Feature: Xbox Live's E3 Extravaganza
By: Andrew Hayward |
Tuesday May 16, 2006 |
| With Xbox Live, Microsoft has changed the way that gamers across the world experience E3 from afar. |
| Each year, the gaming industry descends upon Los Angeles for a few days in May. What is the occasion? Why, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, of course! Best known as E3, the conference gives publishers and journalists a first look at the games and hardware that will command our dollars for the following year. As the show is not open to the public, fans flock to gaming websites, hoping for a glance at the next big thing. Unfortunately for us, many of the top sites save the best footage for those with paid memberships.
Cue Microsoft and the Xbox 360. The latest iteration of Xbox Live, their online gaming service, allows for the direct transmission of playable demos and video trailers to gamers' hard drives. Sensing the opportunity to do something special this year, Microsoft announced the "Xbox Live is Bringing it Home" promotion. Under the terms of the promotion, anyone with an Xbox 360 can hop on Live and download exclusive playable demos of unreleased games, as well as view dozens of brand new trailers, straight from the show floor. On top of that, those without an Xbox Live Gold account (which allows you to play online against others) can use the Gold service for free from May 8-14. All in all, it makes for a spectacular promotion. Always happy to try out new games, I seized the opportunity to download several gigabytes of data to my Xbox 360 hard drive. What follows are opinions on every new demo released during the promotion, as well as details on the available trailers. Test Drive Unlimited Set to arrive roughly a year late, Test Drive Unlimited for Xbox 360 is a conflation of two hugely popular launch titles: Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Project Gotham Racing 3. Add in a bit of the lifestyle features of NBA Ballers and you have an idea of what to expect. Test Drive Unlimited re-imagines the long-running franchise as an open-ended racer set on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. With over 1,000 miles of roads, the game clearly has the advantage in quantity, but what about quality? The environments in Unlimited look spectacular; crisp, detailed, and fairly lifelike. The cars also look nice, but the crashes leave a bit to be desired, especially compared to Need for Speed: Most Wanted. The game has opted to include mostly high performance cars, which I take some issue with. Sure, we all want speed, but the sacrifice of control may be enough to make the game less fun than it could have been. The handling is unforgiving compared to Most Wanted, and should be tightened up before release if Atari wants to release a successful game. I had a blast with Need for Speed: Most Wanted, but that was six months ago. When Test Drive Unlimited drops in four to six more months, will it offer enough to set it apart from its spiritual predecessor? Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Tuesday saw a playable demo of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition hit Xbox Live. Lost Planet comes to us courtesy of Capcom, but this is no Resident Evil clone. Instead, the game is a fairly straight-forward action-shooter that takes place in a winter wonderland... with giant bugs. Visually, the game impresses the hell out of me. Everything moves so fluidly, and many aspects of the environment are destructible. Granted, much of the environment is covered by falling (and fallen) snow, but what you can see is glorious. The only issue I had with the demo was with the control scheme, which seemed very loose and occasionally unresponsive. It controls like many third-person shooters, with one analog stick controlling movement and the other used for moving the camera. With a bit of tweaking, it could be just fine. Other than that, I wonder if there will be enough variety in the final version of the game. At this stage of development, I would consider Lost Planet to be fairly promising, though it may need a bit more to be competitive when it releases early next year. MotoGP 06 Not to be a jerk, but can I get a show of hands of who really loves motorcycle racing games? As much as I love riding the bikes in the Grand Theft Auto games, I have such a tough time enjoying dedicated motorcycle racers. MotoGP 06 is much like its predecessors; sharp, detailed, and incredibly difficult. I will decline the opportunity to drop anymore veiled insults; instead, let me talk about what I liked about the demo. One thing, really: it looks fantastic. I had been playing the similar Tourist Trophy for PlayStation 2 earlier in the day, and MotoGP 06 has such a remarkable visual advantage. Not just in the scenery, but also in the character models. If bike racing is your thing, give MotoGP 06 a shot when it releases in June. Video Trailers The Xbox Live interface allows anyone with an Xbox 360 and a broadband connection access to high-definition game trailers. It really is a major step up from streaming internet video, especially if you are watching on an HDTV. I find it hard to get a feel for how a game will actually look when I am watching it on a space equivalent to one-fourth of my computer monitor. Microsoft unloaded dozens of trailers onto Xbox Live this week, including ones for Halo 3, Fable 2, Forza Motorsport 2, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Gears of War, and other major releases. More importantly, trailers for less-hyped titles like Viva Pinata, Rain, and Rockstar Games Table Tennis allow us a chance to see the games we might have previously ignored. In addition to the straight-forward trailers, Microsoft also released a series of exclusive behind-the-scenes videos under the "Backstage Pass" moniker. These videos allow gamers the opportunity to get answers straight from developers, as well as see in-game footage that was left out of the various trailers. Also included is a shortened version of Microsoft's E3 press conference, in which Peter Moore and Bill Gates present the next generation of Xbox 360 games and introduce the "Live Anywhere" concept which the company will soon be pushing. Overall, I thought the "Bringing it Home" concept was excellent, though the execution could be improved for next year. From their perspective, presenting trailers probably came first before giving gamers a chance to play a variety of new titles. As I see it, gamers are typically more interested in playing a game than just looking at it, so Microsoft might want to focus on delivering more playable demos next year. Three is a good start, though none of them were particularly grand. I would expect Microsoft to do this again next year, as it is a perfect use of the Xbox Live Marketplace. It will be interesting to see if Sony answers with their own E3 package on the PlayStation 3. |
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