PAX: The Games

I didn’t hit the show floor until Saturday, but in the two days I was able to walk around it, I got play time with every game I wanted to, save for Left 4 Dead (holy God, those lines were long) and Mirror’s Edge. Word of mouth got around with that one, and the lines got longer every day, until they spilled over into the Fallout 3 booth. I’m going to practice what Kohler told me about writing tiny, tiny reviews, since writing everything I want to say about the nine games I played would be way too long. Well, except for Fallout, which was too hard to edit down.

Fallout 3
Having not played the previous Fallout games, but a fan of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, I came into the Fallout booth with a strange mix of confusion and a head full of hype, the latter of which was well deserved. It was the longest demo I played, lasting for 15 minutes or until you died. I didn’t make it the 15 minutes.

I opted to go in a different direction than the people who played before me, who all went into an elementary school to the left of where the demo started. To the right was a broken highway and some rocks. It didn’t look as exciting as the town, but I wanted to see something new after watching 45 minutes of dark classrooms. One of the perks of Fallout 3 is that, unlike Oblivion, the game doesn’t scale to your level. It’s not possible to play straight through the main storyline, or stumble upon a set of ruins and run through them with no trouble. I found out about the ruins one the hard way. After following the road for a bit, I strolled into an intersection with three enemies, one of which had a flamethrower. This was the end of my demo. There’s a feature in the combat called VATS, and it allows you to hit the right bumper (the demo was on the 360) and pick which area of the enemy you want to shoot at, allowing you to disarm them or make them limp around, or just plain shoot them in the head. It’s entirely optional, so the game can be played as a straight up shooter.

LittleBigPlanet
This would be the reason I buy a PS3. I’m still surprised that something like this is coming from Sony, but now I’m more jealous than anything. The controls consist of two buttons, the level I played was actually difficult, the minigame was a blast, even the guy running the booth was fun to talk to, and he’s the US producer for the game. If only Sony would keep the price of PS3s down instead of lowering it only to phase out an old version of the system.

Fable 2
It’s more of the same, but that’s not a bad thing. The demo was a co-op one played on the same screen, which I didn’t know was possible. A glittery golden trail guides you to the next point in the story, but it’s smart enough that if you wander off the beaten path a ways, it disappears, so it won’t nag you. The one-button combat mechanic is easy to pick up and deep enough that it allows for some creativity. The only concern I have is for the linearity of it. Hopefully only the demo has tiny, straight paths with no open field in sight.

Guitar Hero: World Tour
It’s not Rock Band 2. When I say that, I’m not implying that it’s not as good, I simply mean that, despite being essentially the same, it’s not. The drums, for instance, feel better, and now a multi-colored bar appears on the guitar and bass parts, signifying the need to strum without hitting any buttons. There’s also a beginner mode now, which I only saw in use on the drums, which eliminates the individual notes, just requiring you to hit anything in time. On the vocals, there’s a helpful track that shows how much higher the next note is, allowing you to hum until you’ve got an idea of what pitch to sing before you sing it.

Resistance 2
Only the multiplayer was playable, and that wasn’t really anything remarkable. In fact, I don’t think I would have remembered playing it were it not for the T-shirt I got afterwards. Something about the analog sticks being so close together and right next to each other was just uncomfortable. I didn’t notice this much with the PS2, but I never played a shooter on that either. This is not my reason to get a PS3.

Legendary
Turok with werewolves, this felt like a good idea executed poorly. I make the Turok reference because it featured extended sections of bad first-person platforming. The idea of having to kill something in order to heal yourself is refreshing, as you’re forced to seek out enemies in order to survive, instead of sneaking around in search of health packs. Plus it’s brutal to cut off a werewolf’s head with your ax to release it’s magic healing dust.

Mushroom Men
This is the one game I can say I genuinely hated. The trailer I saw before the keynote played up the spore powers, but I hardly used any of them, only briefly picking up a baseball and dropping it again, as there was no logical way to throw it. The platforming was awkward, the camera was troublesome, and the world was two shades of brown. If this is supposed to be one of the games to save the Wii’s core audience, we’re in trouble.

Lock’s Quest
A strange combination of Desktop Tower Defense and Zelda, this picked up steam as the show went on with it’s much talked about hourish demo, which takes place in a tiny village under siege by robots. You’re tasked with building walls, gates and turrets to stop the invaders, along with fighting some yourself. Battles begin with a build phase, where you set everything up and repair structures damaged in the previous fight, if you haven’t already done that during it. If you have designs for new items, this is also where you build them. After this is done, the battle phase beings, with enemies spawning in predetermined locations and throwing themselves at your defenses in an attempt to overtake a single point on the map. The story was barely touched on, but it’s very good. It comes out next week.

Echochrome
Yes, I know it’s out, but I don’t own a PSP, so I tried it at the show. It’s not easy to wrap your head around the concept, but it’s fun to try. Rather than give my limited take on it, read a couple reviews.

Those were the only games I played, but I watched a lot of Left 4 Dead, Project Origin, and Starcraft 2, all of which look very promising. I can tell I’ll be losing hours and hours to Left 4 Dead.