AssCreed 2: Whorish lasses.
The day wrapped up with a quick trip through
Ubisoft land. First I’d like to say, I don’t remember the other big developers having these things back in 05/06, when E3 was at its peak. (I think Square Enix held one in 06, but that was the year they announced the 17 thousand versions of
FFXIII as well as
Dragon Quest 9 for DS, and all the dead horse beating with
FFVII tie-ins they were working on.) In other words, this year's Ubisoft event DID NOT need to happen.
The whole thing was 2.5 hours. In that time I learned that Ubisoft bought the company that did the CG for
300 and
Snakes on a Plane. So, now they can do awesome CGI cheaper, and share assets. And why not… look how well that’s worked for LucasArts lately.
They are also making a “mind blowing”, super awesome, totally not “Enter the
Matrix” quality tie-in game for
James Camerons Avatar. It has spectacular effects that were so good that some of them were lifted from the game and put into the movie.
Avatar
If you’d like to see some of these amazing things, tough. There weren't any. I listened to james Cameron describe a movie for 15 minutes without so much as a single image. Then another 10 talking about how good the game will be. The real kicker is that, apparently, the game will be playable to some extent on the show floor. But they couldn’t be bothered to do more than put the logo on screen for 20 minutes straight.
AssCreed 2 - a baddy.
Some other highlights included the same
Splinter Cell trailer I saw at the MS event, followed by basically the same, though slightly longer, game play demo that we saw at MS’s presser. There was also a painfully long bit about games for tweens, and WiFi sharing of hamsters (I kid you not). They then wrapped the whole thing up with a
completely CGI trailer for Assassins Creed 2, the only game I was even excited to see there. It's near-identical to the original except that it’s in Venice instead of the middle east and our “hero” now has a gun. Oh, and swap monks for gypsies.
I'm out of here... see you later.
Like I said, the whole day started off great but just really fizzled by the end. Thankfully we’ve got Nintendo and Sony's conference today, and the opening of the show floor as well so it should be a bit more exciting. Be sure to check back for coverage on both of those as well the Miyamoto round table I’ll be sitting in on tomorrow afternoon.
