E3 2011: Day 3

LotRO – I caught an exciting bit of news yesterday: phasing is coming to LotRO. Why this wasn’t mentioned at all in the Isengard announcement I can’t imagine. Possibly it’s not marketable enough or a common enough term, but I kind of doubt that given WoW’s popularization of it. These are the kinds of details that I mentioned I was going to wait for yesterday, but I hadn’t expected them to come out so quickly.

E3 Sidenote: That’s it? Seems like the E3 news really faded quickly this year. I didn’t see anything else in the news feeds yesterday that caught my attention. That could be a good thing I guess, it’s not like I don’t have a stack of games I want to play already.

E3 2011: Day 2

Nintendo – I haven’t played a Nintendo game since the NES, so yesterday’s E3 held very little of interest for me as far as the big console announcements. I did keep an eye on Twitter though and caught a couple of articles. While I’m impressed that Nintendo is finally paying some attention to graphics, I’m not sold on their new controller. It looks too large to hold comfortably for any length of time.

LotRO – Turbine announced Rise of Isengard and released a cool trailer. Unfortunately there’s not much real information yet. The level cap is going up to 75 (which we already knew) and they’re adding one new raid and three new regions: Dunland, Gap of Rohan, and Isengard. The biggest news is that you can pre-order and get an in-game mount and some cosmetics now.

My first instinct was to get the Legendary version. Then I thought about it a bit. I haven’t played in months, aside from some quick logins to make sure my housing maintenance was paid up. So, since I have until September 26th, I am going to wait a bit and see what additional information comes out. As good as the cosmetics look, I’m curious how my points the expansion would cost. Is it possible I could get it for free using my accumulated lifetime stipend? Do I really want to pay $10 extra for three colors instead of $40 for just one? I may end up spending the money, but not yet.

E3 2011: Day 1

I’m not at E3 and I didn’t watch any of the live streams, but I’ve been catching up on the news of the day.

SW:TOR – Yet another movie. It’s a geat movie and it breaks my heart how much better it is than Episodes 1 and 2 (I gave up and never saw 3), but this is a game not a movie. I want to see more gameplay video.

Batman: Arkham City – I caught this inteview and gameplay demo on RPS, and man does this game look great.

Minecraft – It’s cool that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. I’m not interested in Kinect integration though and I’m not sure I’ll bother to buy the Xbox version. Half of the fun of Minecraft is modding it after all.

Mass Effect 3 – I’m surprised how much they’re showing of the game. I expected Bioware to be pretty quiet about it since it was pushed back. I’m honestly struggling a little bit with what I’m seeing in the many videos. It looks like the pace of combat has sped up considerable, which is great if you’re an FPS fan but I’m not. Still, I’m keeping in mind the lessons from ME2 where the marketing gave me a lot of bad vibes that turned out to be completely false.

Kinect Sidenote: All of the Kinect tie-ins worry me a bit. I’m really hoping Microsoft doesn’t manage to figure out something cool enough that’ll make me want to buy one. It’s not that I hate the Kinect or anything, but my Xbox is in my office which is a small fourth bedroom in my house, and there just isn’t room to set one up and stand 8 feet away from it. Well not without remodeling.

Sony Update: I’m adding this a day late since I didn’t watch it live or stay up to see the post-conference news about it. I was impressed with Tretton’s apology, but I think Sony would’ve done itself a world of good to do that earlier though. Not being a PS3 owner, more of the news I didn’t care about but there were two things I wanted to mention.

PS Vita – That is not a good name, but that’s nitpicking. As cool as the technology sounds, the only thing I thought about when reading about the new portable was that I have a PSP that’s in a box in my closet and I haven’t played with it in more than a year. Even when I was using it, it was basically a Lumines machine. They did get the price right at least.

Dust 514 – Being an exclusive is a mistake. Yes, I’m sure there were business/technical issues with Microsoft but I don’t care. CCP’s new shooter is going to be competing with a lot of established brands and limiting sales to just one console is not a good idea. I’m under the impression that the game is not coming to PC, but hopefully I’m wrong about that. Then again even if it does, I have to wonder if PC players and PS3 players will be able to play together. They can’t in DCUO.