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Strange E3
Honestly as E3s go, there weren’t many strange occurrences, although there was a four-fanzine convergence one night when me, Mathew Kumar (.exp), Frank Cifaldi (Lost Levels) and Raina Lee (1up zine) were all at the same bar, so that was cool — maybe 80% of the entire world population of people still making videogame fanzines in one place! (The new .exp is unspeakably great, by the way, with a faux old-school EGM review of Other Ocean’s faux old-school DSi game Dark Void Zero.)
One of the things I love about the game industry is it puts people in situations that have probably never existed before in nature. I’m pretty sure thumbing through a tourist Japanese phrase book desperately trying to figure out how to convey the sentiment “the dinosaurs are placeholder” is a singularly unique moment in human existence, for instance.
Likewise, if five years ago you had told the gentleman below that he’d find himself in 2010 wearing a tie in 100 degree heat while carefully positioning a spray-painted plastic guitar on top of a steaming, foam-rubber, crystal-encrusted asteroid…
Rock of the Dead was one of the strangest games at the show. An homage to Sega’s Typing of the Dead, it pits you and your Guitar Hero guitar against a horde of zombies. You’ve got to pull off riffs to destroy zombies (who grow crystals out of their bodies, of course). The game is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris and his Dr. Horrible co-star Felicia Day, and the design is as campy as allowed by California law.
Normally I’m not a huge fan of “intentionally weird” games, but Rock of the Dead has a good heart. It’s fun to play, and the team was so into it that it’s hard not be excited, even though the noise level on the outdoor concourse where the game was demoed meant it had to be played by sight only, as the TVs were totally inaudible. Even their models seemed nice and into the game! Plus, I mean… using a plastic guitar to kill crystal bedecked zombies? What’s not to love?
To me as a gamer, Ubisoft owned E3. They had the best attract videos (by like three orders of magnitude), the highest quality jumbotron hardware (including picture-in-picture live footage during world cup games) the most slick press conference, and some of the best games. They also upped the Strange quotient with Battle Tag. In the midst of a press conference filled with the latest Kinect games, Assassin’s Creed, Child of Eden, Ubi suddenly busted out with Battle Tag, a real world laser-tag game that’s enhanced by your PC (which acts as the score-keeper) and real-world virtual objects like a plastic box that gives you more “laser ammo” when you touch it to your gun. On the one hand, it was Ubi’s debutante as a serious toy hardware company. On the other hand, it was a totally strange, mind-bending interlude to an otherwise videogame-focused event.
Try to be less pathetic than last time!
I never saw the strangest game I heard about at E3. One guy, one night, was like “Dude! I saw the strangest game, it was insane!” It was “some Kentia Hall thing,” but the best location I could get was that it was “behind the Microsoft booth sorta.” I never found the booth with the game (and I think now it may have been some looping animation from a Hong Kong licensing fair), but I spent a good couple hours trolling the edges of South Hall looking for it.
That’s where I found the strangest game of the show, hands down. My new love, Cube Shooter. I’m obsessed with games that use LEDs only to interact with players — Mattel Football, Namco’s Flamin’ Finger, the Entex M.A.C. Mini computer, the Gakken GMC-4 — so to discover a new LED game made me really happy. (For more on LED games, uh… watch this space!) Anyway, back to Cube Shooter.
Cube Shooter is a totally insane 10 x 10 matrix of squares, each with a kawaii animal line drawing on it, and a 3-color LED behind it. Squares light up and you shoot them with a realistic looking gun. Simple and even more strange in person than it is on the sell sheet below, Cube Shooter ruled. First, it was HUGE. Second, it was unspeakably low-tech. Third it appears to have a needlessly complicated rule set. And finally… the sell sheet. The sell sheet, jammed into my hands by a friendly but non-verbal, suit-clad man, makes me love Cube Shooter more than I can possibly say.
There’s no pricing, and there’s nothing on ZeroPlus’s website that even hints at its existence (the site is very focused on electronics testing hardware). Is it just some crazy non-commercial project to demonstrate their Accurate Position Technology Sole Patent and OEM light-gun hardware? It’s a mystery, and that makes Cube Shooter even more enticing.
