GoNintendo 'End of day' thoughts - SidePocket's massive Comic-Con impressions article

Time to get me some sleep. Some of you may have noticed that I tried an earlier start time on the site yesterday morning. I think it worked out well, and I’d like to keep doing it. We’ll see if I wake up when the alarm rings! I’ll catch you guys in a few, short hours.

Last year, we were lucky enough to have a fan of GoNintendo send us a ton of impressions from Comic-Con. That man is SidePocket, and he has returned once again with yet another collection of impressions from the NY Comic-Con. He’s obviously taken a lot of time to upload video and write out extensive impressions from the show. As if I needed anymore proof of just how awesome the readers of GoNintendo are.

Now, I’ll stop wasting this space. I turn over the ‘End of day’ thoughts to SidePocket and his monster of an article!

My apologies for not including the pictures that SidePocket sent along. The format in which they were sent was royally screwing up my computer! This is no fault of SidePocket…it’s all on me.

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Hello again! You all should know me by now, right? Sidepocket, aka Jordan White aka the guy who goes to Comic Con every year and takes impressions of it? I was at the NYC Comic Con last year and while they had some interesting stuff to show…there was simply nothing going on! I went to one screening of the Incredible Hulk, one panel about 38 Studios and that was it! While the games were good, there simply was not enough to get excited over them.

Well, someone who runs the con must have injected it with steroids because holy hell, this place was packed! This con was one of the best cons I have ever been to! From meeting Takashi Miike and seeing his new movie YatterMan, to Ben Templesmith, Super Jail, Pixar’s Up and many, many interesting panels; I was constantly busy the entire three days of the con. Then there were the games! Gaming was a huge presence this year. It was so big that for the first time I thought I wandered onto the GDC 2009 Expo floor by mistake.

So enough about the con, lets talk about some of them and let’s start with the best booth of all time: The Sega Booth!

I think my friend Alex Robie (who helped me film footage) said it the best when he played it himself.

Sega Rep: Do you like the game so far?

Alex Robie: I-I-I LOVED THIS GAME BEFORE I EVEN SAW IT!!!

I must agree: Madworld was the best game so far this year. The lines leading up to this game always had six people waiting a time on a slow day and mid-day the game was packed with people. The graphics were so crisp and clear, people were asking if this game was on the X-Box 360 because they could not believe their eyes! Even more so, a few declared that they would buy a Wii just to play Madworld!

Yes, it’s that good. THIS is the game you show to your 360 and PS3 buddies to get them insanely jealous!

Controls are extremely intuitive. Imagine if No More Heroes and Godfather: Blackhand Edition made sweet, sweet love together and they burned that to a disk. The A button when tapped dishes out some melee moves and holding it lets you grab a foe and throw them around. Holding B takes the chainsaw out and swinging the remote will cut people into Chef Boyardee, the Wii Remote speaker screaming that familiar chainsaw sound. Ironically, one of my predictions came true; since we are Americans most people spammed the chainsaw a little too much. On the contrary, in this game you have to be creative. The more you do to a guy before he feels the sweet release of death the better. As you can see in the video, I got a major high score for putting a tire on some guy, throwing him in the trash, grabbed another guy, threw him in, hit the lid and they BOTH got cleaved in half!

And you will be doing a lot of that in this game. Every single thing in the environment is interactive and everything from throwing people into bare walls, electrocuting them via transformers and beating them into fans are not only fun but encouraged in this game. Now for those wondering about the difficulty in this game, trust me, this game will test you. It’s not the hardest game ever (ergo Devil May Cry 3/Godhand) but the enemies will gang up on you, block your attacks and even use the tires and environment to screw you over like you do to them. The boss that was in the game was not only insane but extremely hard to battle. Players were allowed to play until they died once and let me tell you, all three days I was there….. I saw that NO ONE could beat this boss. And he is one of the first bosses too!

In short, would I recommend this game for people on March 10th? Simple answer, stop what you are doing…do not even bother to put clothes on! Go out to your nearest game store and pre order this game any way you can. Any gamer, hell, any person should have this game in their collection. It’s priceless. I have not had this much fun watching and playing a game since Okami and that says something. Buy this game; I do not work for Sega, buy this game. I guarantee you will not regret it. I mean, how many games can you think of where you can head butt a dude until his head pops off and the head flies into another dude, killing both of them? Right. Exactly.

NYC Comic Con 2009 Impressions — Conduit from Sidepocket on Vimeo.

All this hype from this game! Best first person shooter ever on the Wii? Best FPS controls next to Mouse and Keyboard? Best online multiplayer? Best Graphics ever on the Wii? Is any of this hype true!?

Well I played the game and all I can say is…pretty much!

I did not have time to go in and customize my controls (you can fully map them out any way you want, even the HUD graphics) but the default control was a dream to use. I’ve been playing FPS games since Doom II was up for download on id’s fileservers and I must say, I was doing stuff I have only seen PC shooters do. I could shoot a bug, turn and shoot one behind me in a fraction of a second. You move around with the analog stick and the A Button is to jump. B Button is to obviously shoot and you look around with the pointer. The pointer sensitivity is worth mentioning because even in games like Medal of Honor 2 Heroes, you kind of have to drag the cursor and your arm to point were you need to go. This game however, was a bit like fencing. You only needed to move your wrist a centimeter in any direction to look that way and the pointer always pointed where I wanted it to point. You can shoot things that are only a pixel wide in this game, and for that I have to give the IR sensitivity huge praise!

I have also heard people worried about the AI in this game so let me clear it up: THIS GAME IS FREAKIN’ HARD!!! Everyone who played this game died. Repeatedly. One guy who finally got half way through the demo died FIVE TIMES before he did. The enemies duck and cover, they flank you from all angles and positions and are tough to fight. They are not FEAR level, but if you played the later levels of Half-Life 2 or its episodes, then that is the AI level of this game.

The guns were also fantastic to use. I started out with this futuristic sub machine gun that you can spray around and it gets the job done. However, like many people in the video, I found what I have dubbed the “METROID GUN” and I have fallen in love with this alien thing. It fires a three burst shot of energy and if you hold down B to charge, can shoot a rail gun-ish blast so hard that it can blow through walls in the game.

Lastly, this game is BEAUTIFUL to look at. When I first laid eyes on it, I froze for a few seconds because I thought I was looking at a 360 game. Seeing the crappy streaming videos online does not do this game justice, if you have a 40 inch HDTV screen or bigger, you will be grinning like an idiot in this game. Similarly to Madworld, the fact that there were 10 enemies at the time on the screen with Doom 3 level Normal Mapping, particles flying everywhere, advanced AI and all that dazzle with ZERO slow down took my breath away. I had no idea that the white little box next to my TV could do that!

In short, this is another one of those must have games. In the short but hard demo on the floor, I can only imagine that the full single player is going to be a blast…and this is not even covering all the stuff you can do online! So if you are a FPS fan like me and you are looking for the next big FPS, do not look at your $800 PC rig, buy this game for the Wii. Less money, triple the fun!

I am a big House of the Dead fan. I own every game on every system, played all of them in the arcades and own light guns for every one. Well, except for House of the Dead EX, currently exclusive in Japan for now. From what I have played so far, I will be a very happy fan to put Overkill game in my collection!

The first thing that hit me was the graphics. It does have that “Grindhouse” filter with scratches, tears and bad contrasting. However, I think they add another filter again when they do the trailers because this game was surprisingly crisp and detailed. When the zombies get up close, you can see every wrinkle in their face, every strand of hair and the back of their eyes even light up in low lighting conditions! After viewing this game, besides toning down the textures, SEGA would have zero problems porting House of the Dead 4 to the Wii with graphics like this.

The biggest concern I always had as a fan is will it feel like the past House of the Dead games? Usually when a Japanese made property is given to American developers, they tend to screw up the tone and feeling of the game (*cough*SilentHillHomecoming*cough*) and with a new visual look, I feared it would become more like RE:UC. Well, no worries light gun fans, this erringly feels like the past games so much that I felt Wow Entertainment developed this itself! The zombies are not drones like in RE:UC, they jump through windows and even pop out of fireplaces! Very active and each zombie is also its own type with AI patterns like the past games, so if you see a guy with overalls, you know he is going to be throwing axes at you!

The aiming is the best I have seen yet on Wii, the closest you could possibly get to the light guns of the old. The cursor is just right, not sluggish nor is it overly sensitive, allowing you to easily take shots at the zombies. If you miss, it’s because you have bad aim and nothing more. Having multiple weapons at your disposal is also a nice way to vary it up because each weapon type is good for certain situations. Some you will need precision of a hand gun, the stopping power of a shot gun or to shoot as many bullets with the machine gun to keep large hordes at bay!

Another quick thing worth mentioning is the camera view. I thought initially that allowing the camera to move at the edges would be too distracting, but it is surprisingly intuitive and you will need to use it many times. Zombies will flank you so you need to keep tabs and you can peak around to get extra items like the slow-mo-fo to help you out in your brain blasting goodness.

So in short, if you are a House of the Dead fan I highly recommend this game as a fellow fan. If you like light gun games, this is for you too. If you like zombies in your video games, rent it first if you never played light gun games before. However, I think that through its charm and solid mechanics you will end up buying it anyhow. Hey, I never thought I would say this, but Dead Rising Chop Till’ You Drop could only wish it could be one twentieth as good as this game is!

P.S. During certain times at the booth, they had a professional make-up crew turn fans into zombies! And when you were done, they gave you a free T-Shirt and the Prelude to an Overkill Comic. Now THAT’S how you promote a game!

NYC Comic Con 2009 Impressions — Everything Else from Sidepocket on Vimeo.

Here is a quick, short run down of all the other Wii games I saw at the con.

Deadly Creatures was an interesting and fun game. The visuals held solidly most of the time, especially the lighting. I wish some of the animations were better, such as the spider jumping but most of the animation is flawless and the controls, once you got use to them, were pretty cool. It was like an insect version of Madworld and it felt like that lost “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” game, except you play as the evil scorpion. So, I defiantly approve this game…and I am an arachnophobic!

Sadly, I could not get a chance to actually PLAY Overlord: Dark Legend even though I wanted to. Every time I came by, there was a line, they had the Wii off or the booth was closing down. However, eyes on I say it was as solid as Deadly Creatures was. There seemed to be some camera control problems and the textures became a bit PS2 a time, but the lighting was incredible and I was amazed that sitting next to it’s big brother Overlord 2 that it was equally holding its own!

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution was nice to see again from my days of owning a Dreamcast and had a neat boxing ring-like booth. The game looks surprisingly good and I love the exaggerated character designs. They remind me of presidential caricatures or the MTV claymation classic Celebrity Deathmatch. There is a TON of waggle in this game, so for all you anti-waggle fans out there, avoid this game. However, the motion control was very responsive and while I would have liked a move list, I had fun while playing this game. Give it a rent at least.

Ghostbusters was the big surprise since they had all three versions at the show. Everyone I asked said the Wii was the best one and when I played, it showed! Yeah, the other two have the fancy shiny shade of brown graphics bs, but this game not only looked very good it was easy on the eyes. It was like being able to play a Saturday Morning Cartoon and everything was very clean with AMAZNG lighting effects and transparencies. The Wii Remote and Nunchuk really made you feel like you were actually in the game, using the very responsive FPS like pointer to zap ghosts and hold on to them. Depending on what direction and the force of flicking the nunchuk you threw the trap out that way, it was as accurate as throwing balls in Boom Blox. The ghosts were not easy either. Not only were they throwing crap at you and zooming around everywhere, but you have to grab them with your beam, slam them into walls to soften them up and drag them kicking and screaming into the traps. Very challenging. If you always dreamed about a Wiimake of Luigi’s Mansion with four player co-op, this is a day one purchase!

A special shout out for Roogoo: Twisted Towers which was the best surprise at the con and totally blew me away. Originally an X-Box Live Arcade game, I figured this would be a quick dirty port that would shoe horn in some shoddy Wii controls and call it a day. Instead, I found a game that was greatly expanded on with tons of options and modes to make it a true full game. The end game will ship with a whopping 70 levels, multiple mini-games, options and challenges. They added a story mode where you have to traverse ten worlds to fight evil bosses. These bosses change the tables on you and made the game insanely hard. One boss was a vampire and you had to fight him with the IR sensor WHILE you play the normal game. Another had a fifty story tall yeti that took up the entire screen that would constantly turn your tables to try to mess up your shape drops. Along with the multiplayer mode where you can race, fight and work on a really large Roogoo puzzle, this is the perfect game were both casual and hardcore gamers can sit down and have tons of fun!

Sonic and the Black Knight can be summed up in one word: mixed. On one hand, the graphics, while not the best, were really solid. Big improvement over Secret Rings and I would say even better than Unleashed. The game also has a real sense of speed without any visual tricks and once you get the hang of it, you are entertained. However, there are two problems with this game. One is that the game seems to still be on rails and yet its control is designed like you have full platform control. Add to the fact that it still retains the same jumping system as Secret Rings, it takes a while to get used to the control. Another issue is that even though the sword is the focus of the game, the motion control is off and the move performs AFTER you do the motion. So you end up thinking a few seconds ahead of your actions. Knowing Sonic games, they most likely will not fix it, even though I hope they do, this is still a rental in my eyes. Bonus: NO WEREHOG!

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins faired much better than Black Knight. The game was a visual treat to look at, like if they did Tenchu on the X-Box with great lighting and solid details. Warning, this game does have a slow pace, so for all you action junkies who thought MGS4 was awesome because you could play it like an FPS, stay away. I would have also liked to have a move list for this game too, they do this at Nintendo Kiosks at game stop, why not here? However, once I figured out how to mostly control this game, the kills were great and it really rewards you in its stealth mechanics. Rent it first, I think people will enjoy this one. Better than all the “-z” games out now!

I did not get a chance to play We Ski and Snowboard or even the first game, but from what I saw, people were having fun with it. Very relaxing game that I imagine you would play to decompress. However, something I did not understand is that they did not have the Balance Board at the con! You would think since this is a crutch of the game and with the public booth… they would, but nope: missed opportunity ahoy!

Finally to round things off were two Konami games. Marble Saga: Kororinpa is the sequel to the infamous Wii launch title. This year, the game is way more detailed with realistic “Little Big Planet/Nuts and Bolts” textures and lost more objects going on. Game play is basically the same, except it now has four play multiplayer. There are also more ball options including your Mii in a roller ball…or Bomberman in one if you do not have a Mii! Next to it was Fishing Master World Tour, which is much more detailed, cell shaded, and shed its anime look for a Ben 10 Alien Force look. Lots of motion control, many kids playing with their parents and were having fun with it.

Public Service Announcement to Rockstar Games

Now many of you may be wondering “Hey, where the hell is the preview of GTA: Chinatown Wars!?!” Well, I am a casual fan of the series and I did go to check it out and wanted to get video and stuff for you guys. I really, really did.

Unfortunately, I found out the hard way: They BANNED photography and videos of any kind near, around or outside the booth. There was no sign or anything so I thought hey, for all the GTA fans out there, this is for you. I did not even get a chance to turn my camera on before some clone of Andre the Giant marched over, blocked my view of the camera with his sausage like hands, BARKED at me that there was no video or photography and pushed me away from the booth.

Now, had Rockstar had a sign or a flier that stated no photography/video at the booth or a rep just came up to me and informed me nicely of the issue, I would have had no problems. However, due to this, even though I got to play the game later, I remember so little of it because of how pissed I was. From what I can tell you, the graphics were very good for the DS, animation was nice but I had no idea what to do and the controls/menus were clunky as hell. I wish I could tell you more but I was so pissed that I was fed up with the game after 20 seconds of play. Sorry folks, it was not me either, I saw high profile people like IGN and G4 getting the same treatment.

Folks, I have friends who work at Rockstar, so I have no problems with the developers and the games they make. However, I hope this proves that good PR relations and courtesy goes a long, LONG way. Never mind that why show this game in the public in the first place, or the fact that besides a van with tote bags there was nothing going on in the booth, for a company called Rockstar they sure played like a high school garage band this year.

Now Rockstar missed out on the awesome coverage and high praise I could have gave them. Pity. They really need to take a note from their neighbors…like Sega.

Conclusion

Besides the jerks at the Rockstar booth, I had an amazingly fun time at NYC Comic Con this year. All over the place with the people, games and geeky stuff on show I felt like I was five years old at the Toys-R-Us playing the Nintendo kiosks and getting all starry-eyed about all the SNES games coming out! I feel sad for anyone who missed this con or even worse, chose some where else to go thinking this con would suck. This con was full of anti-suck!

A huge praise to SEGA for giving me an all access pass on what they had to show. Also for all the T-Shirts (I have six, two of each!), autographs and free gifts they gave! Also, thanks to all the people who were interviewed in my videos and gave their own 2 cents about their thoughts. These gamers were fun to talk too and I never got a negative reaction or a no from them! Also, a huge thanks to SpiderMonk Entertainment for giving me the tour of their awesome Roogoo games! Thanks to Alex Robie for helping me film some segments, a big thanks to all of you reading it and RMC for publishing it!

Finally, I think EVERYONE including myself should thank all the third party developers who showed off some amazing games this year. Even with big games from the other two companies showing off left and right, HD this and Unreal 3 that, Wii had the biggest lines and buzz this year. This year, even though I have loved my Wii ever since I bought it, I am really glad that I own one for the games coming out this year! This year, at NYC Comic Con I finally said something that Satoru Iwata said we were going to do back in 2005.

I said: Wow!