I fufilled a childhood dream of sorts today by attending E3 for the first time. The show is absolutely huge. Maybe I’m sort of numb to the industry now after doing two GDCs, but E3 just seemed like an amusement park of games. That said, I got to play a lot of games that won’t be playing again until the end of the year. General impressions:

THE GOOD

Brutal Legend
Played the PS3 version and loved every second of it. The combat isn’t the best (reminds me of Ratchet & Clank’s wrench), but the driving was absolutely awesome. Voice acting was solid, animation and graphics were beautiful minus a little bit of a framerate issue (which I fully trust DoubleFine to fix before it ships). I laughed out loud more than twenty times in the course of a ten minute demo. The game screams character, and I’ll be picking it up on day one.

Bayonetta
Looks better than any Devil May Cry game ever did. Honestly, I thought it was more fun than God of War III. The sexual innuendo in the game is funny but possibly a bit too much – the overlimit/fatality mechanism in the boss fight was called “climax” and involves the lead character’s clothes flying off of her and eating the monster. It didn’t make any sense, it’s extremely Japanese, but the game as a whole looks like a complete package.

Left4Dead 2
It’s like Left4Dead, only with cooler characters, brighter graphics, and more gameplay variation. It’s awesome, and it was different enough from the first to warrant a new retail release.

Project Cube (Working Title)
Square-Enix’s under-the-radar XBLA game is a lot like Geometry Wars in that it’s a twin stick shooter, but the comparisons end there. There are some really cool gameplay mechanics like dashing into enemies and confusing them and using shields to collect enemy fire and returning it with a counterattack. Violent, but elegant graphical style too. If this drops at $10, consider me sold.

THE BAD

The Conduit
For all the hype surrounding it as the definitive FPS on Wii, it’s really just a clunky shooter. I saw that IGN nominated for “best of show,” which is complete and total bullshit. There wasn’t even a line to play it at the Sega booth (rare for any game at the show). The controls are nowhere near as good as Metroid Prime 3‘s in practice, the graphics look beautiful in some places and awful in others (textures are awesome, 3D models are atrocious). The gunplay wasn’t particularly fun or intreguing, and I felt like I was struggling to make the Wii do what I wanted it to do. If you want to play a good FPS on Wii, wait for the Metroid Prime Trilogy to come out this fall. I’m not saying this is the worst game I’ve ever played, but no part of it was better than average and many parts were worse. I’d be shocked if this gets a Metacritic score over 75%, but

Red Steel 2
I was cautiously optimistic about this game even though the first one sucked. I went up to the booth, and the Ubisoft rep gives me his pitch. “With Wii MotionPlus, you can control a sword with 1:1 precision.” I waved the sword around, and sure enough, it was moving almost exactly like the remote in my hand. I swung it around a few times and it was sort of replicated on the screen. I then made a stabbing motion forward, and nothing happened. I tried it again, and still nothing happened. There were a few people watching me play, and the Ubisoft rep said “you have to swing it around, make slicing motions.” So in other words, the game offers unparalleled swordplay providing you only use your sword in the small set of ways the developers intend you to. Right.

Sonic & Sega Superstars Racing
The load times in the E3 demo were worse than Sonic ’06. That means something to Sonic fans. The game itself stuttered with a terrible framerate and was about half the speed of Mario Kart Wii. There’s also a really annoying duo of commentators who talk about the race while you play. It’s like Ocarina of Time’s Navi on steroids, except without any sort of gameplay functionality or purpose. This is a game that will look beautiful in screenshots, though, as the tracks were pretty and fairly well-designed.

THE AVERAGE

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Imagine all the fun of Ratchet & Clank Future, and take away all the character from it. That’s the impression I got from the E3 demo. Clank was nowhere to be found, and all of his abilities had been replaced new gadgets for Ratchet. Replacing him with a bunch of tools destroys the bond between the characters, and I hope Insomniac doesn’t keep it up for more than a level or two.

Dead Space: Extraction
Very cool rail shooter, but it’s a rail shooter and therefore limited for playability. Graphics look good for Wii but will be disappointing to anyone who played the original. I basically just told you everything you can figure out from the gameplay videos, which is all I got out of playing it.