Where Do The Days Go?

So instead of a day or two passing, I let an entire week of my life fly by without blogging. It's one thing to forget that you have a blog, but like my last post mentioned, I had an incredibly busy week.

My mom was here from Saturday morning until late Wednesday. We had some pretty rough spots early in the week on Monday, but things got a little better on Tuesday. By the time she left, mom was in a much better mood. We didn't get anything we set out to accomplish done, but I have applied for an apartment. Now we just wait for the results, which I can only assume will be good.

Then I worked Thursday and Friday, while playing inFamous as much as humanly possible in between. I spent Saturday and Sunday in bed almost all day, just because I've been staying up super late for some reason. Maybe my body is rebelling against the idea of getting up retardedly early and going to work five out of seven days a week. Hopefully this doesn't persist for very long, I don't know how long I can go without getting burned out.

In the middle of all of this was the greatest time of the year for gamers, E3. I know I'm biased, and I know that a lot of the bigger things were leaked a week or earlier, but I really felt like Sony kicked some ass this year.

Microsoft came out of the gate with some decent looking games, a non-solid snake starring Metal Gear Solid that isn't exclusive, and the announcement of a motion control system that is still in production. No date, no real games. They did have a video of a virtual boy "interacting" with a young woman that seemed a little too practiced. Don't even get me started on the horrible "look at the bottom of my sneakers" goof that they had or the crappy painting program they came up with.

Nintendo did decent, but left me wanting more. They had some great first party games, as per usual. New Metroid done by Team Ninja? Mario Galaxy 2? Yes please! Even Wii Resort looks nice! I just wanted them to come out with some giant surprise that knocked everyone out of their seats, and it never came. Very little third party support, nothing for the hardcore gamer, and a lack of major announcements.

Sony blasted the roof off E3 from the get-go. They started by showing off a live gameplay of Uncharted 2, which looks simply amazing! They followed that up with a live play through of MAG, which everyone scoffed at last year, for seeming impossible and uninteresting. As a non-FPS player, I have to say I was very impressed. They did a full 256 player demo, with everyone on screen playing in real time. No pre-rendered videos in site. This was all live, and it was incredibly impressive. Then, out of nowhere, the guys who made Little Big Planet came out and showed off their newest idea. A do-it-yourself Mario Kart style game, where everything from characters, cars, and even tracks are fully customizable. It looks like another solid hit franchise for PS3 and I can't wait to see more from it.

Then Sony announced the already leaked PSP go! and it is even sexier than I had originally thought (especially in white!). The only let down was the price, which a lot of people feel could have been cheaper. I have to agree. There was a barrage of PSP and PS3 games on show. They had videos for both systems and were chock full of awesome games that I find myself wanting to play. After all that was done with, Sony brought out their own motion control system. At first I was embarrassed, because they were just coping Microsoft from the prior day's conference. But then they brought the guys on-stage and started showing off the software. Everything that Sony showed was live on stage. There wasn't a single video used to show off what their system was capable of. I was impressed.

Where Microsoft's Natal was used to make a crappy, bitmap paint style drawing, Sony's motion control system was capable of writing a name in real time, with incredible accuracy and ease. Instead of the rehearsed videos of a digital boy interacting with a bad actress, Sony showed a series of awesome possibilities on stage for everyone to witness in real time. It was incredible how much better Sony came off to me. They even took Nintendo's bow and arrow demo and made it work a lot better. Yet all the talk of the town since E3 has been the damn Project Natal from Microsoft. What kind of fucked up world do we live in?

Sony shows a highly accurate motion control system that is capable of doing everything the competition tries to do, but better and Microsoft's little digital boy gets all the press? Face and voice recognition is cool and all that, but if the games played using the technology is shit, then who is going to care past the initial "Hello John" moment? I'm just saying.

Anyway, I've gone on enough. I'll have more later because I have a lot more to talk about, but don't want to drag this post out more than it has.

Until next time.

~Jman