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EA started off their show with a trailer for a racing game, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (November 16, 2010). Now this is how a show should start out, something fast, something exciting, something that gets you pumped. Not some guy speaking six words, playing a quick demo, speaking three more words and peacing out. Craig Sullivan opened by explaining that Hot Pursuit will have two methods of playing, both as a cop as well as a racer. Friends can go head to head against each other, cops chasing racers. I like the concept; it seems that you crash into your opponent until their car crashes and becomes disabled.
Next up was Dead Space 2. Gruesome action, horrifying sound design, yada yada. I didn’t find Dead Space that scary to be honest. Gross sure, but not scary. Then again I didn’t play a whole lot of it, so maybe I’m just ignorant. Because Dead Space 2 does look significantly more terrifying. I don’t know if I can handle this. The audio is really disgusting to listen to, so I guess they did their job well. I may have to pick Dead Space back up sometime. But then, if it’s anything like this, I may not want to. This trailer went on a little too long and was starting to get repetitive, but the quicktime sequence towards the end was pretty sweet.
Uh oh, bring on the shooters. Sean Decker came out to present Medal of Honor. This guy pretty much summed up why I find the FPS genre so sad. “For the first time in 11 years, Medal of Honor will be leaving World War II”. Do I really need to say anything else? They’ve upgraded from WWII to WWIII in Afghanistan. Oh yeah, big jump. I guess it’s a step though, even though the Afghan war is hardly original. Watching a 24 person simultaneous play through is impressive I guess, but I believe that’s also been done before, and with higher numbers. Bored. Beta for this game starts on June 21st. The demonstration ended with a trailer for the same game, and the release date is October 12th?
Next Gun Club was introduced. Although it sounds like a shooter, it seems to be something more. It’s a rewards program for playing all your favorite EA titles. Though apparently all of your favorite titles are shooters. Gun Club is something I’ve wanted for games for a long time now. Rewards for dedicating 60+ hours to your favorite companies’ products. Unfortunately, this really does seem to only apply to shooters, but it’s a start I guess, so maybe other companies will catch on.
Peter Moore was next to come as he started talking about sports games. EA Sports MMA is a game centered around a competition similar to boxing. Apparently MMA is a worldwide phenomenon in the sports world. EA Live Broadcast was also shown off. You can watch gamers around the world compete with real announcers whose sole job is to put them on pedestals. You make your own hype video, and it will allegedly be like a real fighting champion experience. We’ll see how legit it is. Might be interesting if it were paired with Kinect though, then we might actually see some different fighting skill.
EA has a new fitness product in EA Sports Active 2. It introduces a new heart rate monitor that goes around your arms and legs, has 70+ exercises, and allows you to create an online profile to help keep track of your progress. The online profile let’s you create fitness goals and will automatically upload your data from the game once you’ve set it up. It’s set for release on November 16th, 2010. What’s interesting is that it will be available for all three major consoles, making use of the Wii Motion Plus, Playstation Move, and Microsoft Kinect. This is good because anyone can buy the product and play it with relative ease. I feel that the Kinect version will probably be the most effective, but regardless, it’s nice that they’ve tailored this to all three major peripherals.
EA’s next surprise is…a sports game. Breathtaking. I guess EA is well known for their sports titles, but the reason I don’t care for Madden NFL '11 is because in my opinion, if you play one football game you’ve played them all. The games just don’t seem different to me. I know that sports nuts probably feel a difference in controls, and get really excited over stat changes and player choice per each sequel. But I guess I’m just not sophisticated enough to recognize the difference between one head-bashing pigskin-tossing tackle fest from another.
Next up was the Sims 3. Some guy rambled on about free will for a good number of minutes before actually mentioning the Sims 3. Then he continued to give a twenty minute lecture on free will as a slideshow of pictures from the Sims 3: Ambitions. It’s interesting to note that The Sims 3: Ambitions was released two weeks ago, so I don’t really understand why he continued to ramble on about psychology for so long. His free will discussion has been playable for the past 11 years. His speech was literally 10-15 minutes of what you might find in a psychology lecture. Then he just walked away as the trailer for Ambitions played. This was a completely useless point of the press conference until the old guy at the end mentioned something about Sims 3 hitting consoles, which we already knew about. So it was still useless.
Oh goodie, more shooters. Crysis 2 was next to hit the floor. The six people who had enough money to buy the most up-to-date computers that could actually play the original Crysis were probably excited. Crysis 2 visits New York during its campaign and looks just as pretty as it’s predecessor. Which means once again, only six people will have enough money to play it. Either way, I’m not interested. It looks like the same shooter I’ve seen a hundred times before. Oh but it’s going to be the first full game shot in stereoscopic 3D. Now I really don’t care.
Cliffy B’s back now promoting a brand new game. Something that’s a new IP. Something that differentiates itself from all the other games on the market. Something that’s… a first person shooter. Are you serious Cliffy? Bulletstorm is a first person shooter based around redemption and revenge. Despite Cliffy’s excitement, I’m bored now. Kicking people into electrical sockets is kinda cool. But I can’t take the main character seriously when he says things like “Last train out of explosion town,” and “you nearly scared the dick off me". Actually, I found those one-liners kind of funny. Maybe Cliff's on to something here. Bullet Storm is set for release Feb 22th, 2010.
EA’s conference was pretty “eh” overall. It wasn’t particularly bad, but it wasn’t particularly impressive either. Star Wars definitely saved the end of the show for me at the end though. If not for that, the dickless Bulletproof and the potty-mouth blonde promoting it, I might be asleep.
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Most Impressive from EA: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Least Impressive from EA: The Sims 3: Ambitions
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