Zero Punctuation: The E3 Trailer Park
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
Recommended Videos
very true and thank you for pointing that out yahtzee... (when he talked of all the games being sequals)... im just wondering... huxley anyone? what happened to that MMOFPS that i heard of so long ago...? i thought i saw it was supposed to come out this year but i have not heard of anything from it... and also i am sad that he did not talk about fable 2... but then again that is in fact a sequal... and would probably get the same schtick as all the other games basically looking fancy but not to live up to the hype... but the fact that everything that has been hyped has been shown to be in the game that in fact is finished but is coming out in october? (lets see july august september october... four months... WHY MUST YOU BE SO CRUEL PETER?) I for one have high hopes of fable 2 and i may just be one of the only ones (yes you can call me a fan boy... what yahtzee is to valve is me as to lionhead studios)
just one touch on PoP... one person alluded to PoP taking from Assassin's Creed... although i havn't seen very much of that i have to say PoP taking on crackdown graphics seems interesting but very gutsy...
just one touch on PoP... one person alluded to PoP taking from Assassin's Creed... although i havn't seen very much of that i have to say PoP taking on crackdown graphics seems interesting but very gutsy...
A transcript from me in my groovy pants still looking for my socks
The E3 Trailer Park
A cynic can be described as someone who doesn?t hold out hope that anything in the future will be good. And frankly, I find it harder and harder to understand why any gamer wouldn?t be a cynic at this point. Film starring Morgan Freeman would have you believe that hope is your magical shield against the tribulations of life. But the games industry has collectively taken that shield and shoved it up our ass so many times, it?s probably time we started leaving it at home. To put it in another, less stupid way, if you go by the evidence of the last 10 years and just assume that the new Sonic the Hedgehog is just going to be the usual punnit of snot, then you won?t get you?re heart rebroken.
So an appropriately mediocre E3 has limped past for this mediocre year in gaming. Nintendo have proudly announced their intention to make the Wii do what it was always supposed to anyway. While Microsoft and Sony busily compete to see who can rip off each others consoles the most. And of course, a gaggle of upcoming game trailers were wheeled out to stir up excitement. But since the eventual quality of most games is going to be essentially determined by spinning a roulette wheel where the numbers one through thirty have all been smeared with puss, I thought I?d better fly in and point out that we?re still living in a cruel corporate run society that treats you like a wallet mounted on the back of an entranced magpie. So here?s why all ye should abandon hope for the shiny objects being held up for us to gawp at.
First up Prince of Persia, now I thought the sands of time trilogy was the best game series of the last console generation. I?ll pause for a moment so you can all go find your socks that just blew off. Ok, so the combat in game one was a basket of farts, and game two stumbled a bit when the prince went off his angst medication. But over all the characters were solid and the time controlling game play worked crazy well with the sudden death platforming, to the point that I now feel my fingers unconsciously groping for the rewind button every time my toast lands butter side down. And it seems the new Prince of Persia is going to take all that and piss boiling oil into its eye sockets. Leaving aside for now that the music in the background sounds like someone teased a cat?s bollocks with pliers for a few minutes while throwing ball bearings at a piano keyboard, the setting seems to have shifted from historical Persia to somewhere between Final Fantasy 10 and 12. And by the look of the character design the concept artist has been spending more then a few holidays there himself. Maybe Prince of Persia?s appeal lies in the grounding of reality dusted with the fantastic elements of Arabian myth, but Fuck That! The kids are into anime these days and let?s all jump around on the ceiling dressed like twats.
Speaking of which, Final Fantasy 13 also has a trailer and it looks good. Of course it looks it always Looks good. But my philosophy with game trailers is that footage of prerendered cinematics doesn?t count, so bearing that in mind, the actual length of the FF13 trailer is around point three of a second. The rest consists of androgynous twelve year olds running around being improbably awesome and giving absolutely no hints as to storyline. But as an educated guess I?d say it involves some kind of evil authority, one or more heroes who were once associated with the same, a half baked anti industrial hippy sub text, and all in all will closely resemble what you?d get if George Lucas?s brain fell out and he made a new Star Wars movie with everything that was ever good about it replaced with dodgy CG and laughable angst. Oh wait.
The new Resident Evil 5 footage indicates that Capcom are counteracting the accusations of racism by including an African female sidekick resembling a white woman who?s been dipped in tea. I?m sure the game play will be fine because Resident Evil 4 was fine, and bugger all seems to have changed except now we?ve traded up from infected Spanish peasant village to infected African peasant village, and the dialogue is still going to be so bad that every single line hurls you out of the experience like you?re on a fucking trebuchet.
Now then, Fallout 3. Those of that are paying attention will no doubt notice that all these games are sequels, and for those of you who aren?t paying attention, *clap clap* OI! E3 was very much sequel boulevard this year, which might be partly why it was such a damp squib. What? Is there some kind of virus that attacks creativity going around or something? Twenty years ago, in the eight bit era, games could be about French chefs riding giant stick insects while wielding a gun that shoots velociraptors. These days a game?s considered original if the gritty well armored soldier protagonist has a mustache. Anyway, to rope this wild wandering steer back on topic, Fallout 3 is an RPG about a gritty well armored soldier protagonist exploring a ruined city where everyone is either a mutant or a jerk. I?ll admit that it looks very pretty, but then so did Rudolph Hess. Also it?s by Bethesda developers of Oblivion and patron saints of games that look awesome in screen shots and preview videos but ultimately play like bowls of scummy dish water. Case in point is the demonstrated combat system where the game cuts to a dramatic angle to watch you execute a successful kill, which is groovy pants the first time, but since it seems to happen with every kill, I?m sure repetition will swiftly boil it down to just plain pants.
Finally, a brief mention of Gears of War 2. That was it.
So that concludes this little adventure in sport spoiling. I?d like to clarify that somewhere in the flinty pits of my petrified heart I?m open to the possibility of all these games potentially being fun, except Final Fantasy 13 obviously. But my intention is not to troll for once, but to argue that it makes the most logical sense to be pessimistic. After all if the game?s good, great. But if it?s bad you?ve lost nothing. Plus you get the satisfaction of knowing that you?re cleverer than fan boys, which is right up there with winning a beauty contest again Steve Buscemi, but still, it?s a good overall rule. Never let yourself get excited by trailers, unless it?s the new one for the Watchmen movie. Oh yes, I can never get enough big glowing blue men with their celestial lads hanging out.
The E3 Trailer Park
A cynic can be described as someone who doesn?t hold out hope that anything in the future will be good. And frankly, I find it harder and harder to understand why any gamer wouldn?t be a cynic at this point. Film starring Morgan Freeman would have you believe that hope is your magical shield against the tribulations of life. But the games industry has collectively taken that shield and shoved it up our ass so many times, it?s probably time we started leaving it at home. To put it in another, less stupid way, if you go by the evidence of the last 10 years and just assume that the new Sonic the Hedgehog is just going to be the usual punnit of snot, then you won?t get you?re heart rebroken.
So an appropriately mediocre E3 has limped past for this mediocre year in gaming. Nintendo have proudly announced their intention to make the Wii do what it was always supposed to anyway. While Microsoft and Sony busily compete to see who can rip off each others consoles the most. And of course, a gaggle of upcoming game trailers were wheeled out to stir up excitement. But since the eventual quality of most games is going to be essentially determined by spinning a roulette wheel where the numbers one through thirty have all been smeared with puss, I thought I?d better fly in and point out that we?re still living in a cruel corporate run society that treats you like a wallet mounted on the back of an entranced magpie. So here?s why all ye should abandon hope for the shiny objects being held up for us to gawp at.
First up Prince of Persia, now I thought the sands of time trilogy was the best game series of the last console generation. I?ll pause for a moment so you can all go find your socks that just blew off. Ok, so the combat in game one was a basket of farts, and game two stumbled a bit when the prince went off his angst medication. But over all the characters were solid and the time controlling game play worked crazy well with the sudden death platforming, to the point that I now feel my fingers unconsciously groping for the rewind button every time my toast lands butter side down. And it seems the new Prince of Persia is going to take all that and piss boiling oil into its eye sockets. Leaving aside for now that the music in the background sounds like someone teased a cat?s bollocks with pliers for a few minutes while throwing ball bearings at a piano keyboard, the setting seems to have shifted from historical Persia to somewhere between Final Fantasy 10 and 12. And by the look of the character design the concept artist has been spending more then a few holidays there himself. Maybe Prince of Persia?s appeal lies in the grounding of reality dusted with the fantastic elements of Arabian myth, but Fuck That! The kids are into anime these days and let?s all jump around on the ceiling dressed like twats.
Speaking of which, Final Fantasy 13 also has a trailer and it looks good. Of course it looks it always Looks good. But my philosophy with game trailers is that footage of prerendered cinematics doesn?t count, so bearing that in mind, the actual length of the FF13 trailer is around point three of a second. The rest consists of androgynous twelve year olds running around being improbably awesome and giving absolutely no hints as to storyline. But as an educated guess I?d say it involves some kind of evil authority, one or more heroes who were once associated with the same, a half baked anti industrial hippy sub text, and all in all will closely resemble what you?d get if George Lucas?s brain fell out and he made a new Star Wars movie with everything that was ever good about it replaced with dodgy CG and laughable angst. Oh wait.
The new Resident Evil 5 footage indicates that Capcom are counteracting the accusations of racism by including an African female sidekick resembling a white woman who?s been dipped in tea. I?m sure the game play will be fine because Resident Evil 4 was fine, and bugger all seems to have changed except now we?ve traded up from infected Spanish peasant village to infected African peasant village, and the dialogue is still going to be so bad that every single line hurls you out of the experience like you?re on a fucking trebuchet.
Now then, Fallout 3. Those of that are paying attention will no doubt notice that all these games are sequels, and for those of you who aren?t paying attention, *clap clap* OI! E3 was very much sequel boulevard this year, which might be partly why it was such a damp squib. What? Is there some kind of virus that attacks creativity going around or something? Twenty years ago, in the eight bit era, games could be about French chefs riding giant stick insects while wielding a gun that shoots velociraptors. These days a game?s considered original if the gritty well armored soldier protagonist has a mustache. Anyway, to rope this wild wandering steer back on topic, Fallout 3 is an RPG about a gritty well armored soldier protagonist exploring a ruined city where everyone is either a mutant or a jerk. I?ll admit that it looks very pretty, but then so did Rudolph Hess. Also it?s by Bethesda developers of Oblivion and patron saints of games that look awesome in screen shots and preview videos but ultimately play like bowls of scummy dish water. Case in point is the demonstrated combat system where the game cuts to a dramatic angle to watch you execute a successful kill, which is groovy pants the first time, but since it seems to happen with every kill, I?m sure repetition will swiftly boil it down to just plain pants.
Finally, a brief mention of Gears of War 2. That was it.
So that concludes this little adventure in sport spoiling. I?d like to clarify that somewhere in the flinty pits of my petrified heart I?m open to the possibility of all these games potentially being fun, except Final Fantasy 13 obviously. But my intention is not to troll for once, but to argue that it makes the most logical sense to be pessimistic. After all if the game?s good, great. But if it?s bad you?ve lost nothing. Plus you get the satisfaction of knowing that you?re cleverer than fan boys, which is right up there with winning a beauty contest again Steve Buscemi, but still, it?s a good overall rule. Never let yourself get excited by trailers, unless it?s the new one for the Watchmen movie. Oh yes, I can never get enough big glowing blue men with their celestial lads hanging out.
Spore won fucking "Game of Show". Doing a rundown of a convention without even mentioning the supposed best game there doesn't seem like much thought went into the review.
It was more like an argument for pessimism than anything else. Wait the video was about E3?
It was more like an argument for pessimism than anything else. Wait the video was about E3?
Things are made in volume only if the demand for them exists, sequels happen generally because people want them to happen. Personally I've been waiting for Fallout 3 since the moment I finished fallout 2, and its been a while
YES, WE GET IT. SPORE WAS THE BEST GAME THERE.
Somehow people seem to infer from the fact that he DIDN'T mention it that he didn't like it. Face it, he's Yahtzee; if he had to say something about it it would have to be negative, and it's SPORE!! No one wants that!
Thurgist: Assassin's Creed is from the same devs as PoP.
Somehow people seem to infer from the fact that he DIDN'T mention it that he didn't like it. Face it, he's Yahtzee; if he had to say something about it it would have to be negative, and it's SPORE!! No one wants that!
Thurgist: Assassin's Creed is from the same devs as PoP.
Yea, basically same stuff as always in a yahtzee review, maybe its the ADD but Yahtzee has finally gotten to boring and repetitive for me to come back here(not like i ever really posted anyway).
I'm so glad someone in the reviewing business finally agrees that pre-rendered trailers don't count.
And by that logic Sony should automatically be disqualified from getting anything save for the "cockteasing liar of the year award" for every E3 because that's pretty much everything they trot out. Of course, seeing as how they ALWAYS do this (lest we forget the Killzone bullcrap they tried to pass off on us) congnitive dissonance has taken over and that's why gamers cream themselves over 30 seconds of Kratos standing in a thunderstorm while raindrops keep falling on his head.
And by that logic Sony should automatically be disqualified from getting anything save for the "cockteasing liar of the year award" for every E3 because that's pretty much everything they trot out. Of course, seeing as how they ALWAYS do this (lest we forget the Killzone bullcrap they tried to pass off on us) congnitive dissonance has taken over and that's why gamers cream themselves over 30 seconds of Kratos standing in a thunderstorm while raindrops keep falling on his head.
Can't say I agree with Yahtzee's view of the new Prince of Persia. I love PoP, and am probably one of the SoT trilogy's biggest fans, but aside from the graphical style (which is really only prominent on that of the character models), the changes from Sands of Time to this are actually pretty marginal (at least more marginal than what SoT changed from the PoP series before it), and by gameplay standards, sound like pretty decent changes to me. Remember what Ubisoft said about The Two Thrones? About an "open-ended city of Babylon"? Not only did they take that claim and shove it up their ass, but they spat on the combat engine with the weakest excuses for QTE's of it's generation (along with Kingdom Hearts II's reaction commands) which were more prone to glitches than Warrior Within's sound effects. I know I'm making it sound seriesou there, but that's actually just nitpicking.
My point is that in several plays of a particular gameplay demo, there showed varied elements that at least begin to justify their promise of open-endedness for this game (though I wouldn't expect any kind of Assassin's Creed-esque free-roaming). Now, I'm not going out on a limb and saying that this new PoP is gonna be as big a hit as the first Sands of Time was, but as a fan, I'm at least gonna stay in touch with the updates, and with what updates I've seen, I haven't felt like I've been shot through the heart by a false promise (like when I played The Two Thrones while still holding them to their promise of "open-endedness" but got a game that, while still plenty good, was the biggest pipe-run of the trilogy).
My point is that in several plays of a particular gameplay demo, there showed varied elements that at least begin to justify their promise of open-endedness for this game (though I wouldn't expect any kind of Assassin's Creed-esque free-roaming). Now, I'm not going out on a limb and saying that this new PoP is gonna be as big a hit as the first Sands of Time was, but as a fan, I'm at least gonna stay in touch with the updates, and with what updates I've seen, I haven't felt like I've been shot through the heart by a false promise (like when I played The Two Thrones while still holding them to their promise of "open-endedness" but got a game that, while still plenty good, was the biggest pipe-run of the trilogy).
I think people are missing out on Yahtzee's message in this episode. I've been watching the G4 coverage of E3 on my OnDemand network, and it made me sick. It's like that one Penny Arcade strip making fun of previewers ("How awesome is it?", "So Awesome") following it almost completely. There seems to be no skepticism in the games journalism industry these days (especially if you consider ad-space).
I remember reading glowing previews of Drake of the 99 Dragons in every magazine and site several years ago. I was ready for the game to be a ton of fun, only to watch them pull out their 1.005040334 out of 10 reviews when it came out. Everybody thought Killzone 2 was going to be the damned second coming when we saw that pre-rendered cutscene a few years back, and from what I saw it looks like any other Aliens space marine shooter that's released twice a month now. It just doesn't hurt to have a previewer say "Hey, let's not cut off our hair and ghoulies to worship this game over a pre-rendered CG cutscene or the announcement of one new gun quite yet."
I think that's why a lot of these newer original games like Portal get the raving reviews they do. Since they don't have arena-sized development studios, they can't get IGN.com to pull of a weekly developer's journal or some crap, so when they do come out there's no lofty expectation to meet, so we're taken aback by how good they are. I think once Spore comes out, it will be pretty damned fun, but I'm going to follow Molyneux's law which says that not everything promised week one will be there on release date (i.e. don't expect it to be all that and the whole damned Frito-Lay's factory).
I remember reading glowing previews of Drake of the 99 Dragons in every magazine and site several years ago. I was ready for the game to be a ton of fun, only to watch them pull out their 1.005040334 out of 10 reviews when it came out. Everybody thought Killzone 2 was going to be the damned second coming when we saw that pre-rendered cutscene a few years back, and from what I saw it looks like any other Aliens space marine shooter that's released twice a month now. It just doesn't hurt to have a previewer say "Hey, let's not cut off our hair and ghoulies to worship this game over a pre-rendered CG cutscene or the announcement of one new gun quite yet."
I think that's why a lot of these newer original games like Portal get the raving reviews they do. Since they don't have arena-sized development studios, they can't get IGN.com to pull of a weekly developer's journal or some crap, so when they do come out there's no lofty expectation to meet, so we're taken aback by how good they are. I think once Spore comes out, it will be pretty damned fun, but I'm going to follow Molyneux's law which says that not everything promised week one will be there on release date (i.e. don't expect it to be all that and the whole damned Frito-Lay's factory).
Gears of war 2 is probably the only game with a chance to satisfy me. Thanks Yahtzee! Very funny.
The fact that Spore is a Molyneux game is reason enough for me to not expect anything out of it. The man may have once been a gaming god, but I really feel he's getting a bit too full of himself. Fable 1 was really not that good, and Black and White 2 was a stripped down piece of crap. Some of his comments in past articles are also showing signs that he really doesn't think that he can do any wrong.
Needless to say, this is definitely a try before I buy title.
Needless to say, this is definitely a try before I buy title.
It's a FPS with a gimmick, got it.rebochan said:
Nice way to make a assumption for everyone.....rebochan said:
Thanks for proving the point that Fallout 3 is really just a FPS.DamienHell said:
Seems your delusional, since Fallout 3 (Oblivion with guns) with some RPG elements thrown in.Norbington said:
I agree it shouldn't be called Fallout 3.mitsoxfan said:
So tired of the cope out AO rating shit.....there is no proof that it would give them one and ALSO then why not release a special AO edition version on the PC. Also the WC3 thrown in is bullshit.Magnetic2 said:
Indeed, Oblivion is a good example of action/combat game that they tried to toss off as a amazing RPG.