchase an entire set and that is where the trading part comes in. Of course, if you must know what you are buying before you purchase it you can always go to an anime convention or wait until a specialty shop picks them up. They typically sell complete sets for about 2-3 times what it would cost to purchase them at retail. Of course this can either be more or less expensive than you would normally pay depending on how unlucky you are! Good luck.
Your friendly neighborhood Ass Ricky here blogging from my mediocre hotel room in Downtown Los Angeles. After a good 7 hours on the road I finally made it and in one piece fortunately! With the E for All now roughly 10 hours away I was interested to find out who else has already arrived or at least plans on being here soon. Feel free to leave a comment below and hopefully we can all get together at some point over these next few days.
Attached photos:
My Setup PC: (lame)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
1GB (512MBx2) DDR-SDRAM
ATI Radeon X800 Pro (AGP)
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS
Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA HDD
Samsung 17" SyncMaster 997DF Flat CRT
Logitech X-530 5.1 Speakers
Favorite Genres:
RPG's, Shooters, MMO's, Strategy, Action/Adventure, Puzzle, Fighting, Tactics, Simulation, Racing, Survival Horror. Basically, just about anything except for Sports games.
Favorite Games of All Time:
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, Harvest Moon, Pokemon, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Breath of Fire III, Star Ocean: Second Story, Monster Rancher, Resident Evil 2, Fallout, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Neverwinter Nights, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Final Fantasy X, Shadow of the Colossus, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Gears of War, BioShock, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Interests:
Computer and Video Games, Game Design, Journalism, CCG's, Anime, Manga, Japanese, Collectibles, High-Fantasy, Writing, teh Intarwebs.
